AUTONOMOUS SHIP
Every crew member and hostile form acts inside a deterministic 15 Hz simulation.
UNSC Saturn Devouring · Charon-class frigate
The ship is already dead.
A systemic co-op survival game aboard a drifting warship. The crew fights, panics, calls for help, and dies with or without you. The thing in the lower decks learns from all of it.
- PLAYERS
- 1–4 ODST survivors
- NETWORK
- Authenticated WebRTC mesh
- COMMS
- Live fireteam voice
- SIMULATION
- 15 Hz systemic ship state
- OBJECTIVE
- Survive what boarded
MISSION PARAMETERS
Fireteam assembly
Multiplayer
Every match runs peer-to-peer. In peerd, Charon uses the host’s authenticated base mesh. On the web, the same room, identity, gossip, and WebRTC primitives ship inside the page.
Public lobbies
Joins an open lobby, or creates one when every lobby is full.
Invite-only
A high-entropy room code is never listed or advertised.
Connected room
Fireteam
Opening a peer-to-peer room…
Only people with this code can address the room. Send it over a channel you trust.
Project briefing
About Charon
Charon is a browser-native survival simulation set aboard the UNSC Saturn Devouring. It does not wait for the player: marines sweep compartments, civilians spread panic, radios fail, bodies become resources, and the Flood chooses where pressure will hurt most.
Solo and co-op use the same ship simulation. Multiplayer adds live ODST presence, shared weapon damage and explosions, and room voice over authenticated peer-to-peer links. There is no match server in the gameplay path.
SHARED INCIDENT
Co-op peers inhabit the same seeded outbreak and replicate combat actions in real time.
LOCAL-FIRST
The complete game, assets, networking client, and docs can travel as one peerd dwapp.
Developer reference
Docs
Architecture overview
Charon separates the deterministic ship simulation from rendering and player input. The simulation writes one packed agent buffer; the 3D layer consumes it without owning world state.
PRIMARY SURFACES
sim/— ship graph, factions, combat, commands, and deterministic ticks.game/— first-person controls, 3D world, HUD, audio, and the hub launcher.multiplayer/— room abstraction, lobby protocol, game synchronization, and voice.
Multiplayer protocol
The peerd build calls the consent-gated dwapp bridge. The web build bundles peerd’s identity, room, mesh, gossip, presence, direct-message, and WebRTC transport primitives.
FLOW
- Join a room and authenticate peers with did:key identities.
- Quick Match discovers the fullest open public lobby and creates one only if none answers; private lobby messages require a DID-bound invite HMAC.
- A nonce-bound join remains rollback-safe until the requester acknowledges exact commit delivery, so a delayed commit cannot leave a ghost member after timeout.
- The lobby creator may deploy after a second player joins, or keep waiting up to four. Optional capacity ranking chooses simulation authority separately; otherwise DID order is deterministic.
- A proposal/ack/commit-receipt/go-receipt/final-launch barrier freezes membership before deployment.
- The fireteam leaves the lobby for an isolated match room.
- The authority advances the ship simulation and sends term-bound delta checkpoints; player poses and validated actions use direct WebRTC messages.
- The standalone adapter offers native RTP/Opus voice; the current Peerd bridge hides voice because it does not expose media operations.
discover → join / accept / admission-ack → ready → proposal / receipts → final launch → match room
↘ direct state and actionspeerd dwapp package
The hub output contains a schema-1 peerd.json declaring kind: "dwapp", one entry HTML document, one stylesheet, and one self-contained readable module bundle. Textures and audio remain byte-identical binary files resolved through peerd.assets in the opaque-origin sandbox.
BRIDGE OPERATIONS USED
The current bridge provides hello, join, leave, presence, announce, subscribe, publish, retain, history, and dm-send. Optional capacity and voice operations are used only when advertised by a future bridge.
npm run build:dwapp # output: dist/dwapp/hub/
Run and verify
Use any static server for the web build. Multiplayer requires a secure browser context outside localhost because microphone capture and WebCrypto are secure-context APIs.
npm run serve npm run multiplayer npm run determinism npm run build:dwapp