The gates are open: a Marathon fan project in three days

On 2 June 2026 I started an empty repository at 11:24. By 14:08 the same afternoon, it held a working 3D explorer for the maps of Bungie's Marathon. By 08:38 on 4 June it had a squad simulation, adaptive rendering, a soundtrack and a design language borrowed from the game. It's live at marathon.withseismic.com.

It's a fan project. Nobody paid for it and nobody asked for it, but it's the clearest example I have of how my work has changed. The technical side was never the hard part. The hours were, and for years they decided what got cut before I'd written a line. This time nothing got cut, so taste led the project instead of the time I had.

Read how Tau Ceti IV was built.

#typescript #react #simulation #realtime

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Doug Silkstone•Fan project · Marathon

Tau Ceti IV

Fan-made map explorer for Marathon

Design & engineering · Built the 3D explorer, squad sim and soundtrack

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Tau Ceti IV is a 3D surface-data explorer for the three maps in Bungie's Marathon. It's an independent fan project rather than client work, built over three days with Claude Code, and the role covered the design, the engineering and the soundtrack.

Built the explorer in three.js and React Three Fiber, drawing each map's line geometry as one set of segments with a height-graded shader.
Rebuilt the interface in Marathon's visual language, from the palette and type to the field-tag markers and HUD.
Shipped a live contacts layer where runner crews and UESC patrols walk, fight, fall and extract, driven by a unit-tested simulation core.

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marathon.withseismic.com How Tau Ceti IV was built

#typescript #react #nextjs #simulation #realtime #reverseengineering