The view had one rotation in it — the planet on the detail page, at 0.08 rad/s,
a number with no source. Nothing in the system view turned at all.
The data was already on disk: every cached Horizons page carries how its body
spins, in one of five forms. The rate in radians per second is preferred where
it appears, because it is signed — that is how Venus and Uranus are known to
turn backwards — then a period in hours or days, then the `9h 55m 29.711 s`
the giant planets use, and finally the word every major moon here carries
instead of a number: Synchronous. A tidally locked moon's day is its orbit, so
Kepler supplies it from the elements already parsed and the parent it goes
round.
Seventeen of the eighteen bodies come out within 1% of their published period —
Earth 23.934 h, Jupiter 9.925 h, Venus -5832.5 h, Io 42.5 h, Callisto 400.5 h.
Titan is the exception: its page states no period at all, so it is left still
rather than turned at an invented rate.
The axis is the orbit normal tilted by the obliquity about the orbit's
ascending node, which is where an obliquity is measured from and the only line
in the orbit the elements name. The phase at the epoch is published for none of
these bodies, so the face turned toward the camera is not a claim; the rate and
the direction are.
At true rates nothing is visible moving — Earth turns 15 degrees an hour. A
clock the reader can run faster is the next piece, and the audit asks for it
anyway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Three changes to what the system view claims, all of them the same claim: that
the sizes on screen mean something.
**The halo is gone.** It was a sprite sized against the arrival frame — 1.12 AU
for the Sun — so it stayed that wide as the camera closed in and ended up a flat
gradient filling the screen, over the photograph it was meant to dress. It
existed to keep the star visible at a framing that holds the whole system, which
is now handled in pixels instead.
**Bodies are drawn at their own radius.** The old marker size was exaggerated
and scaled to the system span, and clamped: Jupiter and Ganymede both ran past
the ceiling and were drawn at one radius, so every moon orbited inside its
planet, and Phobos and Triton sat entirely within Mars and Neptune. True scale
needs no rule against that — physics already puts a moon outside the planet it
orbits. What it costs is visibility at the arrival framing, where every body is
sub-pixel, so the scene floors each marker at 3 px on screen and holds a moon to
half its planet's drawn size. Measured in the Sun's system: at arrival, planets
3 px and moons 1.5 px, against 3 px for everything before; at Jupiter, the
planet 10.8 px at scale 1 with the Galilean moons on their orbits outside it.
The Sun is drawn at its own radius too. Every other star keeps a size derived
from its innermost orbit, because no stellar radius reaches the app — Gaia's
`radius_gspphot` is the obvious next fetch.
**A click cannot enter a system that is not on screen.** The picker tested depth
but not the frame, and a star's hit area is its drawn size plus a slop, so a
click in the last pixels of the view could fly into a system outside it, with
nothing on screen to explain where it had gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The span went to `distanceRings` as the target's straight-line distance from the
Sun, but a ring of radius r passes within |r - p| of the view's centre, where p
is how far out that centre is *along* the galactic plane. For a target above the
plane the two differ by its height, so the band was centred on a radius no ring
has — and `ringLabels` picks its bearing by comparing its own in-plane distance
against the innermost ring, a comparison the new first ring quietly broke.
Two comments and a constant, from the same review. A frame short of the survey
edge gets its callout only when its last ring overshoots it: 245 pc does, 235 pc
does not, which is now a test rather than a sentence. The ring count can reach
16, not 14, now that the span need not start at the Sun. And a ring label was
measured as 135 px of star name when "50 pc" is a third of that, which rejected
rungs a hand's breadth clear of the name: RING_LABEL_REACH_NDC, 0.23, is the
widest of them — "1.5 kpc" with "Survey edge" under it.
Three mutants, three caught. Measured again in the app: unchanged for a star in
the plane (4 labels at 20 pc above it, 7 at 2 pc), and the rings now follow the
plane for one 195 pc above it rather than ringing a place the grid does not
reach.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The rings are centred on the Sun and the frame need not be. Sizing their step
from how far the frame reaches — 210 pc for a star at 190 with the camera 20 pc
back — gives 20 pc rings at 180 and 200, both outside a frame 19 pc deep, so a
view away from the Sun still had no ring on it and no ladder of labels either.
`distanceRings` now takes the span the frame covers rather than its far edge,
and the step is a fifth of that: 5 pc rings from 165 to 210 for the same view.
Measured in the app, centred on a star 187 pc out in the galactic plane: 4 ring
labels drawn 20 pc above the plane and 7 from 2 pc, against 1 and none before.
The clearance was a radius around the anchor, and a label is a line of text
hanging 135 px to one side of its anchor: at 0.065 NDC apart, past the radius,
"50 pc" printed inside "Alpha Centauri". It is now tested against the span the
name occupies, on the side it hangs, with the radius kept for the pair whose
text runs the other way.
Also from the review: the ladder in the clearance test was built at exactly the
constant it tests, so 1057 of 2000 camera poses would have decided it by float
round-trip error — the rungs now sit 0.02 either side of the rule. And two
comments that were wrong: a frame one step short of the survey edge does get its
callout, and CSS2DRenderer hides a label behind the camera rather than drawing
it at the page edge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The panel printed "No route at this range." beside the range it was offering —
which is the sentence this branch exists to stop it printing. It was gated on
there being no offer, and a search that gives up usually has one: Sol to
HD 120147 at 4.5 pc spends the budget, offers 4.83 pc, and says there is no
route where a 71-jump route exists. The wording now follows the search at the
range that was asked for, and nothing else.
That needs the two give-ups kept apart, so `least` travels beside `gaveUp` to
the panel: one says the asked range was not searched out, the other that the
search for a range that would work was. HIP 69445 at 3 pc — asked-range search
exhaustive in 44 ms, ceiling probe out of budget — used to read "Too many stars
to search at this range." and now reads "No route at this range.", with nothing
claimed after it.
Two more from the same review. The budget flag was read off the settled count,
so a search that proved a dead end with the last star it was allowed reported a
give-up; it now records why the loop stopped. And the bisection's cap could fire
before a single probe had narrowed anything, leaving the ceiling route's own
longest hop as the answer: star 1000115173 at 3 pc was told to go to 8.00 pc,
the control's maximum, for a crossing that works at 6. It now offers 6.93.
Measured in the app, all three: "Too many stars to search at this range.
