# 0.12.0 **0.12 in one paragraph.** Vehicles you drive: a pure model of wheeled and tracked vehicles (no physics engine), `` rebuilt on it and a new ``, with a chase camera that orbits, booms up to overhead and climbs over what is in its way, flat and in a headset. A procedural city to drive them in (`cityLayout`, ``: Kenney's kits, traffic, street lights, lit windows, sound, light pollution), and two demos, City Drive and Cross Country. Models are no longer drawn mirrored. The character creator's working parts are promised as twenty engine-free subpaths, for other engines. Size: barrel (min, packages external) 1510.4 KB raw / 523.7 KB gz, +6.16% gz on 0.11.6 (vehicles, the city, traffic, its sound and lights, the character core split out). ## ⚠️ Breaking Each is in [Migration](/Migration/) with what to do. - **``'s `turnRate` and `friction` are gone** (setting either warns once): use `steerDeg` and `grip`. `acceleration` and `braking` are now m/s². - **Models are no longer drawn mirrored.** Anything loaded through `canonicalize` or a `` now looks as authored; 0.11 drew it as its mirror image. Check anything you placed or measured against the mirrored picture. Skinned models are unchanged. - **`KENNEY_CITY`'s `bend` is `turns: 0` and its `end` `turns: 3`**, measured on the unmirrored models. - **`RiggedBody.surfaces[].material` is `SurfaceMaterial`** (a name), not Babylon's `Material`; cast it back on the Babylon side. ## Added - **Vehicles you can drive.** `ground-vehicle` is a pure model of wheeled and tracked vehicles (springs, tyre grip that slides past its limit, Ackermann steering, skid steer), no physics engine. `` is rebuilt on it: give it a model whose wheels have `wheel` in their names (Tonio Loewald's cars on the CDN, `tonio/vehicles/cars.glb`, work at `scale: 2`; so does Kenney's Car Kit at `1.7`), and it measures them. `` is new: tracks, a pivot turn, and a plain tank when given no model. The car mapping is GTA V's: right trigger accelerates, left trigger brakes and reverses, the left stick only steers, the right stick looks around, A is the handbrake, and one step from GTA, the right bumper also brakes and reverses so the right thumb has both pedals on the on-screen pad (W/S still drive on a keyboard, through the new `keyboard` hook on an `InputMapping`). Vehicles bring their own chase camera, high and aimed ahead of the car (`chaseRigFor`, `chasePose`). Off the throttle a car coasts down (`coast`, m/s²); steering at speed is held to what the tyres grip, so turns keep their speed. A tank keeps turning at top speed and goes where it points. The tank's right stick (arrow keys) aims its turret: traverse and gun elevation, held in the world while the hull turns, and the camera looks where it aims; a model's `turret` and `gun`/`barrel`/`cannon` nodes are found by name. A tank climbs a step about as high as its tracks (a `TrackSpec` may carry `climb` points, which carry nothing on the flat). Vehicles stop at walls with rays from their own body instead of a swept ellipsoid, which stepped over anything under half its height. - **Chase camera and Cross Country.** A vehicle's chase camera pivots round a point above it: the right stick orbits (springing back on release) and up/down moves it along an arc from close behind to nearly overhead, where it stays (`CHASE_BOOM`; `chasePose` takes the boom and a lift). It climbs over walls, traffic and hillsides before it pulls in, and keeps clear of the ground. In a headset it orbits too and looks down from the top. A tank's view follows its turret. `ControlInput.lookMode` is the right-stick click (R3; **V** on a keyboard, `right_stick_click` on the glass gamepad): on a tank it swaps the stick's up/down between the gun and the camera, with a buzz in a headset (`b3d.haptic()`). The track links of a model that animates them (Tonio's tank) run at ground speed. **Cross Country** (Demos): that tank in open country. - **A city to drive in**: `` builds roads, buildings, street lights and parked cars from a seed with Kenney's city kits (any kit, through its `kit` manifest), drawn as thin instances at 12 m a cell (9.6 m kerb to kerb: a lane each way and a parked car; the kit's `roadway` says how wide its road is), each building on as many cells as its model covers; `cityStart(options)` is a clear spot in the middle to start a car. Street lights are spots pointing down from their poles (`lampAngle`, reaching twice their height), and some flicker (`flicker`, `lampFlicker`). **Traffic** (`traffic`, default 24): cars drive round on their own in the right-hand lane, turn at junctions, keep their distance and stop for your car. Each is a body on the same model as your car (`TRAFFIC_CAR`), steering after a plan that drives the lane: cars that touch push and spin each other, and ramming one knocks both cars about (momentum is exchanged; your car is no longer stopped dead), kerbs keep them out of buildings, and two cars jammed into each other sort it out by one backing away. The count is a GTA-style budget (`recycleTraffic`): cars far away or out of view go and come back out of view, driving toward you. Head, tail and brake lamps, and a headlight beam at night. The model is pure (`createTraffic`, `stepTraffic`). **Lit windows** (`windowLights`, `roomLit`): a material plugin lights rooms' windows at night (warm lamps, the odd blue screen). Every room has a habit it keeps (always dark, night owl, early riser, evening, bathroom), each with its own hours: most lit around ten, rare after midnight, more from five. **Lamps** (`lightPool`): street lights and headlights are virtual lights, and the few that matter most to the view get real lights (`lampLights`, a new device budget; ranked by `poolScore`, lamps ahead first), falling off linearly to their range on PBR materials too. Where the device supports clustered lighting, every lamp is a real light (a `ClusteredLightContainer`): a city's hundred street lights and the traffic's headlights all light the street. A `VirtualLight` may carry a ranking `weight`. The sky reports `daylight`, so street lights come on at dusk and a driven vehicle's `headlights` at night. - **City Drive** (Demos): a 48 × 48 