The first generation pass's R32F height is kept as ter_height_tex (not copied into an RGBA32F),
so every reader of the height - placement, the read-back, physics, selftest16's 9 mm - sees the
same 32 bits. ternormal.frag writes the baked normal's x and z into ter_normal_tex (RG16F), and
the six places that read it (terrain.frag twice, tersun.frag, grass.vert, grass.mesh,
grass_cull.comp, which takes a third texture at binding 6) rebuild y. SPIR-V regenerated.
Maroon Lake's play, headless Vulkan: 2793 -> 2647 MB. The camp's frame: 0.066% of pixels differ by
more than 8 (mean 0.024/255), isolated grass blades at the slope gate. ludic-dev test 307/307.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The device's textureCompressionBC is asked for and remembered (gvk_has_bc). tex_load_ex prefers a
DX10 .dds with the full chain beside the .png (not for an edge-padded cut-out atlas):
texture_dds.ludic reads BC7 / BC5 / BC4, gpu_tex_compressed makes the image with every level and
no colour-attachment use (a compressed image is only sampled and copied into), and
gvk_tex_upload_blocks copies each level's blocks from one staging buffer. A colour map is BC7
sampled as sRGB, a data map BC7 read as it is. examples/rendering/bc.ludic holds it, in the suite;
ludic.lab's plate carries its .dds (its three shots render at 56-60 dB against the .png's).
ludic-dev test 307/307, no Vulkan SDK in the environment.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
native/build.sh builds MoltenVK v1.4.2 from its pinned, checksummed tag (its dependencies at the
commits its ExternalRevisions pins), thinned to arm64, id @rpath/libMoltenVK.dylib, signed ad hoc;
its licence goes in native/LICENSE-MoltenVK. Every render3d program links it through its rpath -
the package's lib/ while developing, Contents/Frameworks in a bundle, where ludic bundle puts and
signs it - and vk_mac.ll also looks for @rpath/libMoltenVK.dylib (after an SDK loader, so the
validation layer still stacks in development). The suite's SDK stand-in (vk_env) is gone: the
render checks draw on the MoltenVK the package carries. gpu_is_gl() removed; nothing calls it.
ludic-dev test 306/306 with no Vulkan SDK in the environment.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- gvk_sampler built a key string on every call it was reached (a texture read two ways in turn
misses its per-texture cache each time); samplers are found by their seven numbers instead
- gvk_tex_mips_into allocated a VkImageBlit per level, every frame (the exposure measure's
chain); it comes from the scratch ring, as does gvk_tex_grow_mips's copy
- gvk_program_new made a new program - modules, pipelines - on every call, and every actor asks
for one; a variant is now made once and shared (a program is immutable), and one that cannot
be made stays 0 for every later asker
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
e634177 started a layer at 256 instances and grew it in layer_add and the stream gather, but a
game writes l.inst directly (Maroon Lake's track prints, trees and rocks), past what had been
grown: "index out of range: 2048, len 2048" in play. layer_new takes its cap up front as before;
layer_reserve(l, n) is exported for a caller that writes l.inst itself once layers start small
again, opt-in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Found with malloc_history over 1200 frames of play without the interface (the first Ludic function
on each allocating stack, live bytes at two marks): sh_loc built `name + "[0]"` per program per pass
per frame - 24.6 MB of 33 in the window; its callers pass both names as literals now. tick_set fills
the frame loop's one Tick instead of tick_new making one a frame. A ridden boat or horse said
VEHICLE_MOVED as a new fact every frame; the metres are added up in VehiclesState and taken once
(vehicle_moved_take / _kind / _x / _z). Play's growth without the interface: 92 -> 14.7 MB a minute
(maroon-lake tests/leakcheck.sh); what is left is phys_push (Physics' fix on lang/nav) and the HUD's
strings. Packages 407, ludic-dev test 305 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- model_release(model) frees each primitive's mesh, and each texture once no other model uses it:
the glTF texture cache counts the primitives using each texture (a path loaded again, and a LOD
chain borrowing its LOD0's material, each take a reference); the last one frees the texture and
forgets it along with any remembered material naming it, so a later load is a fresh one
- a scatter layer's instance and sort arrays start at 256 and double as layer_add or a stream
fills them, to the layer's cap, instead of the whole cap up front (0.4 GB in Maroon Lake)
- gvk_tex_read's copy struct comes from the scratch ring
- examples/rendering/release.ludic holds it (RELEASE OK on Vulkan and OpenGL), in the suite
smooth renders pixel-identical before and after (max |d| 0). ludic-dev test 306/306.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
gvk_pipeline_fast cached only pipelines it made, so one the driver refused was attempted again on
every draw, each attempt building its key string and create structs anew; the refusal is cached
too (a Vulkan program's variants are fixed when it is made, so it would fail the same way).
