spaceship/shaders/lunar_tiled.gdshader

shader_type canvas_item;

// The lunar backdrop as it is actually drawn every frame: one texture fetch
// plus a dither, and nothing else.
//
// Forgejo #68. lunar_surface.gdshader derives the crater field procedurally,
// which costs a 9-sample Worley scan on every pixel of a fullscreen rect,
// every frame, forever - and it recomputes the exact same answer each time,
// because the field is a fixed function of world position. So it is
// evaluated ONCE, into a square texture covering one period of the field
// (LunarBackground.gd does the bake at scene load), and this shader scrolls
// that texture with repeat wrapping. The canvas stays infinite; the per-
// frame cost stops scaling with how complicated the field is.
//
// Two things pay for that, both stated plainly because they are real:
//
//   1. The field REPEATS, every tile_cells * cell_size world units. It is
//      seamless (lunar_surface.gdshader wraps the cell index before hashing,
//      so the periodicity is exact rather than blended), but a player who
//      flies far enough passes the same crater arrangement again. Lunar
//      regolith is about the most forgiving possible content for that: no
//      landmarks, no horizon, no orientation cues, nothing to anchor a
//      memory of "I have seen this crater before" to.
//   2. The texture has a fixed resolution, so zooming in past its native
//      density softens the craters rather than resolving finer ones. The
//      field is smooth gradients by construction - the sharpest thing in it
//      is the rim band, and that still spans several texels - so bilinear
//      magnification reproduces it closely instead of showing blocks.
//
// Mipmaps handle the other direction (zooming out), which is where a
// high-frequency crater field would otherwise alias into shimmer.

uniform sampler2D field_texture : filter_linear_mipmap, repeat_enable;
uniform vec2 camera_cell = vec2(0.0, 0.0);
uniform vec2 camera_frac = vec2(0.0, 0.0);
uniform float camera_zoom = 1.0;
uniform vec2 viewport_size = vec2(720.0, 1280.0);
uniform float cell_size = 220.0;
uniform float tile_cells = 32.0;

float hash21(vec2 p) {
	vec3 p3 = fract(vec3(p.xyx) * 0.1031);
	p3 += dot(p3, p3.yzx + 33.33);
	return fract((p3.x + p3.y) * p3.z);
}

void fragment() {
	vec2 screen_px = UV * viewport_size;
	vec2 centered = screen_px - viewport_size * 0.5;

	// Same camera-relative construction as the procedural shader, and for
	// the same reason: an absolute world position reaches the tens of
	// thousands, where a mobile float has lost the fractional bits this
	// needs. camera_cell arrives ALREADY WRAPPED into [0, tile_cells) -
	// LunarBackground.gd does that wrap in GDScript's double precision, so
	// the large number never enters the shader at all.
	vec2 rel = camera_frac + centered * (camera_zoom / cell_size);
	vec2 uv = (camera_cell + rel) / tile_cells;

	// repeat_enable does the wrapping, so uv running outside [0,1] is not
	// merely tolerated, it is the mechanism.
	vec3 color = texture(field_texture, uv).rgb;

	// Tiny per-pixel dither to mask 8-bit colour-quantization banding: the
	// crater shading is a smooth gradient over a fairly large area, which
	// can visibly "step" into faint bands on real hardware. A small random
	// jitter well under one visible step breaks the stepping up without
	// being perceptible as noise. Doubly needed here - the baked texture is
	// itself 8-bit, so it quantizes the gradient a second time.
	//
	// Deliberately keyed to the SCREEN pixel, not the world position: it has
	// to stay fixed to the display or it turns into crawling noise as the
	// camera moves, and it must not be baked into the tile or it would
	// repeat along with everything else.
	float dither = (hash21(screen_px + vec2(7.0, 13.0)) - 0.5) / 128.0;
	color += vec3(dither);

	COLOR = vec4(color, 1.0);
}