tera/scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs

/**
 * Photograph the engine, for the pages that describe it.
 *
 *   node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs                  # everything, full size
 *   node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs --only fidi-night,office-floor
 *   node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs --preview        # fast, 1x, PNGs to look at
 *   node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs --manifest-only  # captions only, no browser
 *
 * `capture.mjs` next door makes the two share cards. This makes the product
 * imagery: the pictures on lumbridgecorp.com/simulate that show what the thing
 * looks like. Same harness, different framing — see `harness.mjs`.
 *
 * ### Why these are renders and not illustrations
 *
 * Every image this writes is a screenshot of the built `dist/` in this repo at
 * the commit named in the manifest. Nothing is composited, retouched, or drawn.
 * That is the whole point: /simulate/tera claims the sun is computed from your
 * clock and the city lights come on as it sets, and the honest way to
 * illustrate that claim is a photograph of it happening, taken by a script
 * anyone can re-run. `og.png` on lumbridgecorp.com spent a month advertising a
 * headline the site had stopped using, because it was a hand-made picture of a
 * page rather than a render of one. This is that lesson applied to the art.
 *
 * ### The two outputs
 *
 * **The site.** `--site <dir>` (default: the sibling `lumbridge-v4` checkout)
 * gets web-sized WebP into `apps/web/public/shots/` and a generated TypeScript
 * manifest into `apps/web/src/data/shots.ts`. The captions travel *with* the
 * images, in the manifest, so a page cannot show a caption for a picture that
 * was reframed underneath it. If the directory is not there — which is the
 * normal case for anyone who cloned this repo on its own — the step is skipped
 * with a note, because the site is Lumbridge's consumer of this script and not
 * a dependency of it.
 *
 * **The archive.** A dated folder under `shots/` keeps the full-resolution
 * frame of every shot from every run. Nothing reads it. It is there because the
 * cities keep changing and a render of the Bay from August is not recoverable
 * once the heightfield moves — the manifest can be regenerated, the past
 * cannot.
 */

import { fileURLToPath } from "node:url";
import { dirname, join, resolve } from "node:path";
import { mkdir, writeFile, access } from "node:fs/promises";
import { execFileSync } from "node:child_process";
import { serve, launch, clockShim, FURNITURE, hide } from "./harness.mjs";

const HERE = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url));
const ROOT = join(HERE, "..", "..");

