Auracraft

Voxel sandbox built with AuraJS 3D rendering and the native character3d controller. The scene is tuned to read like a classic block-world survival spawn: flatter stepped terrain, blockier trees, darker water, flatter clouds, and a voxel-style fallback HUD/title flow even when the optional custom UI art is not present.

The demo now supports an optional block texture atlas. If the atlas file is not present, it falls back to colored materials automatically.

The world renderer batches blocks into chunk-scoped meshes instead of keeping one retained scene node per block. Breaking or placing a block rebuilds only the affected chunk render group. The same top/side/bottom atlas convention is used for both chunk meshes and standalone voxel cube meshes, so readable face shading does not depend on splitting blocks into multiple render nodes. Leaves now render as chunk-batched masked foliage cards, so trees and shrubs do not have to fall back to opaque cubes just to stay on the public runtime path. Chunk face culling now checks full-world neighbors across chunk seams, and the player collision world uses merged solid-column obstacles instead of one AABB per solid voxel. The committed render-quality path now uses material-level faceShadingStrength, nearest-filtered atlas sampling, and a truthful ssao -> fxaa stack instead of relying mainly on fog plus decorative contact-shadow strips. Chunk ambient occlusion now rides the public vertex-color path directly: chunk meshes call aura.mesh.createFromVertices(vertices, indices, normals, uvs, colors) and bake the corner shade into per-vertex RGBA data instead of trying to recover the same readability with extra global lighting hacks. Daytime readability now also uses the engine-owned aura.light.hemisphere(...) skylight contract plus a directional sun, so the scene depends less on example-only ambient compensation. AS125 adds chunk-baked local light transport on top of that daylight base: covered blocks now lose skylight, and crafted emissive voxel blocks can add warm nearby block-light without falling back to hidden point lights. AS126 adds a quantized day-night loop on top of that local-light path: scene-global daylight now changes over time, voxel skylight is re-baked on a bounded cadence, and emissive blocks stay useful after sunset.

Play:

auramaxx play auracraft

# or run the published game wrapper directly
npx auracraft play

Run from packages/aurascript:

npm run build:rust
npm run example:rust -- auracraft

Publish/package flow from examples/auracraft:

npm pack --dry-run
node ../../src/cli/src/cli.mjs publish --dry-run

The npm package is configured as auracraft, so the published package entrypoint is npx auracraft.

Project shape:

• src/main.js is a thin bootstrap, matching scaffolded AuraScript projects.
• src/runtime/ holds the authored runtime shell (app.js, project registry, scene registry, inspector helpers).
• scenes/gameplay.scene.js contains the main world loop and current gameplay implementation.
• config/gameplay/ and content/gameplay/ hold extracted authored data for player/rendering tuning and world layout.
• ui/ and prefabs/ are present so the example mirrors the same public project structure generated by aura create.

Controls:

• Space, Enter, or Click on the title screen to enter the world
• WASD move
• Click left/right mouse lock the cursor for FPS mouse-look
• Mouse look while locked
• Esc unlock the cursor
• Space jump
• Q or left mouse button break block
• E or right mouse button place block
• 1-9 or mouse wheel change held block
• F open or close the two-element crafting mixer
• R reset the demo world
• G trigger a random absurd sky-livestock event
• Collect the floating coins around the valley for a simple pickup loop
• Craft torch, lantern, and campfire to unlock them as placeable hotbar blocks

FPS mouse-look behavior:

• This example requires aura.window.setCursorLocked() plus aura.input.getMouseDelta() and uses that public JS path as its only camera-look route.
• The click that locks the cursor is consumed, so the player does not accidentally break or place a block on the same frame.
• aura.onBlur() unlocks the cursor, and Esc unlocks before the example will allow quit/close.

Proof checklist:

• Press F3 and confirm the Look: line reads click to lock mouse before lock and mouse locked after you click into the window.
• While unlocked, camera look should pause instead of moving until the cursor is locked.
• After the first lock click, break/place actions should only happen on later clicks while the cursor remains locked.
• Press F3 and confirm the Nodes: line stays far below total block count while the Chunks: line reports chunk-group rebuilds instead of one-node-per-block churn.
• With the texture atlas present, trees and shrubs should read as cutout foliage instead of solid leaf cubes.
• With the render-quality stack active, the world should keep its chunked block counts while dropping most decorative ground-shadow nodes that used to fake depth in the fog-only path.
• Press F and confirm crafting only allows two input elements at a time before producing a combined result.
• Craft torch, lantern, or campfire, place the unlocked block, and verify nearby covered terrain brightens from baked local block-light instead of a hidden point light actor.
• For deterministic native AO evidence, run node scripts/capture-voxel-ao-proof.mjs. The committed AO path should emit a non-zero colorEntryCount plus multiple distinctShadeBuckets, while the generated no-colors baseline should collapse those color metrics back to zero.
• For deterministic local light evidence, run node scripts/capture-voxel-light-transport-proof.mjs. The committed proof scene should report: open skylight=15 blockLight=0 bakedTopBrightness=0.6247, covered skylight=0 blockLight=0 bakedTopBrightness=0.1232, emissive skylight=0 blockLight=13 bakedTopBrightness=0.4078, plus distinctColorBucketCount=129 across the rebuilt chunk meshes.
• For deterministic day-night daylight evidence, run node scripts/capture-voxel-daylight-proof.mjs. The committed proof scene should report day/dusk/night open-skylight buckets of 15 -> 7 -> 3, open-face brightness of 0.6247 -> 0.3572 -> 0.2235, and a night emissive bucket that stays at blockLight=13 with bakedTopBrightness=0.4078 while covered night terrain remains darker at 0.1232.

Current frontier:

• The world renderer is now doing the depth/readability work; mobs now use simple authored silhouettes and materials, and the next high-impact step is a real rigged animation/avatar path rather than more renderer churn.
• The AO proof is tied to the current chunk-mesh integration in scenes/gameplay.scene.js. It shows that authored vertex colors survive the native mesh path, not that Aura now matches a full commercial voxel sandbox's lighting, block-light propagation, or content pipeline.
• The local light transport is now paired with a quantized day-night daylight loop and bounded skylight re-bakes. It still does not claim weather, moon phases, dynamic GI, or exact flood-fill parity.
• This demo still does not claim full lighting or art-direction parity with shipped voxel sandboxes.

Texture atlas:

• Place a PNG at assets/block.png
• The demo now auto-prefers a cleaned atlas at assets/block-clean.png when present
• The renderer also uses derived side/bottom atlases (block-side-shaded.png / block-bottom-shaded.png) when present so block faces read with stronger voxel depth
• The example root includes matching top-level atlas copies (block.png / block-clean.png / block-side-shaded.png / block-bottom-shaded.png) so the native 3D material path resolves correctly
• Use a 4 x 3 grid of square tiles
• The runtime also accepts the older fallback name minecraft-blocks-atlas.png
• See assets/README.md for the exact layout