Review follow-up for the sonar pulses (the non-blocking items).
Unpickable pulses: the three pulse lines were polyline entities, which
Cesium always picks, so near-miss and touch picks around them became
unowned hits. They are now drawn by the pulse disc's shader, which
already drew the gradient and is built with allowPicking false. Each
line keeps the polyline outline material's look: 3 CSS px wide with a
1 px dark outline in the ring's colours, measured from the screen-space
gradient of the disc's radius times czm_pixelRatio, as Cesium's contour
material does. Without derivatives only the gradient band is drawn.
Disc follow: with the lines on the disc, it is rebuilt after the subject
moves 500 m instead of 2 km, so the pulses stay concentric with the
ring. A resting disc is hidden and not rebuilt; it catches up when the
pulses wake.
Camera below the disc: the disc sits 2.5 km above the ellipsoid with
faceForward, so from a lower camera it swept across the sky. It is now
hidden while the camera is below that height.
Echo palette: echo brackets keep the pulse blue on the default
detection style and take the style's line colour under NVG, FLIR and
CRT.
Echo test: the detection renderer's echo maths moves into
awarenessEchoBracket and awarenessEchoColor in src/awarenessEcho.js,
tested directly instead of running a regex slice of detection.js
through vm, and the one-sided spread assert is now two-sided.
The positions reuse parameter of awarenessRangeRingPositions and the
pulse segment count had no callers left and are removed.
Pulses: three dim rings grow from the Global Context subject to the
250 km range ring at constant speed, one every 3 s, each taking 9 s.
Each fades in over its first 8% of travel, then fades as
(1 - travel)^1.5 to about a third of its 60% peak, so it arrives at the
ring dim but visible. They are 3 px in the ring's colours, as polylines
with CallbackProperty positions and colours that share the ring's
centre object, so they follow a moving subject.
Ring: while pulses run, the 250 km ring rests unseen and flashes to full
strength as each pulse reaches it, fading over 1.8 s. Without pulses
(reduced motion, or a scene with no primitives or preRender hook) it
stays on screen as before.
Gradient: behind each pulse a radial band in the same blue fades inward
over 35% of the radius. One flat, translucent, unpickable 250 km disc
draws it with a small Fabric material. A preRender listener writes the
pulse radii and opacities into two vec4 uniforms each frame. The disc
(0.25 degree granularity, ~3.5 ms to build) is rebuilt only after the
subject moves 2 km.
Echoes: as a pulse front crosses a flight, military aircraft or AIS
vessel, the detection overlay draws a second bracket in the pulse blue
around that contact's own bracket, spreading outward as it fades over
1.4 s. Awareness publishes the field (centre, radius, pulse timing,
echo styling) through the new src/awarenessEcho.js. The overlay reads
it, so no layer's icon or colour is touched. Mapped installations have
no detection bracket, so they do not echo.
Rendering cost: pulses never hold continuous rendering. They ask for a
frame every 80 ms, the Cyber sonar's parked cadence, so a parked
Contacts view repaints at ~12.5 fps while a subject is shown. This
changes the "parked Contacts stays quiet" behaviour on purpose.
clearVisual stops the timer and removes the disc, the listener and the
echo field.
awarenessRangeRingPositions can now reuse a result array, and passes the
WGS84 ellipsoid explicitly so a reused Cartesian never lands in the
ellipsoid argument. Tuning lives in AWARENESS_RANGE_PULSE,
AWARENESS_RANGE_ECHO and AWARENESS_RANGE_RING_STYLE. src/awarenessEcho.js
is registered in the awareness-layer, application-components and
application-layer-construction packages.
Tests cover:
- the pulse curve and calm rate;
- the ring flash once per arrival, and the static ring without pulses;
- the 80 ms frame cadence and its stop;
- the partial-scene fallback;
- the gradient disc: unpickable, uniform values, rebuild and cleanup;
- per-frame evaluation, and the echo field following the subject;
- awarenessEcho strength, rim wrap, layer filter and altitude handling;
- the detection renderer's echo-bracket band and outward spread.
Drop module-local helpers that nothing calls (linkAbort, summarize,
stringOption, summarizeEntity and the polygonCenter, propertyObject and
unwrapProperties helpers only it used, CALLOUT_DOT_SIZE_PX) and unused
import specifiers in runtime modules, tests, QA scripts and tools.
None of the removed bindings is exported. Re-exports such as the ALPR
policy constants and every package export are unchanged.
Supersedes #218 by @spcpza, ported onto the current component layout with fixes from review.
Verified before merge: format, package boundaries, unit suite, build, and the browser tracking suite; a browser harness for the change where one applies; adversarial review applied.
