**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>
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.
