Range Edition

Nine races on nine laws. Every one of these is the same pod and the same rules — three laps, sixteen gates, six rivals — on ground decided by a different piece of arithmetic. Nothing is stored: there is no heightmap and no track file, and a range always draws the same circuit because the circuit is drawn from the range's own name.

Three ranges draw a circuit of their own

A real track cut into the land: a bed, banking, a slot canyon, pillars standing in the road and a kicker over a gorge.

• The Emberline A kilometre-long straight, a slot canyon sixteen wide, the Needles standing in the track and a kicker over a gorge. 7,604 m a lap · 1.5 s a rebuild
• The Step Circuit Terraces at the rank of the diagonal you stand on, and a circuit threaded between them. 6,878 m a lap · 2.0 s a rebuild
• The Glasswind Run The longest of the three, and the most open: a fast lap with little to hide behind. 9,722 m a lap · 4.1 s a rebuild — the heaviest here

Six more, on ranges with no circuit in them

Sixteen gates laid over open ground, in a ring the world's own word places — so the same range always gives the same race, and no two ranges give the same one.

• The Walsh Mesas A sum of Walsh functions: every term is plus or minus one, so the land is flat tables with sheer sides. The cheapest range here and the quickest to redraw. gate ring · 1.0 s a rebuild — the lightest here
• The Sudoku Mesas Terraced by the digit a finished sudoku grid puts in each tile — nine heights, never repeating in a row or a column. gate ring · 1.2 s a rebuild
• The Indexin Terraces The selection law read as ground: how many of the last addresses it keeps, stepped into terraces. gate ring · 1.4 s a rebuild
• The Dropped Two The ruler sequence with one rank taken out of it, which moves every valley somewhere the other ranges do not put one. gate ring · 1.4 s a rebuild
• The Dunes Three ridge lines with a scarp each: a long windward slope and a sudden lee face. Soft ground, and the hardest of these to read ahead. gate ring · 1.1 s a rebuild, on a 12 km ring
• The Ruler Canyons The Sieve Range with its sign turned over — nothing changed but a minus, and every summit became a gorge. gate ring · 2.9 s a rebuild

If any of them stalls on your machine

Every link here holds 60 frames a second by moving the resolution. These settings were found on a fast machine, and four-times resolution is sixteen times the pixels; the governor drops that as far as it has to and puts it back when there is room, so what varies between machines is sharpness rather than smoothness. What it cannot move is the bake — see below.

These run at a 2,560-block region inside a 29 km ring, at ultra max detail and four-times resolution — the settings Lars found and asked for, and they look it. A browser bakes on the one thread it has, so each rebuild is the second or so each card quotes. Natively that same bake goes across eight cores and you never see it.

Every number on this page was measured, not guessed, with the bake held to one lane because that is what a browser gets. The ring is the part to shorten if one of these is too heavy on your machine: put far-tiles=3 in place of far-tiles=7 and you keep the region and the graphics and lose only how far you can see — which is what the Dunes link does here, and what takes it from 7.9 s to 1.1. The region itself stays at 4,096 on these pages.

What the links are doing

Every one of these is the command line in a query string, and you can edit it in the address bar: ?world=dunes&race&laps=5&rivals=7&hour=0.35&go. They all carry detail=192&res=4x&hdx&ultra-grain&contrast=1.15 — ultra max detail, four-times resolution, the rounder craft and the stronger grain. Those cost almost nothing: at this region size the Emberline is 202 ms a rebuild with them and 190 without.

Those cost almost nothing: at a 640-block region the Emberline is 202 ms a rebuild with all of them and 190 ms with none. What costs is how much ground is kept at once, which is the region and the ring — and the Dunes is the one range here that proves it twice over. Its sampler charges by the extent of ground asked for, so a 29 km ring alone is 2.3 s of it; that one link runs a 12 km ring instead and comes in at 1.1 s.

Tab opens the menu, which has every range and every setting in it.