Presentation only. Nothing here touches Topography, the noise, or any generation
constant; the renderer is handed a height field LOADED from a .f32 dump and has no
way to produce one, so a look change provably cannot move the terrain.
Hillshade: Horn 3x3, cell size 1, edges clamped (never wrapped — the Trench border
is a wall, not a seam). ZExaggeration is required rather than optional: measured
median land slope is 0.22 degrees unexaggerated, so the island shades as a flat
plane. Chosen from a measured slope table — zex 75 gives 16/28/37 deg at land
median/p90/p99, which reads as natural relief. It is a look dial; raw units are not
metres and no code may read it as if they were.
Palette: stops placed on the MEASURED height distribution, not spread linearly.
Land is bottom-heavy (median 0.456, p99 1.113, max 1.415 over 8.6M land columns
across four seeds), so a linear ramp would spend 99% of its range on 1% of the land
and the map would read as green with a few white dots. Bathymetry is compressed by
d/(d+0.35) so the shallow shelf gets the range and the featureless abyss flattens.
Anchors are absolute and fixed across the batch — a map coloured on its own min/max
cannot be compared with its neighbour, and comparison is the point of a batch.
Blend: the naive tint x hillshade darkens everything by 29% before any slope is
involved, because flat ground shades to sin(altitude). So shade is normalized by
its flat-ground value first — flat terrain keeps its true tint and only SLOPE moves
the colour — then shadows multiply while highlights screen toward white. That
asymmetry is the difference between a colour ramp and a map you would frame.
Relief fades to zero with depth below sea. Not only taste: the deep floor is the
Trench, a synthetic wall whose gradient is ~1.5x the p99 land gradient, so shading
it faithfully draws a bright rim around the map and lights the abyss with noise
mottle. The fade puts relief on the near-shore shelf where the bathymetry is real.
Three named looks (atlas / relief / dusk), gated like any other change and kept
deliberately few — iteration fatigue on a subjective gate is a real failure mode.
Each pair isolates one question.
HeightMapRenderer.cs is retired: its raw I/O moved to HeightField.cs and its ramp
to ReliefPalette.cs, so there is one palette everywhere and the generator's own
quick-look is coloured identically to a beauty render.
No biome words, no classification, no water. The 0.15 line is a colour boundary.
Ports MapGenerator.GenerateTopography's pass-1 loop (reference ~:553-619 at tag
pre-rewrite-reference / ab78883) into Tools/. Working code and its tuned constants
carried over verbatim, read from source rather than re-derived from a design
summary (D-050). Six elements, in the reference's execution order — the order is
load-bearing: the sinker lands before the Pow (superlinear), the Trench after it
(a raw additive wall), preTrenchFalloff captured between them.
The fractal config is now PINNED. The reference set only NoiseType/Seed/Frequency,
so the island's entire fractal character was Godot 4.7.1 constructor defaults that
nothing recorded. Measured on 4.7.2 (NoiseDefaultsProbe): Fbm / 5 / 0.5 / 2.0 / 0.0
— identical to the 4.7.1 values, so pinning reproduces the look with no delta. The
terrain no longer depends on an engine default, and the probe makes a future drift
visible instead of silent.
Two deliberate departures from the reference's literals, both flagged in-code:
- the latitude noise offset is expressed in map widths, not the reference's raw
+1000 px, so a resize no longer samples a different slice of the noise field
(chat1/00 §4.2). Pinned to 1000/8192 so the 8K realization is unchanged.
- the `if (temperature < 0.65f)` spine gate is dropped as the provable no-op it
is — southernFade already reaches exactly 0 at 0.65. Bit-identical.
The reference's "temperature" is ported as a latitude field and deliberately NOT
named temperature: it is stage-1-local input to terrain geometry, and climate is
stage 3 (D-049 §2, D-056). The ±0.1 wobble is kept — it is what stops the spine's
southern terminus being a ruler-straight line.
Deferred to Phase 2 with the seam open: coast shelf and offshore islets (below-sea,
judged once water renders). Pass1Result exposes PreTrenchFalloff at their exact
consumption point, plus HMaxSeed for the seed-dependent curve.
Render is a direct Godot.Image, not the SubViewport capture path — that machinery
exists to composite vector overlays and is why --headless hangs; Phase 1 has none.
Hypsometric above 0.15, bathymetric below, fixed ramp anchors so seeds and ablation
rungs are comparable. No biome words anywhere.
Verified: land fraction 51.5% identical at 1024, 2048 and 10240 — the scaling
discipline holds across a 10x resize. Full-size 10240 pass: 36.3 s.
No curve, erosion, rivers, water, crater, biomes, roads, or mesher.
