0.8.4

A sky you can actually see the stars in, and a world with things growing on it. The encoded sky is decoded exactly (sharp points, not smeared blobs), twinkles, and is rebaked from the new voxel galaxy — one galaxy implementation now, with stable star addresses and a biased "interesting stars" population. Worlds get their own air and dust (a black noon on the Moon, a butterscotch Mars), cosmetic extra moons whose phase follows the sun, and render resolution follows the display by device tier. <tosi-b3d-decorator> scatters rocks and trees by budget and biome, with near-only shadows and colliders. Plus a batch of adopter fixes (ensemble's #76–#91, touch-orbit #52) and review follow-ups, and the first release through the OIDC + staged publish flow.

Size: barrel 837.8 KB min (+5.6%) · 279.6 KB gz (+6.3%); dist total 1.30 MB gz (+4.3%).

Visible, not breaking: every PRNG-seeded output re-rolls (xoshiro128** replaces the Mersenne Twister), so a given seed produces a different galaxy, star system, cloud field, crowd and spawn sequence from 0.8.3 — "same seed, same battles" holds within 0.8.4, not across the upgrade. The shipped sky is rebaked (and now served from a versioned URL). Deprecated names still work and warn once: generateGalaxy (use voxelGalaxy), onEnter/onExit on the trigger, handleChange/handleCommit on the manipulator (whenChange/whenCommit). registerIcons now refuses markup that can run.

