StormLib's bundled libtomcrypt uses x86 inline assembly (bswapl/movl)
gated by __MINGW32__, which is defined on CLANGARM64 too. Pass
-DLTC_NO_BSWAP to force portable C byte-swap fallback.
Replace monolithic finalizeTile() with a phased state machine that spreads
GPU upload work across multiple frames (TERRAIN→M2→WMO→WATER→AMBIENT→DONE).
Each advanceFinalization() call does one bounded unit of work within the
per-frame time budget, eliminating 50-300ms frame hitches when entering cities.
Additional performance improvements:
- Pre-allocate bone SSBOs at M2 instance creation instead of lazily during
first render frame, preventing hitches when many skinned characters appear
- Enable WMO distance culling (800 units) with active-group exemption so
the player's current floor/neighbors are never culled
- Add 4-tier adaptive M2 render distance (250/400/600/1000 based on count)
- Remove dead PendingM2Upload queue code superseded by incremental system
Fix tile re-enqueueing bug: keep tiles in pendingTiles until committed to
loadedTiles (not when moved to finalizingTiles_) so streamTiles() doesn't
re-enqueue tiles mid-finalization. Also handle unloadTile() for tiles in
the finalizingTiles_ deque to prevent orphaned water/M2/WMO resources.
Instead of relying on material flag 0x40 (F_CLAMP_S, not F_WINDOW) to
identify glass materials, detect windows by checking for "window" in the
texture path. This correctly applies glass to window textures while
leaving lamp posts and other geometry opaque.
Two WMO rendering fixes:
1. Glass batch merging: BatchKey didn't include isWindow, so window and
non-window batches sharing the same texture got merged together. If
the window batch was processed first, the entire merged batch (lamp
base, iron frame, etc.) rendered as transparent glass. Add isWindow
to the batch key so glass/non-glass batches stay separate.
2. LOD group culling: WMO groups named with "LOD" are distance-only
impostor geometry (e.g. cathedral tower extension, hill tower). They
should only render beyond 200 units. Store raw MOGN chunk for
offset-based name lookup, detect "lod" in group names during load,
and skip LOD groups in both main and shadow passes when camera is
within range.
POM fixes: use blurred height only for ray march (keep crisp Sobel for
normals), reduce pomScale 0.03→0.012, clamp grazing angle denominator
to 0.15, hard-limit max UV offset, smooth fadeout at steep view angles.
Add Normal Map Strength slider (0.0-2.0) in Video settings for user
control over surface detail intensity. Persisted across sessions.
Generate normal+height maps from diffuse textures at load time using
luminance-to-height and Sobel 3x3 filtering. Compute per-vertex tangents
via Lengyel's method for TBN basis construction.
Fragment shader uses screen-space UV derivatives (dFdx/dFdy) for smooth
LOD crossfade and angle-adaptive POM sample counts. Flat textures
naturally produce low height variance, causing POM to self-select off.
Settings: Normal Mapping on by default, POM off by default with
Low/Medium/High quality presets. Persisted across sessions.
Dedicated Vulkan pipeline with alpha blending AND depth writes so
windows look transparent at oblique angles without see-through artifacts.
Fresnel alpha ranges from 0.4 (grazing) to 0.95 (head-on) with sun
glint, reflections, and silver-lining specular.
- Per-family mount sounds (kodo, tallstrider, mechanostrider, etc.) detected from M2 model path
- Skip WMO groups with SHOW_SKYBOX flag or all-untextured batches (grey mesh in Orgrimmar)
- Freeze physics during taxi landing until terrain loads to prevent falling through void
- Disable bone animations on tropical vegetation (palm, bamboo, banana, etc.) to fix wiggling
- Snap player to final taxi waypoint on flight completion
- Extract mount aura spell ID from classic UNIT_FIELD_AURAS for CMSG_CANCEL_AURA dismount
- Increase /unstuck forward nudge to 5 units
- Added transport fields to MovementInfo struct (transportGuid, transportX/Y/Z/O, transportTime)
- Updated MovementPacket::build() to serialize transport data when ONTRANSPORT flag set
- Modified GameHandler::sendMovement() to include transport info when player on transport
- Fixed coordinate conversion for transport offsets (server↔canonical)
- Added transport tracking in both CREATE_OBJECT and MOVEMENT update handlers
- Connected M2Renderer to WMORenderer for hierarchical doodad transforms
- Server-authoritative transport movement (no client-side animation)
Issue: Server not sending MOVEMENT updates for transports, so they remain stationary.
Transports register successfully but don't animate without server position updates.
