The Tornado Chaser — Drive Toward an EF5 in a 1996 Pickup
You're driving a pickup across the Kansas plains. A supercell builds. The funnel descends. 2,000 spiraling debris particles, inverse-square vortex pull, sickly green sky. Stay close enough to score; too close and you're sucked in.
What this is
You're in the cab of a pickup truck on the Kansas plains. A real supercell builds in the distance — billboard cloud system with internal lightning, sickly yellow-green sky. The funnel descends and 2,000 GPU- billboarded debris particles spiral upward in a vorticity-based simulation. WASD drives. Get close for the score multiplier. Stay too close and the inverse-square vortex pull jerks the truck sideways and eventually sucks you in. Speed-of-sound delayed thunder. Best score in localStorage. An EF-scale HUD rises with proximity.
Why this is mind-blowing
This is a real game with real meteorological accuracy in one HTML file. The tornado isn't a sprite — it's a particle simulation with proper vorticity. The sky color is the actual atmospheric chemistry of a supercell. The thunder is delayed by the actual speed of sound. The fear when the funnel turns toward you is real.
Build a first-person tornado-chasing simulator in Three.js. Endless flat
plains via fbm-noise terrain. One real supercell thundercloud rendered as
a billboard cloud system with subtle vertex displacement and flashing
internal lightning. A funnel descends and forms a real tornado: a
vorticity-based particle simulation of dust and debris swept upward in a
spiral. WASD drives a pickup truck; the tornado pulls the truck sideways
via wind drag if you get too close. Risk-reward: closer = better view,
more danger.Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or Copilot. Change one thing that matters to you.
What I learned shipping it
- Inverse-square vortex pull (perpendicular swirl + radial inward attraction within 200m) is the entire physics. The truck behavior emerges from one equation.
- Sickly yellow-green sky toward the supercell direction is the meteorologist's tell. Add it and the whole scene reads as 'Plains chase' instead of 'random storm.'
- Speed-of-sound delayed thunder + lowpass cutoff scaling with distance + a low-frequency rumble for close strikes makes thunder behave like real thunder. The model knows.