**Clouds were invisible to everyone who had not wired up NWS.** The layer
took `currentWeather()?.cloudCover ?? 0`, and `currentWeather()` is null on
any deployment without a weather source — which is the default, and the
exact configuration this repo is held to: a stranger clones it, runs one
command, and gets a city with no account and no key. Their sky was
permanently, silently empty. `atmosphere.ts` already models a sky when
nobody has observed one; it now models cover too, an observed reading
still wins outright, and the clouds are there on a bare clone.
**Both offices are pins on the city, and clicking one walks you in.** Each
pack has carried a real `site` since the sun needed one, and that
coordinate was known to the lighting and to nothing else — a visitor
looking at the board had no way to tell that two of those buildings are
ones they can go inside. The coordinates move to a tiny eagerly-imported
`offices/sites.ts` that the packs import *from*, because a pack is a 25 kB
lazy chunk and the board wants its pins long before anybody opens a door.
A test asserts the pack and the table hold the **same object**, not merely
equal values: a drifted coordinate would put the marker on one building
and the sun on another and both would look entirely plausible.
**Aircraft bank into their turns.** The roll channel existed and was never
written, so every turn was flat. Bank comes from the coordinated-turn
relation against the measured turn rate, damped by a first-order lag so it
settles rather than oscillates, and clamped at 30° like a real limiter.
Six regression tests, because roll is the one channel that feeds itself —
position and heading are recomputed from the last two observations and
wash out a bad value, while a NaN in the roll would persist for the life
of the track.
That fed straight into a real defect: `AdsbFlights` substituted
`heading: 0` for records with no `track` field, which is harmless for a
symmetrical dart and is a **sustained full-scale artefact** once aircraft
bank — a target whose real heading is 200° reported as 0° reads as a 160°
turn and pins the roll at its limiter for as long as it is in the feed.
Those records are dropped now. An aeroplane the feed will not give a
heading for is one this layer cannot draw honestly.
**The office empties out overnight.** A full complement of seated people
at one in the morning, under house lights that came on because the sun is
down, was the least believable thing left in the room once the clock
became real. A live roster always wins — an API that says the building is
empty is telling the truth about the building.
**Robots go somewhere.** They pick real addresses — a seat, a room — and
turn to face the seat when they arrive, rather than stopping at a random
angle. Godmode gets an office section: house lights forced on or off or
following the sun, robots and ceilings toggled, with a readout.
**The bundle is split.** Entry chunk 758 kB to 208 kB, with three.js and
satellite.js in a vendor chunk that survives an app deploy instead of
being re-downloaded on every one. Rollup's 500 kB warning still fires and
should — it now points at three.js, where it is true, instead of at our
code, where it was pointing at three.js all along.
Reviewers caught two false geography claims in the new prose ("both
shipped buildings stand in San Francisco" — one is across the estuary at
Alameda Point) and several miscounted figures. Fixed. In a codebase where
the comments are the design record, those are defects.
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.