Transport System (Phases 1-7):
- Implement TransportManager with Catmull-Rom spline path interpolation
- Add WMO dynamic transforms for moving transport instances
- Implement player attachment via world position composition
- Add test transport with circular path around Stormwind harbor
- Add /transport board and /transport leave console commands
- Reuse taxi flight spline system and external follow camera mode
NPC Spawn Fixes:
- Add smart ocean spawn filter: blocks land creatures at high altitude over water (Z>50)
- Allow legitimate water creatures at sea level (Z≤50) to spawn correctly
- Fixes Elder Grey Bears, Highland Striders, and Plainscreepers spawning over ocean
- Snap online creatures to terrain height when valid ground exists
NpcManager Removal:
- Remove deprecated NpcManager (offline mode no longer supported)
- Delete npc_manager.hpp and npc_manager.cpp
- Simplify NPC animation callbacks to use only creatureInstances_ map
- Move NPC callbacks to game initialization in application.cpp
Water Rendering:
- Fix tile seam gaps caused by per-vertex wave randomization
- Add distance-based blending: seamless waves up close (<150u), grid effect far away (>400u)
- Smooth transition between seamless and grid modes (150-400 unit range)
- Preserves aesthetic grid pattern at horizon while eliminating gaps when swimming
Add SkySystem coordinator that follows WoW's actual architecture where skyboxes
are authoritative and procedural elements serve as fallbacks. Integrate lighting
system across all renderers (terrain, WMO, M2, character) with unified parameters.
Sky System:
- SkySystem coordinator manages skybox, celestial bodies, stars, clouds, lens flare
- Skybox is authoritative (baked stars from M2 models, procedural fallback only)
- skyboxHasStars flag gates procedural star rendering (prevents double-star bug)
Celestial Bodies (Lore-Accurate):
- Two moons: White Lady (30-day cycle, pale white) + Blue Child (27-day cycle, pale blue)
- Deterministic moon phases from server gameTime (not deltaTime toys)
- Sun positioning driven by LightingManager directionalDir (DBC-sourced)
- Camera-locked sky dome (translation ignored, rotation applied)
Lighting Integration:
- Apply LightingManager params to WMO, M2, character renderers
- Unified lighting: directional light, diffuse color, ambient color, fog
- Star occlusion by cloud density (70% weight) and fog density (30% weight)
Documentation:
- Add comprehensive SKY_SYSTEM.md technical guide
- Update MEMORY.md with sky system architecture and anti-patterns
- Update README.md with WoW-accurate descriptions
Critical design decisions:
- NO latitude-based star rotation (Azeroth not modeled as spherical planet)
- NO always-on procedural stars (skybox authority prevents zone identity loss)
- NO universal dual-moon setup (map-specific celestial configurations)
- Add distance-based + backface culling for STORMWIND.WMO LOD shell groups
- Hide floating cathedral shell when within 185 units of group center
- Enable backface culling for LOD shell to reduce artifacts from inside
- Increase WMO view distance from 160 to 500 units for better visibility
- Extend fog distances to 3000-4000 units for clearer long-range views
- Add fog support to water renderer matching WMO fog settings
When inside a WMO, use:
- Smaller sweep step size (0.20 vs 0.35) for more frequent collision checks
- Tighter player radius (0.45 vs 0.50) for less claustrophobic corridors
- Stronger push response (0.12 vs 0.08 max) for more responsive walls
Prevents clipping through walls in tight indoor spaces while keeping
outdoor movement smooth.
Remove active group fast path from getFloorHeight to fix bridge clipping.
Replace ground smoothing with immediate step-up snap (WoW-style: snap up,
smooth down). Accept upward Z from wall collision at all call sites. Skip
floor-like surfaces (absNz >= 0.45) in wall collision to prevent false
wall hits on ramps. Increase getFloorHeight allowAbove from 0.5 to 2.0
for ramp reacquisition. Prefer highest reachable surface in floor selection.