stream_evict made a new chunk list per eviction and never freed the evicted chunks' records; it
compacts the list in place and frees each evicted chunk with its data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
terrain_generate, terrain_use_dem and terrain_use_ortho each overwrote the previous height
texture (256 MB of RGBA32F at 4096^2), the heights read back (64 MB), the DEM texture and the
orthophoto's texture and pixels. terrain_reload unloads first, so the world swap was already
clean; any other caller building a map over a live one now lets the old go, and the read-back
array is reused, being the same size for every map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- every texture upload malloc'd a CPU copy of its pixels and never freed it (236 MB over the
valley's boot, and again for every model loaded later): the pixels are converted straight
into the mapped staging buffer
- the per-level and per-layer views gvk_view_of made outlived their texture, and on MoltenVK a
view keeps its Metal texture alive: a released texture takes its views with it, and the cache
is keyed by numbers instead of a string built on every call
- the Vulkan structs filled for a draw, pass, barrier, descriptor set, buffer, allocation or
upload (about sixty call sites) come from a reused 1 MB scratch ring (gvk_tmp)
- the descriptor-set cache and the retired buffers are emptied in place, not replaced; the grass
cull's dispatch arguments are made once
- macOS drains an autorelease pool each frame (Vk.frame_pool, lvk_frame_pool in vk_mac.ll)
- R3D_VK_PROF reports Vulkan objects made and destroyed by kind, and every cache's length
- examples/rendering/smooth presents through render3d, so it runs on Vulkan too
The full valley on headless Vulkan loads to 2.18 GB and holds (it passed 8 GB while loading
before). ludic-dev test 305/305, selfhost-test 33/33.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
300 parses of a 446 KB glTF: 2118 MB before, 528 MB with the one-allocation string, 94 MB freed.
A headless Maroon Lake at play: 2334 -> 2195 MB by footprint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- grass_cull.comp decides each candidate blade once a frame (place, ground, density, water,
slope, frustum, colour field) and writes survivors into three bands by distance, one indirect
draw each; grass_inst.vert only bends and places the vertices. OpenGL keeps grass.vert's
per-vertex path; R3D_GRASS_GPU=0 compares
- compute programs take sampled textures after their buffers (gpu_compute_tex / gpu_dispatch_tex),
and every dispatch now records a compute-to-draw memory barrier
- the blades as a sward: 4 m cells, bands with five, three and one-quad blades, spacing doubling
every 18 m to 70 m, never narrower than a pixel; lit facing the sun and leaning to the sky,
shadow looked up above the ground (it read the terrain as its caster), a colour ramp that
leaves only the sheath dark, clumps, dry patches and a tussock shade worked out per blade
- scatter layers flagged grass are skipped while the blades draw (and under R3D_NOGRASS);
R3D_BLADES, R3D_NOBLADES win over the game's setting; R3D_GRASS_S0/D0 for measuring
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a CAMetalLayer on the view (cocoa.ll win_metal_layer), VK_EXT_metal_surface, QuartzCore linked
with Vk.*; the drawable measured after the layer sets the backing scale
- vk_mac.ll opens MoltenVK directly after any loader: a bundle ships only libMoltenVK.dylib
- a covered window is not presented to (win_visible); one frame in flight on macOS
(R3D_VK_INFLIGHT), with images, buffers and descriptor pools held until it is done
- win_held / win_mouse / win_pad / win_touch / win_text / win_present pass slice elements (arg_buf):
every windowed program died on its first input poll
- variants.list and SPIR-V for the three NEAR_FADE foliage programs
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
collide.ludic (circles in a cell grid that could not be removed) and its Render3dState fields are
deleted, and the reload example stops asserting colliders. A game still calling col_* must move to
ludic.physics first (Maroon Lake's src/solid).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ludic migrate state packages <every example program> packages/ludic.lab/example/plate.ludic
1804 vars into 126 states, 64 into lets; 23498 edits in 460 files
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A scene is an entry in the open registry LabScenes, shown on a plate: a
flat lit disc, the package's own small sky with the sun at one hour, and
a frame clock. Headless each camera (lab_shot, lab_shot_at) settles and
is written as build/lab/<scene>/<shot>.png (a stored PNG, written here);
in a window N and P step through them. tools/lab/run.sh and sheet.py
make the contact sheet; tools/lab/plate_build.py makes plate/.
