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>
Medal targets are no longer one uniform 15/35/60k guess across every event.
tools/tune_junctions.gd plays each junction 12 times with varied launches and
sets bronze/silver/gold at the 35th/65th/88th percentile of actual damage, so
they now range from $4k at Cliffs Corner to $73k gold at Melbourne x Merivale.
The old numbers made half the events impossible and the other half trivial.
Grey x Glenelg scored $0 in 12/12 runs and took three fixes, each found by
measuring rather than reading:
- The launch sat on the street centreline, so the car drove cleanly BETWEEN the
two convoy lanes -- closest pass 2.9 m, almost exactly the 2.7 m lane offset.
It now launches in a lane. (The first attempt offset the wrong way and widened
the pass to 5.5 m, which is how the sign error announced itself.)
- int(L / headway) floors to one car on a short clipped stream, so that junction
fielded 9 convoy cars against the usual 20-25. Minimum 3 per stream, evenly
spaced to fit.
Result: $0 -> $91k, convoy 9 -> 18, and 0 of 9 junctions now unplayable.
The tuner has turned out to be the event validator as much as a balance tool --
"scores nothing in every run" is an unplayable event, not a tuning problem.
Also from the review: the deformer no longer crumples det_* panels after they've
been shed onto their own body, and notes that rebuilding an ArrayMesh drops any
imported LODs.
Honest gap: Cliffs Corner and Bridge Approach show median == max at ~$4.7k --
winnable and correctly tuned, but the run ends on scenery before the convoy is
reached. Both are curved approaches; they want better crossings picked by hand.
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>
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>
