**Shadows were the right size and pointed at nothing.** Last round fixed the
missing `updateProjectionMatrix()`, so the frustum finally became the size
every caller asks for — but nothing aimed it, and `sun.target` sits at the
world origin. A pack's origin is the **north-west corner of its slab**, so
for lumbridge-hq the box was off-centre by half the building: 14.4 m of a
48 m plate, about a third of the floor, fell outside the frustum and
neither cast nor received. Invisible while three's broken ±5 default made
shadows useless everywhere; obvious the moment they started working.
`SceneKitOptions` takes a `shadowTarget` now, both callers pass one, and
the light's target is added to the scene — which is the part that actually
matters, because `LightShadow.updateMatrices` reads `target.matrixWorld`
and an unparented `Object3D` is never reached by the traversal that
updates it. The sun is also placed relative to the target rather than the
origin, so light-to-target is exactly `sunDistance` for every direction,
which is the invariant each caller's `shadowNear`/`shadowFar` were chosen
against.
**`flights.ts` could not be tested, and that is why it was untested.** It
used a TypeScript parameter property — the one piece of TS syntax that
*emits code* rather than annotating a type — so Node's type stripping
refused the whole module. The bundler never cared, so nobody found out
until the first `node --test` file tried to import it. The module carrying
the worst bug this project has shipped was, by construction, the one
module that could not have a test. It has eleven now, including one that
fails if the live-aircraft repeat-skip is removed.
**Robots are on the plan panel** — a turned marker with a bow for heading,
in the one hue left that is neither the people-blue nor the camera-amber.
Review findings cleared across the four new sky/robot modules: a real
24 mm void at the ankle and an 8 mm hole through each forearm, a
per-frame allocation in the robot heading picker, a per-frame sort in the
starlink ranking, `uTime` growing unbounded until the cloud breath
quantises, and `DAY_REFERENCE`'s derivation which did not reproduce.
`createStarlinkMeshLayer` now takes a **board** radius — the same unit its
sibling takes — instead of a dome radius with nothing in the types to tell
them apart. That is the exact confusion that has already caused one real
bug here. `DOME_RADIUS_FACTOR` has one owner and is imported, not copied:
the points and the meshes must be on the same dome or a satellite that
grows geometry also jumps.
Several comments were wrong rather than merely stale — a fabricated claim
about `Object3D.clone`, a fabricated attribution to `Plan`, an inverted
`DoubleSide` argument, a triangle ledger citing a function that no longer
exists, and a defensive-call rationale that contradicted the paragraph
above it. In a codebase where the comments are the design record, those
are defects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
**Lights.** A sited office follows the real sun, and the real sun spends
half its time below the horizon — which was producing a technically
correct and completely useless picture: an unlit floor plate at midnight
in a building whose whole premise is that you can see who is at which
desk. `luminaires.ts` brings the diffusers up as the sun goes down and
reports one scalar for how much interior light there is; `withHouseLights`
adds it to the rig. CONTRACT §4's rule that a fitting emits no light is
kept in full — nothing here is a light source, and the rig still has one
owner.
**And they notice you.** A fitting within four metres of somebody walking
underneath brightens and fades back as they leave, which is what an
occupancy-sensed floor actually does at night. They are one `InstancedMesh`
sharing one material, so `emissiveIntensity` cannot vary between them —
`instanceColor` can, but three multiplies it into the diffuse term only, so
six lines of `onBeforeCompile` carry it into the emissive term as well. The
alternative was one mesh per fitting: forty draw calls of ceiling in a
building that spends about twenty on everything.
**Optimus.** A posable Gen-3 humanoid — eleven articulating joints, pale
shells over a dark frame, a black visor — with a walk cycle driven by
*distance travelled* rather than wall-clock, so the feet do not slide when
a robot slows down. Two per floor, derived from the pack's levels, so the
two-storey tower gets four and the hangar gets two without either pack
knowing robots exist. They wander between reachable points using
`Plan.blocked` — the collider the wall split already produces — and they
are deliberately **not** gated on `depth`: the build-time-exclusion rule is
about occupancy, and a robot is nobody.
**Starlinks stop being pixels.** The sixty-four nearest the centre of view
grow real geometry — a flat bus with ONE large solar array, which is the
actual signature and the thing everybody draws symmetrically and wrong —
fading in so there is no pop where a point becomes a mesh. Two draw calls.
The sun for their attitude comes from `solar.ts` and not from the rig,
because `atmosphere.ts` floors the light direction to keep the shadow
camera usable, and a sun ten degrees *down* is exactly the dusk geometry
that makes a pass visible.
**Aircraft** are airliners now — swept wings, nacelles, a fin — instead of
an arrowhead, still one shared geometry facing +Z as `flights.ts` requires.