ludic.render3d gains r3d_plate_mode (no terrain, grass or water is made)
and r3d_sky_path. quit() in a program with no frame loop links. The
example takes ~120 MB resident, 417 MiB peak footprint. Reseed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A game no longer writes a host:
- The runtime reads Input itself: focus and keyboard navigation (Tab, arrows, Enter/Space,
autofocus), the pointer (hover, :active, click on release, drag), and scroll boxes with the
wheel, a draggable scrollbar, clipping and scroll-into-view.
- HTML's controls are built in (button, checkbox, radio, range, select, text, key capture), made
of plain parts a stylesheet styles, each reporting with on-change and event.value.
- ludic.ui/render3d.ludic draws with render3d's overlay: textures, named atlases (icon:NAME),
nine-slice border-image, rounded rects and rings, clipping, and a scale.
- Hooks for the program's language, sounds and clock (ui_translator, ui_sounds, ui_clock).
- ui_dev: hot reload, errors on screen, LUDIC_UI_DUMP.
- CSS:
- colours as #rgb / #rrggbbaa / rgb() / rgba() / names;
- border-radius and outline (following the radius), box-shadow, background-image and a tinted
border-image;
- group opacity, @keyframes / animation, transition;
- :focus, :focus-visible and :focus-within.
- HTML mixed content, and boolean attributes.
- render3d gains tex_width / tex_height, and the XML reader keeps text runs in order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The typed buffers are slices: words/floats/fixeds/doubles/pointers(n) make
zeroed, bounds-checked []int/[]float/... and the type names mean them. buffer(n)
is a []byte, with text_of, Fs.read_bytes/write_bytes and view(xs, start, n).
bytes(), indexing a raw pointer or bytes, free, resize, Memory.*, raw file calls,
data_of and C externs are refused outside unsafe { } / unsafe function, and a
project's own files may write unsafe only with --unsafe; the runtime and packages
are the platform. A slice passed to an extern goes as its data.
What the change found: Sync's atomics on a slice header, words(n) uninitialised,
input's fixed axes in ints, truetype's fixed outlines as ints, skin matrices
typed int, gl_shader's source table made from raw bytes. render3d gets safe
entry points (safe_api.ludic). Rendering is byte-identical; a frame costs the same.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
selfhost/check/ walks every function, the entry, tests, globals' initializers and
@On listeners with real scopes, and refuses mixed number kinds, text and numbers,
two record types, mismatched slices and fn types, wrong argument counts, wrong
returns and wrong push elements - every mix-up at once, each at its line.
LUDIC_CHECK_REPORT=1 lists them by category. pointer stays untyped (L7's).