4.90 pc would reach.", "No route at this range." alone, and 7.00 pc in place of
8.00. The duplicated dead-end test now asks the question it was named for —
exactly the budget's worth of stars reaching each other and none of them the
destination — and each fix kills its own mutant.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
From the review of #19. The rings are distances from the Sun, but their step was taken from
`effectiveDistance`, which under the plan view means the extent of the frame rather than how far
the camera is from the Sun. Centred on a star 200 pc out and flipped to 2D, the grid became rings
of 2 to 20 pc: not one of them on screen. The step now comes from where the view is centred plus
how far the camera is orbiting it, which is the same distance under either projection.
The set was also rebuilt while the grid was hidden, and every rebuild disposes the rings and
builds every vertex again; it now happens only while the grid is drawn.
The ring labels went straight to the overlay: never culled to the frame, and free to land on a
star's name. They now have to be on screen and clear of the names already placed, by half the
separation two names keep — they are a ladder up one ray a twentieth of the screen apart, and
holding them apart from each other would take "Survey edge" off the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The route search stops after MAX_VISITED stars and returned null, which everything downstream read
as "the catalogue holds no chain". On the real catalogue that was wrong for real questions: Sol to
HD 120147 (136 pc) at 5 pc is 50 jumps, and the panel said there was no route. The budget also sat
under what the shipped catalogue needs, so it is now 40 000 rather than 20 000: both that route and
a star at 170 pc are found, and Sol to HD 2626 at 6 pc, which used to be refused after 4.7 s, plots
56 jumps in about 2 s.
A search now reports whether it gave up. The range search no longer counts a give-up as proof that
nothing routes below it — that is what reported ranges up to 29% too wide — and it stops after two
of them, since those are the probes that cost the most and settle the least: for HD 2626 at 3 pc it
offers 5.92 pc in about 4 s, against 6.13 pc in 4.7 s. At the panel's widest range the refused route
and the range search are the same question, so it is asked once. Where nothing can be said, the
panel says "Too many stars to search at this range." rather than claiming there is no route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
- The budget counted CSS pixels; lines are drawn in device pixels, so a screen scaled to 150% or
200% drew 1.5-2x the calibrated line. It now counts the canvas's drawn pixels.
- A graph was re-asked only when the drawn stars changed, so with a star budget covering the whole
catalogue, or a resize, its budget and centre stayed wherever the layer was turned on. A view that
chose its stars again now asks, and a graph is rebuilt when the stars, the range or the budget
changed (the budget by more than half the margin, or its centre by more than 5 pc).
- From inside a system the budget was worked out in astronomical units about the system's origin.
Graphs are now asked for in parsec space only; the flight back out asks.
- Comparing budgets let a request re-asked with a slightly different one supersede its twin, and the
twin's rejection cleared the state of the request that replaced it. A rejection now clears it only
for the latest request.
- The worker sorted every link to keep a few thousand, 2.2x an unbudgeted build. It now bands links
by distance, keeps every band before the one the budget runs out in, and sorts only that one:
142-168 ms on the real catalogue against 233-388 ms, 103 ms unbudgeted, returning early when all fit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
With the drawn set following the view, the layer at 8 pc cost the integrated Radeon 503 ms a frame
at 30 pc from the Sun. Measured, the cost follows the length of line on screen (about 10 ms per
million pixels near the Sun), not the number of links: 100 000 links were 12 ms at the opening
view, 25 000 were 61 ms at 30 pc. So the budget is a length: a million pixels, turned into parsecs
at the depth the view is centred on, spent on the links nearest that centre by their nearer end.
Orbiting with links at 8 pc on the iGPU: 12-18 ms p50 at every pose measured, no long tasks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
- Flights: the drawn stars were checked once a label pass, and a flight outruns that. Leaving a
system jumps the camera to face another way, then zooms out forty-fold in a second: 74-83% of
the stars that belong on screen were missing on the first frames back in parsec space, 33-50%
before each re-choice on the way out. While the rig animates, the check now runs every frame.
Probe on real flights (Gl 806, Barnard's Star, out): 0.90-1.00 of a fresh choice drawn on
screen in flight, 1.00 on the frame of the jump; frame p95 12.2 ms, no long tasks. Choosing for
the whole sky during flights was tried first and measured worse (0.15-0.18).
- Portrait frames: the turn and pan limits use the narrower half-extent, not the height.
- Links: a new drawn set arms the rebuild timer only when none is pending, so a continuous orbit
gets a graph at most every 250 ms instead of never; an unchanged set asks for nothing.
- The centre-move test lets the first pass happen before moving the centre.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Graph requests were never shared, on the grounds that the scene never asks for the same graph
twice. It does: turning the layer off and on while the worker is busy asks again for the graph
already waiting. The new request superseded the old one, and the old one's rejection handler,
which finds its request by range and drawn list, wiped the state of the new one: the layer stayed
on with no graph. An identical request now shares the outstanding promise, a graph being the same
when its range matches and its drawn list is the very same array.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The drawn set was two spheres, around the view's centre and around the Sun, then the brightest
stars anywhere, so most of the budget sat behind or beside the camera: at 30 pc from the Sun
15.8% of the drawn stars were on screen, at 5 pc 9.1%, in a plan view zoomed to 10 pc 3.8%.
The same tiers are now taken only from the camera's frame, widened by a quarter
(VIEW_MARGIN), with the planet hosts in view drawn first after the pinned stars, so every ring
circles a star that can be clicked. The set is chosen again at the label cadence once the view
has turned, zoomed or moved half the margin, switched projection or been resized, and once for
the whole sky on the way out to the Galaxy. Drawn stars on screen: 74-76% at 30 pc, 73-75% at
5 pc, 66% in the zoomed plan view, 91.5% at the opening view.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Same stars in the same order, for less: one walk of the brightness index, reading positions laid
out in that order, sorts the view's neighbourhood, the Sun's and the rest as it goes, instead of
gathering both neighbourhoods in catalogue order and sorting them. A refocus in the page drops
from 11.3 ms to 4.6 ms (median; worst 19.1 to 7.1). This comes before the drawn set follows the
camera's turns, which makes refocusing far more frequent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The jump-link graph linked the whole catalogue: 3.7 million links at 8 pc, 7.4-7.8 s in the
worker and a 443-515 ms frame on the main thread when they landed, and most of them between stars
that were neither drawn nor clickable. A graph request now carries the star field's drawn stars,
and the worker links only those, over an index of its own with cells as wide as the range. The
scene asks again once a new drawn set has held still for 250 ms.
The renderer is handed the graph's bounding sphere instead of computing it: three.js walked every
vertex on the main thread in the first frame that drew a new graph, 48-55 ms at 8 pc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed three defects in this PR, all reproduced in
the browser.
