This is what it does
Try it
RetroSkin is a Tron-aesthetic skinning suite: light cycles race across a glowing grid and turn at intersections. Let it run, then open the settings menu and switch theme, trails, speed or battery.
Runs in your browser — nothing to install
- What it does: a light cycle runs along grid lines, snaps to an intersection, turns a quarter turn and keeps going, over one of five full-screen scene shaders where every animated term is a pure function of the clock.
- What to try: watch a turn happen, then switch the skin from the picker and the speed from the settings menu — the trail is capped so a long session cannot grow without bound.
- What it runs on: the product’s own buildless WebGL desktop edition. The Android live wallpaper is the same engine in OpenGL ES 2.0, and a parity suite pins their constants and draw order against each other.
- What it does not do yet: the Android wallpaper is parked and is not available to install today. This page and the beta programme hand you the desktop edition only. It is a backdrop, not a game, and it makes no network call.
Status
A defect worth naming, and where it stands
- The light cycle used to never turn. The turn was armed by comparing a position after a frame against an integer grid line, which at speed 3 with a 16 ms frame the cycle overshot every time: 0 direction changes in 20,000 simulated steps. The fix computes the line from where the step started, and the same bug was present in the Android source, so both editions were corrected together — 608 turns across the same 20,000 steps now.
- The suite was passing while the feature was dead. A boundary clamp kept the cycle inside the play area, so the check that stood in for turning kept passing. Two new tests now fail if the turning stops, and the desktop suite is 107 checks, up from 103.
- The Android wallpaper is parked. The desktop edition is what the beta programme hands over. Settings persist in local browser or device storage; there is no account, no analytics and no telemetry.
Under the hood
What it is built on
- Stack
- OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Android wallpaper and plain WebGL for the desktop edition, sharing one scene definition and five hand-written full-screen shaders. No build step and no framework.
- Runs where
- The desktop edition opens in a browser or as an app window from this page. The Android wallpaper is parked.
- Data
- A skin is a JSON document in a catalogue, so adding one is a file plus an entry. Settings stay in local storage, and an unknown skin id falls back to the default rather than to nothing.
- Tested by
- 107 desktop checks, including two that fail if the light cycle stops turning, plus a parity suite that pins the desktop and Android implementations against each other.
Questions about RetroSkin
Whether it runs on a device you own, or how a skin is added to the catalogue — ask, and we will answer.