# Tera — architecture

**Tera** is the map view: California and its cities from above, rendered in three.js, public and
self-hostable. **Spaces** is the other half — the offices you walk into. They
are one engine and one asset library, seen from outside and from inside.

Lives at `tera.lumbridgecorp.com`. Apache 2.0, on the fleet's own Gitea.

## The names

Getting these straight early matters, because two of them were nearly overloaded
onto things that already exist.

| name | what it is |
| --- | --- |
| **Lumbridge Simulate** | the product line these sit under |
| **Tera** | the map view. Cities — SF, LA, NYC — from above. Public, no login. |
| **Spaces** | the interiors product. Offices you enter, host, and self-host. |
| **Office** | one building's interior, belonging to a tenant. You go *into* an office. |
| **Space** | a room or zone inside an Office — a desk bay, a meeting room, a lounge. |

Two things this avoids. `lumbridge-simulate` is already a **Rust crate** in the
private monorepo — the Governor's memory-admission simulator — and in its
vocabulary a **"Scene" is a set of models**, not a three.js scene. This engine
therefore does not take either word for itself: it is Tera, and its three.js
scene stays an implementation detail behind `createScene()`.

One overload survives on purpose: *Spaces* the product versus *a Space* the
room. It sits at two different levels and matches how people already talk about
offices, so it is kept rather than invented around.

---

## 1. Why this is its own repo, and why it is public

Tera began as `/live` inside Workie, the private career portal. That is now
**deleted**, not deprecated — a 3D city engine has no business living in a job
tracker, and Workie is a private repo besides.

**You cannot cleanly Apache-2.0 a subdirectory of a private repo.** The licence
attaches to a distribution, and a consumer has to be able to clone the thing the
licence covers. A folder inside `lumbridgecorp-website` or inside
`lumbridge-runtime` would mean every release is a manual extraction, and every
extraction is a chance to ship something private by accident. The point of this
project — a reusable asset library other people can build on and self-host — needs
a repo that *is* the open-source artefact.

So: **`lumbridge-public/tera` on the fleet's own Gitea.** Not
GitHub. Self-hosting the forge is the same claim the engine makes: the whole
thing runs on hardware you own, and nothing about it requires somebody else's
platform to stay alive.

### The 2D world comes down

The existing Lumbridge world at `world1.lumbridgecorp.com` is a Phaser 2D
office, and its tileset is exactly what stops it being open-sourceable. It has
no real users, so it is being retired rather than migrated — Tera and Spaces
replace it outright, with original assets, which is the whole point.

That reframes this repo: it is not a map that happens to sit next to the
platform, it is the platform's renderer. The city is the outside of the world,
offices are the inside, and a tenant moves between them.

---

## 2. Layout

```
tera/
├── src/engine/         # renderer. Knows about terrain, blocks, streets, flights.
│   ├── types.ts        #   City, District, Hill, Marker, FlightSource
│   ├── world.ts        #   projection + cached heightfield, built per city
│   ├── terrain.ts      #   relief, coastline, parks
│   ├── blocks.ts       #   the built city, on a per-district street lattice
│   ├── structures.ts   #   bridges, streets, freeways
│   ├── markers.ts      #   pins. Takes Marker[], knows nothing about companies.
│   ├── flights.ts      #   FlightSource interface + a simulated implementation
│   └── scene.ts        #   lights, sky, camera flights, render loop
├── src/interiors/      # the inside of the world — floorplans, desks, presence
├── src/assets/         # the library. Original meshes and materials, Apache 2.0.
├── src/transport/      # serialisable route packs + renderer-free fixed-step sim
├── src/cities/         # data packs. Pure geography, no code.
│   ├── california.ts   #   state/corridor scale; LA ↔ SF continuity
│   ├── sf.ts           #   ~1000 lines of coastline, hills, districts, landmarks
│   └── socal.ts        #   LA / OC / Riverside
├── src/realtime/       # strict game-state wire/client/interpolation adapters
├── src/media/          # separate screen signaling, ICE and texture lifecycles
├── src/profile/        # local profile plus ephemeral webcam consent/capture
├── src/adapters/       # generic HTTP and sample-data boundaries
└── src/main.ts         # the standalone demo app
```

The split that matters: **`engine` never imports `cities`, and neither imports
`adapters`.** A city is data handed to the engine. A marker is a `{id, lat, lng,
label, colorKey}` handed to the engine. The engine has no idea Workie exists,
which is what makes it publishable, self-hostable by someone with no Lumbridge
account at all, and free of anyone's private data.

