PORTUGA

A new look: interface, people, animals, buildings, ground and trees done 3 Oct 2026

As you asked, before more gameplay every model and texture is being remade, keeping the game light. Five agents worked on it in parallel, and all five parts are now live.

• Interface with a game feel: panels of tanned hide stretched on wooden frames and lashed at the corners, bars of dark worn wood and leather, shell beads under the top bar, and ochre red and sun gold as accents. It has new fonts (Cinzel for titles and Alegreya Sans for text), a full set of drawn icons (no emoji left) and a painted dawn start screen. You can choose the interface size (small, normal or large), and soft click sounds are optional. All of it adds just 150 KB
• People: a new man and woman with muscle, hands, feet and faces, under a cap of tight curls; hide wraps and skirts, and a shoulder hide on some. Walking, jogging, working, sitting and sleeping are animated anew. Everyone now shares one material (it was one per person), which makes them lighter to draw
• Animals: a new bushbuck (chestnut coat with white stripes and spots, spiral horns on the bucks; does are smaller and hornless) and a spotted hyena, each with a painted coat. They have new animations: walking, grazing with the muzzle down, galloping with the white tail raised, and a hyena that prowls and sniffs the ground. A hunted antelope now falls
• Buildings: all 14 remade: beehive huts of layered thatch, the camp store under a big open roof with baskets of goods, work places with their own props (pelts, fish racks, log stacks, shell heaps, ochre, gourds). Building sites now go up step by step: ground, then frame, then thatch, then goods. The resources on the land have new models too. Everything shares one textured material
• Ground and trees: six blended ground layers (sand, creek mud, red earth, dry grass, leaf litter, coral rock), with rock on steep slopes. Far trees are lit like near ones and fade into them smoothly. The coast now has baobabs and doum palms. A bug that put the forest floor in the wrong place under the trees is fixed. The ground now downloads in 4.5 MB instead of 11.6 MB and needs about half the texture reads

Now played in the style of Anno 117: build, supply, grow done 3 Oct 2026

As you asked, the game now plays in the style of Anno 117: Pax Romana, while staying its own game with its own world and names.

• Screen in the Anno 117 layout: population and goods across the top with the date and speed, objectives on the left, the build toolbar along the bottom, a round minimap bottom-left that turns with the camera, and a panel for the selected building
• You build, the band works: place homes (branch huts), a hearth, and work places: plant gatherers, hunters, shellfish gatherers, fishers, wood and stone collectors, knappers making tools, water carriers, an herbalist and ochre workers. They work on their own within their area, and people walk out and carry what they gather to the camp store. Building costs are paid at once from the store
• Homes have needs: fresh water within reach, food, and a hearth nearby, then variety, tools, medicine and ornaments for the Clan. When needs are met, homes fill, children are born and newcomers join. Advance a home from Foragers to Clan once your people know prepared-core stone working. Tiers are stages of human society: Tribe, Village and Town come with later ages
• Placing buildings: a preview that you can turn shows its work area and how many food patches, game or homes are within reach, and whether it is near a hearth and the store
• 14 new building models made in Blender. Discoveries still come only from what your people do, now through their work; leaps, the chronicle, neighbours and all the rest stay

Cooler running and hunts you can watch done 3 Oct 2026

• Runs cooler: ⚙ Settings now has a frame-rate limit (30 FPS for less heat and battery, 60, or no limit) and automatic resolution, which lowers sharpness a little when the frame rate drops and raises it when there is room. When the game is paused and left alone it drops to about 10 FPS
• Hunting on screen: hunters creep up on the herd, crouch and wait, then sometimes chase. The antelope walk off or bolt, a successful hunt drops one, and the hunter comes back to camp with the meat on his back. People now carry their loads of food, wood or stone on their backs. A wounded hunter limps until he heals

Your people as individuals, generations, and a map done 3 Oct 2026

• Person card: double-click anyone (or click a name in the band panel) to see their family, skills, what they are doing and their life story. You can rename them and follow them with the camera
• After a leap, a summary of the generation that passed: who was born and who died (and of what), the new couples, partners exchanged with other bands, the oldest and youngest, and how much the sea moved
• Minimap (top right): the region with its hills, the sea of the date, lakes and rivers, your camp and people, what the band knows, neighbouring camps and where you are looking. Click it to go there

A living world: lakes and rivers, weather, sound, neighbours, animals done 3 Oct 2026

Built with several agents working in parallel, then merged and tested together.

