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Tide Commander Tide Commander

2D Canvas

The 2D Canvas is Tide Commander’s alternate battlefield. It shares every behavior with the 3D Battlefield — selection, commands, buildings, areas — but renders in a flat top-down canvas instead of a Three.js scene. If your laptop’s fans spin up the moment you open the 3D view, this is where you live.

2D canvas populated with four agents

How to open it

Click 2D in the top toolbar, or press Alt + 2 to cycle views. The toggle is persistent — Tide Commander remembers your last view on relaunch.

When to use it

Low-power devices

Integrated GPUs, remote-rendered sessions, mobile browsers — anything that doesn’t love shader-heavy Three.js.

Screen shares

Flat renders compress better over video calls and read more cleanly on low-DPI secondary displays.

Dense maps

When you have 20+ agents, the top-down perspective is easier to scan than an isometric camera.

Battery saver

Runs without the post-processing pipeline. Quieter fans, longer battery, same workflow.

What carries over from 3D

  • Selection — click to select, drag to box-select.
  • Movement — right-click ground to move the selection.
  • Buildings — servers, databases, Docker, links, boss nodes render as flat icons in the exact same positions as 3D.
  • Areas — rectangle regions you drew in 3D appear as outlined zones in 2D.
  • Spotlight — Ctrl/Cmd + K works everywhere, view-agnostic.

What’s different

  • No camera tilt — the camera is locked to top-down. Zoom and pan still work.
  • No scene post-processing — Settings → Scene sliders for bloom, SSAO, and shadows don’t apply here. The Agent Model Style and Animations sections are also ignored.
  • Tile-aligned icons — agents snap cleanly to the terrain grid, which makes crowded maps easier to read.

3D scene for comparison — same agents, richer renderer

Gotchas