`interiors` and `assets` sit beside `engine` rather than inside it: an office
and a city share the projection, camera, lighting and render loop, and differ
only in what they put in the scene. That is why `scene.ts` owns the loop and
knows nothing about terrain specifically.

`transport` also stays outside the renderer. A `TransportPack` is plain JSON and
`VehicleSimulation` returns plain geographic poses. Three.js enters only in the
`roadTraffic` render layer, which projects poses through the active `World`.
That separation lets the authoritative session service validate and replay the
same route state without importing a browser or a GPU.

### 2.1 Product/control-plane boundary

Tera/Spaces is the authoritative renderer and simulation client. The separate
`lumbridgecorp` service remains the control plane: identity, tenant registry,
membership, billing, provisioning, and short-lived launch grants. It must not
grow a second world renderer or own frame-by-frame simulation.

The public Tera build remains zero-config and useful without any service. Hosted
presence, multiplayer and remote media arrive through adapters whose absence
cannot stop the city, office, traffic, or sky from running. Local profiles and
webcam faces require no hosted service; webcam pixels never enter the realtime
or office-screen transports. This is the replacement path for the retired
Phaser World 1; it is not a migration of that renderer.

The first hosted adapter is now concrete: the Fastify API owns short-lived,
in-memory authoritative presence sessions and streams validated deltas over
authenticated POST/SSE. `src/realtime` remains renderer- and transport-neutral;
the browser transport, interpolation buffer, procedural peer renderer and small
status UI are separate adapters. A city or full-depth office opts into remote
peers explicitly, while an anonymous/public scene does not even allocate their
assets. Interest changes clear the old coordinate frame before a new one is
shown. Game-state deltas never carry webcam or screen media. Webcam faces are
local-only; office screens use a separate consent, signaling and authorization
lifecycle.

---

## 3. Three rules that keep Apache 2.0 honest

Apache 2.0 is a promise that everything in the repo is ours to give away. Three
things would quietly break that promise, and all three are easy to walk into.

### 3.1 No trademarks in the repo

Company logos are **trademarks**, not code. Salesforce's logo is not ours to
relicense no matter how the file got here, and an Apache-2.0 repo containing
`logos/salesforce.svg` is making a claim it cannot back.

The NYC atlas ships 47 of these in `public/logos/`. We do not.

- The shipped application does not fetch or display third-party logos.
- The repo carries zero logo files. Self-hoster asset directories are ignored,
  and the provenance/no-binary gates prevent a logo-shaped binary from quietly
  becoming part of the procedural source library.
- `NOTICE` carries the standard "trademarks are the property of their
  respective owners; their use here is nominative" line.

### 3.2 No OSM-derived coordinates in the repo

This is the subtle one, and it is the reason the geography in `cities/sf.ts` is
hand-traced rather than imported.

OpenStreetMap data — including anything that comes out of Nominatim geocoding —
is **ODbL**. ODbL is share-alike: a "derivative database" has to be released
under ODbL too. Committing a table of company lat/lngs geocoded from Nominatim
into an Apache-2.0 repo mixes an incompatible share-alike obligation into a
permissive one. That is exactly the kind of thing that makes a repo unusable for
the people we want using it.

So:

- **Geography** (coastlines, hills, districts) is traced by hand from scratch.
  Original expression, ours, Apache 2.0. This is already true for SF.
- **Elevation**, when we want real terrain, comes from **USGS/SRTM**, which is
  US-government public domain. Not OSM.
- **Geocoded company coordinates never enter this repo.** They live in a private
  database and arrive over the API at runtime.

There is a real result here: the licence constraint and the privacy constraint
want the same thing. Company positions and pipeline status both stay behind the
API; the open-source repo holds the city and the renderer. The tempting shortcut
— "just commit an `sf-companies.json`" — breaks both at once.

#### Correction: containment is not discharge

An earlier version of this section stopped at the paragraph above, and it was
**wrong** in a way worth recording rather than quietly fixing.

Keeping OSM-derived coordinates out of the repo solves licence *mixing inside
the repo*. It does not touch ODbL's actual trigger. Serving a snapshot of those
coordinates from a public endpoint is **Publicly Using a Derivative Database**,
which brings ODbL §4.3 attribution and §4.4 share-alike onto the served data
**regardless of where the rows are stored**. Moving the table off-disk hides the
obligation; it does not discharge it.