What it found is fixed: render3d's HDR scan calling the float-bits extern f_lt
with floats; ludic.shooter's right-stick aim overflowing past half a push;
prof.ludic storing longs in []int; extern arguments now coerced to their
parameters. Text-returning runtime functions say string; Assets.ready says bool.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
fn(int, float) -> bool is a type, fn name is any top-level function's value, and a call through
a local, a global, a record field, a slice element, a parameter or a result of a function type
is an indirect call; two function types mix only when equal, a call checks its argument count,
and a value may be null (examples/functions/values.ludic). Job.parallel_for keeps its worker
check.
render3d's scene is registered rather than required by name: r3d_on_draw, r3d_on_casters and
r3d_on_stream_fill (hooks.ludic). The two rendering examples register theirs - and had defined
scene_draw_casters with no parameter while the renderer passed one, which nothing checked.
render3d declares numbers float itself; smooth.ludic is converted to floats and returns when
r3d_init fails instead of running on into a segfault. Noise.* check their argument count (a call
one short crashed the compiler). selfhost-build says why it failed. The migration tool reads a
declared float as evidence. Seed regenerated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A numbers float file adapts decimal literals to a fixed operand or slot, and refuses to
promote a computed int to a float implicitly: there it is almost always float bits. Explicit
float(x) is always allowed.
render3d's numbers are float, converted by tools/migrate/floatbits.py - a whole-program
inference of which ints carried IEEE bits (union-find over flows, calls, returns, buffers,
nested buffers and lexical scopes) and a rewriter to operators, Math.* and float literals,
with float_bits / float_from_bits left only where bits really cross (runtime scratch
buffers, mixed buffers). Seed regenerated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Input.text, App.monitor_count / window_to_monitor / window_fixed,
gl_sleep_us, and the grass and collide changes, uncommitted on main and
depended on by the game; carried here so the language work starts from
what the game actually uses. main's working tree is untouched.
A slice has carried { ptr, len, cap } since it existed and nothing ever read
the len: every index emitted a bare getelementptr. Running off the end of one
wrote into whatever the allocator had put next, and the program died somewhere
else entirely - a maroon-lake crash took a day to find because the stack named
a texture upload and the write was in a telemetry buffer five frames earlier.
Now each index loads the length and compares unsigned, which rejects a negative
index in the same instruction, and a failure aborts with the location the other
located errors use:
oob.ludic:9: index out of range: 7, len 3
`words` and the other raw buffers are unchanged - they are a bare malloc with no
length to check, which is the argument for moving off them.
The SPIR-V variants are regenerated in the same commit: shaders --check was
failing against the edited GLSL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Actor.cast_hidden separates drawn from casting. ac_visible rejected a hidden actor from
the shadow pass too, so hiding the player's own body for first person took the player's
shadow with it - and in a sunlit basin your own shadow is what tells you where you are.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
layer_flutter(l, v) gives a scatter layer a per-leaf tremble. The vertex stage offsets
each leaf by a phase taken from its own place on the card, so neighbouring leaves are
never in step, and writes the result out as a varying the fragment stage uses to flash
the leaf's pale underside as it turns - which is the part that reads, since a still
frame of a tremble is a still frame of nothing. One uniform, one varying, no extra pass.
And the sway itself was measured in METRES: hgt * hgt * 0.35 is right for a 40 cm
flower and puts ten metres of sideways into a 14 m trunk, so every tall tree in the
valley stood bent over like a fishing rod. It is a fraction of the model's own height
now - the tip moves a few per cent of the tree whatever the tree is, and the base does
not move at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
water.frag takes u_wade - a point and a strength - and puts spreading rings and a
patch of churn into the surface normals there, so a wader marks the water and a
swimmer works the whole of it. It is one uniform in a fragment stage that was
already running, applied after the distance flattening so a disturbance close to
the camera survives it, and it measures no frame cost at all.
Also records the two renderer features that shipped without a changeset.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The existing occlusion is tuned as AMBIENT occlusion: a wide radius answering "how open is
the sky here". That is the right question, and it leaves every object in the frame
hovering - because what says a log is ON the ground rather than in front of it is a hard,
narrow darkening in the last few centimetres where the two meet, and at a metre and a half
of radius that darkening is spread so thin it is not there.
A second, tight pass: eight taps inside 40 cm, which at any normal distance is a handful of
pixels and stays in cache, with a much tighter range check than the ambient one so a wall
across the room does not darken the floor in front of it.
