v0.109.1 Solid Ground

Distant terrain stays solid: no more seeing caves through a hillside, or slivers of sky between near and far ground. Sunlight stays out of buildings, a game lit by stars gets the fast shadow map, and shadows cost far less beside buildings made of many colliders. A web game starts on an iPhone.

Terrain

• Far ground no longer shows what is behind it. Rock thinner than a far-away detail level could see vanished at a distance, so a tunnel, a cave or a dug gallery showed through the hillside until you walked up to it. Ground keeps its solid rock at every distance now.
• No gaps where detail levels meet. Thin slits of sky between near and far ground are closed.
• No more spikes and folds. Where two surfaces meet closely (cave mouths, thin ridges, the rim of a dig), the mesh pinched into shards. Each surface now meshes on its own.
• Far terrain takes longer to build when it first comes in. The work happens in the background, so play is not interrupted, but a planet's first load does more of it.
• floptle shot builds terrain detail around terrain.lodAnchor when the game sets one, as play does, rather than always around the camera.

Shadows

• The sun stays out of scaled buildings. A box collider under a scaled parent cast a shadow at its unscaled size, so a building scaled up six times cast a sixth of its shadow and sunlight lit the rooms inside. It now casts at the size it collides at.
• Stars mode uses the shadow map. With shadow map on, the brightest star casts through the map, so a room lit by a star costs about what the view outside does. Other stars keep their own shadows as before.
• The shadow map includes what the camera can't see. A roof above you, or a tower behind you, now casts through the map. Before, only things on screen cast, so the sun could reach the floor of a room.
• Shadows near many colliders cost far less. Standing among a building's box colliders used to make lighting several times dearer than out in the open. In our test with 32 boxes overhead, lighting fell from 2.3 ms to 0.95 ms, with an identical picture.
• perf.counts() reports shadowProxies, shadowProxiesDropped and shadowVolumes, so you can see what the shadows are working through.

Web games on iPhone and Safari

A site can serve a game's page at one address and its files at another, using a <base> tag to say where the files are. That is how fopull.com serves a game's Play page. Safari, and every browser on an iPhone (Chrome included), ignored that tag when loading the engine, so the game stopped at "Importing a module script failed". The page now finds its files wherever they are, in every browser.

Upgrading

Export your web build again and upload it for the iPhone fix. A build served from the same folder as its files, as on itch.io, was already fine.