Fixed

• Dropdowns in a panel with a pinned header opened over their own control — body popups were anchored as if there were no header, too high by its height. The in-VR scene panel has one (the transport bar), so this was every select in the headset. Header widgets also get a host now, so a select3d pinned in a header can open at all.
• FrameInfo keeps wall-clock time while paused, as documented: realDt, realElapsed and frame advance on a paused (still rendering) frame; dt and elapsed stay stopped. They used to freeze too, which broke the one case they exist for — a spinner on the pause panel.
• Floating origin reaches the placeables. b3d-prop, a standalone b3d-beacon and a place-anchored b3d-spawner drifted on a terrain rebase; they now shift with it. The shared piece is AbstractMesh.followOrigin(), which b3d-destroyable now uses too.
• b3d-trigger no longer calls BOTH whenEnter and onEnter — the new name wins and the old one warns once, like every other deprecated callback. themeEditor reads handleChange/onChange the same way (it never warned).
• A table's row-button menu opened low by the COLUMN gap; it is now anchored at the row.
• A log slider with zeroStop ignored step; it quantises in decades like one without.
• registerIcons refuses markup that can run (<script>, on*= handlers, <foreignObject>, javascript: URLs) with a warning; the trust boundary is now documented.
• Clouds, ambient and water share one wind-inheritance rule (inheritedWind); vector3d/footprint3d/curve3d import handlerOf from its own module rather than dragging in widgets3d.
• Stars were smeared into soft plus-shaped blobs. The sky's star decoder placed each star relative to whichever tap fetched its texel, so it moved as the fragment moved and was drawn across the whole texel (sometimes twice, when two rotated taps hit one texel). It now walks the 3×3 neighbourhood in texel space and rebuilds every star from its own texel and sub-texel offset, through an exact GLSL mirror of the codec's cube convention. Also, the data cube had mipmaps, despite a comment saying otherwise: a mip of packed fields is data nobody encoded. They are off now.
• Airless sun and moon vanished (the moon kept only its glow). The sky model draws both through scattering, so without air there was nothing left. Real half-degree discs now fade in as the air goes, and the glow fades with it: a hard white sun and moon on a black sky. The airless moon is as bright as the moon seen through air.
• The voxel galaxy's disc was built of slabs (seen by Tonio as "ellipsoid columns" at 1M stars). Voxel layers (0.03 at nz 20) were as thick as the disc, so stars sat in flat slabs with hard edges. nz now defaults to 60. Every voxel address changes (0.8.4 already rerolls the galaxy), and the shipped sky is rebaked with a slightly crisper band.
• Big objects in the star sky were clipped square, and packed stars sat on a lattice. Objects wider than the decoder's 3×3 reach (distant galaxies run to 3.5 texels) were cut at texel edges. Everything now tapers to nothing within a texel. Packed stars in the dense core, known only to a quarter texel, were drawn at their cells' centres, which formed a lattice the cube projection bends into curves. They now get a deterministic jitter within the cell (error diffusion for position).
• atmosphere just below 1 made the clouds vanish. 5% vacuum pushed a 1–4 km fog out past 50 km, and the haze that hides the cloud deck's rim went with it. The world's air is now steep, nearly binary (vacuum is (1 − atmosphere)⁴): 0.95 is Earth, and only the last stretch thins the sky.
• Touch on the orbit camera: two fingers pan, a pinch zooms (tosijs-3d#52). Babylon's default does both on every two-finger move, with zoom from the change in SQUARED spacing, so a drag read as "a weird zoom"; its alternative mode turns a slow pinch into a pan for good. New touchOrbit(camera) (wired into <tosi-b3d>'s default camera and orbitCam) decides once per gesture from NET spread vs NET centroid travel, then locks. Pan follows the fingers (pixels → world units at the target's depth), and zoom is natural. Pure decision model in touch-gesture, unit-tested; measured in headless Chrome with emulated touch: a 150 px two-finger drag now moves the target 2.35 m with the radius unchanged, where before it moved 0.76 m and zoomed 8 → 8.68.
• Vacuum hid the stars it was supposed to reveal. The space band's fog layer defaulted its sky veil to its weight, so leaving the atmosphere painted the sky black OVER the starfield. Vacuum is the absence of a medium; it now thins the haze without veiling the sky. Found building atmosphere: 0, and it applies to the rocket climb too.
• A field outside an attached fieldGroup swallowed keystrokes silently (tosijs-3d#82). Attaching any group stood the global key listener down for EVERY field, so a tapped field outside it showed a caret while its keys went to the group's active field or nowhere. Now the listener stands down only for fields an attached group owns, and a field outside every group that takes focus makes those groups let go. fieldGroup gains add(field), so a field created after the group can join it rather than depending on construction order.
• A page that mounted and removed scenes hit Chrome's WebGL context cap (tosijs-3d#79). Babylon's engine.dispose() keeps the context alive unless loseContextOnDispose is set, so every removed scene held one until GC, and Chrome force-loses the OLDEST live context past its cap — the scene you are looking at goes black. Teardown now releases the context, and an element re-added after a removal gets a fresh canvas (a lost context is permanent for its canvas). A genuine re-add no longer warns "an engine already exists". bun bin/context-cap.ts checks it in headless Chrome: 50 trips with the removed elements retained; the live scene rendered nothing before the fix and renders now.
• Starfield attributes were construction-time only (tosijs-3d#88). Setting starfieldData, starfieldCube, starfieldTilt, nebulae, … on an existing sky did nothing — no request, no stars, no error. They rebuild the starfield now; the dome is untouched. A dispose also releases the cube textures (a moved sky used to leave them behind).
• A sky given starfieldData alone drew no stars. The build returned early unless starfield or starfieldCube was set, although the data cube stands on its own.
• slider3d, toggle3d and select3d rejected the reactive boxes they are designed to bind (tosijs-3d#76) — 24 false type errors in one consumer panel. value is Bindable<T> now (exported): a T or anything with .value and .observe.
• spaceStart, spaceFull and starDistance said unit where every other schema field says x-unit (tosijs-3d#85). A test now rejects a bare unit.
• azimuth is out of skyboxSchema() (tosijs-3d#86). It has been a no-op since the sky material fork (the sun is placed by latitude and timeOfDay), and the schema offered it as a 0–360° slider while the docs called it a 0–1 fraction. Still accepted in markup; documented as ignored.
• A cloud deck forgot its local weather on a re-parent. Its bake memo survived sceneDispose, so the fresh mesh stayed unbaked — orographic cloud gone — until some input moved. A deck moved into another <tosi-b3d> also kept sampling the OLD scene's terrain (a narrow regression from 0.8.3's cached lookup). Both reset on dispose now.
• The deck did per-frame work it did not need. With no field in force (orographic 0, no weather) it re-baked zeros on every grid snap and every terrain rebuild; and the fly-into-cloud whiteout rebuilt the whole weather field — a fresh terrain height sampler — every frame to sample one point. The first bakes once; the second samples the field the bake already built.

