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.
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