0.8.3

A galaxy that costs nothing per frame, a sky that keeps the right time, and clouds that light like clouds. Galaxy billboarding moved into the vertex shader (3.19 ms → ~0.02 ms of CPU per render). The sun now runs a northern arc, ignores starfieldTilt, and a skybox without a sun still knows it is night. The cloud deck's silver lining finally faces the sun, and fair-weather cloud is white from below and outshines the sky at its thinnest. The kitchen-sink demo is now Land and Sky.

Visible, not breaking: scenes tuned by eye will look different. The sun crosses the SOUTH at noon (it crossed the north), the tilt no longer lifts or drops it, the moon rides the night arc, cloud undersides are brighter and their rims glow toward the sun rather than away from it, and a volcano grows a basalt apron. No component API was removed, but two paths moved: the kitchen-sink demo module tosijs-3d/world-sim is now tosijs-3d/land-and-sky (a side-effect-only demo, not a library entry point), and the unused 2048 reference sky (/sky/default_*.png) is no longer served — it lives in reference/sky/ in the repo.

Added

• galaxy.pickStar(x, y) — the star under a screen point, or -1: the nearest star whose DRAWN disc the ray crosses (the old triangle pick also hit a quad's invisible corners), else the nearest within 3 px, so a one-pixel star is clickable. getStarPoints() — every point in the star mesh, for bakers.
• SHIPPED_SKY — the recipe for static/sky (seed, 100k stars, 42% out, 1 off-plane, roll 0, 256 + 1024, and the 12,25,58 tilt it is framed for), plus a "use shipped recipe" button in the baker demo. It used to live only in commit messages.
• Live terrain climate: biomeTemperature, biomeMoisture and biomeVolcanicScale attributes (−1 = the plugin's default), synced like biomeSeaLevel. The moisture default (0.45) is steppe — a green world wants ~0.7. And terrain.generationKey, which changes whenever the terrain's shape does.

Changed

• b3d-galaxy billboards in the vertex shader. Stars and nebulae are static quads the shader turns to face the viewpoint; the per-frame setParticles() that rewrote every vertex whether or not anything moved is gone. Measured on the baker's 10k-star galaxy: 3.19 ms → ~0.02 ms of CPU per render, and it no longer scales with star count. A sky baked through it is byte-identical in the data cube and differs by 1/255 in 3 of 393,216 smooth-cube pixels (GPU float32 vs CPU float64 at a triangle edge). Quads face the camera's POSITION rather than its view plane — the rule the cube bake already used, so there is one mechanism where there were two that could stack. setVisibility() now genuinely fades.
• cirrus is signed, -1…1. The magnitude is how wispy; the sign is the axis — positive streaks ALONG the wind heading (as before, bit for bit), negative ACROSS it.
• A volcano goes through basalt before lava. Its province tail was one smooth ramp from 0.5 at the rim, so almost all of it sat on the ladder's glowing-seam stage and vegetation met glowing rock directly. It now cools gradually over 0.3 R past the rim and holds a cold-basalt apron (~0.15) before fading into the biome by 0.75 R; the shader's local volcanic mask is fully on by 0.12 (was 0.3), so the apron reads as solid basalt.
• Fair-weather cloud is white from below, and outshines the sky at its thinnest. The underside lift peaked at 42% toward white on a clear day; it is now ~90% up to coverage 0.5, easing onto the storm curve by full cover (following the dial, so an orographic cap does not turn fair weather into a slab). Below 0.5 the cloud gains a forward-scatter glow in the sun's HUE — golden at golden hour — rising to ~3× as cover falls to 0, mostly spared the distance fog. An explicit transmission keeps its authority.
• The kitchen-sink demo is "Land and Sky" (/land-and-sky/, under Demos). Titled world-sim, it slugified onto the World Sim category and adopted all twelve world-simulation pages as its children; /world-sim/ is the category's landing page again. New defaults (Tonio's): volcano on, moisture 0.72 (forest), volcanic scale 0.02 for its 420 m cone (the demo's value — the library default stays 0.09, right for ~50 m cones), cover 0.10, 18:30. A Climate group joins the panel, and the camera turns in place — arrows ROTATE (up = look up); it was an orbit camera, so up-arrow nose-dived and left/right swung the eye round a 300 m circle.

Fixed

• The sun ran a southern-hemisphere arc at a northern latitude. North is +Z (every heading is atan2(x, z)) and the latitude rotation leaned the arc toward +Z. Now it rises east, crosses the south at noon and sets west (98° / 180° / 262° at 7:00 / 12:00 / 17:00, latitude 40).
• starfieldTilt moved the sun. It orients the galaxy behind the atmosphere; noon is latitude and time. With the demos' 12,25,58 the noon sun sat ~15° up instead of 50°. The tilt now sits in the celestial frame, inside the diurnal turn, so sun, moon and stars still wheel as one, and the moon rides the night arc — up at night with or without a tilt.
• A skybox with no <tosi-b3d-sun> ignored the clock. The dome's day/night writes sat inside the sun-element branch, so without a sun it stayed at stock daylight while the star exposure said night — stars through a sunlit sky (the beacon demo). Only the light's writes need a light now.
• Cloud deck: the silver lining pointed the wrong way. sunDir is the light's travel direction and the forward-scatter term read it unnegated, so rims blazed with the sun BEHIND the viewer and the clouds in front of a sunset were the darkest in the sky.
• Cloud deck: orographic was not live. The local-weather field only re-sampled when the grid moved, so dragging orographic (or reshaping the terrain under it) did nothing until the camera travelled a grid step.
• Cloud deck: coverage: 0 is a clear sky. The orographic boost was added on top of the dial, so zero still left cloud on every peak; it now ramps in over the first quarter of the dial.
• The skybox baker encoded every distant star twice — once as a spectral-less 0.02 "star" (it walked the whole star mesh, whose tail IS the distant stars) and once properly. The shipped sky (static/sky/stars_*) is rebaked without them; the recipe was first proven by reproducing the old faces byte-for-byte with the pre-fix code.

Deprecated

• getStarSPS() returns null and warns once — there is no particle system. Use pickStar. getDistantStarParticles() / getDistantGalaxyParticles() now return GalaxyPoints (the position/scaling/color subset of a SolidParticle the baker read).