- Add setInstancePosition() to M2Renderer and WMORenderer for moving
transport instances at runtime
- Detect UPDATEFLAG_TRANSPORT on gameobjects and track transport GUIDs
- Parse player-on-transport state from movement blocks
- Wire transport move callback in Application to update render positions
- Implement CMSG_GAMEOBJECT_QUERY / SMSG_GAMEOBJECT_QUERY_RESPONSE so
gameobjects display proper names instead of "Unknown"
- Add name/entry fields to GameObject entity class
- Fix CMSG_USE_ITEM packet: remove extra uint8 that shifted the item
GUID by one byte, breaking hearthstone and all item usage
- Remove redundant CMSG_LOOT after CMSG_GAMEOBJECT_USE for chests
- Show PvP enabled/disabled state in toggle message
- Relax WMO ramp wall-collision step-up check to allow walking on
gentle ramps where floor rise per step is under 0.1 units
- Add M2 fallback when WMO group files fail to load for gameobjects
- Handle re-creation of existing gameobject render instances by
updating position instead of silently ignoring
- Implement flight path system: SMSG_SHOWTAXINODES parser, CMSG_ACTIVATETAXIEXPRESS builder, BFS multi-hop pathfinding through TaxiNodes/TaxiPath DBC, taxi destination UI, movement blocking during flight
- Fix WMO interiors too dark by boosting vertex color lighting multiplier
- Dim M2 objects inside WMO interiors (rugs, furniture) via per-instance interior detection
- Fix ramp/stair clipping by lowering wall collision normal threshold from 0.85 to 0.55
- Restore 5-sample cardinal footprint for ground detection to fix rug slipping
- Fix /unstuck command to reset player Z to WMO/terrain floor height
- Handle MSG_MOVE_TELEPORT_ACK and SMSG_TRANSFER_PENDING for hearthstone teleports
- Fix spawning under Stormwind with online-mode camera controller reset
Build a 2D triangle grid per WMO group at load time so getFloorHeight and
checkWallCollision only test triangles in nearby cells instead of brute-forcing
all triangles. Also reduce sweep steps (12→4), ground probes (3→1), camera
floor probes (5→2), throttle isInsideWMO to every 10 frames, and early-out
wall collision on first hit.
- Fix CMSG_BUY_ITEM count field from uint8 to uint32 (server silently dropped undersized packets)
- Character select screen: remember last selected character, two-column layout with details panel, double-click to enter world, responsive window sizing
- Fix stale character data between logins by replacing static init flag with per-character GUID tracking
- Parallelize WMO visibility culling across worker threads (same pattern as M2 renderer)
- Optimize WMO collision queries with world-space group bounds early rejection in getFloorHeight, checkWallCollision, isInsideWMO, and raycastBoundingBoxes
- Reduce camera ground samples from 5 to 3 movement-aligned probes
- Add WMO interior lighting, unlit materials, vertex color multiply, and alpha blending support
Save/load floor cache per map (e.g., cache/wmo_floor_Azeroth.bin) instead
of a single global file. Saves current zone's cache before teleporting,
loads target zone's cache after terrain streaming completes.
Add precomputeFloorCache() method that samples all WMO bounds at load time
and populates the persistent floor height grid. Called after terrain
streaming completes (initial spawn and teleport) when cache is empty.
- Add texture-sorted batch merging with glMultiDrawElements to reduce draw calls
- Pre-compute merged batches at load time instead of per-frame
- Add persistent floor height cache with disk save/load (cache/wmo_floor_cache.bin)
- Reduce collision focus radius and sweep steps for faster collision checks
- Add floor cache size to performance HUD
- Reduce WMO group distance culling to 80 units
Renders bounding boxes in depth-only pre-pass and queries GPU for
visibility. Groups fully occluded in previous frame are skipped.
Significantly improves performance in dense areas like Stormwind.
Portal-based visibility culling for WMO rendering (disabled by default,
needs debugging for complex WMOs like Stormwind). Skip character creation
screen when characters already exist in single-player mode.
Anisotropic filtering now queries GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT once
and applies via a single applyAnisotropicFiltering() utility, replacing
hardcoded calls across all renderers. Fog (sky horizon color, 100-600
range) and Blinn-Phong specular highlights are added to WMO, M2, and
character shaders for visual parity with terrain. Shadow sampling
plumbing (sampler2DShadow with 3x3 PCF) is wired into all three shaders
gated by uShadowEnabled, ready for a future shadow map pass.
- Add spellbook screen (P key) with Spell.dbc name lookup and action bar assignment
- Default Attack and Hearthstone spells available in single player
- Fix WMO floor clipping (gryphon roost) by tightening ceiling rejection threshold
- Darken ocean water, increase wave motion and opacity
- Add M2 model distance fade-in to prevent pop-in
- Reposition chat window, add slash/enter key focus
- Remove debug key commands (keep only F1 perf HUD, N minimap)
- Performance: return chat history by const ref, use deque for O(1) pop_front
- Add loading screen system with stb_image for JPEG loading
- Two loading screen images (orc and dwarf) randomly selected
- Display loading screen while terrain data loads
- Cache WMO inverse matrices to reduce per-frame computation
- Stub WMO liquid rendering (needs coordinate system fix)
- Update spawn point to Stormwind Trade District
- Increase WMO render distance from 1500 to 3000 units for better city loading
- Increase M2 render distance from 500 to 1000 units
- Increase terrain load radius from 4 to 6 tiles (~3200 units)
- Add raycast-based camera collision that zooms in when obstructed by walls/objects
- Move spawn point outside chapel to road near Stormwind gate
- Add ground height smoothing to prevent stumbling on uneven terrain
