The Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges and their industrial hinterland, from OSM
+ DEM like everything else -- but a 64.5 m concrete box girder split
across 13 OSM ways and twin carriageways broke every bridge assumption
the builder had, three different ways, before the right abstraction
appeared:
- Per-way sine humps (the Story Bridge recipe) turned each short
approach span into a 52 m wall.
- A whole-bridge axis projection lifted named segments 3 km from the
water and cliffed at every segment seam.
- The fix: deck height is a CONTINUOUS FIELD of distance-to-river --
smoothstep from terrain to +57 m over the water. The river is the
thing being bridged; let it set the profile. Seams are geometrically
impossible because the field doesn't know what a segment is.
The bridge arg grew to Name:hump:style. Style "box" adds concrete
piers under every bridge-tagged span (28 of them), collision guardrails
chasing both deck edges (a 64 m deck with open edges is a cliff with
lane markings -- the first playtest fell off it), and puts Spawn,
DragStart/End and the RacePath on the deck field. Story Bridge keeps
its 16 m truss unchanged.
The payoff mode: a 1,422 m drag strip -- the longest in the game --
running up and over the bridge, verified in-shot racing Nanna's Morry
between the steel rails with the deck climbing ahead. Race mode's
auto-traced loop weaves interchange ramps and is honestly chaotic;
README flags the hand-authored-loop fix if bridge racing matters.
Plus the trace stitcher's loose-join pass (carriageways within 60 m
merge), a FLUX river-industrial sky, and the loose-join is what future
divided-road levels will lean on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The OSM pipeline pointed at actual mountains. Both levels ride the real
terrarium DEM (Coot-tha's range tops at 287 m, Gravatt's at 196 --
matching the survey numbers) with the real roads draped and carved over
it: Sir Samuel Griffith Drive winding up one side of town, Mount
Gravatt Outlook Drive zigzagging up the other. Race mode is 3 laps of
the mountain; the drag finder even discovered a 1080 m strip through
Mount Gravatt's suburbs (Logan Road, of course it is).
Pipeline upgrades earned along the way, all reusable:
- trace: RacePath mode now STITCHES every OSM way sharing the name into
one chain by shared endpoints (SSG Drive is 19 segments; tracing only
the longest produced a fraction of the route) and samples densely --
16 points cut hairpins cross-country and gridded race starts in a
paddock.
- 9th builder arg selects the raw-terrain texture. Bushland levels pass
"grass" (tiled at 3 m -- 18 m tiling reads as macro-photography lawn
blades under the car) which also enables forest fill: ~2600 extra
gums, 65% biased to within ~150 m of roads, where the driver's eyes
actually are.
- amenity=parking polygons are now PAVED (draped asphalt) as well as
stocked with parked shitboxes -- a summit lookout carpark is a
burnout pad, not a dirt patch. Both summits come ready.
- man_made mast/tower ways become tapered lattice towers with a cage
and whip antenna, built from beams into the steel bucket. Mount
Gravatt's telecom tower stands over its carpark.
- Levels can carry their own sky: levels/<id>/sky_<time>.jpg overrides
the global panorama for any time of day, including day (previously
always procedural). Both mountains ship FLUX skies with the Brisbane
skyline on the horizon; Gravatt also has a sunset one, because John's
reference photo demanded it.
Suite green at 11 levels. Next burnout spot: the Gateway Bridge, when
the details arrive.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tools/fetch_dem.py pulls the open AWS terrarium elevation tiles for each
level's bbox (derived from the OSM geometry itself -- the fetch bboxes were
never recorded) and writes an f32 heightmap. The builder bilinear-samples it:
roads/footpaths/crossings drape (subdivided to ~8 m so long OSM segments stop
chording across curved ground), buildings lift rigidly to the lowest terrain
under their footprint with a 2 m foundation skirt, trees/props/planters ride
their own base heights, and the flat ground slab becomes a real terrain mesh.
Bridges get an explicit deck profile (lerp between end heights plus a hump)
instead of draping down into the river, the truss follows the deck, and the
Bradfield Highway now genuinely flies over Kemp Place -- the game has an
underpass. Kangaroo Point's cliffs are an actual 20 m drop, Edward Street
climbs to 55 m at Spring Hill.
