The entire genre of flight simulation is built on the assumption that you want to fly the plane. InFlightSimulator removes that. You get the window seat. The plane flies itself. You look out at the terrain going by, and that’s the piece.
It appeared on Show HN this week and collected several hundred points, which for a project with no features is worth examining.
What it is
A browser-based experience, built in three.js according to the creator’s post on the three.js forum, in which the entire flight is procedural — the terrain, coastlines and cloud layers beneath you are generated rather than streamed from a map service. Flights can be saved and resumed. The stated intent was to recreate the specific experience of staring out of the window on a long flight.
Why procedural matters here
The obvious way to build this is satellite imagery: pull tiles from a map provider and fly over real places. It would look better in a screenshot, and it would be worse.
Procedural generation buys three things that matter for this particular piece:
- It never runs out. A flight can last as long as you leave it running, and the ground below stays interesting without a tile budget or an API bill.
- It has no provenance. Flying over real cities makes the piece about those cities. Flying over invented coastline makes it about the condition of flying — the boredom, the altitude, the anonymity of a landscape you can’t name.
- It’s cheap to run in a tab, which is why it exists as a web page and not a 40GB install.
The tradeoff is the honest one: procedural terrain at this scale rarely bears close inspection. But you’re not inspecting it. You’re glancing at it between other things, which is exactly the viewing mode the piece is designed around.
The lineage
This sits in a small, good tradition of deliberately uneventful software. Airplane Mode (2020) put you in a window seat for the real-time duration of a transatlantic flight, tedium included. Desert Bus is the ancestor of the whole idea. Euro Truck Simulator’s actual appeal, whatever its marketing says, is the calm of a long drive.
What they share is a bet that ambient presence beats challenge for a certain kind of attention — something to have open beside your work, closer to a window than a game. That’s an old idea in art and a rare one in software, and the browser is the right venue for it because opening a tab costs nothing.
For creative coders the technical lesson is narrower and useful: the constraint that makes this work is doing less. No controls to design, no failure states, no progression. The engineering effort goes entirely into terrain generation and atmosphere, which is where the whole experience lives.