Added

• Undo for the two page-global mutations. themeEditor()'s element has restore() — the palette as it was when the editor was built, then handleChange so you rebuild. registerIcons() now RETURNS an undo that removes the names it added and brings back any icon it replaced.
• <tosi-b3d-moon> — cosmetic extra moons (tosijs-3d#89). Put up to four inside a <tosi-b3d-skybox>: azimuth/elevation on the star sphere (they ride with the stars), size (angular diameter, degrees), color, brightness. The PHASE is automatic: each disc is shaded as a sphere lit by the real sun, so a moon near the sun is a crescent and one opposite it is full. A moon hides the stars behind it; it casts no light.
• voxel-galaxy (tosijs-3d/voxel-galaxy) — the first step of GALAXY-DESIGN.md: a galaxy as voxels, each with a derived bright and dim seed. brightStars() is the global pass; dimStarsNear(point, radius) is the local one the skybox baker will use. Density is sampled from generateGalaxy and propagated so no voxel is empty; stars are addressed population:voxel:n (no shared-seed clones). galaxy-data exports starDetailFor, SPECTRAL_CLASSES and SPECTRAL_WEIGHTS, split out so both generators share one definition.
• The baker reads the voxel galaxy (GALAXY-DESIGN.md step 2): starsFromVoxelGalaxy(galaxy, shell, eye, { dimReach, floor }) gives every bright star (today's rule — intrinsic brightness), the dim stars near the eye falling off with distance (the gather radius computed from the floor, not guessed), and the distant shell. bakeSkyPair takes precomputed objects; bin/bake-stars.ts rebakes static/sky/stars_* without a browser in ~1 s for the tuning loop; SHIPPED_SKY.voxel holds the dials.

