Floating origin + precision

At large coordinates, float32 eats your sub-meter detail. Keep the player at 0 and move the world instead.

Long Silence precision · depth

How it works

Naive: ship world position → 1e6+; nearby props jitter
Floating origin: ship stays at (0,0,0); subtract ship position from every object each frame (or in chunks)
Log depth: remap depth so near and far nested spheres share resolution — custom shaders must opt in

p_render = p_world − player_world

What this demo shows

Two panels of a grid of thin poles. Left: each world position is rounded to float32 while the origin is far away. Right: same relative layout, coordinates kept small. Crank the offset — left snaps to a coarse grid and jitters, right stays clean.

Float32 carries a 24-bit significand, so the representable spacing at |x| is 2^exp(x)−23. At 8 million units that is 0.5 m — larger than the gap between these poles. The HUD prints the grid for the current offset.

ulp(x) = 2^(floor(log2|x|) − 23)

Worth knowing if you try to reproduce this: three.js Vector3 and Matrix4 hold float64. Adding a huge offset and subtracting it again cancels exactly and shows nothing at all. The loss only appears if you round to float32 while the coordinate is large — here via Math.fround, in an engine via float32 transform storage or a vertex buffer.

Controls

World offset magnitude1,000,000

Animate (makes jitter obvious)

Also pair with logarithmic depth when you nest planet-scale spheres — linear 24-bit depth loses the fight first.

Source prompts

The Long Silence

Technique notes · All techniques

← SDF shell Next: bake →

left: naive · right: floating origin