Junction events bake spawn/convoy heights (osm_junction.py grew a pure-python
DEM sampler); the game respects marker heights everywhere it used to hardcode
ground=0.
Bugs the terrain surfaced, all found by measurement:
- Long road segments chorded across curved ground: the car visually sank to
its windows mid-block. Fixed by subdividing draped ribbons.
- The 9 m terrain grid aliases cliff edges and bulged metres ABOVE the finely
draped roads: a car spawning there was inside the terrain sheet and got
depenetrated through the floor into the void (y = -710). Fixed by giving
roads real collision and carving the terrain grid down wherever a draped
road sample lands (11k+ carve samples on Kangaroo Point alone).
- The junction validator and tuner drove throttle-only, which cross-slope
drift turned into 40-86 m misses; they now hold aim like a player would.
- Edward x Elizabeth launched down a 17% grade, went airborne at the crest
and wedged off-street: unwinnable geometry, not a bug. Swapped for
Elizabeth x George on the flat lower CBD. All 9 junctions validate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three new modes, all our own code:
- Pursuit (Simpsons Hit & Run's meter): smashing in cruise fills heat, at full
the police hunt you. Open 250 m for 6 s to escape, get pinned 4 s to be busted.
Heat decays, so picking a fight is a choice not a timer.
- Drag (NFSU2's): the gearbox IS the event. The builder finds each level's
longest genuinely straight run of wide road (442-628 m across the five OSM
levels) and drops DragStart/DragEnd, so no level needs hand-authored coords.
- Derby: five opponents in the carpark, last one running. Reuses the pursuit AI,
each hunting a different car so it's a brawl not a mob.
Crash damage now shows: total control-point travel drives paint dulling,
roughness and a scratch layer, so scuffs and crumple can never disagree.
Junction generator fixes, all found by measurement rather than inspection:
- streams[:6] truncated after street A's ways, so junctions where A yielded 3+
usable ways shipped with ZERO cross traffic. Interleaved before capping;
every event now has 2-4 crossing streams.
- RADIUS 170 -> 95 spread the convoy over a 340 m window, so you threaded the
intersection through a 20 m gap. Margaret x Edward was unwinnable: 27 convoy
cars alive, zero collisions, $0.
- Launch points now walk the street to exactly SPAWN_DIST and pick the busiest
shared node, and _clear_spawn() unblocks a buried start. Albert x Adelaide
went from $0 (drove 1 m into a building) to $91k.
- build_all_junctions.sh records the street pairs, which existed nowhere before.
Fixes from an adversarial review (23 confirmed findings), the worst being:
- Derby could only ever be LOST: wrecked opponents un-wrecked 2.2 s later via
Car._recover, so "last one running" was unreachable and the kill bounty could
be farmed to the boost cap off one revived car. They now hold their wreck.
- Drag reported WON to a beaten player: the AI's lookahead wrapped on a 2-point
path, U-turning before the line so its distance-to-finish grew again.
- The scratch layer used BLEND_MODE_MIX, whose mask defaults to white -- it
replaced the paint entirely rather than scuffing it. Now MUL.
- Drag on a level with no strip left the car at the origin, half-buried, unable
to end. Cop spawns used an unflattened basis. Stale "WANTED" HUD text.
Test harness: smoke covers all seven modes, and failures now exit instead of
hanging -- a failed assert in a headless SceneTree halts the script but leaves
the tree spinning, which cost 53 minutes of wall clock to notice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Street lamps, bollards and bins are no longer baked scenery. The builder emits
SL_/BO_/WB_ markers off the OSM nodes and game.gd spawns them as RigidBodies
with a low centre of mass, so clipping a lamp at 100 topples it instead of
driving through a painted pole. ~206 physics bodies per level (58 parked cars,
60 lamps, 88 bollards/bins), all asleep until hit. Verified by ramming one:
23.6 deg tilt, launched at 18 m/s.
Fixes a self-inflicted trap from the last commit: level_*.jpg are Godot's
extraction of the GLB's embedded textures, NOT Blender output. build_all
cleared them to avoid orphans but left level.glb.import, so Godot's cache
decided nothing had changed and never re-extracted -- queen_st_mall shipped
with 0 of its 31 textures, loading fine but rendering untextured. The .import
now goes with them.