So the rule is about the *geocoder*, not the storage:

- The sanctioned geocoder is the **US Census Geocoder**
  (`geocoding.geo.census.gov`) — a US Government work in the public domain,
  keyless, covering every city planned here.
- **Google, Mapbox and HERE do not solve this either.** Their terms restrict
  storing and redistributing returned coordinates, which is precisely what a
  public snapshot does. "Not OSM" is not the test; "may be redistributed" is.
- Every synced row carries a **provenance** field, and the public-shape
  assertion rejects any row whose provenance is not on a non-ODbL allowlist. The
  gate that already checks field *names* now also checks where a coordinate
  came from.

Nothing had been built against the old reasoning when this was caught, which is
the only reason it was cheap.

### 3.3 The engine takes no position on what a marker means

`markers.ts` renders `Marker[]`. A marker has a `colorKey`, not a `status`. The
mapping from "rejected" to red lives in the *adapter*, in the consuming app.

That is what lets the same engine serve the private Workie build (coloured by
pipeline state), the public Lumbridge demo (coloured by sector), and whatever
someone else builds from this repo, without any of them being a fork.

---

## 4. Flights: FlightRadar24 is the wrong source for this

Real aircraft over the Bay is a great idea. FR24 specifically is a problem, and
it is worth being clear about why before any code is written against it.

FlightRadar24's terms prohibit scraping and prohibit redistributing their data;
their commercial API is licensed per-seat and explicitly does not grant
redistribution. An Apache-2.0 repo shipping an FR24 client is publishing
instructions for violating a ToS, and any FR24 data that reached the browser
could not be relicensed onward. Neither is fatal to a private deployment, but
both are fatal to the open-source story that is the point of this repo.

The engine therefore takes a **`FlightSource` interface**, and the repo ships
only sources it can actually give away:

| source | licence | notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **`SimulatedFlights`** | ours, Apache 2.0 | great-circle tracks on real SFO/OAK/SJC approach and departure paths. **This is what ships first**, and it is genuinely enough — the map wants convincing motion, not a spotter's log. |
| **`adsb.lol` / `airplanes.live`** | community, open terms | free, no key, real aircraft. The default "real data" adapter. |
| **OpenSky Network** | free, non-commercial | fine for a demo, awkward for a commercial product page. |
| **your own receiver** | *no licence at all* | an RTL-SDR + `dump1090` on any fleet box in the Bay produces first-party ADS-B. Nothing to comply with, and it is very on-brand. |
| FlightRadar24 | commercial, no redistribution | if it is ever wanted, it is a **private adapter in the Lumbridge deployment**, not in this repo. |

Recommendation: build `SimulatedFlights` now, `adsb.lol` next, and treat a
receiver as the eventual real answer.

---

## 5. LA is not "SF but more data"

SF is 0.20° × 0.36°. At the 45 m cells the SF heightfield uses, that is 336k
lattice points and a 1.0 s build. (The pack has since grown to the whole Bay
Area: 0.53M points and about 2.3 s.)

LA + Orange County + Riverside is roughly 0.5° × 1.9° — about **14× the area**.
The same approach would be 4.6M lattice points and a mesh nobody can load. This
is the one place where the engine as written does not simply extend, and it is
better to know that before writing `cities/la.ts` than after.

Two changes make it work, and both are cheap now:

1. **Cell size is per-city, not a constant.** LA's basin gets coarse cells;
   nothing is lost, because LA's relief is mountains at the edges rather than
   SF's hills every four blocks.
2. **Cities declare `focusRegions`** — a handful of boxes (DTLA, Santa Monica,
   Culver, Irvine, Pasadena) rendered at fine resolution, with the basin between
   them coarse. This is the LOD story, and it is a per-city data declaration
   rather than engine machinery.

SF gets one focus region covering the whole city and behaves exactly as it does
now. LA gets six. NYC, later, gets Manhattan plus the inner boroughs.

### 5.1 The heightfield is built off the main thread

Both numbers above are seconds during which nothing rendered and nothing
responded, because the build ran on the thread that paints. It runs in a Worker
now (`src/engine/terrain.worker.ts`), which is why `createScene` is async and
takes a `Stage` rather than a canvas.