Small by frame area, because contact occlusion is - 1.8% of the frame, 7% of the region
around the things it grounds. GL 7.0 -> 7.1 s, VK 7.3 s over 400 frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rain fell and the ground did not change: the weather was a curtain of particles in front
of a dry valley.
u_wet, 0 dry to 1 soaked, does the three things a wet surface does. Darkens the albedo.
Drops the roughness hard - which is what makes a soaked meadow read as soaked rather than
merely dark, because the sky glances off it. And pools: water finds the low places and
flat ground holds what a slope sheds, so the puddle mask is the macro noise the materials
already use gated on slope, and a puddle takes the world's up for its normal rather than
the ground's relief.
It joins the shore's existing wet band rather than fighting it - the same term from a
different cause.
34.1% of the frame changes between dry and soaked. GL 7.1 s either way over 400 frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
You walked through a meadow and every blade ignored you, which is the most noticeable
thing missing from every step the game asks you to take.
u_push (x, z, radius) bends blades away from a body and DOWN - a trodden stem is shorter
as well as leaning, and leaving the height alone made them splay outward like a fan
instead of being walked through. Applied after the blade's own yaw has put it into world
axes and before it is tipped onto the ground normal, so the push is a world direction
rather than something in the blade's private frame.
Radius 0 means nobody is there, so nothing is paid for when it does not apply. Measured:
GL 6.9 s, VK 7.3 s over 400 frames, unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The grass had a gust built from two sines; the trees had no gust term AT ALL, only a
per-instance wobble. So the meadow rippled and the canopy above it swayed to an unrelated
rhythm, and nothing ever crossed the valley.
wind.glsl is prepended to every stage (programs.ludic, and shaders.ludic for the SPIR-V
build) so grass, crowns and water read the same field at the same world position. It
declares no uniforms on purpose: u_time and u_wind already exist in several of those
files and redeclaring them is a compile error in whichever stage includes both.
The wavelength is what made it work. At 0.030 the front was 209 m crest to crest -
longer than the meadow you can see - so the whole frame sat in one phase and the gust
read as everything breathing together. At 0.085 it is 74 m and a front crosses a view in
a couple of seconds.
R3D_DEBUG_WIND=1 paints the field on the ground. It is the only honest way to show a gust
in a still image, and two shots 0.3 s apart move by 39/255.
400 frames: GL 6.9 s, VK 7.2 s. Backends agree to 0.68/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two changes that have been sitting uncommitted in this checkout, gathered as a recovery
point before the next run of work.
grass.vert: the blade existence gate tested green DOMINANCE - g - max(r, b) - which is a
test for lush green and nothing else. A dry alpine meadow is yellow-green, its red as high
as its green, so the meadow scored zero and was thinned to the floor - a QUARTER of the
blades - on exactly the ground that should be thickest. Measured on Maroon's own ortho,
g - max(r, b) reads +0.026 at the camp and -0.002 six hundred metres away, flipping between
full density and a quarter over continuous meadow; g - b reads +0.076 and +0.014 and
separates plant from rock and snow just as well, because rock and snow are neutral and
vegetation is not. Bare ground in the near band went 82% -> 57% looking down.
Blade height is biased short (h3 * h3) rather than spread evenly, so a meadow is a dense
mat with taller stems out of it; an even spread read as a lawn that had been cut.
water.frag: the planar reflection is returned at 0.72 of the scene's exposure rather than
all of it, the fresnel mix caps at 0.70 rather than 0.86, absorption falls so the bed is
visible through the surface at the angles a player stands at, and the ripple field is
roughly halved - so a sheltered lake is one sheet of water with a mountain in it instead
of open chop to the horizon.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The shipping default had NO anti-aliasing at all: the temporal resolve was removed, the
setting's first option went on saying "Temporal", and MSAA defaults to one sample, so
every machine without DLSS drew grass and needle cards with nothing smoothing an edge.
FXAA in the sharpen pass, which already reads the neighbourhood and runs last on the LDR
image. No history, so it cannot drag or smear a reflection. 25.5% less single-pixel
staircase on edge pixels.
The trap, recorded because it inverted the result: the unsharp delta must be computed
from the RAW image and only then applied to the anti-aliased colour. Centre from FXAA and
neighbours from the raw texture measures half smoothing and half signal, so the mask
sharpens precisely what FXAA softened - 29% WORSE than no anti-aliasing at all.