1. Superseded graphs queued up in front of routes. The worker answers
messages one at a time and cannot drop one it has started. With the
jump-link layer on, every pause on the range slider posted a full graph
build, seconds of work at 6-8 pc. Answers no longer wanted were thrown
away only once built. A route asked for afterwards waited behind every
one of them: a one-jump route took 44 s.
RoutingClient now holds requests and sends them one at a time. While one
is out, only the latest of each kind waits: a newer graph replaces an
older one before it is ever built, and the older promise is rejected with
SupersededRequest. Routes go ahead of graphs. The same question asked
again while outstanding shares the answer rather than being worked twice,
as when the layer is turned off and on during a build.
The same scenario in the browser (layer on, range stepped 5 -> 8 pc with
400 ms pauses, then Sol to Proxima): the route came back in 110 ms. The
worker was sent "links 3, links 5, route, links 8"; 6 and 7 were never
built.
2. A worker that failed left the panel stuck. With no error handling, a
worker that failed to load (a 404 on its chunk after a redeploy) or
threw left "Plotting…" and a disabled button for good, and a graph at a
range could not be asked for again.
The worker now answers an exception with a 'failed' message, which
rejects that request. A worker that fails to load or dies is abandoned,
and what it left outstanding, and everything asked afterwards, is
answered in place. The scene releases the panel when a route fails, and
forgets a graph range that was never drawn so it can be asked for again.
3. Nothing type-checked the worker. The application builder never reads
webWorkerTsConfig, and bundles the worker with esbuild, which strips
types without checking them. tsconfig.app.json leaves the file out. A
type error in the worker shipped.
`npm run worker:typecheck` (tsc -p tsconfig.worker.json) now runs in CI
beside the other project checks. webWorkerTsConfig is removed from
angular.json, since it only suggested that something checked the worker.
Tests with a fake worker cover one request at a time, a waiting graph
replaced and a route sent ahead of it, a question shared, a failure rejected
and the next request sent, and a failed worker's requests answered in place.
A scene test covers the panel released after a failed route. Negative
controls, each caught: several requests sent at once, a waiting graph kept,
graphs ahead of routes, a question asked twice, a failure answered as a
success, a failed worker waited on, the panel left pending, and a type error
in the worker (caught by worker:typecheck).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The label and star-field review fixes arrive under the routing client: the
scene keeps constructing RoutingClient beside the neighbourhood, and builds
the brightness index where it built the order. Both sides' new scene tests
are kept.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed three costs this PR added, all reproduced in
the browser.
- The first pinned refocus stalled the first flight of a session. The
renderer built its own id-to-index Map of 423 651 entries the first time a
star was pinned, which is at the first selection, inside the approach
flight. The worst frame was 47-103 ms, and the Map stayed as a second copy
of a lookup the scene already had. The scene now pins by catalogue index,
through the StarNeighbourhood it builds at load (new `indexOf`), and the
renderer takes indices. First selection, measured in the browser: worst
frame 18 ms.
- At galactic scale every label pass rewrote the drawn set. The view centre
sweeps hundreds of parsecs a pass there, far past any star, so each pass
chose the same 70 000 stars again and uploaded 2 MB to the GPU: 11 times
on the flight out to the Galaxy. The scene no longer refocuses at galactic
scale, where the whole catalogue is a few pixels, and the renderer leaves
its buffers alone when the drawn set is unchanged. Flight to the Galaxy:
2 refocuses, no frame over 50 ms.
- At load the same set was chosen twice: once by the renderer's constructor
around the Sun, and again by the first label pass, centred on the Sun. The
scene now records the constructor's choice as the current focus.
Tests: the buffers keep their version for an unchanged set, no refocus at
load, none at galactic scale, and pins arrive as indices. Proxima's id in the
scene spec now differs from its index, so a lookup by id cannot pass for one
by index. Negative controls, each caught: an unchanged set rewritten anyway, a
refocus at galactic scale, the boot choice not recorded, and pins passed as
ids.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The label fix turns the brightness order into an index with positions and ids
laid out beside it. The star field only needs the order, so it is handed
`.order`. Both sides added scene tests in the same place; both are kept.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed a regression in this PR. Near the Sun, the
label pass became three to four times slower than the scan and sort it
replaced.
Within about 11 pc of the Sun, and in any plan view zoomed tighter than that,
the label radius clamps to 4 pc. That sphere holds a few dozen faint dwarfs
deep in the brightness order, so the walk rarely finds fifteen stars to name
and reads nearly the whole catalogue. Reading the star objects in brightness
order jumps all over memory, so a full walk took 19-25 ms against the old
5-6 ms.
The review also found that spreadLabels checked the label count at the top of
its loop. After placing the fifteenth label it asked for a sixteenth
candidate, which near the Sun can lie at the far end of the order.
brightnessIndex now lays each star's position and id out beside the
brightness order, in that order. The walk tests stars from those arrays in
sequence and reads a star object only when it yields one. spreadLabels breaks
straight after placing the fifteenth label.
Measured on the real catalogue with the label logic reduced to what decides
placement, camera at the given distance from the Sun (old sort / this PR as
first pushed / now):
2 pc 4.9 / 24.7 / 2.5 ms
5 pc 5.7 / 23.0 / 3.1 ms
10 pc 6.3 / 18.2 / 0.95 ms
307 pc 22 / 0.01 / 0.00 ms (the opening view)
The labels are identical in every case. Now faster than the old sort at every
distance.
A new scene test counts the candidates spreadLabels takes: exactly fifteen for
fifteen labels. Negative controls, each caught: positions one axis off, ids in
catalogue order, the selected star dropped, the radius edge excluded, and the
count checked before taking a candidate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Route plotting ran on the main thread, and so did the jump-link graph:
- the range search for a far target, HD 2626 at 236 pc, takes 4-5 s;
- the graph at 8 pc is 3.7 million links, 6-10 s to build, then as many
link objects again to turn into vertices.
The map stopped for as long as either ran.
A Web Worker now does both. RoutingClient sends it the catalogue's ids and
positions once, and it keeps its own spatial index. A route question comes
back with the route, or with the range that would open one. A graph comes
back as one Float32Array of segment vertices, transferred rather than
copied.
