Tinyworld Opacity Torch

Tiny World Visibility — Sticky Preview Reveal

The opacity torch is gone. The home board is always fully rendered; Preview cells reveal one-by-one as the camera pans into them, and stay revealed forever after that (a breadcrumb trail behind the user).

Mental model:

• Every user has one editable home board (size GRID, default 8).
• The home GRID x GRID region is always at full opacity, full color, full scale — never fades, never pops.
• Preview boards surround the home board and preview other users' content.
• Nothing is rendered in grayscale — all tiles use their full color.
• A Preview cell is hidden until it enters the visible square around target.x/z (renderVisibleSize wide). Once revealed, the cell is sticky: root.userData.revealed = true and it stays revealed for the rest of the session. Its final display opacity is controlled by the user-facing Preview opacity / floors / objects sliders.

Reveal rules:

• opacityAtWorldPosition(x, z) returns:
  • 1 inside the home GRID square,
  • 1 inside the visible window around the camera target,
  • 0 otherwise.
• revealOpacityFor(root) wraps opacityAtWorldPosition and adds stickiness. Once it sees a positive opacity for a root it sets userData.revealed = true and returns 1 from then on. Per-frame update loops (updateGhostRenderBubble, updateHomeBoardFade) call this instead of opacityAtWorldPosition directly so revealed cells don't disappear when the camera moves away.
• updateHomeBoardFade short-circuits in-grid cells to opacity 1 — they never go through the reveal path.
• tickOpacityTransitions(dt) eases each root's currentOpacity toward targetOpacity at rate dt * 20 for a snappy snap-in.
• During the transition, root scale follows 0.6 + 0.4 * currentOpacity, so revealed tiles grow from 60 % to full size in <200 ms. At opacity 1 the scale is exactly 1 — static home tiles and previously-revealed cells stay untouched.
• userData.landing (drop-in animator) takes priority — skip the scale pop while landing.
• desaturateMaterial() is now a no-op; all Preview / out-of-bounds tiles render in full color.

Interaction rules:

• Left-click edits only the central home board through pickTile.
• Preview board meshes must not set userData.gx/gz on their tile/object roots in a way that lets them be edited.
• Right-drag pans. Space+drag pans. Left-drag orbits.
• Panning is unrestricted: clampTargetToHomeBoard() is no longer called from the pan paths (panCameraByPixels/panCameraByCells in 02-cameras-lighting.js) or the minimap click-to-go (30-ui-boot-wiring.js), so the camera target can move anywhere regardless of Autoexpand. The clamp helper is retained only for the explicit Autoexpand-OFF reset (which recenters to the home board). Note: with Autoexpand off, panning beyond the home board shows empty water/sky because maybeEnsureGhostBoardsAroundTarget early-returns when renderAutoExpand is false — turn Autoexpand on to reveal preview boards.

The home board has a thin dark ground-line border (see buildHomeBorder() in the home board border section) so the user can always see where the editable region ends, regardless of how much of the Preview world has been revealed around it.

• Preview distance/window auto-scale from GRID on first load and whenever board size changes: small boards can preview farther; large boards keep neighbour preload distance/window tighter for performance. Users can still override those settings from Settings → World.
• Landscape-mode ghost-board suppression must be scoped to an actually active isLandscapeMeshActive() engine. If the user leaves terrain/landscape mode, normal Autoexpand should immediately restore classic Preview ghost boards.
• Preview objects must always stay full-fidelity. Do not render ghost-board houses/trees/crops/rocks/animals as cheap proxy boxes, cones, or pyramids at any zoom level. If a grid size is too expensive for full Preview boards, reduce/disable preview rings through renderBudgetForGrid() instead.

Validation:

• The home GRID x GRID board never fades and never scale-pops.
• Panning forward should reveal new Preview pieces one cell at a time with a tiny scale-up pop.
• Panning back over previously-revealed territory should keep that territory at full opacity (no re-fade, no re-pop).
• Out-of-range cells the camera has never seen should be root.visible = false.
• No tile should appear washed-out / desaturated.
• pickTile() over a Preview board should still return null.
• Home board outline should remain visible at every grid size (8 / 12 / 16 / 20).

Continuous Landscape Mode Visibility & Panning

When landscapeMeshMode is active (procedural Canyon landscape style):

• Clipped Diorama: If the user has not panned the camera yet, the landscape is clipped strictly to the home board (GRID size) to present a clean, sliced diorama look.
• Dynamic Panning: Unlike standard mode (which clamps camera panning to the home board), landscape mode allows the camera to pan freely.
• Dynamic Clip Bounds: On the first camera pan, hasUserPanned is set to true, and the landscape clipping radius expands to renderVisibleSize within the 20x20 home-board cap and centers on the camera target. This allows continuous terrain chunks to generate and "paint in" dynamically as the user explores the surrounding landscape, while the 8x8 home grid remains centered and intact.
• Reset to Diorama: When a new scene is generated, loaded, or reset, hasUserPanned is reset to false, restoring the clean sliced diorama look centered on 0, 0 until the user starts panning again.
• Pixel Outline Clipping: During normal/depth outline passes, the active clipping planes are copied to pixelState.normalMaterial.clippingPlanes to prevent out-of-bounds clipped mesh segments from rendering outline "ghosts".