Three consequences worth knowing before touching it:

- **The city pack has to stay structured-cloneable.** It is posted to the
  worker as data. A `City` that acquires a method, a class instance or a
  closure stops being sendable, and the fix is to remove it rather than to
  JSON round-trip around it — a city pack containing code is the thing §2
  exists to prevent.
- **The sampled accessors stay synchronous.** `elevationAt`, `groundAt` and
  `isLand` are called in tight loops by `terrain.ts`, `blocks.ts` and
  `minimap.ts`; the asynchrony is confined to *becoming ready*, and sampling
  before then is a documented error rather than a silent zero.
- **There is a main-thread fallback and it is not optional.** An environment
  without Workers — a `file://` open, a locked-down browser — still has to
  build and render, because "clone it and it works" has no exception clause.

The same reasoning put Spaces behind an `await import()`: the office is a large
slice of the bundle and most visitors never open it, so it is fetched when
somebody reaches for the door rather than by everybody at boot.

---

## 6. Hosted data and authority boundaries

Tera has no database requirement. The optional Fastify API supplies bounded
weather, flight, satellite, marker, office, realtime and screen-signaling
adapters behind same-origin `/api/v1/*`; a static clone continues with authored
geography and simulation when that API is absent.

Marker rows cross the strict public-shape and provenance allowlist before the
renderer sees them. The renderer receives only `Marker[]` and never pipeline or
tenant records. Realtime peers receive opaque page-scoped actor identifiers and
validated pose state, never auth subjects or profile faces. Screen media is
peer-to-peer: the API validates exact authored screen bindings and relays bounded
signaling, but it never receives media bytes, recordings or source locators.

The currently implemented hosted authorization is deployment-member plus global
admin. It is deliberately not described as tenant/office membership. A control-
plane membership provider must be added before private tenant offices share the
same deployment authority boundary. TURN is also optional and fail-closed; the
credential endpoint being implemented does not mean a public relay is deployed
or approved.

---

## 7. Interiors — and why the asset library is the real product

The existing Lumbridge world is a Phaser 4 2D office, and Karti's read is right:
its tileset is the thing that stops it being open-sourceable. Redrawing that in
3D with original assets is not a graphics exercise, it is a **licensing
unlock** — it is what lets the walkable-office half of Lumbridge ship under
Apache 2.0 at all.

That makes `src/assets` the highest-leverage part of this repo over time: an
original, consistent, Apache-2.0 library of desks, chairs, partitions, screens,
doors, lighting rigs, floor and wall materials. Built once, used by every
Lumbridge world and by anyone else who wants one.

Interiors reuse the engine's renderer, camera machinery and render loop, and
swap the city layer for a floorplan layer. The city view and the office view are
the outside and the inside of one world, and moving between them is a scene swap
rather than a different application.

Two claims that stood here earlier were wrong, and CONTRACT.md carries the
resolutions:

- **They do not share a `THREE.Scene`.** They cannot. San Francisco's `latScale`
  puts one scene unit at ~94 m with 3.6× vertical exaggeration; an office renders
  at 1 unit = 1 m. There are two scenes over one renderer, and the city scene is
  *retained and paused* when you step inside rather than disposed — rebuilding
  its 0.53M-point heightfield costs about two and a half seconds on the way back
  out.
- **A person at a desk is not a `Marker`.** A marker is geographic — it has a
  lat/lng. Presence binds to a **seat id** and never to a coordinate, which is
  what lets the office geometry be public and open-source while who is sitting
  in `eng-04` stays private data behind an API. Same shape as the marker rule,
  one level in.

Reference point: the per-office spatial products in this space (Simile and
friends) are the shape to aim at. The difference Spaces is going for is that this
one is Apache 2.0 and self-hostable — you can run your own world on your own
hardware, which is the same claim `lumbridge-compute` makes about compute.

That phase is now implemented: offices consume the same procedural library and
retain the city scene behind a metre-scale interior scene swap.

---

## 8. Current release topology

The repository now ships California corridor, Bay Area and Southern California
boards; walkable offices; procedural actors, vehicles and aircraft; optional
authoritative realtime; local webcam faces; and separately authorized office
screen signaling. `BUILD_PLAN.md` is the milestone evidence ledger.

The source code is Apache-2.0. `src/assets/LICENSE-ART` additionally dedicates
the artistic output of the procedural asset library under CC0-1.0.
`PROVENANCE.json`, the dependency allowlist and SPDX SBOM gate the distribution.

Remaining questions are deployment questions, not missing renderer contracts:

1. Which authoritative control-plane provider proves tenant/office membership?
2. When do operators approve public TURN/DNS/firewall/certificate changes after
   relay-only and abuse-boundary acceptance?
3. Which Firefox/WebKit versions become supported browser-test targets?
4. Which additional worlds or optional asset packs enter through the same
   provenance and performance gates?