On the scene side, only the latest route request is shown: an earlier
answer arriving later is dropped. Only the graph for the range last asked
for is drawn. The Routes panel says "Plotting…" and holds its button while
a request is out.
collectJumpLinks gave way to jumpLinkSegments, which writes the vertex pairs
straight into floats rather than building link objects first; the scene was
its only caller. The routing module (routing.ts) is the message protocol and
the one function answering it, so the worker is a dozen lines, and the same
answers are worked out in place where there is no Worker, as in the unit
tests' DOM. The worker is built with its own tsconfig, as the Angular
builder expects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The star field draws a budget of the catalogue: everything within 25 pc of
the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. That choice was made once, at load,
around the Sun, and never again. On the Gaia catalogue it left most of the
map empty wherever the view went:
- a region 150 pc out drew 49 of the 442 stars within 25 pc of it;
- a plotted route ran through stars no one could see or click. Sol to
Almach at 8 pc passes 19 stars and drew 6, Sol to Mirfak 11 of 26;
- a search for a faint star flew the camera to an empty point.
The drawn set now follows the view. The scene chooses it again at the label
cadence, once the orbit target has moved more than 5 pc or the pinned stars
have changed. The budget goes, in order, to the selected star and the stars
of a plotted route, then everything within 25 pc of where the view is
centred, then the same around the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. The
instance buffers hold the budget and are rewritten in place.
Checked in Chromium on WebGPU, framing Mirfak from 12 pc: with the set
chosen around the Sun, 122 of the 649 stars within 25 pc were drawn;
following the view, all 649. At the opening view the drawn set is the same
as before.
A refocus takes 9 ms in the browser (5 ms of it choosing). The first version took
16-36 ms in the browser, a visible hitch during a flight. Most of that time
went on walking the 423 651-star brightness order once per neighbourhood,
out of catalogue order, and on recomputing 70 000 colours. Now both
neighbourhoods are gathered in one pass in catalogue order and sorted on
their own, and colours and sizes are computed once for the whole catalogue.
The brightness order itself sorts a typed copy of the magnitudes, taking
83 ms at load instead of 104-139 ms.
STAR_RENDER_BUDGET is now 70 000, and its comment gives the measurements
behind it rather than "currently set to the whole catalogue", which stopped
being true when Gaia landed. At 1920 x 1080 on a Ryzen 7700X:
- on the RTX 4080, the whole catalogue costs the same 6.1 ms a frame as the
budget;
- on the processor's two-core Radeon, standing in for an entry-level laptop,
every 100 000 stars costs about 4 ms: 112 fps at the budget, 44 at the
whole catalogue, and the same under WebGL2;
- drawn whole, the opening view turns into a grey wash that buries the
labels and the host rings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The star labels are refreshed every 0.2 s. Each pass filtered the whole
catalogue to the stars within the label radius, sorted them by magnitude,
and turned every one into a label object, all to place at most fifteen.
At the opening view the radius holds about 60 000 stars, so each pass was a
55-70 ms task on the main thread. A CPU profile of the opening view, on a
Ryzen 7700X with an RTX 4080, counted 29 tasks over 50 ms in 6.7 s, one
every 230 ms; updateLabels took 23% of the main thread. That is the stutter
the frame-time bench measured on every GPU and every render budget.
The catalogue is now sorted by brightness once, when it loads.
brightestWithin walks that order and hands stars over lazily, and
spreadLabels already stopped once it had placed fifteen labels, so a pass
reads only the stars it looks at. The output is the same as before: the
same stars, in the same order, with ties in catalogue order, the selected
star named wherever it is, and a star exactly on the radius included. The
spec checks it against the filter-then-sort it replaces. Stars are no longer
scanned at all when the view is at galactic scale, where the result was
thrown away.
Profiled again on the same view: 0 tasks over 50 ms, and the scene's
per-frame work over the window dropped from 2 028 ms to 342 ms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The route search widened evenly from the departure, Dijkstra-style, with a
budget of 20 000 stars. On the Gaia catalogue those are all within about
40 pc of the Sun, so it found no route to anything farther at any range:
Sol to Mirfak (155 pc) failed at 3, 8, 15 and 30 pc alike. Every failure
then asked minimumRangeBetween what range would work. That search widened
the same way with a 30 pc ceiling, and it ran for up to a minute on the
main thread before giving up with nothing.
routeBetween is now an A* search. Each star is queued by the distance
travelled to it plus the straight line on to the destination, on a binary
heap rather than a linear scan of the frontier. It heads for the
destination instead of flooding the core around the departure.
minimumRangeBetween bisects the range, one routeBetween per step, because
whether a chain exists can only become truer as the range grows. Its
answer is always the longest hop of a route actually found, so a range it
names always opens one. Its ceiling is now the Routes panel's own
maximum, MAX_JUMP_RANGE_PC: a range the control cannot be set to is no
answer, and raiseTo already clamped any figure above it.
The spatial index keys its cells by one number packed from their three
indices instead of an "ix,iy,iz" string. A search visits up to 125 cells
for every star it expands, and building those strings was half of what a
route cost. forEachWithin hands neighbours over unsorted and uncollected,
which was most of the other half; within is now that, gathered and sorted.
The no-route line said nothing in the catalogue bridged the gap; it now
says no chain of jumps up to the panel's maximum reaches the star, which
is what was searched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The map had one way to read a distance: the Range readout, a number for how
far back the camera is. The local grid's five rings sat at 50 to 250 pc,
fixed and unlabelled. They said nothing from inside a 2 pc hop, and nothing
past 250 pc now that the Hipparcos stars Gaia places there are drawn.
A scale bar now sits under the scale rail. It shows the longest round length
(1, 2 or 5 x 10^n) that fits in 120 px, in AU inside a system and in parsecs
or kiloparsecs outside. It is measured at the depth the view is centred on,
since under perspective every depth has its own scale; under the plan view
it is exact everywhere.
The local grid's rings are now distances from the Sun, at a round step of
about a fifth of the camera's distance and out past the camera: 50 to 350 pc
from the opening view, 2 to 20 pc from twenty parsecs out. Each ring is
labelled with its distance, on the side facing what the view is centred on,
or across the far side of the grid when that is the Sun (the near side is
under the camera and out of frame). The survey edge at 250 pc stays called
out, as "Survey edge", whatever the step.
The rounding lives in one place, scale-bar.ts, shared by the bar and the
rings and tested there. Its formatter keeps three significant digits: one
digit, enough for the bar's round lengths, printed the 250 pc ring as
"300 pc".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
HYG and Gaia were both cut at 250 pc, each on its own distance. A star
Hipparcos put at 200 pc and Gaia at 300 was kept by the first, never
downloaded from the second, and drawn at 200. That is where 83% of the
9 691 mid-magnitude HYG stars without a Gaia counterpart came from, and at
the median Hipparcos had them a third too close. The mirror case, Hipparcos
outside and Gaia inside, dropped the HYG row and left its Gaia entry
anonymous.