// ---- The shots --------------------------------------------------------------

/**
 * `chapter` is an index into the chapter list, because that is all the DOM
 * offers — `renderLegend()` in `main.ts` builds the buttons from the city pack's
 * array and binds each to `flyToIndex(i)`, with no id on the element. `expect`
 * is the `shortLabel` that index is supposed to be, asserted before the shutter
 * opens. A city pack is data, and data gets reordered; without the assertion a
 * reordered pack silently reframes every picture on the site and captions them
 * with the old names.
 *
 * Times are local to the city and are chosen, not defaulted. Midday is the
 * worst light a heightfield ever gets — the sun is behind the camera, nothing
 * casts, and 83k buildings read as gravel. The relief shots are taken in the
 * morning and the city shots at dusk for the same reason a photographer would.
 */
const SHOTS = [
  {
    id: "bay-relief",
    door: "tera",
    city: "sf",
    chapter: 0,
    expect: "Whole Board",
    at: "2026-08-06T07:40:00-07:00",
    place: "San Francisco Bay Area",
    caption:
      "The whole region at twenty to eight in the morning, sun fifteen degrees up. Everything else in the engine stands on this heightfield: 83 named hills, four octaves of value noise, and overlapping peaks combined as tallest-plus-35%-of-the-rest — the one rule that makes a run of summits read as a ridge instead of stacking into a fictional mountain.",
    alt: "The San Francisco Bay Area seen from above in low morning light, the peninsula and the East Bay hills raking shadows across the water.",
  },
  {
    id: "soma-afternoon",
    door: "tera",
    city: "sf",
    chapter: 2,
    expect: "SoMa",
    at: "2026-08-06T17:20:00-07:00",
    place: "SoMa, San Francisco",
    caption:
      "South of Market at twenty past five, where the grid turns forty-six degrees and the blocks get long. About 83,000 buildings are on screen here, drawn as instanced geometry on street bearings the city pack declares per district.",
    alt: "Downtown San Francisco south of Market in afternoon light, towers clustered on a street grid turned at an angle to the rest of the city.",
  },
  {
    id: "fidi-night",
    door: "tera",
    city: "sf",
    chapter: 3,
    expect: "FiDi",
    at: "2026-08-06T21:40:00-07:00",
    place: "Financial District, San Francisco",
    caption:
      "The same city at twenty to ten, sun sixteen degrees below the horizon. The lights are not a night theme — they are emissive window faces chosen from a seeded RNG as the computed sun goes down. The moonlight carrying the ground is about five orders of magnitude brighter than the real moon-to-sun ratio, deliberately: the honest number renders a black rectangle.",
    alt: "The San Francisco financial district at night, tower windows lit from within, the Bay Bridge running off to the right and the ground reading dark blue rather than black.",
  },
  {
    id: "peninsula-morning",
    door: "tera",
    city: "sf",
    chapter: 6,
    expect: "Peninsula",
    at: "2026-08-06T09:20:00-07:00",
    place: "The Peninsula",
    caption:
      "Twenty miles of city between the water and the ridge, never more than four wide, with an aircraft on approach drawing the line across the bay. The camera is about 32 km back — the city scene's orbit limit — which is why the region ships as five chapters rather than one impossible wide shot.",
    alt: "The San Francisco peninsula from above in morning light, the Santa Cruz mountains on one side, the bay on the other, and an aircraft trail crossing the water.",
  },
  {
    id: "socal-dtla",
    door: "tera",
    city: "socal",
    chapter: 1,
    expect: "DTLA",
    at: "2026-08-06T18:10:00-07:00",
    place: "Downtown Los Angeles",
    caption:
      "The second city pack, on the same engine and the same renderer. A city is pure data — coastlines, hills, district street bearings, landmarks and camera chapters in one file with no code in it — so adding one is a reviewable contribution rather than a fork. The camera is square to downtown's grid, which is why everything else in the frame looks crooked.",
    alt: "Downtown Los Angeles from above in late afternoon light, the river running past the tower cluster and the San Gabriel mountains standing behind the basin.",
  },
  {
    id: "office-floor",
    door: "office",
    chapter: 0,
    expect: "The Floor",
    at: "2026-08-06T11:20:00-07:00",
    place: "Lumbridge HQ",
    caption:
      "The same renderer from inside: thirty-four metres by eighteen, one storey, glazed along the north edge. An Office is one building's interior and a Space is a room within it — and this cannot share a THREE.Scene with the city, because San Francisco puts one scene unit at about 94 metres and this is one unit to the metre.",
    alt: "A whole office interior rendered in 3D as an open-topped model, walls, desks and meeting rooms laid out across one floor, with its plan drawn beside it.",
  },
  {
    id: "office-desks",
    door: "office",
    chapter: 2,
    expect: "Desks",
    at: "2026-08-06T11:20:00-07:00",
    place: "Lumbridge HQ",
    caption:
      "Thirty-six seats in four benches. Stepping in here does not throw the city away — the city scene is retained and paused rather than disposed, because rebuilding the Bay's heightfield costs about 2.3 seconds and nobody should pay that to walk back out of a door.",
    alt: "A closer view inside the office: rows of desks with chairs and monitors, people seated at them, bookshelves and planting behind a partition.",
  },
];

// ---- Sizes ------------------------------------------------------------------

/**
 * Shot at 2x and delivered at two widths, because the pages that use these run
 * a picture at about 720 CSS px on a desktop and full-bleed on a phone.
 *
 * WebP rather than PNG, and by a wide margin: these frames are photographs of a
 * continuous-tone render, and PNG spends about 650 KB on what WebP says in 90.
 * The encoder is the browser that is already open — this box has no `sharp`, no
 * ImageMagick and no `rsvg-convert`, which is the same constraint that made the
 * share cards a screenshot in the first place.
 */
const VIEWPORT = { width: 1440, height: 900 };
const SIZES = [
  { suffix: "1600", width: 1600, quality: 0.82 },
  { suffix: "800", width: 800, quality: 0.84 },
];
/** The archive frame: full sensor, near-lossless, kept forever. */
const ARCHIVE_QUALITY = 0.94;

