Why we started building a driving sim in a browser
Episode 1 of our Seat Time build journal: three cars, a caught slide followed by a spin, and the Physics Lab we built to keep failures visible.
Posts tagged “build-log”
Lab notebook posts about “build-log”.
Chasing ‘sim-grade’: writing down the gap, rebuilding the tyre
Our browser sim needed a definition of ‘sim-grade’. Failing tests and a tyre port gave us better questions—and a score we had to withdraw.
Our first engine sounded 8-bit
Our browser sim passed its audio checks and still sounded artificial. A same-day detour through synth samples led us to recorded engines.
Building places to drive in Seat Time
Seventeen hairpin misses, a 41-byte margin, and kart tracks we traced then reshaped: building Seat Time’s roads in October 2026.
Rain at 94% dry grip, and a parked car that crept
Our rain retained almost all its dry grip on Haruna. We traced three drainage causes, stopped parked-car creep and checked our models against outside data.
Seat Time outgrew its name—and some merges went missing
We renamed our browser driving game, split racing from the life-sim loop, and found merged work that had never reached main.
Every merge is a release
A missed release exposed the gap between merged and live. We rebuilt Seat Time’s release checks around real failures.
Every number gets a source
We asked where our car numbers came from. The answer brought 147 corrections, estimated mass layouts, and stiffer frames that barely changed handling.
A steering wheel in a browser tab
Our G923 accepted force commands, but we felt nothing. Building browser wheel support meant tracing pedals, steering ratios and missing force.
Fast for visitors on phones
Seat Time's first-load cuts: translation text, car models, audio, and the server imports that kept rebuilding the circuits.
Grip is the rack going light
Our tyre texture passed its spectrum checks and felt wrong on the wheel. A week of reversals taught us where measurement ends and driving begins.
Drift, and the AI driver that found the shortcut
Our small learned driver passed a drift course on shallow slides. First we repaired the tyre; then its results exposed an open scoring gap.
Like-for-like, and the squat hunt
Our physics checks agreed with themselves. Fairer comparisons exposed reference mistakes, missing wheel reaction and a tyre force bypassing the springs.
Five weeks in: what we learned and where it goes next
Five weeks of our browser driving sim: 516 merged pull requests, delivery failures, decisions at the wheel, and the complete episode index.