terpage.glsl is the reference block (tpSlot, tpUV, terHeight, terHeightSmooth, terNormalXZ,
terOrtho, tpOrthoRes, tpOrthoLod), pasted by section into terrain.vert, terrain.frag,
tersun.frag, model.vert, grass.vert and grass.mesh. u_tp_on = 0 reads the old samplers with the
old coordinates and filtering; on, a resident tile is read at level 0 from u_tp_h / u_tp_nrm /
u_tp_ortho, anything else from the coarse map now bound under the old names. The B-splines use
the FULL map's texel and take every tap through the page, so a tile edge stays one surface;
blurred photograph reads (lod 1-2.5) stay on u_ortho with the level moved down by the coarse
map's ratio. The fragment stages drop their unused u_height. SPIR-V rebuilt: terrain programs
carry 23 samplers (21 in the fragment stage), up from 19.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user saw kit grass, ferns and flowers lit up at night. Nothing was
emissive and every layer draw binds the scene's lighting; what differed was
occlusion. At night the sky's light is nearly all the light, and it is
scaled by ambient occlusion: the meadow's blades are heavily occluded near
the ground, while a kit plant's own AO map knows nothing of the grass around
it, so it took the full sky. By day the sun hides the difference.
model.vert hands on each vertex's height above the model's base (v_lh), and
a non-blade FOLIAGE plant under 2 m scales its AO from 0.35 at the ground to
1 at 0.9 m. Crowns and the blades are untouched.
Measured in the lab (R3D_AT=tree, same binary, old and new SPIR-V): the fern
against the meadow beside it was 2.05x at 23:00 and 1.66x at 13:00; now 1.58x
and 1.60x - the same relation by night as by day. The flowers' brightest
tenth at night 78 -> 52. The noon frame moves 8.4% of pixels past 8 (the fern
and flower bases a little darker; run-to-run noise is part of that).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user's play found the aspens' branches swinging like rope. Three terms:
- the whole-tree bend reached 22% of the tree's height at a gust's top (three
metres on a 14 m aspen); 4.5% now, and the side-to-side part at a quarter of
that and slower;
- a branch term: nothing within 0.35 m of the trunk, growing with the distance
out, phased by the direction the branch leaves the trunk (constant along a
branch, so it moves as one piece and its neighbours are out of step);
- the aspen's leaf flutter took its phase from each vertex at eleven radians a
metre, which bent every twig along its length; about three now, and half the
amplitude.
Measured on the lab's `aspen` view (10-frame bursts, crowns only, same binary
with the old and new SPIR-V): pixels moving more than 8 over ten frames 16.8%
-> 9.7%, frame to frame 4.4% -> 2.1%. SPIR-V rebuilt with `ludic-dev shaders`
(vertex stages only; the manifest is unchanged).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <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>
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>
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>
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>
`Gl.*` binds the whole OpenGL 4.1 core API — every entry point of the
platform gl3.h with every GL_* constant, generated by `ludic-dev glgen`
with per-call ABI thunks. Windowed builds get an NSOpenGLContext on the
existing window at Retina resolution; headless builds render into an
offscreen CGL context, so a program that uses Gl.* renders and
screenshots identically under the test harness. It links gl.ll, the
thunks and OpenGL.framework only when used; every other build stays
byte-identical.
packages/ludic.render3d is a physically based renderer written on that
surface: HDRI image-based lighting, GPU-generated terrain with scanned
PBR materials, CDLOD, cascaded shadows, glTF with skinning, instanced
vegetation with impostors, procedural grass, water, SSAO, and an HDR
pipeline with bloom, auto-exposure and ACES.
It also carries this session's work on it: the terrain at half its cost
(10.3 -> 5.4 ms of frame), the streaming hitch that got worse the longer
you played, a resize that emptied the world, and the packaging that lets
a game use the renderer from its own repository — `ludic assets`, the
material manifest shipping with the package, and shader lookup falling
back to the install root. See changes/ for each, with its numbers.
The camping game that drove all of it has moved out to its own
repository, Maroon Lake; examples/rendering/smooth.ludic stays as the
renderer's example here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