Also confirmed the Wheel of Brisbane pivot really does turn (0.086 rad over
120 frames, 0.000 m centre drift) -- it was previously untested.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Taps the last big unused seam in the OSM data: 140 highway=traffic_signals per
CBD level become pole + mast arm + two lantern heads with emissive lenses.
Timber power poles with catenary-sagging wires run down one side of every
residential street. Billboards now cycle three fictional ad designs.
Cloudflare's free tier (10k neurons/day) ran out mid-session, so flux_texture.sh
now falls back to the local MODELBEAST farm automatically -- transparent, same
output contract. tools/crop_poster.py trims generated billboards to the poster
face by saturation, since FLUX renders them in situ with sky and support pole
however the prompt is worded.
Fixed: signal lenses were built as 0.04 m beams and beam() bails under 0.05 m,
so they silently never existed -- caught by inspecting the exported GLB, not
the screenshot.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every OSM level now spawns 50 shuntable parked fleet cars + 40 wheelie bins
from builder-emitted PP_/WB_ markers (kerbside + real amenity=parking rows;
asleep until rammed, absent in junctions to keep the puzzles deterministic).
Traffic bumped in cruise/crash.
Brisbane pass: red busway asphalt, jacaranda canopies on a fifth of the street
trees, Queenslander weatherboard + corro on building=house, art deco + glass
apartment facade variants, fictional shop-fascia signs above awnings, rooftop
billboards. Southbank gets the Wheel of Brisbane (by its mapped ticket office)
and the Grand Arbour's bougainvillea tendrils along the mapped footway.
Verified: smoke green, 50+40 smashables counted on southbank, screenshots of
the wheel, arbour trail, red busway, and one authentic parked-car rear-ending.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Builder now uses the furniture OSM already carries (footways, lamps, benches,
bins, bollards, bus stops, crossings): raised chamfered footpaths, shopfront
bands, awnings in three fabrics, parapets, layered fig/palm trees, zebra bars,
dashed centre lines, Queen St Mall winged canopies. ACES tonemap + SSAO + fog
in game.gd. flux_texture.sh gains size/luma clamping (FLUX renders "pale" as
blown-out white); gen_textures.sh + check_textures.py manage the set. Woolies
carpark rebuilt textured, parking the real fleet. Fixes: fractional OSM layer
tag crash, zero-length-normal UV projection, blood-red mall pavers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
9 junction events across 6 levels, auto-generated from real OSM intersections
(tools/osm_junction.py): each crossing street's ways become lane-offset convoy
streams, deterministic speeds/intervals/models -- learnable puzzles, not dice.
Menu lists CRASH JCT entries; crash -> 9s settle with camera-relative
aftertouch on the wreck and a one-shot crashbreaker shockwave (blast() on
traffic, radial impulse on debris, orange boom). Damage tally vs
bronze/silver/gold targets. Fixed zero-normal UV projection that striped
roads. Smoke test drives a full junction run to tally (k, gold).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
southbank, albert_parklands, story_bridge, kangaroo_point + queen_st_mall
rebuilt textured. Level builder now does: FLUX facade/road/grass/water/rock/
steel materials with box-projected UVs (roofs split to plain grey), parks,
multipolygon river water (solid, cars skim it), tree nodes as low-poly cones,
natural=cliff walls, and a procedural steel cantilever truss along a named
bridge way (Story Bridge / Bradfield Highway, 338m). osm_xml_to_json.py
assembles water relations; osm_level_args.py gains trace: mode for race paths
that follow one iconic road. 11 textures via Cloudflare Workers AI
flux-1-schnell (tools/flux_texture.sh, creds from .env never printed).
Data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tools/build_level_osm.py extrudes OSM buildings (-col), lays road strips,
Spawn + RacePath empties; osm_level_args.py computes a building-clear spawn on
a named way and race-loop corners from street intersection nodes. game.gd
builds Path3D from GLB RacePath empties, sanitizes spawn bases, and places
bodies BEFORE add_child. Three real bugs fixed: mall canopies (building=roof)
extruded as solid blocks, underground busways rendered at surface, and the
km-wide ground trimesh breaking suspension raycasts (now -convcol). Cars get
continuous_cd for thin building shells. tests/probe.gd is the physics
raycast debugger that found it.
Data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
