HexGL

Overview

Boosting over a glowing pad tilts the camera, the boost meter begins its steady drain, and the next corner arrives sooner than the last one left you ready for. That loop is the heart of HexGL, a futuristic anti-gravity racer Thibaut Despoulain wrote in JavaScript and WebGL under the handle BKcore and shipped in 2012 under the MIT License, years before browser engines made real-time 3D feel routine. The ship hovers above a neon Cityscape circuit, scraping through gated canyons while a collision-map sampled every frame decides whether the hull is on pavement or over a boost pad. What sets it apart from later web racers is that the physics is hand-rolled against three.js rather than handed to a heavyweight engine: the airbrakes, the pad-triggered boost, and the drift live in a few thousand lines of CoffeeScript compiled to plain JS. It pulls the crowd that chased lap records in WipEout, and it is distinct from the WASM rewrite of the PS1 original — HexGL is a native browser demo, not a console port.

How to Play

The goal is the cleanest fast lap: complete the circuit, absorb every boost pad, and keep the hull on the track. Hold Up to accelerate and Down to brake, with Left and Right steering the ship. The inputs that define the game are the side airbrakes — Q or A feathers the left brake, D or E the right — and each sharpens your yaw toward its own side while scrubbing speed and banking the hull. Boost is not a button at all: passing over a pad sets the boost value to maximum and it then bleeds away over the next stretch of track, so the quick line is the one that chains pads together rather than spending one and coasting. Before the green light a launch menu picks a quality preset (Mobile, Mainstream, Ultra), flips the HUD on or off, and can even enable a Godmode training flag.

Tips & Strategy

Chain the pads instead of coasting on a single hit, because the boost only carries to the next gate if your line keeps the hull on pavement, and the fast lap is the route that links pad to pad with no speed-scrubbing detour between them. Feather the airbrakes one-sided into corners: holding only Q while steering left piles on far more yaw than the rudder alone, and the mirror image holds for D on right-handers, while clutching both at once is mostly a way to dump speed before a chicane since every trigger applies an airBrake penalty. If the frame rate stutters, drop a quality preset before your next run, because the pad sampling is per-frame and a hitch can skip the hull clean past a thin pad zone and quietly cost you the boost. Treat Godmode as reconnaissance rather than a crutch: switch it on to memorize where each pad sits and which bends genuinely demand an airbrake, then run it clean to log a real lap to the Hall of Fame.