# The platform

> Orbium Games is a home for real-time 3D multiplayer games in the browser, on WebGPU. Here is what that means.

Orbium Games is a platform for multiplayer games that run in a browser tab.
There is nothing to install and no account to make: you pick a name, open a
**Hold** and share its link with your crew.

## What makes it different

- **A Hold that stays.** A Hold is your crew's place. It keeps its record, its
  settings and its link between matches, for as long as you keep playing in it.
  The matches, the Worlds and, as more games arrive, the games change inside it.
  Read [how a Hold works](https://orbium.games/docs/platform/holds).
- **Full 3D in the page.** Every World is drawn with WebGPU, the browser's
  modern graphics interface: a moving sea with surf and foam, a sky with clouds
  and weather, light that changes with the hour. See
  [what it takes to play](https://orbium.games/docs/platform/requirements).
- **Made for a crew.** From 2 to 16 units in one Hold, on keyboard and mouse, a
  gamepad or a touch screen.
- **Procedural Worlds.** No model or texture files: the island, its rocks and
  every unit are generated from a seed, so a whole World arrives in a few
  megabytes.

## Our goals

1. **Games worth playing with friends**, that start from a link in seconds.
2. **A platform for many games.** One Beam is the first; the next ones open in
   the same Hold, with the same crew. See the [roadmap](https://orbium.games/docs/platform/roadmap).
3. **Open knowledge.** The code is public, and these Docs explain how it works,
   from the rules of a game to the shaders that draw its sea. See
   [open source](https://orbium.games/docs/platform/open-source) and the
   [developers' docs](https://orbium.games/docs/developers).
4. **Free to play, backed by its players.** Every player can open a Hold.
   Patrons and sponsors pay for the servers and the work: see the
   [backers](https://orbium.games/backers).

## The words we use

Orbium speaks like a dock. These words appear across the games and these pages:

| Word   | Meaning                                             |
| ------ | --------------------------------------------------- |
| Hold   | A host's place for its crew, kept between matches   |
| Crew   | Everyone in the Hold                                |
| Unit   | A player's droid                                    |
| World  | Where a match is played: Earth, Desert, Mars or Ice |
| Window | One round's time                                    |
| Deploy | Start the match                                     |
| Dock   | Enter a Hold (Undock: leave it)                     |
| Signal | Ready                                               |
| Down   | Out of health                                       |
| Hunter | In One Beam, the one unit that can fire             |
| Risk   | In One Beam, the score multiplier                   |