Contributor: @spcpza. His original commit is the base of this branch, and his own re-port onto main (2026-09-15, `5b69011`) was consulted while finishing the height work. That port reads every vehicle's surface from the app's shared ground-floor system (`cachedGroundFloor` / `warmGroundFloor` / `GROUND_FLOOR_LIFT_M`) rather than sampling the scene per layer, keeps a vehicle hidden until its cell answers, warms a bounded batch per poll on a timer instead of per frame, and renders at the ellipsoid above the altitude gate. That is the sounder primitive — one floor system for the app, with the rooftop-versus-street question already settled against a datum-correct DEM prior — and this branch's height work was rebuilt on it, replacing a bespoke cell cache, ground prior and rooftop rule written here. Credit for that direction is his.
Future work (not in this PR), both written up in docs/CURRENT-STATE.md:
- Readable route names. The realtime feeds carry only `route_id`; `route_short_name` / `route_long_name` live in each operator's static GTFS `routes.txt`, and headsigns in `trips.txt`. Doing it properly wants a server-side metadata loader beside the transit proxy with fixed registered static sources, bounded indexes built once and persisted, a slow conditional refresh, and a versioned route dictionary the browser caches. Shipped here: ids are never rewritten, and a cut one carries an ellipsis instead of reading as a typo.
- Below-ground rendering. Subway vehicles are drawn on the surface directly above themselves, because the feeds carry no depth and a train nobody can see is not worth drawing; the card says so plainly. Real treatment wants OSM tunnel geometry per city and a ghosted sprite tethered to the surface. The owner recorded it and left it.
Round four and after (2026-09-15). The owner tested round three under FLIR and NVG, and then asked for the design to be taken further: elegant in performance, beautiful on camera, trails with a cache for public transport, Cesium-native, and a core other moving layers can adopt. Codex Astra reviewed the plan (it confirmed the speed fault: a glide started from the drawn position at receipt time but spanned the gap between report times, so with MBTA reporting every ~10 s against a 15 s poll every second glide ran at 1.5x; it rejected a queued-segment patch), then wrote the design, then implemented it in commit-sized passes with adversarial review between them and real-browser harness runs by the integrator.
What this PR now contains beyond the contributor's original port:
- Delayed playback in a contact-agnostic core (`src/data/contactPlayback.js`): each vehicle keeps a typed, bounded fix history and a display clock that runs at one second per second through it, a feed-derived lag behind real time, holding at its newest fix rather than extrapolating and never sprinting to catch up. Marker, course, motion word, card and trail all read the same displayed sample. The clock has an explicit time-offset and seek API so a rewind is a later feature, not a rewrite; flights and vessels are untouched.
- A selected-vehicle trail (`src/data/contactTrailRenderer.js`, `src/layers/transit/trails.js`): the retained history drawn with batched Cesium primitives, clipped at display time so the head is exactly the sprite, faded by age, in the mode colour (white under sensor presets), on the same surface path as the marker.
- Bounded proxy-side history (`server/providers/transitHistory.js`): fifteen minutes and at most 128 fixes per vehicle with hard byte ceilings, MBTA only for now (opt-in per feed), served by a small endpoint that never fetches upstream, so a selected trail survives a browser reload while the server keeps running.
- Scene work bounded to what is visible and moving, an occluder, cached DETECT candidates, holds on the render loop only while something visible moves.
- Sensor presets: white-hot haloed sprites under NVG/FLIR/noir (black-hot inverts), saturated mode colours under CRT, per-mode bracket tiers in every theme, the selected card keeping its mode colour.
- A discriminating browser harness (`scripts/qa-transit.mjs`) that samples postRender frames, reads the real card anchor, and measures fleet budgets at 800 and 3,000 vehicles.
Not built, recorded as follow-ups: curated route display names (lowest priority per the owner), fleet-wide tails, route snapping, a rewind UI, adoption of the playback core by flights and vessels.
Verified at merge (2026-09-15 morning): unit suite 3,896 passing, build clean, format and boundary gates clean, tracking regression 109/109, browser harness keyless 200 pass / 0 fail (13 sensor checks unexercised because the live view offered fewer than six isolated sprites; every judged sprite passed), keyed on Google 3D tiles 198 pass with the per-frame allocation gate as the only failure. Follow-ups recorded: the keyed build's playback sampler still allocates per frame (CPU and frame time stay within budget; the 3,000-vehicle metro view sits at a 27.6 ms frame interval against a 25 ms budget), the shared detection overlay's per-paint allocation, friendlier route names, fleet-wide tails, a rewind UI, and adopting the playback core for vessels and flights.
Co-authored-by: spcpza <[email protected]>
Manjunath