Depth of field for the photo mode: a disc whose radius is the circle of confusion,
normalised by focus distance so a landscape shot is not a macro, with taps rejected
unless they are at least as out of focus as the pixel they blur into - which is what
stops a sharp foreground haloing into a blurred background. Between the scene and the
bloom, so a blurred highlight still blooms. Skipped whole when the aperture is shut.
400 frames in ordinary play: GL 7.1 s, VK 7.2 s - the lens does not draw there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Foliage roughness was pinned to 1.0 and grazing Fresnel switched off, so nothing green
in the game had a highlight anywhere. The glint off waxy leaves and wet needles is most
of what makes a stand look alive rather than painted.
The reason it was off is real: a crown is card quads, and at a grazing angle the card's
normal is a lie, so a specular lobe frosted whole crowns white against the sky. The sheen
returns as its own term gated on exactly that - it fades as the card turns edge-on, which
is where its normal stops meaning anything. A tight lobe for the glint, a weak wide one
for the waxy rim, nothing at the angles that frosted.
Translucency reaches 260 m rather than 140, and a dense crown passes 0.45 of it rather
than 0.3, so a backlit stand glows for as far as you can see it.
400 frames: GL 7.1 s, VK 7.4 s. Backends agree to 0.14/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Correcting the previous commit, which said this was unfixed. It is fixed, and I had the
wrong knob: raising the mudstone tint's magnitude from 0.14 to 0.38 made the face LIGHTER
rather than REDDER and it came out pale tan. The shader's own DEBUG_ALB view measured
red:blue at 1.56 on the peak where maroon mudstone wants nearer 4, which says plainly that
what needed moving was green and blue DOWN, not red up.
The built-in DEBUG_MAT view is what settled it, and I should have reached for it an hour
earlier instead of inventing my own: it shows the Bells as pure red, rockW = 1, so the
face is rock and always was. That also explains why painting the snow albedo bright red
changed nothing and I wrongly read that as "this surface is not drawn by this shader" -
there is no snow on those faces to paint.
The far tier's fallback moves with it, so the cheap tier keeps the near tier's mean.
Backends agree to 0.60/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
55% of every ground pixel was the orthophotograph, at every distance and on every
material. A survey image records WHERE the forest and the scree are well and what a
steep rock face is coloured badly - it is shot through kilometres of air at an angle no
player stands at. The photograph keeps the meadow and the forest and gives the rock back
to the rock, by material and by elevation and never by distance: a distance fade used to
live here and was removed because the photograph has the day's own shadows baked in, so
grass grew dark patches as you backed away and they slid as you walked.
The far tier's rock fallback is the maroon mean, not a neutral grey - TFAST_3 skips the
rock sample and leaves that constant standing in for a whole mountain.
Ortho-classified snow needs altitude now. Bright and unsaturated is what snow looks like
from a satellite and also what a sunlit rock face looks like. Gully snow is gated on the
snow line rather than two absolute heights.
Distance desaturation eased 1.9 -> 1.15: tuned on a valley whose rock was grey anyway.
NOT FIXED, and I want it recorded rather than implied: the Bells themselves are still
not maroon. The near and middle rock is warmer and measurably so, but the distant peak
does not respond to ANY of this - not the rock tint, not the ortho weight, not the snow
line, not the gully gate. Painting sA bright red left it unchanged, so whatever surface
that is, it is not this shader's snow and not this shader's material blend. Somebody
should find out what draws it before tuning any of these numbers further.
400 frames: GL 7.0 s, VK 7.2 s. Backends agree to 0.62/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything before this made the air a COLOUR APPLIED TO A SURFACE. Nothing put light
in the space between surfaces, so the basin had no shafts, no pooled mist and no rays
off a ridge at any hour, whatever was done to the fog.
A half-resolution march from the camera to the depth buffer, asking the same shadow
the rest of the frame asks - the cascades, the baked height-field shadow and the cloud
mask - so a shaft is cast by the actual trees and the actual ridge and a passing cloud
dims its own rays. Henyey-Greenstein scattering, because real air throws light forward.
