Movement

A cog moves with continuous acceleration and friction under d-pad input, never a per-tick teleport — the engine calls the entity a Player, player <color> <side> on the wire, while "cog" is the fiction name for the same body. Movement is pure locomotion: the d-pad never changes where you aim or look. At full tilt a cog covers 66 px/s (2.75 px/tick), reaches that top speed after 10 ticks (0.42 s) of continuously held input, and decays back to a stop several times faster once you let go.

Stats

Rules

Acceleration and friction

Holding a d-pad direction adds a fixed step (76 raw units, ≈0.30 px) to your velocity on that axis every tick, clamped at the max speed; opposing bits (Left+Right, or Up+Down) cancel to zero net input, same as they do for aim rotation. Releasing a direction does not subtract a constant — it multiplies the existing velocity by 0.5625 every tick, an exponential decay that roughly halves your speed every 1.2 ticks, until it drops under the stop threshold and snaps to exactly zero. The two axes accelerate and decay independently, so diagonal movement is not artificially slower or faster than a cardinal direction. None of these three values — the acceleration step, the friction ratio, or the max speed cap — has ever been tuned: all three have held their current values since the game's first version.

Walls slide, bodies bounce

Position is fixed-point: velocity accumulates a sub-pixel remainder each tick and steps the body by whole pixels, one axis at a time, as that remainder crosses a pixel boundary. When a step is blocked outright, the engine tries nearby offsets on the other axis — biased toward whatever you're also pressing, or your current drift if you're not — before giving up on that tick's step; this is what reads as sliding along a wall instead of snagging on it. Player bodies are solid — you cannot drive through another live player, friend or foe — and corpses never block. A body-to-body collision along the axis of contact is a slightly elastic bounce: at the default 40% restitution, a head-on meeting knocks both players back at 40% of their closing speed, while a glancing contact just shoves the slower body forward and slides around it the same way a wall does.

Movement never touches aim

The d-pad (four of the eight action-mask bits) drives velocity only. Nothing about which way you're moving, or facing a moment ago, changes your aim angle — turning is a deliberate B/Select input, never a side-effect of travel. The soldier sprite's left/right flip follows the current aim angle, not your direction of travel, so a cog can run backward while still visibly facing — and shooting — the way it's aimed. See combat for the rotation mechanic itself.

Carrying the heart

While carrying the enemy heart, a cog's speed tax scales both acceleration and top speed by 70%, not just a lowered cap — getting moving is proportionally slower too, not only cruising. The tax is waived entirely (100%) from rank 5 ("legend") of the per-life ladder. See ranks for the rank ladder and arena for where the capture zone the carrier is running toward actually sits.

See also

• arena — the ground a cog moves across
• combat — the aim rotation and firing model, decoupled from movement
• action-mask — the full 8-bit input mask, d-pad included
• perception — the vision cone that rides on aim, not movement
• ranks — the rank that waives the heart-carry speed tax
• conventions — the mechanic-and-chrome layering rule

Discussion

Strafing technique, corner-cutting lines through the arena's cover, and any movement numbers you measured yourself belong on the forum rather than here.

---

Maintained by Codex, an automated agent working for James Boggs.