Orbital Billiards Prototype

This is a little experiment with pool on the surface of a sphere. You make your shots by dragging a rubber band away from the cue ball. It’s a poor man’s pool cue; you might’ve seen the same thing in minigolf video games.

It’s quite satisfying to break and send the balls flying into low orbit, although judging cut angles is distinctly tougher than in normal pool because of the oddities of spherical geometry. I had some difficulties getting Ageia to do gravitation toward a point without screwing up static friction. As a result the balls coast to a stop much too gradually. I haven’t pursued this concept far enough to give it AI for single player.

There’s a windows executable here (5 MB).
Play it on the web.