Gaia's own Hipparcos cross-match (hipparcos2_best_neighbour, a fixed DR3
table of 99 525 rows) gives a usable Gaia distance for 97 751 of them.
placementDistancePc keeps a star either survey puts inside the cutoff, and
draws every kept star at the better measurement, inside the cutoff or not.
57 121 HYG stars now sit at Gaia's distance. 6 833 of them are past 250 pc:
Zet Per 230 -> 259 pc, 35 Ori 137 -> 330, 44 Cnc 223 -> 613, and the
farthest, HIP 69445, at 8.7 kpc. 3 666 stars that Hipparcos put outside are
now kept, and 3 656 of them give a Gaia entry its name.
The cross-match is required rather than skipped when unreachable. Without
it, every one of those stars would move back to its Hipparcos distance, and
the published map would flip with the archive's availability. The ESA TAP
answered it with a 500 at first and in 102 s on the next try. So fetches
now retry 5xx and network failures twice, after 30 s and 120 s, in the
fetch every source goes through. The refresh job also carries the Gaia DR3
responses from run to run in the Actions cache: the release is frozen, and
a live re-fetch has already reproduced stars.bin byte for byte.
423 651 stars (+10), 61 168 HYG rows folded into Gaia entries (+3 656),
351 597 unnamed designations (-3 656). 10 886 HYG survivors and 23 unmerged
pairs under an arcsecond, both inside the merge gate's ceilings. The same
1 972 exoplanets have a host; KELT-4 A b and MWC 758 c now sit on their
named star.
The HUD's "Radius" becomes "Survey radius": 250 pc is where Gaia is
surveyed to, and no longer the edge of the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Three findings from the adversarial review of the merge, all reproduced.
The distance test was hiding 1 489 stars that sit under an arcsecond from
their Gaia entry with a Hipparcos parallax off by half — thirty of them at a
false few parsecs from the Sun (HIP 82724 at 3.7 pc, where Gaia has it at
62.8) — and the first audit did not see them because it counted residual
doubles through the same 50 % filter. Under three arcseconds the distances
are now not consulted: a coincidence of direction that close is never chance
at this depth (the quarter-degree shift finds none), and the parallax is the
thing to fix. Brightness keeps its say at any separation, and is now
one-sided: a folded entry may be five magnitudes fainter (a red dwarf in V
against G) but not one brighter, because an entry a magnitude brighter than
what is already at that spot is a primary Gaia does not carry — Almach,
Alfirk and Ashlesha had all been folded into their companions' entries,
93 in all. The sky grid wraps at 0h.
The Gaia query orders by source_id after G, so the row order — and the ids
assigned from it — is a function of the archive's content rather than of the
server's plan for 20 064 ties; the cache key is a hash of the query.
And a bookmark to a star id the catalogue no longer holds — 56 000 Gaia ids
change with this — sent the scene through reconcileSelection, enterSystem,
its decline, finishTransition and reconcileSelection again until the stack
overflowed. The selection is cleared instead, at the one place every path
goes through.
Regenerated: 423 641 stars, 57 512 HYG identities on Gaia positions, no HYG
id or name lost, no star within 20 pc left with an unclaimed Gaia entry under
an arcsecond. 403 HYG survivors still have an unclaimed Gaia entry within
60": 13 under an arcsecond, where the brightness guard does not trust HYG's
magnitude, and the rest components 3" to 60" from their counterpart.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QL6F9Bgfh8SgAiAAcPB9Hw
The neighbour ring exists to say where you are. Since the catalogue refresh it
has been spending one of its four places in Sol on "Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696"
-- a nineteen-digit survey id for the star printed beside it as Proxima
Centauri, the same star twice -- and that duplicate row pushed Barnard's Star
off the ring altogether. 91.9% of the refreshed catalogue is named that way.
Named stars now come first, and survey designations fill in only where fewer
than four named ones are in reach. The line between the two is the one the
catalogue format already draws: a name is a designation when it is what the
star's source would generate for it. Judged by the prefix rather than by
rebuilding "prefix id" from the row, because the number after "Gaia DR3" is the
survey's own id, which the 32-bit row id cannot hold -- a round trip through
the id would have called every one of those stars named.
The preference lives on the index as `nearestPreferring`: the preferred pass
exhausts the search before the fill runs, so a named star is never outranked by
a nearer unnamed one. That is the whole point of asking.
The end-to-end spec names Barnard's Star again, on purpose. The four nearest
named stars to the Sun are a fact about space, not about which catalogue was
refreshed last, and without this change that is exactly the label that
vanished -- checked by running the spec with the preference stashed: it fails
on that line, and passes with it back.
npm test 609/609, npx playwright test 16/16 under CI=true --workers=2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
Two more findings against this projection, both of the same shape as the last
two: something written to the camera that happens to be live, where the plan
view derives from the other one.
The system's own depth range — a near plane a five-hundredth of an
astronomical unit out, a far plane twenty thousand — was set on the active
camera. Entering a system with the plan view already on therefore wrote it to
a camera that re-derives near and far from the perspective one every frame, so
the range never applied and the system clipped. All three unit-space depth
writes go to the perspective camera now, which is the one they are reasoned in.
And the ring of neighbour names collapsed toward the middle of the frame. Its
placement unprojected a point on the ring, treated the offset from the camera
as a direction, and stepped a fixed distance along it — which is a perspective
construction. A parallel projection has no vanishing point to step towards:
every ray through the frame is the view direction, so normalising threw the
sideways part away. Measured before and after, from inside Sol: the two names
sat 319 and 335 pixels out under perspective, 104 and gone under the plan, and
323 and 335 with the unprojected point used as what it already is.
Verified: build clean, 596/596 unit, 16/16 end-to-end on the branch this merges
into, and the ring measured on both projections.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two findings, both right, and the second was the feature not doing what its own
commit message said.
The depth range stopped being updated under a plan view. It is worked out in
perspective terms — near from the distance, far from eight times it — and the
orthographic camera derives its own range from that one, so skipping the
calculation left the far plane wherever it had been when the projection
changed. Flying out to the whole Galaxy from a plan view clipped away most of
it. The range is written to the perspective camera whichever one is live now,
and the plan view goes on deriving from it every frame.