city on ground flattened for it, in green hills by the sea under the full sky (day and night, cloud deck, stars), with woods round it; drive out of town and keep going. `cityGround({ width, depth, level, x, z })` gives a terrain `landform` (a pad flat under the grid) and a decorator `clear`; `` takes `clear`, ground kept clear of trees and rocks. - **Sound in the city** (positional, synthesised): the nearest traffic's engines (the note rises with speed, opens on the throttle), a horn from a driver you block (and, after a long wait, from one stuck behind a stuck car; `car.honk` in the pure model), the hum of the nearest street lights and a sputtering buzz from the failing ones. Your own vehicle's engine plays while you drive it (`sound="off"` to silence; a tank's is lower). New effect voices: `engine`, `hum`, `horn`. `` for silence. - **A city's plan**: `cityLayout({ width, depth, seed })` lays out roads, blocks and lots on a grid of cells (every road connected, every lot on a street), with each road cell's piece and rotation; it knows no kit or metres, so any kit on any grid can dress it. - **Light pollution.** A lit town washes the faint stars out of its own sky and lays a warm glow along the horizon; out in the country they come back. Anything that lights the night registers a source (`lightPollutionSource(scene, { centre, radius, strength })`, `` does, following its street lights), and `` reads them at the camera every frame; its `lightPollution` attribute is the base for the whole sky (0, a dark sky). - **The scene waits until it is built.** `el.holdLoading(label)` keeps a `` behind its spinner until the returned release is called (at most 20 s); the first showing also waits for a streaming terrain. `` and `` hold it, so a city is never shown without its buildings. - **The character core is engine-free, and promised.** Twenty modules that make a character with no Babylon and no DOM (human-pack, human-morph, human-rig, rigged-body, rig-fit, bone-heat, rig-recipe, retarget, spatial-transform, proxy-fit, proxy-rigid, hair-fit, garment-cut, garment-file, uv-unwrap, skin-tone, character-file, and the new character-settings, proxy-cover and asset-url) are subpaths (`tosijs-3d/human-morph`, …) a three.js app or a server can import; a test fails if any of them reaches Babylon, types included, and the packed tarball imports each under plain Node. `RiggedBody.surfaces[].material` is typed `SurfaceMaterial` (a name) instead of Babylon's `Material`: cast it back on the Babylon side. New: `character-settings` holds `DEFAULT_CHARACTER`, `CHARACTER_SLOTS`, `HAIR_COLOURS` and `hm08PackUrl()` (with `HM08_PACK_PATH`, `HM08_PACK_VERSION`); `proxy-cover` is the engine-free half of `coverBody` (`coverSkin`, `BODY_WRAPPING_SLOTS`). The barrel exports everything it did. See the `character-core` page. - `b3dLight` takes `nightIntensity`: under a day/night `b3dSkybox` the ambient fill eases to it as the daylight goes (the sun is already the moon), so night no longer looks like an overcast noon. ## Changed - **Faster on a headset**: a vehicle's physics takes at most 0.1 s a frame, so a stall cannot pile up steps; the vehicle model steps at 1/60 s (was 1/120), and a vehicle casts each wheel's ground ray once a frame, its later steps meeting the plane that ray found; `pickWorld(scene, ray, predicate)` and `rayProxies(scene)` let something that knows its own shape answer rays (a `RayProxy`), and `` does (flat ground, a box per building, parked car and pole, filed by cell), so a vehicle's ray in the city costs a quarter of what it did. City models are one mesh each, and only buildings and moving traffic cast shadows. Fixed: cars with their wheels as instances (half Kenney's) were drawn without wheels; your own headlights flickered as you looked round (the lamp pool gave their light away; the one you drive now keeps it, and a lamp holding a light keeps it unless another is clearly better). Effect audio that cannot start (an iPhone's audio device) no longer retries every frame or throws an unhandled rejection; it tries once a second. In a headset the lamp pool uses its ranked lights, not clustered lighting: Babylon's container bins lamps for one camera a frame, so the second eye flickered and lost the street lights. ## Fixed - **Fixed: models were drawn mirrored.** Everything loaded through `canonicalize` or a `` (vehicles, aircraft, lamp fixtures, the city's kits, any library instance) was its own mirror image: text backwards, left and right swapped. Babylon's glTF loader converts handedness with one mirror on `__root__`, which both paths dropped. `unmirrorGltf` / `unmirrorContainer` now move that mirror into the content node by node (transforms, vertices with their winding, animation keys), so every frame stays proper and the model looks as authored. ⚠️ An asymmetric model now appears the other way round from 0.11, and anything measured off the mirrored picture needs checking: `KENNEY_CITY`'s bend is now `turns: 0` and its end `turns: 3`. Skinned models are left as they were. - Fixed: a car's headlight beam trailed the car by a frame or two (visible from above at speed). The lamp pool now places its lights after everything else has moved that frame, and a vehicle aims its beam from where it is now. - Fixed: building a scene after the page's only one was removed (a route change) lost skin, hair and cloth shading, caustics, the biome ground, cloud shadows and projected occlusion; skin shading threw 'plugin not registered'. Babylon clears material plugins when its last engine goes; ours now register again (`registerMaterialPlugin`). - iPhone: the page no longer zooms from inside a scene (`` is `touch-action: none` and cancels Safari's pinch), and a zoomed page is reset when the scene goes full screen, where nothing was left to pinch out on. - Fixed: getting into a car during a VR session no longer blanks the headset (the car's camera waits until you leave VR), and leaving VR in a vehicle shows the scene behind it, not a frame from inside the ground; the Enter VR button is no longer left lit. - Fixed: setting a vehicle's removed `turnRate` or `friction` warns once instead of doing nothing silently.