• Real fresh water: rainfall is traced over the real terrain. Hollows fill into lakes (the old Kilifi creek basin is a lake 300,000 years ago) and rivers run to the sea. That gives 290 water sources instead of 5. Small waterholes dry up in the hot dry season
• Weather: showers in the long and short rains (mostly in the afternoon), clouds that build and clear, rain on the water, wet ground, and dry clear skies in the hot season
• Sound, all made in the browser: wind, waves on the coast, birds by day, crickets and distant hyenas at night, the crackle of the fire, rain. The 🔊 button turns it on or off and sets the volume
• Neighbouring bands: two or three other groups of early humans live a few km away, with their own camps. When your people meet them they may exchange partners, give gifts, or share what they know, and sometimes they quarrel. They show in Knowledge → Neighbours
• Animals: antelope herds graze and bolt from people; at night hyenas prowl around the camp, held off by the fire light; birds fly by day and bats at dusk
• More to discover: water containers (ostrich eggshells and gourds, so the camp can be farther from water), medicinal plants, ochre and ornaments (the first symbols). Illness comes more in the rains and when hungry
• For players: a step-by-step guide on the first game, the band's Chronicle (its story across generations, its people and discoveries), settings (graphics quality, language, sharpness, frame rate), save slots and save files you can move between devices, and a layout for phones and tablets (tap to place buildings)

The game is playable: camp, leaps, start and end done 3 Oct 2026

• Start screen: name your band, choose English or Português, and begin a new story or continue the last one. The game saves itself once a game day and when you leave
• Build the camp: place a fire or a shelter (a ring of stakes marks the site; people bring wood and you see it go up). The fire lights the camp at night, keeps predators away, and once your people discover cooking their food goes further. People sleep better in a shelter. The band starts with a small fire, since people of that time already kept fire
• Lead the band: move the camp ("Camp here"), set the band's priorities (food, wood, stone, tools), and see their knowledge: what they have discovered, with hints for what is next
• Leap a generation: 25 years pass in a moment. Children grow up, the old die, and as many children are born as the land you know can feed. The sea, coast and sky move to the new date, but nothing is learned in a leap
• News as it happens: births, deaths, discoveries, attacks, hunts, buildings. If the band dies out, the story ends with a summary and you can begin again
• Balance: a day is now 24 minutes at 1× (and 16× for the nights); fires burn a bundle of wood every 90 minutes; the band knows its home range (1.5 km) from the start

The first people: your band lives, works and follows your orders done 3 Oct 2026

• A band of 11 early humans (made in Blender with walk, jog, work, sit and sleep movements): three couples, an elder, a young man, three children, and a baby on the way. Each has a name, an age and their own skills
• They live on their own: they get hungry, thirsty and tired, go to fresh water to drink (there is nothing to carry water in yet), eat from the band's food, sleep at night, gather plants, hunt, collect wood and stone, and make stone tools. Food spoils in a few days, so foraging never stops. Health suffers when needs go unmet; children are born and people die
• You can lead them: left click to select someone (drag for several); right click to send them to a place, or to water, food, wood or stone to work there. Tab switches between the map camera (WASD, wheel, Q/E) and free flight
• What the land offers comes from the real terrain. Rivers and waterholes are found where rain would gather and flow, food plants and wood come from the land cover, shellfish from the shallow shores (gathered only around low tide, with real tide timing), and there is game in the bush and stone along rivers and outcrops. The camp is placed on flat ground near water with food around
• Discoveries come from what your people do, not from dates: making tools leads to better stone working, gathering shellfish to fishing, and so on
• Behind it is a game simulation that is tested on its own and can be saved, replayed exactly, and later played together

The world of 300,000 years ago: time, sun, moon and stars done 2 Oct 2026

First step towards a playable game (plan: world clock → people and their needs → people in the world → what the land offers → camp → game screens).

• The game starts 300,000 years ago. The sea then was 43 m lower (real reconstruction: Spratt & Lisiecki 2016, with the Lambeck 2014 curve for the last 12,000 years). The coast is several km further out, and today's reef flats and creek mouth are a dry coastal plain with bush. Sea level is now a setting of the world: land, plants, waves and surf all follow it
• Game calendar: years ago, the season (long rains, cool dry, short rains, hot dry), day and time. One day lasts 24 minutes at 1×; pause, 2×, 4×, 8×, 16× (keys P, [ and ])
• The real sun for Kilifi's latitude through the year: sunrise in the east, the noon sun shifting north and south with the seasons
• The night sky of that date: 8,600 real stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, each moved back 300,000 years along its own path through space. Earth's axis wobble (precession) is included, so the constellations and the pole are those the first humans saw, not today's. There's a faint Milky Way, and the moon goes through its 29.5-day cycle and lights the land
• From now on, how fast your people develop will depend on what you achieve, not on fixed dates. The calendar, seasons and sea level follow real time

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