**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>
Tera
The map view of Lumbridge Simulate — cities from above, in three.js. Its other half, Spaces, is the offices you walk into: one engine and one asset library, seen from outside and from inside.
Apache 2.0. Runs at tera.lumbridgecorp.com.
What it is
An engine plus data packs. The engine renders terrain, coastline, a built city on real street grids, bridges, roads, markers and air traffic. A city pack is pure data — coastlines, hills, districts, landmarks, camera chapters — so adding a city is a data contribution anyone can review, not a fork.
San Francisco ships today. Los Angeles / Orange County / Riverside is next; New York after that.
A plan view sits top right: the board drawn flat, with the footprint of the camera's own frustum on it, so you can see where you are looking from outside the shot. Click or drag it to move the camera; scroll it to dolly. It is a 2D canvas rather than a second WebGL context, drawn from the same city pack, and it follows the sun into the night along with everything else.
Who sees what
Three tiers, resolved once at boot by src/access.ts:
| anonymous | signed in | admin | |
|---|---|---|---|
| the map, the plan view, the named chapters | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| observed weather and live aircraft | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| the office | public depth — shell, furniture, viewpoints, nobody home | full depth, with presence | full depth |
| the marker feed | per TERA_MARKERS_ACCESS |
✅ | ✅ |
the godmode panel (G) — date, season, weather override, counters, pose editor |
— | — | ✅ |
The sky is public on purpose. Cloud cover over San Francisco is a government sensor reading, and the aircraft are broadcasting their positions unencrypted to anyone with a receiver; neither is something an account can grant you access to. Gating them cost the only moment that makes this project land — real fog rolling off the Pacific onto a city you recognise, at the real time of day, on a first visit.
The markers are the one feed that can carry something private, so the server
decides. TERA_MARKERS_ACCESS is members by default and an operator has to
say public out loud, which /api/v1/health then announces in degraded[].
The default is the safe answer rather than the common one, because the failure
mode is silent: nothing errors, nothing looks broken, the data is just readable
by the internet.
These are drawing decisions, not a security boundary, and src/access.ts
says so at length. Live data and office presence are withheld by the API, from
a caller it does not recognise; the client tier stops the app asking for
something it will not get. Admin is granted only by TERA_ADMIN_SUBJECTS on the
server — never inferred in the browser, and never from an API that failed to
answer. A deployment with no API at all is open, because "clone it and it works"
is the promise; it is not "clone it and you are an administrator".
Quick start
npm install
npm run dev
Using the engine
import { createScene } from "@lumbridge/tera/engine/scene.ts";
import { createStage } from "@lumbridge/tera/engine/stage.ts";
import SAN_FRANCISCO from "@lumbridge/tera/cities/sf.ts";
// One stage per canvas, for the life of the page. Cities are put on it and
// taken off again; a renderer per city leaks its shadow map on every switch.
const stage = createStage(canvas);
const scene = await createScene(stage, {
city: SAN_FRANCISCO,
markerPalette: { hiring: 0x4ade80, closed: 0xef4444 },
});
scene?.setMarkers([
{ id: "1", lat: 37.7765, lng: -122.4241, label: "Somewhere", colorKey: "hiring" },
]);
createScene is async because the heightfield is built in a Worker — half a
million samples, about 730 ms on the Bay Area, and not on the main thread. It
resolves to null if the build was abandoned through options.signal, which is
what makes switching city mid-build cheap.
The engine renders Marker[] and looks colours up by colorKey in a palette
you supply. It does not know what your markers mean — that mapping lives in
your adapter. This is what lets one renderer serve a private map coloured by
one scheme and a public map coloured by another, without either being a fork.
Adding a city
Write src/cities/<id>.ts exporting a City. Trace the coastline and parks by
hand, place hills as radial peaks, and give each district its street bearing.
Two rules, and they are not stylistic:
- Do not import geometry from OpenStreetMap. OSM and Nominatim output is ODbL — share-alike, and incompatible with this repo's licence.
- Do not commit logos or brand assets. They are trademarks, not code.
See ARCHITECTURE.md §3 for the full reasoning, and NOTICE for the attribution and data-provenance statement.
Aircraft
The engine takes a FlightSource. Two ship here: SimulatedFlights (original,
flies real approach and departure corridors) and AdsbFlights (open community
ADS-B feeds such as adsb.lol).
FlightRadar24 is deliberately absent — their terms forbid scraping and forbid redistributing their data, so a client for it cannot live in an Apache-2.0 repository. Commercial sources belong in private deployments. The best long-term answer is an RTL-SDR receiver: first-party data with nothing to comply with.
Layout
src/engine/ renderer — terrain, blocks, structures, markers, flights, scene, minimap
src/cities/ data packs — pure geography, no code
src/adapters/ where outside data plugs in
src/tools/ instruments — god-only, dynamically imported, never statically
engine never imports cities; neither imports adapters.
Nothing under src/tools/ may be reached by a static import from the app. It is
loaded by one await import() behind access.can.debug, so a visitor who is
not an admin does not download the code at all — which is the strongest
available reading of "nothing here runs for a non-god visitor": not a hidden
panel, not a disabled panel, no panel. src/tools/index.ts states the rule and
what silently undoes it.