And the galaxy-scale plan looked down the celestial pole. "The plane the
current scale is read against" is this system's orbital plane inside a system,
and the galactic plane outside one — but the fallback was the scene's own z,
which is the Earth's rotation axis. The normal is the north galactic pole now,
and up is the direction of the galactic centre, so a plan of the Galaxy is
laid out the way the model that draws it is described. The arms are face-on.
Verified: build clean, 596/596 unit, 16/16 end-to-end, and the Milky Way
photographed flat from 28.3 kpc with nothing clipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Carries the shared reference-viewport module and the cached card lookup up from
the branch they were reviewed on, and answers the one comment left against this
one.
The orthographic branch of the star field's hit test multiplied the angular size
by the frustum's half-height and then divided the result by that same
half-height. The two cancel: `setProjection` had already sized the sprite as
`angular * halfHeight / tan(REFERENCE_FOV/2)`, so dividing back out by the
half-height leaves the reference field of view and nothing else. Both
projections are one formula over a different angle now — which is also one
fewer division by a number that is zero if the frustum ever degenerates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two of the three comments were worth taking.
The star field and the rings drawn over it each carried their own copy of the
reference viewport and field of view the angular sizes are figured against.
They agree today, and nothing would have told anyone when they stopped: a ring
would just sit a little wide of its star at some window sizes. One module now
holds the three constants and says what they are for.
The leader line to the object card looked the card's panel up by selector on
every frame it was drawn. The host element is stable and the panel inside it
only changes when a different body is selected, so the lookup is derived once
per change instead of sixty times a second.
Left alone: replacing `positions.set([x, y, z], i * 3)` with an index-by-index
loop to avoid a temporary array per host. It runs once, over six hundred and
thirty-four stars, at bootstrap, and the version with the temporary reads
better than the version without.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
A perspective camera leans everything away from the centre of the frame. In a
system that means the orbits are ellipses whose shape depends on where they
happen to sit on screen, so two planets on the same circular orbit do not look
like they are on the same circle. Plan view, in the Display panel, swaps the
projection for a parallel one and swings to look down the plane the current
scale is read against — the galactic plane out in the field, this system's own
orbital plane inside one. Circles are circles again, wherever they are.
Both halves are the feature and neither alone is it. The projection is what
makes the shape honest; the swing is what makes it worth looking at. Orbiting
still works afterwards, so a plan is where the view starts rather than a cage.
The engine now holds both cameras and keeps them in step, rather than making
one on demand: a camera that exists only while it is being looked through is a
camera whose pose is always one swap out of date. The orthographic frustum is
derived, never stored — it is the perspective camera's own frustum at the
current orbit distance, made parallel — which is why the camera flights work
through it untouched. They move the camera; the frame follows.
Three things had to be taught that a projection had changed.
Sprites. three.js turns an angular size into a world size only when it is
compiling against a perspective camera (SpriteNodeMaterial: `camera
.isPerspectiveCamera && sizeAttenuation === false`). Under a parallel one that
step is silently skipped and every star in the field collapses to a thousandth
of a parsec. The same arithmetic is now done in the node graph behind a
uniform, so one material serves both cameras without being recompiled — and
picking follows it exactly, since a star has to be clickable where it is drawn.
Depth. A parallel camera does not back away as its frame grows, so at galactic
framing the backdrop shell and half the Milky Way sit behind its own plane. Its
depth range is symmetric about it instead, which a linear depth buffer can
afford and a perspective one could not.
And distance. Half the map was keyed on how far back the camera was pulled —
the scale ladder, the crossfade, the label radius, the range readout — which
under a parallel projection says nothing at all, because the frustum sets the
extent. They all read one honest equivalent now: the distance a perspective
camera would need to frame the same thing.
Two defects found while verifying, both mine, both from this change:
The per-frame work was computed against the camera captured at bootstrap while
the renderer drew through the other one, so after a swap every label was
projected by a camera nobody was looking through.
And the zoom limits were derived from the orbit limits, which are in whichever
unit space the view is in. Reading them on the frame the scene swaps parsecs
for astronomical units pinned the zoom at the ratio between the two, and
leaving a system landed the view three kiloparsecs out. Zoom is a plain
multiplier on a frame the distance already sets, so it is bounded by a factor.
Verified: build clean, 595/595 unit including a new spec for the projection
arithmetic, 13/13 end-to-end including two that flatten a system and check the
ladder still knows how far out it is, design detector clean, screenshots of
both scales in both projections.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Restores the commit reverted off the routing branch, which is where it was
committed by mistake. The change is unmodified; only its branch is.
The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has been
kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a body by
opening its page.
Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write, and
a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather than
losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place would
each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited store
cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied outright the
bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.
The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up, so the list reads
before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.
The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does: a tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.
Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, the same move as
choosing a search result and for the same reason. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel just used was still covering it.
Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
This reverts commit bd3a5a4. The bookmarks work was committed onto this branch
by mistake — it belongs to its own pull request, and it has one, branched from
this branch's own tip. Reverting rather than rewinding because the branch is
published and a pull request is open against it: the diff this pull request
shows is what matters, and after this it shows the routing change alone.
The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has
been kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a
body by opening its page.
Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write,
and a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather
than losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place
would each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited
store cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied
outright the bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.
The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up. That way the list
reads before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.
The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does. A tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.
Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, which is the same
move as choosing a search result and for the same reason: the panel has done
its job and the thing to look at is now the scene. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel that had just been used was still covering it.
Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end including a spec that
keeps Earth, leaves the page, comes back to it from the list and forgets it,
and one that keeps Proxima Centauri, flies out to the field and flies back in
by what was kept. Design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The map could say where a star is and what is near it, and nothing about
getting from one to another. This adds the question and the answer: pick a
departure and a destination, choose how far a single crossing may be, and get
the chain — how many jumps, how far in total, and every star on the way, each
one a step you can fly to.
A jump link is not a feature of space. There are no corridors out there; a
link is a question asked of the catalogue, which is why the range is the
user's control rather than a constant. Two facts about that catalogue decide
what the answers look like, and both are stated in the code because they read
as defects otherwise. It is magnitude-limited, so it is dense around the Sun
and thins with distance — within 50 pc a 3 pc range links 99% of it into one
piece, while over the whole 250 pc reach the same range leaves most stars
alone. And a gap in it is a gap in what has been catalogued, not in what is
there.
That is why "no route" is not the end of the answer. Where no chain exists at
the range asked for, the panel says which range would open one — the chain
whose longest hop is as short as possible, found by the same search with the
cost of arriving somewhere being the worst hop taken rather than the sum — and
offers that number as a control to accept.