// ---- Arguments --------------------------------------------------------------

function flag(name, fallback = null) {
  const i = process.argv.indexOf(`--${name}`);
  return i > -1 && process.argv[i + 1] && !process.argv[i + 1].startsWith("--")
    ? process.argv[i + 1]
    : fallback;
}

const preview = process.argv.includes("--preview");
/**
 * Rewrite the site's manifest from the shot list without opening a browser.
 *
 * A caption is prose and gets edited like prose — several times, in a row, to
 * hear how it reads. Charging three minutes of software rasterisation for each
 * pass is how a caption ends up shipped in the first wording anybody tried,
 * which is the same failure the share-card README describes. The images this
 * points at are the ones already on disk, and the commit it stamps is today's;
 * both are true, because the pictures did not change.
 */
const manifestOnly = process.argv.includes("--manifest-only");
const only = flag("only")?.split(",").map((s) => s.trim());
const siteDir = resolve(flag("site", join(ROOT, "..", "lumbridge-v4")));
const archiveRoot = resolve(flag("archive", join(ROOT, "shots")));
const wanted = only ? SHOTS.filter((s) => only.includes(s.id)) : SHOTS;

if (only) {
  const unknown = only.filter((id) => !SHOTS.some((s) => s.id === id));
  if (unknown.length) {
    console.error(`unknown shot(s): ${unknown.join(", ")}`);
    process.exit(1);
  }
}

// ---- Provenance -------------------------------------------------------------

const git = (...args) => execFileSync("git", args, { cwd: ROOT, encoding: "utf8" }).trim();
const commit = git("rev-parse", "--short", "HEAD");
/**
 * Recorded, and shown on the site. A shot taken from a working tree with
 * uncommitted changes is a picture of a build that exists on exactly one
 * machine, and the manifest should say so rather than name a commit that would
 * render something else.
 */
const dirty = git("status", "--porcelain").length > 0;
const day = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10);

// ---- Capture ----------------------------------------------------------------

/**
 * Re-encode a PNG buffer to WebP at a target width, using the browser as the
 * codec. `height` follows from the source aspect so a size table only has to
 * carry widths.
 */
async function encode(page, png, width, quality) {
  const dataUrl = await page.evaluate(
    async ({ b64, w, q }) => {
      const img = new Image();
      img.src = `data:image/png;base64,${b64}`;
      await img.decode();
      const canvas = document.createElement("canvas");
      canvas.width = w;
      canvas.height = Math.round((img.naturalHeight / img.naturalWidth) * w);
      const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
      ctx.imageSmoothingEnabled = true;
      ctx.imageSmoothingQuality = "high";
      ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
      return canvas.toDataURL("image/webp", q);
    },
    { b64: png.toString("base64"), w: width, q: quality },
  );
  return Buffer.from(dataUrl.slice(dataUrl.indexOf(",") + 1), "base64");
}

/**
 * Read a chapter button's label, and optionally press it.
 *
 * The index is all the DOM offers, so `expect` is the guard. `main.ts` renders
 * the number into its own span, hence the prefix strip.
 */
async function chapter(page, index, expect, { click = false } = {}) {
  const label = await page.evaluate(
    ({ i, press }) => {
      const button = [...document.querySelectorAll("#chapters .chapter")][i];
      if (!button) return null;
      if (press) button.click();
      return button.textContent.replace(/^\d+/, "").trim();
    },
    { i: index, press: click },
  );
  if (label === null) throw new Error(`no chapter at index ${index}`);
  if (label !== expect) {
    throw new Error(
      `chapter ${index} is "${label}", not "${expect}" — a city pack was reordered, ` +
        `so the shot list and its captions need re-checking before anything ships`,
    );
  }
}

