# 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 `` 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 `GalaxyPoint`s (the `position`/`scaling`/`color` subset of a `SolidParticle` the baker read).