**Clouds** drift over the board, driven by observed cover, lit by the rig
rather than by themselves.
Four modules were built by subagents and reviewed by another; every one
came back `needs-work` and the reviews were right. Fixed before wiring:
- The walk cycle's arms were a quarter cycle out of step with its legs —
the legs are cosine-shaped and the arms were on `sin`, so at the
instant the left leg reached full forward the left shoulder was at dead
neutral. Uncanny, and hard to name until it is pointed at.
- Every Optimus shell used a `roundedBox` radius of 0.12–0.22, which that
primitive turns into a near-circular cross-section — the figure was
built out of lozenges, not panels. The rest of the library uses
0.02–0.09.
- The cloud material was `transparent` + `DoubleSide` without
`forceSinglePass`, so three rendered it twice per frame *and* bumped
`material.version` on each pass — rebuilding the program cache key
forever, on the one layer that is fill-rate bound.
- `starlinkMesh.dispose()` freed the geometries but not the
`InstancedMesh`es, orphaning their instance buffers on every city
switch.
- The airliner's tailplane roots sat outside the tail cone and hung in
free air over most of their chord.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
**Aircraft actually move now, and the reason they did not is the headline.**
`HttpFlights` holds a frozen snapshot between network refreshes and is
polled at 1 Hz, so a live feed handed the layer the same position five to
fifteen times and then jumped. `span` therefore measured the poll interval
rather than the gap between the two positions that differ, the teleport
test saw an airliner covering 36 units in a "second" against a ceiling of
8, and **every live track's history was wiped on every refresh** — so no
aircraft on the deployed site could ever grow a trail, however long
TRAIL_POINTS was set. Skipping the repeat fixes the motion and the trail
at once. Trails then go to 72 points / 240 s, which is about seventy
seconds of flying.
Three more defects in the same file, found while looking: trail
truncation dropped the segments nearest the aircraft (leaving a streak
with no aeroplane attached), MAX_TRACKS was declared and never enforced,
and one missing target deleted its whole trail. The buffer now uploads
only what it wrote, rather than 46 MB/s of untouched array.
**You can get above the constellation.** Dome to 1.05 board *radii* and
the orbit to 2.0 spans. Radii, not spans: scene space is centred on the
city and the Bay Area board runs forty kilometres down the peninsula, so
the furthest corner is 0.94 spans out where the half-diagonal is 0.65 —
sized off the half-diagonal the dome sat inside its own city. The far
plane goes to 4 spans to stop clipping the sky from off-centre chapters,
and `PointsMaterial` defaults `fog: true`, which was quietly dimming the
whole constellation with the city's haze.
**An office can say where it stands.** `Office.site` — lat, lng, height
above the ground outside, and the compass bearing the pack's −Z points
along — and with one it gets the same sun the city does, a sky, and a
horizon at `-elevation`. CONTRACT §4 reserved this as "a later
refinement"; it is taken up rather than overturned, and `daylight.ts`
computes no light of its own. It does the two things a room needs that a
map does not: turn the sun into the building's frame, and move the fog
outdoors before it greys out the far wall.
Two buildings now, and they are deliberately unalike: Lumbridge HQ 188 m
up a Transbay tower facing 205°, and **Frontier Valley**, a startup in a
hangar at Alameda Point — one room, 54 x 30 m, nine metres to the
trusses, four metres above reclaimed ground.
Floor-to-floor in the reference pack is now 16.8 m: the interstitial is
ten times a real one, so the space between the slabs is somewhere things
can hang. It is frankly not architecture, `PLENUM` is the one number to
change, and the file says so.
Also fixed, all found by review rather than by looking at the screen:
- `sun.shadow.camera.updateProjectionMatrix()` was never called, so
three's default ±5 unit box has been in force this whole time and
every `shadowExtent` this repo passes — including the city's ±752 —
has been silently ignored.
- A missing aircraft was kept alive by the new grace period and *drawn*,
so it froze in mid-air at full opacity for 32 s.
- Frontier Valley's mezzanine was a `Room`, which carries no height: its
slab lay on the concrete, its chairs floated 4.4 m over it, and its
balustrade fenced off a patch of ground floor. It is a `Level`.
- Overlapping floor slabs z-fought. The format permits overlap and
resolves later-first, so `shell.ts` now lifts a slab a hair per
earlier slab it overlaps — and by nothing at all in a pack, like the
reference office, whose rooms only ever abut.
- `switchOffice` bypassed the `entering` guard (leaking a whole scene
per double-click) and tore down the old room before knowing the new
one would load, with no way back.
Known and not fixed: raising MAX_SPAN to 30 s doubles the worst-case
re-base snap when a feed's gap shortens. It is bounded, pre-existing in
kind, and the fix wants carrying the live head into the next leg.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Satellites, end to end: CelesTrak element sets behind the same TTL cache
the weather and the flights use, served as TLEs rather than as positions,
and propagated in the browser with SGP4.