async function shoot(browser, shot) {
  const host = shot.door === "office" ? "office.lumbridgecorp.com" : "tera.lumbridgecorp.com";
  const query = shot.city ? `?city=${shot.city}` : "";
  const page = await browser.newPage({
    viewport: VIEWPORT,
    deviceScaleFactor: preview ? 1 : 2,
    /**
     * The camera cuts instead of flying, and this is the difference between a
     * shot list that takes three minutes and one that takes twelve — or worse,
     * one that quietly photographs the camera mid-flight.
     *
     * `scenekit.ts` eases a chapter change over about two seconds of *scene*
     * time, and `stage.ts` clamps `dt` to 50 ms a frame. Under SwiftShader on a
     * box with no GPU the app runs at roughly three frames a second, so those
     * two seconds take about twenty of wall clock, and any fixed wait short of
     * that lands somewhere over the bay. Reduced motion is the app's own
     * documented answer to "I only clicked a name in a list": `flyTo` calls
     * `setPose` and the pose is simply true on the next frame.
     */
    reducedMotion: "reduce",
  });
  const problems = [];
  page.on("pageerror", (e) => problems.push(String(e)));
  try {
    await page.addInitScript(clockShim(shot.at));
    await page.goto(`http://${host}:5210/${query}`, { waitUntil: "networkidle" });
    /**
     * Wait for the app to say it is up rather than for a number of seconds.
     * The terrain is built in a worker and the city is ~83k instances, and how
     * long that takes on software GL depends on the city, the machine and what
     * else is running — a fixed sleep is either wrong or wasteful, and here it
     * would have been both.
     */
    await page.waitForFunction(
      () =>
        document.getElementById("boot")?.hidden === true &&
        document.querySelectorAll("#chapters .chapter").length > 0,
      { timeout: 180_000 },
    );
    // Boot hiding means the scene exists, not that it has drawn a full frame.
    await page.waitForTimeout(preview ? 3000 : 6000);
    await chapter(page, shot.chapter, shot.expect, { click: shot.chapter > 0 });
    if (shot.chapter > 0) await page.waitForTimeout(2500);
    await hide(page, [...FURNITURE.transient, ...FURNITURE.CLUTTER]);
    const png = await page.screenshot({ timeout: 120_000, animations: "disabled" });
    if (problems.length) {
      throw new Error(`the page threw while being photographed: ${problems[0]}`);
    }
    return png;
  } finally {
    await page.close();
  }
}

// ---- Run --------------------------------------------------------------------

const exists = (p) => access(p).then(() => true, () => false);
const publicDir = join(siteDir, "apps", "web", "public", "shots");
const dataDir = join(siteDir, "apps", "web", "src", "data");
const haveSite = () => exists(join(siteDir, "apps", "web"));
const noSite = () =>
  console.log(
    `site    skipped — no checkout at ${siteDir}\n` +
      `        (pass --site <dir>; the archive is complete either way)`,
  );

if (manifestOnly) {
  if (!(await haveSite())) {
    noSite();
  } else {
    await mkdir(dataDir, { recursive: true });
    await writeFile(join(dataDir, "shots.ts"), manifest());
    console.log(`manifest → ${join(dataDir, "shots.ts")} (no images re-rendered)`);
  }
  process.exit(0);
}

const app = await serve(join(ROOT, "dist"), 5210, { spa: true });
const browser = await launch();
const results = [];

try {
  // One page for encoding, reused. Spinning up a browser context per re-encode
  // costs more than the encode does.
  const codec = await browser.newPage();
  await codec.goto("about:blank");

  const archiveDir = join(archiveRoot, `${day}-${commit}${dirty ? "-dirty" : ""}`);
  if (!preview) await mkdir(archiveDir, { recursive: true });

  for (const shot of wanted) {
    const png = await shoot(browser, shot);
    if (preview) {
      await mkdir(join(ROOT, "shots", "preview"), { recursive: true });
      await writeFile(join(ROOT, "shots", "preview", `${shot.id}.png`), png);
      console.log("preview", shot.id);
      continue;
    }

    await writeFile(
      join(archiveDir, `${shot.id}.webp`),
      await encode(codec, png, VIEWPORT.width * 2, ARCHIVE_QUALITY),
    );

