PORTUGA

Lighter again, and a water fix for Mac done 2 Oct 2026

• Lighter: the bigger trees had made woodland views about 40–60% heavier for the graphics card. Nearby trees are drawn only when in view again, have fewer leaf cards and simpler trunks, and switch to the lightweight far version a little sooner. Woodland views are now about 25–30% lighter than the previous version and close to how heavy they were before the trees grew
• Water fix: where there is no surf (under the land, and past the edge of the detailed map) the surf math produced an undefined value. Some graphics cards, Apple's among them, turn that into garbage, which could break the water's look and make it vanish beyond a certain distance. That value is now always safe

Breaking waves done 2 Oct 2026

• Your Water Pro is an open-ocean surface: its waves never shoal, break or roll ashore. Breaking waves are now added on top, computed from the real seabed of the region
• How it works: the swell (9 s, 1.5 m, from the south-east, Kenya's monsoon swell) travels in from deep water. In shallow water it slows down, so the crests bunch up and turn to face the shore. The waves grow taller and sharper until they are too tall for the depth (0.78 × depth), then they break into whitewater that fades as the broken wave runs on
• At Kilifi the waves break along the edge of the fringing reef, and the lagoon behind it stays calm, as it does in reality. Any coast in the world gets the right surf from its own seabed: big breakers where deep water meets a reef, gentle waves in sheltered bays and creeks
• Works on both WebGPU and WebGL. From far away the surf shows as a white line along the reef

Trees at their real size, with real leaves done 2 Oct 2026

• Size: measured against the person and the house, the water and terrain were already right (real metres from the satellite data); the trees were too small. They are now rebuilt at real heights: the main forest tree about 10 m, the wild syringa 8 m, the wind-swept coastal tree 6 m, shrubs 2.5 m
• Leaves: the leaves keep their real size while the trees grew. Each crown is now 160–450 small cards cut from four different patches of real foliage, in place of 60 big blotches. Leaves deep inside and under the crown are darker, and every tree has its own slightly different green

No more stutter when flying over land done 2 Oct 2026

• The cause: every new patch of nearby trees made the graphics engine compile its shaders again, so the game froze briefly whenever new trees came into range. Trees are now drawn by a few long-lived batches, and every shader is compiled once, while loading
• Terrain and plants are now built in small slices, a few milliseconds per frame, and the terrain needs a quarter of the height lookups it used before
• Fixed: bushes between 70 and 130 m away were sometimes missing
• Measured over a flight from the sea to 2 km inland: at the house, zero new shader compiles (70 before); 99% of frames spend under 1 ms building terrain and trees (71 ms before)

A person and a house to measure everything by done 2 Oct 2026

• Made in Blender at real size: a 1.75 m person and a 6 × 5 m house (2.6 m walls, a 0.9 × 2.0 m door, 1 m windows, a ridge at 4.2 m)
• They stand on the nearest flat ground in the starting view. At Kilifi that is the top of the coral cliff above the creek mouth, about 15 m above the sea. Press R in the game to fly straight to them
• Terrain and water are in real metres from the satellite height data, so trees, waves and everything else will now be sized against these two

The water reacts to land and to things in it done 2 Oct 2026

• Land: waves now shrink as the water gets shallow and never run up onto the land. Behind the reef the lagoon is calm, as real reef lagoons are. This was added inside your Water Pro as a small, clearly marked extension
• Things in the water use Water Pro's own physics: a drifting log floats on the real waves (bobbing and tilting) and leaves a wake; when you fly low over the water you leave ripples, and diving in makes a splash
• Trees and bush are back (the four species made in Blender), now on Three.js

Engine switch: Three.js, with your own Water Pro and Sky Pro done 2 Oct 2026

The water rebuilt in Godot looked far worse than the original, so the game now runs on Three.js and uses your water and sky code directly, unchanged: the same waves, colour, foam, reflections, refraction, underwater effects and volumetric clouds as threejswaterpro.com.

• Your decoded Water Pro + Sky Pro packaged as a library for the game (it can be swapped for your original source as soon as you have it back)
• Kilifi Creek's real terrain rebuilt for Three.js and set under your water: the water's own shore foam, depth colour and see-through shallows now follow the real coast and reef
• Much lighter download: the game code is ~0.6 MB compressed (the Godot engine alone was ~10 MB)

Click to look with the mouse (Esc frees it), WASD to move, Space/E up, Q/Ctrl down, Shift faster, wheel for speed.

Free flight: under water, over the land, up to 12 km done 2 Oct 2026

The game now starts in free flight: move anywhere like a flying character. The map camera is still there (Tab).

