Aether

It’s live!
Where there used to be a black loading screen, a whole galaxy now drifts quietly behind the title, waiting for you at https://kvin-21.github.io/Aether!

Type a word, warp in, and everything glows. Bright stars bloom and bleed light into the dark around them. Same as the first day: none of it is downloaded. Still flat 2D, still pure maths, still conjured from your word. It has just put its make-up on. This is the part where it stops being a build and starts being a place. It holds together now/
I spent this last stage trying to break it, then fixing whatever broke. Strange seeds, empty ones, ones in other alphabets, ones two hundred characters long, all land somewhere real. Zoom as far out as you like and it stays smooth. Click like a maniac and nothing trips. Your browser’s back and forward buttons move through the universe with you now. And a share link, opened cold by a stranger, rebuilds your exact world on your exact planet, every single time.

So that is the whole thing: a universe from a single word, that you can fly through, land on, scan, listen to, and hand to someone else with a link. Try violet-tide-77 and watch a lava world glow on its night side. Try bin-3 for a system with two suns sharing one centre. Then type your own name, and go and see the universe that only you have.

But ofcourse, there are still some bugs with the sound :(

Now it casts shadows

Look closely at the planet. That bright spot on the ocean is the sun, reflecting off the water exactly where it should, and it vanishes the instant a cloud drifts over it. Those clouds sit above the surface and throw soft shadows onto the ground below. The rings lay their own shadow across the globe.

Now the surprising part, the same one as last time: none of this is 3D. There is still no GPU, no model, no texture, not one downloaded file. It is all flat 2D and pure maths, conjured from your word. It has simply learnt to pretend it has depth, and it pretends well enough that your eye stops asking.

Drop onto a planet now and it is actually alive with detail. Clouds drift a touch faster than the ground turning beneath them, and they shade what passes under them. Moons now circle on their own lit paths, slipping in front of the planet and then behind it. Lava worlds, ice worlds, deserts, oceans, green terran worlds, each one scanned and flagged for whether anything could live there. The lore has grown a memory too: it reads the world’s gravity, its heat, its moons, have a different story for each.

Systems are stranger than before. Some stars have a companion, two suns sharing one centre, each with its own corona. Belts of asteroids hide in the gaps between orbits.

Clicking a star now is no longer a cut. The camera dives, flying you down into the star before its system opens around, and flying you back out when you leave.

There is a jump-to-seed box in the corner if you want to leap straight to a particular universe, with your seed, coordinates and zoom always on show!

What if you could create a universe from your favourite words?

What loads is a universe. Your universe. A galaxy of stars nobody has ever flown through, scattered over nebulae nobody has ever seen, because none of it existed until the moment you pressed Enter. Type a different word and the old one is gone, replaced by another entire cosmos waiting to be explored.

That is Aether.

And here is the part that’s surprising: there are no images in it. None. Not a single texture, model, photo or downloaded file. Every star, every ringed gas giant, every drifting smear of colour is pure maths, generated live from your word. The whole thing is light enough to run on your phone, because there is nothing to load. It is all conjured on the spot.

This is the first build, and you can already travel. You start above a galaxy map, an endless field of stars you can drag and zoom through, drifting over layered clouds of gas. Each star is coloured by its real stellar class, from hot blue-white giants down to dim red dwarfs, and each carries a name. Hover one and it tells you what it is called. Pick one and you warp in, starlines streaking past.

Inside a system, planets swing around their star on live orbits, rocky worlds and banded gas giants, some having rings. Choose one and you fall towards it. It turns slowly under its own sunlight, wrapped in a thin halo of atmosphere, its rings passing in front and behind. A scan panel reads out the world: radius, gravity, surface temperature, atmosphere, the length of its day, its moons, and a line or two of lore about the place.

Then you can leave, and the whole universe is still sitting exactly where you left it.

Every world has an address. Hit share and you get a link holding the seed and your exact position, down to the planet you were staring at. Send it and the other person opens the same cosmos, in the same spot, on the same world. Try a different name, and watch a completely different universe assemble itself.

Next, I am deepening every layer: richer terrain and weather on the planets, binary stars and asteroid belts, more believable names and histories.