This is the inaugural post for the working journal behind 3dsolarsystem.online. Two flavors of thing will live here.
Dev journal
The technical posts. Shader breakdowns when something interesting goes into the codebase, performance notes when a frame budget gets fixed (or broken), decision logs for the architectural choices that took more than five minutes to settle. The kind of writing that's most useful to other people building real-time 3D in the browser, and most useful to me six months later when I'm trying to remember why a constant ended up at 0.182 instead of 0.18.
Things on the rough docket: the multi-pass atmosphere shader, the chase-camera math for the new Interstellar Ranger craft, what 151 MB of Sketchfab textures look like after gltf-transform optimize, and how the depth buffer holds up when you fly from solar-orbital distance down to the cloud tops of Earth.
Space notebook
The educational posts. The same flavor as the planet and pillar pages on the site, but free of the per-body taxonomy. Long-form on whatever catches my attention from the literature this month — Hillaire 2020, Bruneton-Neyret, the JWST cycle-3 papers, the Cassini "In Saturn's Shadow" geometry, the Apollo earthrise framing, the strange axial tilt of Uranus. The bits of astronomy I find myself wanting to write down anyway.
Cadence
No schedule. Posts go up when they're worth reading. The RSS feed lives at /blog/ (and yes, I'll add an actual RSS endpoint when the second post lands).
— André