Departure defaults to wherever the view already is, so one field is usually
enough. Sol to Vega at 3 pc: four jumps, 10 pc, by way of Barnard's Star,
Struve 2398 B and HD 155876. Narrow it to 0.8 pc and it says 2.26 would reach.
The graph is drawn as one buffer of line segments and the route as a second,
brighter one over it, with the graph stepping back while a route is up: near
the Sun the links are a haze, and a thread through a bright cloud is not a
thread. Both fade out with the local layer, since from outside the Galaxy the
graph is a smear.
Two measurements shaped this. Asking the index for each star's neighbours in
turn — sixty-eight thousand sorted lists, thrown away — took eight seconds; the
grid now walks its own cells once and pairs them, which takes a quarter of one.
And the range control emits per pixel dragged, so the rebuild waits for the
hand to settle.
Three defects fixed on the way, all older than the routing:
hud-acquire animated with fill-mode `both`, which leaves its closing keyframe
applied for good — and that keyframe carries a clip-path. Every panel wearing
it has been clipping its own box ever since, so anything that had to escape
one was cut away and could not even be clicked. Nothing had needed to escape
until this panel's dropdown opened upward.
The routing fields returned nothing when typed into before the catalogue
finished loading, and stayed nothing until the next keystroke. The options are
derived from the query and the index together now, so they appear when the
second of the two arrives, whichever that is.
And a link was `3-7` walking one way and `7-3` walking the other, which is two
links to anything comparing them.
Verified: build clean, 571/571 unit, 9/9 end-to-end including two new specs —
one plotting Sol to Sirius, one narrowing the range until there is no route and
accepting the one it names — design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900
and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Three findings out of forty-one raised survived being argued against, and all
three were real.
The vignette was painting over the label layer. It lived in the HUD component,
which sits after the label host in the same stack with neither carrying a
z-index, so paint order was tree order and a decorative gradient was laid over
the names — worst at the edge of the frame, which is precisely where the
neighbour ring is. Composited, the ghost's distance line fell to 4.02:1, under
the floor the CSS next to it claims. The gradient is scene chrome rather than
HUD chrome, so it moves down between the canvas and the labels; the authored
contrast then holds as written, and every label near the edge — planets
included — is read against the sky rather than through a wash of void.
A binary companion printed "0.00 pc". A catalogue holds a close pair as two
rows at one position, so the nearest neighbour to one of them is the other,
zero away — the exact string the readout deliberately suppresses for a star's
distance from itself. The query now asks wide and drops any separation that
prints as no separation, compared through the formatter rather than against a
hand-picked epsilon so the rule survives the formatter changing.
And the edit that added all this had been spliced between updateSystemLabels'
docblock and its body, leaving a paragraph about labelling planets sitting
over the neighbour resolution and the method it described with nothing, plus
two divergent copies of the same fourteen lines seventy-five apart. Both are
back where they belong.
Verified: build clean, 558/558 unit, 7/7 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots re-read in Sol and Proxima Centauri.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
A system view could say everything about the star it was inside and nothing
about where that star was. The four nearest catalogue stars are now named
around the edge of it, each with its distance, each a button that flies there
— so a chain of neighbours can be walked without pulling back out to the field
between hops.
These are bearings, not sky positions, and that is the one deliberate
compromise here. A true direction was tried first and does not work: at this
field of view the visible cone is about 30 degrees, so on average one
neighbour in fifteen falls inside the frame — measured, not guessed, at one
label of four in Sol and none at all after a small orbit. What survives the
ring is the half of the direction a viewer can act on, which way to turn to
face it, and the ring reads as instrument rather than as scene because it sits
at a fixed radius. Real distance was never an option: Proxima is 268 000 AU
from Sol, thirteen far planes out, so the distance goes on the type line.
Proximity is answered by a new pure module rather than by a scan. A uniform
grid over the catalogue answers both "the k nearest to this star" and "every
star within n parsecs", the second being what the jump-link graph in the next
PR is built from — one scan per node, and the quadratic would show. Its spec
pins the grid against a brute-force sweep of a pseudo-random cloud, because a
spatial index is an optimisation and never a different answer.
Where the ring meets the HUD, the HUD wins: placement is given the boxes the
readout, the strip and the object card occupy, and slides a name along the
ring until it clears them, or drops it rather than print it half hidden. That
rule is a pure function with its own spec.
Four defects found while verifying this, three of them older than it:
The dock's flex column was pointer-events-auto and as wide as its strip, so
an invisible band above the strip swallowed every click in it — including,
but not only, a neighbour's. The column is transparent now and each surface
opts back in.
The ring was sized against the frame's height alone, which on a phone held
upright put it a viewport and a half wide: no neighbour was reachable on any
portrait screen. It is sized against the shorter side.
Picking a search result reopened the readout, which on a narrow viewport is a
sheet over most of the scene — reopening it onto whatever was just flown to.
Below sm it now folds away.
A selectable label's two lines are adjacent spans, so it announced as
"Sirius2.64 pc"; it carries an explicit label saying what it does.
Verified: build clean, 558/558 unit, 7/7 end-to-end including a new spec that
flies Sol to Barnard's Star by its label, design detector clean, screenshots
at 1440x900 and 390x844 in Sol and Proxima Centauri, and the keyboard path
walked: both names are in the tab order, focusable, with the accent ring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Four things the scene did not yet say, all about where to look.
Selection. Hovering or pinning a body raised its card in the corner, but
nothing in the scene said which point the card was about. Two hairline arcs
now bracket the body — the one mark borrowed from the ARK's control disc — and
a leader runs from their rim to the card's near edge, in screen space, once
per frame, because the body moves and the card's height depends on its
content. The selected body's own label swaps to the left of its point, since
the leader leaves the right and would otherwise cross the text.
Labels choose a side. Right by default; left when the text would run off the
right of the view, or into the reach of a label already placed to the right,
and never left when that would run off the left. The overlay hangs the label's
near edge on the point either way, so the hairline still meets the star.
Rings on the systems. A faint accent ring on every star known to host
planets — the one binary fact about a point of light worth reading at a
glance from the neighbourhood, since it is the one thing that says "there is
somewhere to go here". Drawn the way the star field draws stars, as
unattenuated instanced sprites with the ring a band of the quad's own uv, so
they sit on the field's points at any zoom; a first cut as three.js Points
rendered nothing at all under the WebGPU renderer. 634 of them are a lot at
the overview, so they are faint, small, fade with the local layer, and have
their own toggle — Systems — in the dock's Display tab.
