layer_flutter's mask was the vertex's height alone, so on a ten metre aspen every part of
the trunk above 1.2 m trembled with the leaves and the bole read as cloth. What separates
a leaf from a bole is distance from the model's centre line, not height; the mask is
radial now, and small plants keep the old one because a flower is all leaf.
NEAR_FADE dithers tree foliage out inside arm's length of the camera, in the depth
prepass, so the lit pass never sees those pixels and the equal-depth optimisation is
untouched. gl_Position.w is the view depth, so it costs one varying and no uniform.
Blades, cards and flowers are excluded - they live at the player's feet - and the shadow
pass keeps every leaf.
daylight_hand takes a reach in metres. The falloff was an inverse square windowed between
26 and 6 with both numbers hard-coded: two per cent of its own near field at ten metres,
so a torch lit your boots. It is a gentle power out to the reach now.
Measured in Maroon Lake, twice per side: the crown mask moves 1.7% of an aspen frame and
nothing at all in the meadow under it; the near fade moves 7.1% of a first-person frame
at a conifer and 0% where there is no foliage in the lens; the torch's reach lifts the lit
ground 20 to 45% and leaves the sky bit-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Needle-card crowns are many cut-out quads deep and a discarding shader turns early depth
rejection off, so every card behind the front one ran the full lighting shader. The near
tree LODs now write depth first (depth.frag, the same alpha coverage test), terrain under
them is rejected before shading, and the lit pass draws them with no discard and an equal
depth test (invariant gl_Position). R3D_NOPREPASS=1 restores the old path.
Dense forest on a Windows PC: 61 -> 78 fps at 3840x2160, 116 -> 164 fps at 1920x1080.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
