1 · What it is
Midnight Compass is an offline-first companion app for drivers. The entire map of Germany lives on the phone, so the map, your speed, your routes and the world you explore all work with zero connection — on a mountain pass, in a tunnel or abroad on roaming. Opening the Compass drops you straight onto the map; everything else (speed, drag, drift, quests) is a pill away on top. An optional online layer adds community rankings, events, a marketplace and a deep quest system, but the core experience never needs a signal.
2 · The offline map
All of Germany is bundled as a vector map (PMTiles, ~3.4 GB) and rendered on-device with MapLibre GL — roads, water, buildings and town labels draw instantly in a custom day/night style with a 3D driving tilt. Points of interest (fuel, car-wash, food), ~23,000 mobile-camera hotspots and ~7,000 fixed speed cameras are packed in too, so navigation and warnings work fully offline.
3 · Fog of war — explore & reveal
The map starts hidden under a fog layer that clears as you drive. Every revealed cell is permanent and counts toward an exploration score for each Bundesland and Kreis — a game-like reason to take the road less travelled. A background mode keeps revealing the map and logging kilometres with the screen off, and crews can pool their explored territory into a shared, colour-coded map.
4 · Quests — discover Germany
Midnight Compass turns Germany into a board of quests, sorted into categories you switch between with the pills atop the Quests menu. Explore holds admin-built treasure hunts: travel to each hidden "?" one stop at a time, answering a question to unlock the next, until the final location is permanently revealed as its reward marker. Car History, Culture and Biography are thousands of real German origins — car makers and inventions, composers and artists, motorsport legends. Drive once to a place of origin to unlock it, then replay its short illustrated quiz from anywhere. Compass holds rare grand tours that chain several origins into one epic journey, and Race Maps unlock a repeatable race course when you finish them. Anything that isn't location-locked works the same way: a "?" appears on the map, you drive within range to locate it, and from then on you can play it wherever you are. Completions earn points by tier — Compass 99, Car History 50, Race Maps 35, side quests 25 — tallied in Unity and in Settings → Quest Completion.
5 · Building & sharing quests
Admins build quests by hand in the Builder: set a start, add stops with text, images, videos and a multiple-choice question, mark the final destination's reward marker, then upload to publish for everyone. A Quest Generator can auto-build a whole multi-stop tour from any of 51,000 bundled German landmarks — pick a destination and a difficulty and it lays out a route with facts-based questions to preview, tweak and publish. Finishing a quest can trigger a cinematic Completion Experience: an optional intro video under a "Quest Completed!" overlay before the destination is revealed. And once you've located a quest yourself you can share it by QR — a friend who scans it sees the origin revealed on their map, but still has to drive there to unlock it.
6 · Speed & performance
A GPS speedometer records today / month / all-time bests, a timed 0–100 km/h benchmark tracks your personal best, and dedicated Drag, Drift and Sprint modes measure acceleration, cornering and point-to-point runs. Vehicles are ranked into S–F performance classes from power-to-weight and recorded times.
7 · Road racing
The community builds real-road courses — simple A→B sprints, multi-waypoint routes or free-ride recordings. GPS triggers the timer at the start line and stops it at the finish, with a hidden scoring model rewarding length and difficulty. A start can only be triggered from within range of its marker, keeping times honest.
8 · Community
Online extras layer on top: a live event calendar with QR-unlocked meets, a parts marketplace, a vehicle knowledge base, crews with shared territory, and friends with opt-in live location sharing. New accounts are reviewed and approved by an admin before they unlock.
9 · Privacy & technology
Built in Flutter for iOS and Android on top of MapLibre GL and geolocator, backed by a PHP/MySQL service on mi-su.me. Everything that can run offline does; your explored map and stats live on the device, location sharing is strictly opt-in, and background tracking runs behind a visible Android foreground-service notification — never silently.
10 · Offline & online mode
Midnight Compass is offline-first: the whole map, fog-of-war exploration, quests, the Car & Moto Dex, the quiz, your kilometres and speed records all work with no signal — everything that realistically can run on the device, does. Features that inherently need the network are the online mode: sharing crew points, direct messages, the marketplace and admin account approval. In particular, crew points can only be shared with an internet connection; offline you keep playing and everything syncs the next time you are online — the online mode never blocks the offline experience.