• Desktop: click to look with the mouse (Esc frees it, or hold the right button), WASD to move, Space/E up, Q/Ctrl down, Shift to go faster, mouse wheel for cruising speed. Phone: left stick, drag to look, ▲▼ buttons
• Under water: blue-green water that gets darker and murkier with depth; looking up you see the sky through a bright window and the rest of the surface as a mirror, as in real water
• Fly high: the real coast continues all the way to the horizon (16 km of detail, 96 km of surroundings, 400 km of distant relief from satellite data), and the Earth curves away below you

Milestone 1, step 4: the sky, the real sun and time of day done 2 Oct 2026

The sky is now a physical model of Earth's atmosphere, ported from the water project's "Sky Pro" (the same equations and constants). The sun stands where it really is over Kilifi for the chosen date and hour.

• Air scattering: blue sky by day, golden and red skies at sunrise and sunset, the sunlight itself turning orange as it crosses more air
• Everything follows the sun: the light on land and trees, the ambient light, the haze colour, the ocean's reflections and glitter
• The view adapts to the light like an eye, so dawn and dusk stay readable
• Time-of-day slider and a Day cycle switch (one hour every 20 seconds)

Milestone 1, step 3: trees and bush, made in Blender done 2 Oct 2026

The land now has 3D plants: coastal trees, the African wild syringa (Burkea africana) and shrubs. They're placed by habitat: dense in forest, sparse on open bushland, low wind-swept trees near the coast, and none on beaches, creek mud or below the sea level.

• Built with Blender through the AI assistant (Blender MCP): free photoreal models (Poly Haven, CC0) of up to 1.6 million triangles each were turned into game trees of ~700 triangles. The leaves were rendered into leaf-cluster textures, the trunks simplified, and each tree rendered from 8 directions for distant views
• Thousands of plants at once: full 3D near the camera, flat "impostor" cards further away with a smooth cross-fade, gentle wind sway, and sunlight shining through the leaves

First load is now ~24 MB; it will be trimmed later.

Milestone 1, step 2: the first real place, Kilifi Creek (Kenya) done 2 Oct 2026

A 16 × 16 km piece of the real East African coast, built from satellite elevation data. Nearby, at Panga ya Saidi, people have lived continuously for about 78,000 years.

• Real land shape (Copernicus 30 m elevation) and sea floor (NOAA), with the coral reef and lagoon rebuilt from the real coastline
• The water responds to depth: waves calm down behind the reef, shallows are see-through (turquoise, with coral and moving light on the sea floor), surf breaks on the beach and the reef
• Natural land cover with no modern towns: forest, coastal bush, red soil clearings, beaches, creek mud
• Sea-level slider: drag it to around −120 m to see the coast during the last Ice Age

The land is still flat close up: trees and bushes in 3D are next. First load is ~17 MB.

Milestone 1, step 1: the ocean in Godot done 2 Oct 2026

The water's wave simulation is rebuilt inside the game engine and runs in the browser:

• Real ocean physics: an FFT wave simulation at three scales (1 km swells down to 9 m ripples), driven by wind speed and wave length, repeating seamlessly
• Checked against an independent calculation: matches to within 1–3% (centimetres on half-metre waves)
• Ocean to the horizon (~50 km) with seamless detail levels, sky reflections, sun glitter and whitecaps
• Camera for mouse, trackpad and touch

Desktop: left-drag to move, right-drag to rotate/tilt, wheel to zoom, WASD and Q/E. Phone: one finger to move, two fingers to zoom, rotate and tilt. First load is ~10 MB.

Ocean technology extracted and decoded done 2 Oct 2026

The Three.js Water Pro ocean (the water this game will use) was downloaded in full and its protected code decoded, so it can be rebuilt inside the game engine.

• Every file the demo uses, including 8 skies, models, textures and sounds
• 2,269 hidden strings decoded; ~2,300 scrambled names given readable names
• 117 distinct GPU shader programs captured: FFT waves (3 scales), wakes, foam, spray, sky and clouds
• The decoded version was tested in a browser and runs the same as the original

Heavy on the GPU; best on a desktop. This is the reference being ported, not the game yet.

Game engine upgraded: Godot 4.7.2 done 2 Oct 2026

The game is built with Godot 4.7.2 (the latest stable) for desktop and mobile browsers. The other game on this server was tested and moved to the same version too.

3D modelling pipeline (Blender) done 2 Oct 2026

Blender is connected to the AI assistant, so 3D models for the game (buildings, ships, people) can be made and exported directly.

Website, domain and project history done 2 Oct 2026

portuga.pedrolascasas.com with HTTPS, plus a version history of everything we make.

Milestone 1, next steps next

• Iconic species made from scratch in Blender: baobab, doum palm, mangroves in the creek
• Ground detail close up (grass tufts, stones)
• Clouds, stars and the moon at night
• More of the water: spray, wakes, foam that lingers