Realtime graphics techniques

Seen in: SNOWFLOW, desert explorer

Nested rings of mesh (or a single mesh tagged by ring level) centered on the player. Triangle density is high near the camera and falls off with distance. Vertices store only grid indices; world placement, CDLOD morphing, and height sampling happen in the vertex shader — no CPU rebuild, no per-frame upload of positions.

Prompt match: geometry clipmap or nested-ring LOD · sub-10 cm inner spacing · one static mesh, one draw call

Seen in: SNOWFLOW heightfield, desert dunes

Do not use a single fBm stack. Compose broad forms (tens of metres), medium drifts (metres), and fine ripples (decimetres). Stretch and shear medium/fine layers along a prevailing wind so lee faces and transverse ridges appear.

Prompt match: directional structure carved by a prevailing wind · sastrugi · lee-face asymmetry

Seen in: SNOWFLOW §2.3, desert sand spells

A player-following render target stores world interaction: depression depth, displaced mass (berms), and compression/ice for shading. Address with toroidal UVs (fract(worldXZ / size)). Feet, surf, and spells all write through one brush(). Displace geometry in beauty and shadow passes so trails self-shadow. Refill with diffusion + decay.

Prompt match: persistent and additive · never rebuild from a list of past events · trail that does not self-shadow is a failure

Seen in: SNOWFLOW snow material

Blend normals (and sometimes albedo detail) at multiple tiling frequencies by distance and slope. Add triplanar on steep faces. Analytic derivatives from the heightfield feed macro slope; fine scales provide grain.

Prompt match: detail at three tiling scales · surface detail legible at three distinct scales simultaneously

Seen in: SNOWFLOW snow SSS, spell lights through berms

Snow and skin go dark too fast under Lambertian N·L. Wrapped diffuse softens the terminator; a back-scatter term adds a blue-white glow on the lit-through side. Dynamic lights should share the same SSS include as the sun.

Prompt match: this single term does more for reads-as-snow than almost anything else

Seen in: Fable procedural creatures

Author a character from capsules/cones. In the vertex shader, snap each vertex onto the smooth-min SDF surface of all primitives so seams vanish. Normals from the SDF gradient. Still ordinary mesh rendering (cheap), not full-screen raymarching.

Prompt match: ragdoll-like primitives that look like one seamless body · mobile-performant tech-art solution

Seen in: The Long Silence

At planetary scale, float32 world positions jitter. Keep the player/ship at the origin and translate the world relative to it each frame. Use a logarithmic depth buffer (and opt custom shaders into it) so nested spheres don’t z-fight.

Prompt match: one world unit is one kilometre · floating origin · LOGD_* chunks

Seen in: Long Silence planet cubemaps

Twenty octaves of simplex per pixel per frame is not free. Bake expensive fields into textures/cubemaps at load (or when the view changes), then sample cheaply at runtime. Prefer cubemaps over equirect for planets (no poles/seams).

Prompt match: planets are baked, not evaluated · runtime shader is three texture taps

Seen in: SNOWFLOW Nishita LUT, Long Silence Rayleigh shell

An analytic single-scattering sky (or a baked LUT driven by one) ties sun color, horizon warmth, and ambient tint to sun elevation. Stock HDRIs look good but don’t re-light correctly when you scrub time of day.

Prompt match: low warm sun · ambient strongly blue-shifted · elevation slider correctly drags horizon warmth

Seen in: SNOWFLOW, Long Silence, Claude of Duty

Typical order: prepass → TAA → SSAO → SSR (selective) → DOF → bloom → volumetrics → AgX/ACES → grain → sharpen → FXAA. TAA stabilizes glints. Bloom in exposed units. Snow’s primary failure mode is clipped pure white — watch highlight roll-off. Measure 1% lows, not only average FPS.

Prompt match: blown-out white is the primary failure mode · TAA is essential

Seen in: SNOWFLOW snow-surf wake + water spells

Coherent fluid/snow bodies are swept meshes along a spine (path history in a data texture), not particle clouds. Cross-section (curl/amplitude) encodes a breaking wave; normals from the same function as geometry.

Prompt match: wake is a swept mesh, not a particle effect · one curl parameter from bank to hanging lip

Seen in: Claude of Duty materials, Solebound leather

Generate albedo / roughness / height from tiled noise at load, derive normals via Sobel or analytic derivatives, optional triplanar and edge wear from curvature. Zero runtime art pipeline.

Prompt match: GPU texture forge · no art assets · periodic noise so everything tiles