← Ground look and levels · all tasks

Water and lava move — shader drift, shimmer, glow, shore foam, behind a toggle with a frame-time readout

ground-look-and-levels/004 · created 2026-08-18 · updated 2026-08-18

What to do

Decision 9 of the workshop note (land-of-lor/docs/design/2026-08-18-ground-look-and-levels-workshop.md).

• ground.gdshader: for cells flagged as sinking liquids (water, lava — the flag byte in the data texture already says sunken; sand is not a liquid) drift the tile sample position with TIME; a second, slower offset layer blended in for shimmer; lava a slow brightness pulse; animated foam (value noise, white) on the bank band at the waterline, read off the height. A ground_animation uniform (0/1) turns all of it off.
• A frame-time readout in the HUD’s dev/debug corner (or the existing dev overlay), so the number is readable on a phone; game/README.md says how to read it. Take the laptop and web numbers with the animation on and off on the 60×60 Badlands at maximum zoom-out; the phone number is Kris’s — say so in the handoff.
• A short GIF (a few frames from the shot harness) in docs/handoff/ground-look-and-levels/.

Definition of done

Animation visible in the GIF, toggle works, readout works, numbers in the handoff note. Committed and pushed.

Where the work lands

land-of-lor/game/world/client/, docs/handoff/.

What was done (2026-08-18, laptop workshop session)

Built and shipped the same day. Drift + shimmer for liquid cells (two reads instead of one, a coherent per-cell branch), a slow glow pulse on lava, foam along the waterline (water only, never lava or a cliff face, sparse moving crests), all from TIME; behind the animate uniform, remembered across Area rebuilds; the HUD’s bottom-left perf readout (frame ms · fps · water moving/still) flips it on a tap. LOR_SHOTS_ANIM=N for the GIF (docs/handoff/ground-look-and-levels/water-lava-foam.gif), LOR_SHOTS_PERF=1 for the number: laptop iGPU, whole 60×60 Badlands at 844×390, viewport GPU time 0.96 ms still, ~1.2 ms moving. The phone number is Kris’s — read the readout, tap, read again. Handoff: land-of-lor/docs/handoff/ground-look-and-levels.md.

View source in repository · also available as raw markdown.