Sending elements is the same trick `flights/plan.ts` plays and it has a
better excuse here — a TLE *is* the closed form, valid for days either
side of its epoch, so one cacheable fetch every six hours replaces a poll
and every viewer agrees about where everything is.
Two things are worth knowing about the shape of it:
- There is no region parameter. An aeroplane at 10,000 m is local and
a satellite at 550 km is above the horizon for a circle two thousand
kilometres across, so one catalogue serves both boards and the client
decides what is above its own horizon. Only the observer is per-city,
which is why `main.ts` shares the elements and rebuilds the catalogue.
- The layer draws on a dome, because it cannot draw anywhere else.
`world.metres(550_000)` is 21,000 scene units against a far plane at
3,000. Azimuth and elevation are real; the radius carries nothing.
Off by default: a clone that started pulling CelesTrak on `npm run dev`
would have volunteered somebody else's bandwidth for its onboarding.
Godmode gets the two dials that point at the sky rather than at the
light — fabricated traffic, which composes with a live ADS-B feed instead
of replacing it, and a switch for the satellite layer with a count beside
it. Both are god-only lies about the inputs, in the manner of the weather
override.
`satellite.js` is the second runtime dependency this package has taken.
Its entry point star-exports an Emscripten build that cannot be shaken
out, so `noWasmPropagator` in the Vite config cuts it: 308 kB of WASM
loader for a bulk propagator nothing calls, against 26 kB for the SGP4
that does the work.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things that were built and never connected, connected.
**The weather was already there.** `observe()` has always taken a
`WeatherObservation` and `main.ts` has always passed null, so the cloud,
precipitation, visibility and marine-layer paths in atmosphere.ts had never run
outside a test. The server already shipped NWS, met.no and Open-Meteo, all
configured off. What was actually missing was that a single TERA_ORIGIN_LAT/LNG
served one metro and lied to the other — so weather and traffic are per-region
now, derived from the city's own bounds, and the Bay Area gets its fog while
Long Beach gets its own sky. The route takes ?city= or a validated ?lat=&lng=
and refuses to become an open geocoding proxy for the planet.
**The heightfield moved to a Worker.** 2.3 s of blocked main thread at boot, and
another ~950 ms of point-in-polygon on top of it: the park mask is filled in the
worker now, and block placement samples four corners and only runs the exact
test on a cell that straddles an edge — 8 buildings differ out of 185,036.
createScene is async and takes a Stage as a consequence, and there is a
main-thread fallback because "clone it and it works" has no exception clause.
**Spaces is a chunk you fetch when you reach for the door**, not one everybody
downloads. Same for the godmode tools. The entry chunk is 722 kB rather than
772; three.js is most of what is left and splitting it is a different job.
**Godmode is an instrument panel now** rather than one slider: the date and the
season, not just the hour, so the Meeus moon and the sun's seasonal arc become
visible instead of merely correct; a weather override that says on screen when
it is lying; a frame-time and draw-call readout; and a pose editor that emits a
paste-ready Chapter block, which is the thing that makes adding New York cheap.
Two blockers the review caught:
- Every city switch leaked 8 GPU textures — one of them a 2048x2048 shadow map
— and ~10.5 shader programs, and deleteTexture had never been called once in
the app's lifetime. The renderer was being built per scene; it belongs to the
canvas, for the life of the page.
- An upstream fetch that threw rather than returning null skipped the cache
stamp, so the TTL — the only rate limit on outbound calls — collapsed to one
upstream request per inbound request, and the caller got a 500.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three loose ends turned into four, because one of them was not a stale comment.
`cityDaylight()` closed its fog at 210/460 — numbers tuned when San Francisco's
230-unit board was the only one. Every caller who supplies an `Atmosphere`
overrides them, which is why this survived: the demo does, so nothing looked
wrong. A self-hoster who renders a city with no clock and no weather gets the
default path, and on the Bay Area's 1003 units that fog closes well inside the
city. It now scales to the board exactly as the camera limits do, with the old
constants preserved as the default for a caller holding a palette but no world.
The three that really were comments: socal.ts justified its `latScale` by
citing the 340-unit orbit cap and the 460-unit fog as things the engine
insisted on, and the engine stopped insisting when both became board-relative —
285 is now a choice the pack makes because its lot sizes and hill radii were
authored against it. CONTRACT.md and ARCHITECTURE.md still measured the
retention argument against a 336,864-point San Francisco that has been the
whole Bay Area for some time. And server/package.json listed five routes where
there are six.