Verified: build clean, 537/537 unit, 6/6 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at the overview, at 90 pc, and in Sol and Proxima with a body
hovered and pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Three findings from the automated review, all confirmed before acting.
The Sky toggle did nothing in system view. Its write lived only in the galaxy
crossfade, which the tick parks while the system group is up — and the sky is
still on screen there. It is now also written on toggle, in applyDisplay. The
suggested form of that fix crashed the scene on mount: the effect that calls
applyDisplay fires once at construction, before the engine has a scene, and
getScene() throws — the dock rendered no tabs at all. Guarded on
engine.isInitialized; verified with a screenshot of Proxima with the sky off.
isWideViewport built a fresh MediaQueryList on every document pointer-down;
one module-level query is read instead. And openSearch in the e2e support
clicked the Search tab unconditionally, which would fold it closed if a test
ever called it while already open; it now checks aria-selected first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The overlay had grown by accretion: a search box floating top-centre, a
readout panel bottom-left, a range readout bottom-right, and nothing that
said these were parts of one instrument. This puts them on one rail across
the bottom of the viewport — the dock — with a tab strip pinned to the bottom
edge and whichever panel is open growing upward from it. The top of the
screen keeps only the scale ladder and the nameplate, so the map itself is
what fills the frame.
Three tabs. SEARCH is the old search, with its field pinned to the bottom of
the panel and the results growing upward above it, so the thing being typed
into never moves while the list grows. READOUT is the old bottom-left panel.
DISPLAY is new: five layer toggles — labels, orbits, grid, deep sky, sky —
each a real scene object switched by visibility, except the ones the galaxy
crossfade already rewrites every frame, whose toggles fold into that
crossfade instead of fighting it. The range readout sits on the strip itself,
so it is readable whatever is open.
Behaviour worth stating: choosing a search result hands the panel straight
back to the readout, since the thing to look at is now the scene. `/` opens
the search from anywhere. Below `sm` the dock is the strip alone; a tap opens
a panel as a sheet, a tap on the scene folds it away. The body-detail page
gets the same dock with only the search — the info panel is its reading.
Two things found on the way. CSS2DRenderer gives every label its own
z-index for depth order, and the label host created no stacking context, so
labels painted over every HUD panel; `isolate` on the host keeps them under.
And starmap-hud's readout tests were really tests of the panel that moved,
so they moved with it.
Verified: build clean, 535/535 unit, 6/6 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440×900 and 390×844 across galaxy, galactic, system,
body-detail, all three tabs and the layers-off state.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Fourteen findings from an adversarial review pass, applied together because
most share two roots — geometry written against assumptions the renderer does
not hold, and a design language spelled out longhand until it drifted.
Correctness. The leader line pointed at empty space: CSS2DObject centres a
label on its anchor by default, and margin only nudges the centred box — the
overlay now anchors the left edge (center 0, 0.5) so the hairline meets the
star. The info panel and not-found panel returned to top-4 at sm, under a
search field that is 26rem wide and centred, covering the back button on
every viewport from 640 to 1088px; they now wait for xl. The search empty
state asserted "nothing matches" while the catalogues were still loading —
and forever if they failed — so it now waits for the index. "Matches 8" was
the page size wearing the costume of a count; the header now reports the
real total, with the cap stated when it bites. The nameplate un-hides at lg
instead of sm, clear of the rail and the object card. theme-color matches
the void again.
Accessibility. Tabbing to search changed one hairline's hue; the wrapper now
carries the old ring as a visible focus indicator.
Structure. hud-surface names the panel recipe that had been inlined at seven
sites and had already forked into /85 and /92; the backdrop blur it carried
is gone from every near-opaque panel — the canvas beneath redraws every
frame, so each blur was re-sampled continuously for an effect the fill hid —
and survives only as blur-sm on the genuinely translucent search shell.
type-label and type-eyebrow name the two label voices, retiring 0.14em and
the stray hover:bg-accent/10. The Measured/Derived rows both cards pasted
twice each live once in ReadoutSectionsComponent; the reticle and chevron
each draw from a single geometry, the reticle's stroke held in screen pixels
so one mark serves every size. The acquire wipe plays once per search, not
once per keystroke, because both outcomes now share one panel. hud-banner,
which styled nothing since the rule was deleted, is a data-testid — the
convention its own file already used.
527 unit tests, 6/6 end-to-end, production build, and a driven screenshot:
every label now hangs off its star with the hairline touching the point.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
Main moved while the previous merge was being verified. It brought the
shared bodyReadouts builder — one source for a body's measured and derived
rows, used by the detail page and the system view's new object card — plus
the derived-value asterisk in the HUD readout panel.
All of that data flow is kept. The templates it arrived in are restyled to
this branch's idiom: the info panel and the object card share the same
organism (header, full-bleed readout rows, provenance line, route rail),
the object card's route rail sits at the bottom because there the route is
the next step rather than the way back, and the derived asterisk and its
footnote keep their meaning in sentence case. The card also needed the
restyle to render at all — it arrived wearing hud-panel, a class the
observatory system no longer defines.
Verified: build clean, 527/527 unit, 6/6 e2e, design detector clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two HUD redesigns happened in parallel: this branch restyled the old chrome
as a precision observatory instrument, while main rebuilt the chrome against
screenshots of the Star Citizen starmap — a scale ladder, a nameplate, a
readout panel, and two-line labels that say what a thing is, not just what
it is called.
This merge keeps everything main's rebuild learned and says it in this
branch's voice. Kept: the ladder's reachability semantics and test hooks,
the two-line name/kind labels and their shared declutter logic, system-view
body labels, every readout. Restyled: chamfered clip-path panels become
hairline frames with corner-tick brackets; Orbitron is gone and one readout
face carries the hierarchy; the hexagon reticle becomes the same
circle-and-ticks mark the search field wears; focus states move to real
focus-visible outlines; the long uppercase caveat notes drop to sentence
case so they read as sentences.
Two merge-borne fixes along the way: the labels' translate offset moved into
.map-label as a margin (CSS2DRenderer rewrites the inline transform every
frame, the margin is the offset it cannot touch), and the info panel's new
Derived section picked up the horizontal padding it lost when the panel
moved to per-block padding.
Verified: build clean, 496/496 unit, 6/6 e2e (on a free port — 4300 is
occupied on this machine), design detector clean, screenshots reviewed at
1440x900 and 390x844 across all four views plus search states.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5