Portugues
Space Pirates
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Space Pirates puts you in the cockpit of a small fighter, seen from behind, flying in a patch of space with a planet, a sun and a field of asteroids. Raiders attack in grey ships of their own, and you shoot them down with a pair of cannons and with missiles that lock on to a target. The ships are in full 3D, with glowing engines, shields, explosions and trails of sparks, and the stars and nebulae are a big picture all around you.
There are three missions, each bigger than the last. Solo is a short hunt for three raiders, to learn the controls. Squad gives you three wingmates, who fight on their own, against ten enemies. Battle is a large fight with twenty enemies in an asteroid field, where your missiles hit harder and so do theirs. A panel at the bottom left shows your health, your speed and the missile that is reloading, and the numbers on its sides count the allies and enemies still flying. The side that runs out of ships loses.
It was made by a few members of the team behind the Babylon.js 3D engine, as a demo for the release of version 5.0, and they published the whole thing so people can learn from it.
Playing it here
Click Play, wait for the title screen (the game loads about thirty megabytes of models and textures, so it takes a moment) and choose Play and then a mission. Click once inside the game window to capture the mouse: the mouse steers the ship and, while it is captured, the pointer is hidden. Press Esc to let go of the mouse and open the pause menu. Your computer needs a graphics card that supports WebGL 2, which almost all of them do. There are sliders for volume and mouse sensitivity in Options, and an option to invert the vertical axis. Nothing is saved.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Mouse | steer (click the game once to capture it) |
| Left mouse button | fire the cannons |
| Right mouse button | fire a missile |
| W | afterburners (speed up) |
| S | brake |
| Q | reverse course (a half loop that turns you around) |
| Esc | release the mouse and open the menu |
| Touch screen | thumbstick to steer, with buttons for the cannons, missile, boost, brake and flip |
A few things worth knowing
Missiles need a lock. Keep an enemy in front of you until its target marker locks, then fire; missiles do much more damage than cannons, but they take a while to reload.
Use the flip. When a raider gets behind you, Q turns you around faster than any turn with the mouse.
Keep inside the arena. If you fly too far from the action the game pulls you back, so use the planet and the asteroids as a map.
Let your wingmates work. In Squad and Battle your allies fight on their own, so help them with the enemies they are chasing rather than hunting alone.
Credits and licence
Space Pirates was made by members of the Babylon.js core team, named on the credits screen as Patrick Ryan (@PatrickCRyan), @skaven_ and Darragh Burke (@DarraghBurke_), and it is released under the Apache License 2.0, together with its models, textures and sounds. It runs on Babylon.js 5.3 (Apache 2.0). The licence text is linked from this page. Changes made for this site: an Adobe web font kit that the page used to load was removed, the paths of the assets were made relative, and the "made with Babylon.js" logo was taken out of the screens, because the licence does not give the right to use that brand. The game does not contact any other site.