0.9.0

A sea that knows its shore, and a temperature that means one. The water takes the depth and the distance to land from the terrain and draws surf that runs in, pale shallows and sea ice; solid ice is solid for everything in the scene. Temperature is now a real scale (0 is 0 °C, 1 is 50 °C), so the same dial reaches Titan and Venus.

Size: barrel (min, packages external) 948.5 KB raw / 318.9 KB gz, +1.75% on 0.8.15 (the shore model and its shader).

⚠️ Breaking

• biomeTemperature is a temperature, and -1 no longer means "default". 0 is 0 °C and each unit is 50 °C (1 = 50 °C, -1 = -50 °C, which warns once in the console), with no limit either way, so a world can be as cold as Titan or as hot as Venus. It used to be the biome chart's 0…1 axis with -1 for "default". Convert old values with (old - 0.36) / 0.8; the default is now 0.45 and looks the same. The chart is a window onto the new scale (-22.5 °C to 40 °C) and clamps beyond it. chartTemperature / planetTemperature convert. Everything inside the biome shader, province climate and decorator bands is still in chart units. See Migration.

Changed

• The deprecated onX callback names stay for one more minor. They were announced as "removed in 0.9"; they are removed in 0.10 instead, and still work and warn once in 0.9.x. The same goes for the other names marked for removal in 0.9 (whenEnter/whenExit's old spellings on the trigger, the manipulator's, generateGalaxy). Nothing to do yet beyond renaming at your own pace.

Added

• A shoreline, and sea ice. <tosi-b3d-water shore="on"> gives the water the depth of the ground under each vertex (from the scene's terrain) and draws from it: surf (wave fronts running in to the shore one after another, and a wet edge lapping at the waterline), paler water over the shallows, and ice. The surf is drawn from each vertex's DISTANCE to the waterline, not its depth, so it is the same width on a steep shore as on a flat one. The distance is a real one, carried across the grid from the waterline, so the fronts are evenly spaced whatever the bed does. shoreFine doubles the mesh near the viewer: a vertex every 2 m out to 64 m (about 16,600 in all) where there is otherwise one every 4 m. The ice follows the cold and the shore: a solid sheet along the beach, breaking into plates further out, open water beyond, and all of it moving out to sea as the climate at sea level (season included) gets colder. It is there from below as well. The sea starts to freeze at -2 °C at the beach; open water stays clear to about -8 °C and is one unbroken surface by -22.5 °C. iceCover(temperature, depth) is the rule; see water-shore. With shore="on" a vertex colour on the water mesh is shore data, not a tint. The shader patch is made once for the page, so this holds for EVERY WaterMaterial on a page that has one shore="on" water: a vertex-coloured water mesh of your own loses its tint there.
• Solid ice is solid. Ice is water until it has knitted solid (iceBears); where it has, the water carries an invisible collision mesh (collision group ice), so anything that collides or picks meets it: a car, a shell, a ground probe. Plates and a sheet still showing its cracks are water. Wave displacement fades out under ice, so the sheet lies flat where it collides. A biped swimming at the surface climbs onto solid ice; one that dived first goes under it, with the ice as a ceiling. water.iceBearsAt(x, z) asks for any point.

Fixed

• Water animates on every browser. Babylon's WaterMaterial advances its clock only on a frame whose duration differs from the last, so where frame times are steady (a browser that rounds its timer, a display holding its rate) the ripples crawled. <tosi-b3d-water> now writes the material's time itself, once a frame, from the scene's clock. It also stops when the scene is paused.
• Fog takes the sky's tint. A syncSkybox fog fades distant ground to the skybox's horizonColor, which ignored horizonTint: under a tinted sky the far hills stood out as a pale blue-white band along the horizon. It now keeps its brightness and takes the tint's hue, by tintStrength.
• Land and Sky: no air, no cloud. The demo's cloud cover and orographic dials are thinned by the air setting (none below a twentieth of Earth's), so Mars has a clear sky. The cloud deck itself is unchanged.
• Negative cirrus had a quarter of the cloud of positive cirrus. The two streak directions were built differently; across-the-wind is now the same field turned a quarter, so the sign changes only which way the streaks run.
• Clouds needed exactly full air. With atmosphere under about 0.8 the sky dome becomes a blended mesh, and it was drawn after the cloud deck and over it. It is now drawn first.
• A little less air cleared the haze almost completely, and a slow drag back to full air never quite arrived. The vacuum fog layer now mixes fog by strength (FogLayer.reciprocal), and the sky's air value lands exactly on 0 and 1.