Changed

• b3d-manipulator callbacks are whenChange / whenCommit — the component convention. handleChange/handleCommit still work, warn once, and are removed in 0.9.
• AbstractMesh.applyUniformScale() replaces the identical private copies in b3d-prop and b3d-destroyable.
• ONE galaxy implementation (GALAXY-DESIGN.md → "Reconciliation"). The voxel galaxy is the galaxy now. b3d-galaxy, b3d-star-system, the skybox baker and bin/bake-stars all read it. Its nebulae and distant shell have their own derived seeds, so they no longer depend on the star count.
  • Visible: a given seed now produces a different galaxy from 0.8.3 (same shape and distributions, different stars), and starCount is the galaxy's bright budget (±noise), not an exact count.
  • generateGalaxy is deprecated (removed in 0.9). It is now an adapter returning voxelGalaxy({ seed, brightBudget }).view(). The spiral model it was built on survives as sampleSpiral, which the density is sampled from.
  • Stars have an address: id is seed:population:voxel:n, with a sequence number rather than the derived seed. galaxy.star(id), b3d-galaxy.getStar(id) and b3d-star-system's new star attribute resolve it. Star n never depends on the budget, so an address resolves even in a galaxy computed with a smaller one.
  • New: voxelGalaxy().view(), .star(id), .nebulae(), .shell(); b3d-galaxy's dimBudget; starAddress / parseStarAddress, starNameFor, sampleSpiral and starsFromVoxelGalaxy in the barrel.
  • Interesting stars. The dim population splits in two. Interesting stars have a planet with HI ≤ 2 (breathable or filterable air, under 2 g, not extreme); they are generated globally, so the galaxy demo's HI filter sees every habitable system with its HI already known. Boring stars are generated only locally, as sky texture. Both are exact: candidates are drawn from a spectral mix biased by measured pass rates, then verified with the real HI rules. The rates come from a harness, bin/tune-populations.ts, which writes population-table.ts. A fingerprint test fails when HI changes, and the fix is to rerun it. HI 3 is deliberately not "interesting": it has no air requirement, so the Moon and Mars are HI 3. generateGalaxy (deprecated) keeps meaning bright stars only.
  • PRNG runs on xoshiro128** (new Xoshiro128, exported). MT carried 624 words of state and regenerated them before its first draw, so just constructing one cost ~13 µs, and a star system builds one per planet. xoshiro has 4 words: 30–75× faster to construct and draw, and it passes BigCrush and PractRand, which MT fails. A star system now costs 6.5 µs, down from 70. It is checked against an independent BigInt transcription of the reference C. Every PRNG-seeded output re-rolls: planets, the spiral samples, nebulae, the shell and the skybox's point starfield. That is folded into this release, which already changes every galaxy. b3d-clouds, b3d-crowd and b3d-spawner moved too, so their seeded layouts (cloud blobs, crowd placement, spawn rings) reroll once as well. MersenneTwister stays exported.
  • The shipped sky's nebula half is rebaked with the new nebulae. bin/bake-nebula.ts bakes it in headless Chrome and checks that the point half on disk came from the same galaxy.
• Noted late, from 0.8.3: slider3d's peek readout appears BESIDE the caption rather than replacing it (tosijs-3d#84). Deliberate — a label that vanishes the moment you touch the control loses the name of what you are adjusting — but it went unannounced, and a consumer test pinned the old behaviour. Press and drag over the caption also work (the stacked layout made the whole width the track); now pinned by a test.
• The shipped sky's stars are rebaked from the voxel galaxy — 100k bright stars plus the dim stars around the bake point (~119k objects, against 100k before). Far more stars at night, and a dense local sprinkle across the whole sky rather than only along the band. The band itself is a little broader. bun bin/bake-stars.ts with no flags reproduces it byte-for-byte; the smooth nebula_* half is unchanged.
• The shipped sky has pinned, versioned URLs (tosijs-3d#90): /sky/0.8.3/… (the previous sky) and /sky/0.8.4/… (this one), each with a manifest.json holding the decode parameters and the recipe. /sky/stars stays "latest" for the demos; a document should pin a version. shipped-sky.test.ts fails if latest drifts from the newest version.
• A world's own air, and its sky colour (tosijs-3d#89). b3d-skybox gains atmosphere (1 Earth … 0 the Moon: black noon, stars out, no haze, a hard sun), which multiplies with the space band, and zenithTint / horizonTint / tintStrength, which colourize the scattered light only, keeping its brightness (a butterscotch Mars, a green alien sky). Stars and moon are behind the air and stay untinted. Land and Sky gains an Atmosphere group: a world preset (Earth / Mars / Alien / Airless) plus live air, tint, turbidity, rayleigh, mie and luminance.
• Viewer-relative panels in the flat view (tosijs-3d#81). <tosi-b3d-panel presence="both"> appears on a monitor as well as in a headset, placed with the same frame vocabulary (eye / body / neck / face, azimuth-elevation-distance, presets, gaze reveal). XrFrames.flat(scene, camera) derives the frames from any flat camera's world pose (the eye frame takes the view's yaw, not its pitch). Hands have no flat analogue, so a hand panel declares flatFrame; without one it stays VR-only and warns once. presence defaults to 'xr', so existing panels are unchanged.
• <tosi-b3d-decorator> — rocks and trees on the terrain, by budget and by climate. The pure scatterPlacements model places a fixed NUMBER of things. Its rules use the biome shader's own axes (temperature, moisture, altitude above sea, slope), so pines grow in the cold, palms on warm shores, cacti in hot dry country, and boulders on the steep. Candidates are world-anchored and deterministic, and an acceptance threshold is solved to hit the budget. Provinces suppress by kind (no plants on a lava field; rocks still). Models come from Kenney's Nature Kit, drawn as thin instances: one draw call per model part, whatever the budget. A small collider pool follows the camera: trunks as posts, boulders as boxes. measureCost() steps through budgets and reports frame time, GPU time (where exposed), draw calls and indices. Land and Sky has a Vegetation group (budget 0–20k, reach).
• Render resolution follows the display, by device tier. Scenes rendered at CSS resolution, so a 1.25× or 2× display upscaled everything (soft edges, soft stars). The render now uses the display's pixel ratio capped by tier: high up to 2×, medium up to 1.5×, low at CSS resolution. The new PerfBudgets.pixelRatioCap sets the cap, and <tosi-b3d pixel-ratio> overrides it with an explicit value (1 = CSS resolution, 2 = full Retina, 0.75 = below CSS for speed). It follows a window moved to another monitor, and XR is unaffected. The rule is renderScalingLevel in b3d-quality, tested.
• Twinkle (starfieldTwinkle, default 0.35): scintillation, which is the air, so it scales with the gas (none on an airless world), is strongest at the horizon, and each star flickers on its own pattern. Land and Sky has a twinkle slider.
• dust on b3d-skybox separates dust from gas. Gas (atmosphere) scatters blue; dust scatters a bright grey haze that the tint colours. So Mars is almost no air, lots of dust and a butterscotch sky (Land and Sky's preset: air 0.03, dust 0.85), and the Moon is neither. The previous Mars needed full air to be bright at all.
• Star look dials on b3d-skybox: starfieldGain (brightness) and starfieldFloor (the faint mass) join starfieldSharpness (size) and starfieldSizeScale. All four are live uniforms, so a slider does not reload the cube. With exact points the defaults moved to gain 0.9 and floor 0.4. Land and Sky has a Stars group (size, brightness, faint stars).
• slider3d({ useful: [lo, hi] }) (tosijs-3d#83) — a soft band on the track where the values anybody wants live; the handle still reaches min and max. It is where a schema's x-useful lands.
• cloudDeckSchema() in sceneSchemas (tosijs-3d#87) — the deck was the one scene primitive a schema-driven consumer had to describe by hand.
• Fetched strings are marked in the scene schemas (tosijs-3d#91): format: 'uri-reference' on starfieldData, starfieldCube, nebulaTexture, water.normalMap, clouds.model and ground.texture (which also lists its keywords in x-keywords). A test fails on any new plain string that is not a colour, enum, URL or deliberately listed.
• bun run sizes — the barrel as a consumer bundles it, and the shipped dist/*.js, against a committed dist-sizes.json (0.8.3: 263.1 KB gz).