None of these changed behaviour except the first. All of them would have gone
on quietly disagreeing with the pages that now cite them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six agents in parallel, and the two city packs independently reported the same
blocker: `focusRegions` and `coarseFactor` existed on the `City` type and
nothing implemented them. Uniform lattices would have been 2.9M points for
Southern California and 3.7M for the expanded bay. Both packs were unloadable
as written.
`buildAxis` is the answer, and it is honest about its limits: refinement is per
axis, not per rectangle, so a focus region sharpens its whole row *and* its
whole column. Two regions at opposite corners refine nearly everything between
them. Measured, not guessed — the bay went 0.53M points with one region and
1.64M with three, for detail nobody is looking at from a board this wide. One
region each, coarse factor ten, and the builds land at 3.8 s and 2.3 s.
Then three things that were only ever right because San Francisco was the only
city. `maxDistance: 340` and a 170-unit shadow box were constants tuned for a
230-unit board; the bay is 1003 units across and the camera physically could
not retreat far enough to frame it. Fog distances were scene units pinned to
the same assumption. And `minVisibilityM` defaulted to 4.5 km of honest
weather, which over ninety-four kilometres of bay correctly hides three
quarters of it — the night view was a black rectangle for a completely
reasonable reason. All three now derive from the board.
The moon is a real ephemeris and its light is a deliberate lie: 1.15, against a
physical ratio of one to four hundred thousand. What is being reproduced is
what a moonlit night looks like on a screen in a lit room.
The CI gate caught itself, which is the part worth keeping. Port 8431 was
already held by a server from an earlier session, so the boot check polled a
healthy stranger while the process it started died on EADDRINUSE. It now
refuses to run rather than pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ten agents wrote this in parallel against CONTRACT.md, which exists because the
five design agents before them collided on fifteen blocking points — four files
specified twice with incompatible contents, three separate backends for one box,
and `Environment` exported twice meaning different things.
What landed: a Stage owning only the renderer and the loop, with the city and an
office as two scenes over it. They cannot share one — San Francisco is ~94 m per
scene unit with 3.6x vertical exaggeration and an office is 1 unit = 1 m — and
the city is paused rather than disposed on the way in, because rebuilding its
336,864-point heightfield costs about a second on the way back out.
Offices are data. `src/offices/lumbridge-hq.ts` is fifteen rooms and seventy-six
seats, and it is the file a self-hoster copies. Walls are a segment list with
1-D openings, so doors and windows are holes punched in a wall rather than
placed objects, and the pass that splits a wall around its openings hands the
walk-mode collider its segments for free.
The sun is real. `solar.ts` is a NOAA/Meeus implementation with no imports at
all — not even three.js — so time of day keeps working on a laptop in a field.
Verified against known values: 75.45 degrees at the June solstice in SF, 28.79
at December, sunset at 03:15Z. The first screenshot after wiring it was a black
rectangle, which turned out to be correct: it was midnight in San Francisco.
Presence binds to a seat id and never to a coordinate. The pack knows where
`eng-04` is; who is sitting in it is private data behind an API. Same shape as
the marker rule, one level in.
Two corrections to ARCHITECTURE.md are in here. Containment does not discharge
ODbL — publishing OSM-derived coordinates is Public Use of a Derivative Database
wherever the rows live, so the rule is about the geocoder (US Census, public
domain) and not the storage. And a person at a desk is not a Marker; markers are
geographic.
One contract gap surfaced only in a screenshot: two agents read `height` on a
viewpoint differently, so the establishing shot aimed at empty air fourteen
metres above the roof. It now means what the same field means for a city.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LSE is the third of the three, beside lumbridge-compute and lumbridge-bench: a
3D engine for walkable places. This first commit is the outside of the world —
San Francisco — plus the seams the inside will attach to.
The engine renders a City and a list of Markers and knows nothing else. It does
not know markers are usually companies and it will never learn that "rejected"
is red; that mapping lives in an adapter. Which is what lets one renderer serve
a private map, a public one, and a self-hoster with no Lumbridge account, none
of them a fork of the others.
Three things were designed around the licence rather than discovered after it,
because each one is a promise Apache 2.0 makes that is easy to break by
accident. No trademarks in the repo — logos are fetched at runtime, and
public/logos/ is gitignored. No OpenStreetMap-derived coordinates, which is why
every coastline in cities/sf.ts was traced by hand: Nominatim output is ODbL,
share-alike, and would attach to the whole pack. And no FlightRadar24 client —
their terms forbid scraping and redistribution, so flights are an interface
with a simulator and open community ADS-B behind it.
The privacy constraint and the licence constraint turned out to want the same
thing. Geocoded company positions and pipeline status both stay behind Workie's
API; the open repo holds the city and the renderer. The tempting shortcut —
commit an sf-companies.json — breaks both at once.
Ported out of Workie, where a 3D city engine had no business living. Workie's
/live is deleted rather than deprecated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
karti
Karti Tripathi