On foot

A character can walk, sprint, strafe, crouch, and jump on solid planetary terrain, with first-person and third-person views. Pointer lock is an explicit choice after landing. The planetarium has no avatar: its standing stance flies with the keys and never touches the world.

The controller also contacts the walkable relief a surface structure declares: the pad's deck, aprons, ramp, grilles, lamp housings and service enclosures, each the top of something a boot can stand on. A rise a step cannot take is a wall the walk slides along. Rocks, hull walls, ceilings, other characters, and arbitrary meshes do not participate in character collision. The suit, interaction, and interior systems below remain design direction. They are not implemented survival mechanics. ADR-0047 records the controller and camera boundaries.

Controls

Land a ship on a solid body, then activate Lock to walk. The browser must grant pointer lock before the character enters play; the walker steps out beside the hull. A refused request leaves the ship's camera controls as they were. The planetarium offers no walker: standing there, the keys fly the stance.

For a repeatable scale check, open the author's Controls panel and choose Scenarios → Walk the Mars pad. This stages the character in third person beside the 46 m Rocinante and opens solo play. It leaves the pointer free; choose Resume controls to walk.

These are the default bindings. Settings can rebind them; the HUD and keys sheet display the current bindings.

Releasing pointer lock stops held movement. Resume requires another explicit activation. Focus loss, a hidden tab, a dialog, or a cutscene also releases the controls. Return to ship leaves the character and restores ship control.

Flight permission comes from the trusted session host. A local solo world's owner has permission by default. There is no online administrator sign-in or role service yet, and the browser's movement keys do not grant permission.

Movement

The character has canonical state in a body's rotating bf: frame. The simulation consumes held input at 64 Hz, normalizes diagonal movement, and transports the character's heading across the surface, including the poles. Local gravity controls jump and fall acceleration. The motor is kinematic; it does not integrate an orbital trajectory with Coriolis or centrifugal terms.

The motor drives momentum, held in the entity's velocity, toward what the keys ask: a key press is a push that reaches the walk in about a tenth of a second and stops faster, a jump keeps the momentum it left the ground with, and the air push can lean a hop but not turn it around. A jump pressed within six ticks of walking off an edge still counts, and one pressed within eight ticks of landing is spent on the ground. Jump height and airtime depend on the body's gravity. Walking speed does not model suit exertion, oxygen use, fatigue, or high-gravity egress restrictions. Flight remains subject to ground contact; descending into the ground returns the character to walking.

Contact uses canonical terrain and the relief a structure declares. The visible terrain has a detail tail bounded by drawnDivergence, currently 1.25 m. The renderer adjusts the character's visible feet and camera to that ground near contact, then fades the adjustment while airborne. It does not write the adjustment back into the world, save, or state hash.

The camera

The camera keeps a memory between frames, and every number in it is a filter over a canonical value that moves in steps: the crouch eases the eye over 0.1 s; a step up, which teleports the feet 0.35 m in one tick, is held and paid back over 0.09 s; a landing dips the eye by a share of the speed the ground stopped, at most 0.16 m. The memory is dropped on a cut, so a teleport does not ease across a planet.

The third-person boom is 3.6 m, pivoted 0.35 m over the shoulder so the suit stands beside the crosshair. It sweeps the visible ground and the relief, refined to a centimeter, snaps in when a ridge takes it and eases back out over 0.3 s. A grounded chase eye stays above the foot plane, so it cannot leave a deck and descend through its rim. Switching from first to third person lets the boom ease out from the head.

Save schema 5 records character state, the consumed jump edge and the ship the walker steps back into. Loading through the game releases held input and pointer capture, and every session — the browser's, a test's, pnpm sim — reapplies its own flight permission to each walker the save carries. A saved camera preference or a pointer-lock flag is not permission to resume moving.

The reference set

The design takes first-person work from Hardspace: Shipbreaker, environmental tension from Alien: Isolation, and curiosity from Outer Wilds. The current movement controls offer direct keyboard movement and optional flight. The longer-term purpose is survey and physical work, rather than a shooter.

The suit

The rendered character is a 1.8 m EVA suit derived from DigitalSpace Corporation’s Astronaut model, distributed through NASA 3D Resources. It has neutral materials, a closed visor, and no backpack or agency insignia. A 39-bone rig, heat-weighted over the welded source, carries ten generated clips for locomotion, crouching, strafing, jumping, falling, and flight. The gait places the feet and lowers the pelvis to reach them, rolls each foot from heel to toe, and is authored at the walk and sprint speeds; the runtime advances its cycle by the ground the entity covers, so a planted foot stays planted at any speed. The suit is anchored once at its rest pose's soles and never re-anchored per frame. The source terms and modification license ship with the asset at apps/game/public/models/astronaut/LICENSE.txt; the build script is scripts/models/astronaut.py.

Suit survival is unimplemented. The design calls for oxygen, power, thermal state, radiation exposure, and integrity to define an excursion. These gauges must describe simulated resources before the HUD presents them as readings. There are no current oxygen costs for sprinting, fall injuries, pressure failures, or radiation limits.

Suit modules

Life support, shielding, thermal control, tools, and mobility equipment remain future content. Magnetic boots, tethers, and a finite EVA propellant supply need their own mechanics. The permitted flight mode is not that EVA system.

Interaction

Looking around and traversing terrain are implemented. Picking up objects, throwing, operating hatches, sampling, and using tools remain unimplemented. The intended survey role is described in exploration; the separate combat direction is in combat.

Inventory

The intended inventory is a visible suit rack with mass limits and a ship as its depot. There is no inventory interface, carried-object simulation, or persistent dropped-item interaction yet.

Ship interiors

A hull model is scenery for character collision. Walkable rooms, doorways, airlocks, pressure volumes, seating transitions, and interior movement are unimplemented. The current Return to ship control changes the controlled entity; it does not animate boarding through an airlock.

During a burn

The design calls for acceleration to determine a ship interior's floor and for freefall during coasting. The body-fixed surface controller does not implement that moving-hull frame or its contact geometry.

Structures

Durable surface placements use the shared body-fixed anchors from ADR-0040. Each asset declares its walkable relief in its own meters — disks, rings, an octagonal skirt, boxes and a ramp, the tallest top winning where they overlap — and the world resolves a body-fixed ray to it. This provides the floors, walls and ramp of a landing pad, not general mesh collision with the rest of a structure.

What is deliberately not here

First-person and third-person controls are both available. Character customization, NPC dialogue, base building, crafting, suit survival, inventory, and combat are outside the implemented movement feature.

Related

• ADR-0047 records character state, input, permissions, and camera ownership.
• ADR-0021 defines the drawn and canonical terrain split.
• Roadmap tracks the remaining content.
• On-foot HUD describes the intended suit instruments.