▶ Live demo (WebGPU required — Chrome or Edge)
A real-time volumetric sky and weather engine for Three.js WebGPU (TSL), demonstrated inside a full interactive first-person desert world. The world exists to prove the point: authored volumetric skies, live weather fronts, lightning with surface impact, day/night, and three different skyboxes — running at high frame rates with a complete playable scene underneath.
Serve the folder with any static file server and open it in a WebGPU-capable browser (Chrome/Edge), e.g.:
python qa/dev-server.py 8378Open http://127.0.0.1:8378/. The included server binds to loopback and supplies JavaScript/WASM content types explicitly. If the review server is already running, reuse it. The first load warms the WebGPU pipelines before revealing the world.
The v0.2 release includes the sky, reflection, weather and surface-water overhaul. The 0.2.1 patch reduces shader preparation delays and shows each startup stage. See the release notes for its changes and remaining limits. Implementation details and retained measurements are in OVERHAUL_REVIEW.md. The selected capture gallery is at qa/review/index.html, with the latest red giant and rain corrections in the September 10 report.
- Skybox: Earth / Orbital Halo (with displaced, eroded terrain, eclipse and band lighting) / Shieldworld with its red giant and shattered moon
- Weather: eight states from clear to Dark Storm — sealed volumetric storm canopy, forced lightning strikes (⚡ button), burn scorch decals
- Time of day slider and day/night cycle; the moon is NASA LROC imagery
- Walk the desert: eroded mountain terrain, Mojave flora with wind and touch response, a climbable ziggurat temple
Controls are on-screen. Quality tiers in the panel; Balanced targets 60+ FPS.
Cloud shadows work on scene PBR geometry without a terrain callback; see the integration guide. Rain shelter, impacts, wetness and puddles use nearby surface geometry; see engine/RAIN.md.
This is an early 0.2 release — see KNOWN_ISSUES.md.
- Code: MIT (see LICENSE)
- Three.js (vendored, r186 / 0.186.0): MIT; local renderer patches
- Audio: see
assets/audio/README.md— mostly CC0; four desert-bird recordings are CC BY-NC-SA (xeno-canto) and are not CC0 - PBR surfaces: Poly Haven / ambientCG (CC0); moon: NASA CGI Moon Kit; starmap: Tycho
- Wind/grass techniques derived in part from CK42BB's procedural-grass-threejs (MIT)