    const sizes = {};
    for (const size of SIZES) {
      sizes[size.suffix] = await encode(codec, png, size.width, size.quality);
    }
    results.push({ shot, sizes });
    console.log(
      "shot   ",
      shot.id.padEnd(16),
      SIZES.map((s) => `${s.suffix}w ${Math.round(sizes[s.suffix].length / 1024)}kB`).join("  "),
    );
  }

  if (preview) {
    console.log(`\npreviews in ${join(ROOT, "shots", "preview")}`);
  } else {
    console.log(`\narchive ${archiveDir}`);

    if (!(await haveSite())) {
      noSite();
    } else {
      await mkdir(publicDir, { recursive: true });
      await mkdir(dataDir, { recursive: true });
      for (const { shot, sizes } of results) {
        for (const size of SIZES) {
          await writeFile(join(publicDir, `${shot.id}-${size.suffix}.webp`), sizes[size.suffix]);
        }
      }
      // Regenerating the manifest from a partial run would drop every shot the
      // run did not take, so `--only` writes images and leaves the manifest be.
      if (only) {
        console.log(`site    ${results.length} image set(s) → ${publicDir}`);
        console.log("        manifest left alone (partial run; re-run without --only to rewrite it)");
      } else {
        await writeFile(join(dataDir, "shots.ts"), manifest());
        console.log(`site    ${results.length} image sets → ${publicDir}`);
        console.log(`        manifest → ${join(dataDir, "shots.ts")}`);
      }
    }
  }
} finally {
  await browser.close();
  app.close();
}

// ---- The generated manifest -------------------------------------------------

function manifest() {
  const aspect = VIEWPORT.width / VIEWPORT.height;
  const entries = SHOTS.map(
    (s) => `  {
    id: ${JSON.stringify(s.id)},
    door: ${JSON.stringify(s.door)},
    place: ${JSON.stringify(s.place)},
    at: ${JSON.stringify(s.at)},
    src: ${JSON.stringify(`/shots/${s.id}-1600.webp`)},
    srcSmall: ${JSON.stringify(`/shots/${s.id}-800.webp`)},
    width: ${SIZES[0].width},
    height: ${Math.round(SIZES[0].width / aspect)},
    alt: ${JSON.stringify(s.alt)},
    caption: ${JSON.stringify(s.caption)},
  },`,
  ).join("\n");

  return `/**
 * Generated. Do not edit — \`scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs\` in the tera repo
 * rewrites this file wholesale, and the captions below live next to the camera
 * poses that framed them so the two cannot drift apart.
 *
 * To change a picture or its caption: edit \`SHOTS\` in that script, run
 * \`node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs\`, and commit both repos.
 *
 * Every image is a screenshot of tera's built \`dist/\` at the commit named
 * below. Nothing here is an illustration.
 */

/**
 * A union rather than \`string\`, so a page asking for a picture that is not in
 * this list fails \`npm run typecheck\` — which the pre-push hook runs — instead
 * of rendering a hole a reader finds later.
 */
export type ShotId =
${SHOTS.map((s) => `  | ${JSON.stringify(s.id)}`).join("\n")};

export interface Shot {
  id: ShotId;
  /** Which door the engine was showing: the city, or an office interior. */
  door: "tera" | "office";
  /** Where this is, in words a reader would use. */
  place: string;
  /** The instant the engine's own clock was set to. The sun follows from it. */
  at: string;
  src: string;
  srcSmall: string;
  width: number;
  height: number;
  alt: string;
  caption: string;
}

/** The tera commit these were rendered from. */
export const SHOTS_COMMIT = ${JSON.stringify(commit)};
/** True if that commit is not the whole story — the tree had uncommitted work. */
export const SHOTS_DIRTY = ${dirty};
/** The day the shutter opened, ISO. */
export const SHOTS_CAPTURED = ${JSON.stringify(day)};

export const SHOTS: Shot[] = [
${entries}
];

/** Total, because \`ShotId\` cannot name a shot that is not in \`SHOTS\`. */
export const byId = (id: ShotId): Shot => SHOTS.find((s) => s.id === id)!;
`;
}