Density and a separate ground-hugging mist layer ride the sun's elevation, so mist
forms in the cold at either end of the day and burns off by mid-morning.
Composited with the bloom pyramid's own tent upsample under ONE/ONE - what was wanted
and already there - and before bloom, so a shaft blooms. Into post_hdr, not post_scene:
post_scene is what the water refracts and shafts added there would sit under the lake.
The tuning that mattered was the sky term, which is added at every step: at 0.06 it
accumulated into a flat grey wash lifting lit and shadowed air equally, which is the
contrast a shaft is made of, and the valley came out one pale sheet. At 0.012 the sun
dominates and there is light rather than fog. I cut the density and mist three times
before the frame looked like air instead of paint.
R3D_NOVOL=1 for an A/B; Off in Settings skips the pass whole.
400 frames at 07:00: GL 7.1 -> 7.3 s, VK 7.2 -> 7.4 s. Backends agree to 0.08/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Aerial perspective is a curve now. A low sun shines through far more air than a
high one and shines ALONG the ground rather than down onto it, so density, height
falloff and forward scatter all ride the sun's elevation; overcast thickens the air
and flattens the scatter, because a grey sky has no disc to scatter from. `lowsun`
falls away BELOW the horizon as well as above it, or the middle of the night gets a
dawn's haze with no dawn to justify it.
The term that was missing entirely is distance DESATURATION. Blending a saturated
green ridge toward a saturated blue noon sky leaves a saturated ridge - which is why
the same valley read as a photograph at dusk, where the fog colour happened to be a
warm grey, and as a toy at one o'clock. A surface is now pulled toward its own
luminance faster than the fog itself arrives. Measured far/near saturation at the
camp: 07:00 1.11 -> 0.89, 09:00 1.04 -> 0.93, 13:00 0.98 -> 0.89.
The grade is the hour's too - nine literals bound at the draw, written by
daylight_set now. Noon is the case worth naming: direct sun is warm-white and the
only thing filling a midday shadow is a blue sky, so noon gets a cool balance over a
blue-lifted shadow with hard contrast, and dawn and dusk the reverse. Ground R-B,
lit vs shadowed: 07:00 +42.8/+14.2 -> +48.9/+15.1, 13:00 +32.2/+14.8 -> +25.2/+2.9.
Gain is left alone deliberately: the grade is `c * gain + lift * (1 - c)`, so warming
it warms the whole frame, and warming it at noon made one o'clock yellower than seven
in the morning - the opposite of the point.
The visible sky is relit. Turning a photograph on its axis does not change what
colour it was taken at, so every sunset had a mid-morning blue overhead. An analytic
sky supplies the chroma and the photograph keeps the luminance: the cloud stays where
it is and goes orange at dusk, the zenith goes deep blue at noon, and no second sky
is shipped. It fades out under the horizon and eases off under cloud.
The ground bounce follows the ground, crossing meadow to rock at the map's treeline
instead of being one green constant everywhere including above the scree.
R3D_NOAIR=1 restores all of it, so a before-and-after comes from one binary at one
hour; it joins R3D_NOCLOUD / R3D_NOSHADOW / R3D_NOGI.
Verified on macOS OpenGL, macOS Vulkan (MoltenVK) and Windows Vulkan (RTX 3070 Ti).
Backends agree: mean difference 0.15-0.88/255 within a machine. Across machines the
ORIGINAL renderer already differed by 5.02/255 at 19:12 and this build differs by
2.80, so cross-platform variance is pre-existing and did not grow. 400 frames: GL
7.4 s before and after, VK 7.0 s before and after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The runtime opens a game's window before main, titled with the program's name, and
gl_open attached to it without passing its title on (render3d's gvk_open called win_open,
which returns early on Windows and opened a second window on macOS). win_set_title in
cocoa.ll / win32.ll (setTitle: / SetWindowTextW, UTF-8 -> UTF-16; a no-op without a window,
stubbed headless) retitles it from gl_open, and win_open on an open window retitles it on
both platforms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
