3D Fighter

An on-rails 3D arcade jet combat game built with Godot 4. Fly a reference-informed J-36 prototype through coastal, mountain, and city missions while fighting F-35A and Su-57 formations, missiles, drones, and an aerial-fortress boss.

Play 3D Fighter online

Campaign

Coastal Assault	Mountain Pass	Skies Over the City

Features

• Fast third-person rail combat with smooth chase-camera movement, banking, barrel rolls, camera shake, and afterburner FOV.
• Cannon heat, lock-on missiles, enemy projectiles, homing missiles, shield regeneration, hull damage, and missile warnings.
• F-35A and Su-57 enemy formations, progressive waves, drones, radar, scoring, combos, and an aerial-fortress boss.
• Three connected environments with animated water, atmospheric fog, a carrier deck, alpine formations, and a dusk city.
• Procedural combat audio plus explosions, contrails, speed lines, bloom, tracers, sparks, smoke, and fire effects.

Controls

Action	Controls
Steer	Mouse, WASD, or arrow keys
Cannon	Left mouse button or Space
Locked missile	Right mouse button or E
Afterburner	Shift
Airbrake	Ctrl
Barrel roll / missile dodge	R
Pause / resume	P or Esc
Fullscreen	F

Run locally

Open the project in Godot 4.6 or newer and run the main scene, or launch it from a terminal:

godot --path .

Run the deterministic combat-rule test with:

godot --headless --path . -- --self-test

Web export

The Web export preset writes the browser build to dist/3dfighter.html. Serve the directory over HTTP instead of opening the file directly with file://:

python3 -m http.server 8067 --directory dist

Then open http://localhost:8067/3dfighter.html.

Aircraft references and generated assets

The aircraft are original, reference-informed game assets rather than redistributed photography. Real photographs under assets/references/aircraft/ are used only for research and are excluded from distribution. The J-36 model follows the photographed tailless, three-engine, diamond/double-delta prototype; its public designation and configuration remain provisional.

Reference sources:

• J-36: The Aviationist — second test flight
• F-35A: Wikimedia Commons image via Wikipedia
• Su-57: Wikimedia Commons image via Wikipedia

Asset	In-game scale	Geometry	Path
J-36 player aircraft	23 m provisional length	28,172 triangles	assets/generated/aircraft/j36.glb
F-35A enemy aircraft	15.7 m length	29,052 triangles	assets/generated/aircraft/f35a.glb
Su-57 enemy aircraft	20.1 m length	28,468 triangles	assets/generated/aircraft/su57.glb

All three GLBs passed glTF validation and import successfully in Godot. Each uses an opaque PBR material with 2048×2048 base-color, normal, and metallic/roughness textures. Static model previews are stored in artifacts/model_previews/.

Real-world scenic photographs similarly guide environment shape, lighting, density, and atmosphere but are not bundled as runtime textures. Sources and art notes are documented in docs/environment-references.md.

Asset generation setup

Copy .env.example to .env, then set IMAGE_API_KEY and TRIPO3D_API_KEY. The local .env, Vercel metadata, signing material, caches, and research-only photos are ignored by Git and must not be committed.

The initial three-aircraft Tripo3D batch used $0.90 in credits, plus image-provider billing for the three reference renders.