look

Everything about the air on the Ironspine: the low raking sun, the storm cloud deck, the height fog and physical atmosphere, the sea below, the rain, the reflection probes, and the colour grade the whole game is photographed through.

The idea the slice is built on is that the air changes with altitude. Four bands blend continuously, keyed off whatever altitude the camera is actually looking from:

band	altitude	what it is
spray	0 – 55 m	sodium haze off the sea, heavy rain, the sun a rumour behind the deck
mid	55 – 96 m	the haze thins, the rain does not
cloud	96 – 142 m	inside the deck: whiteout, the tower the only thing with an edge
crown	142 m up	above the weather — thin cold air, a hard low sun, cloud lying below as a floor

What it provides

• Game.state.wind / Game.state.windDir — the live storm envelope, in newtons of lateral push and a unit horizontal direction. Written here; CLIMB turns them into force.
• "gust" { strength } — emitted on the frame each gust peaks, so CLIMB's push and STAGING's shake land together.
• Look.band() — { name, spray, mid, cloud, crown, altitude, storm, wind }.
• Look.previewAt(y, seconds) / Look.releasePreview() — force the envelope to an altitude. A capture taken from an explicit world position does not move the camera, so without this a frame at the crown is photographed through the base's air.
• Look.recaptureProbes() — re-take the reflection probes after the skyline changes.
• Look.sun() / Look.sea() — the entities, for anything that wants to read them.

What it is made of

• assets/look/storm_cloud.shader + .material — the cloud deck: five huge horizontal sheets between 97 m and 141 m, faded by the angle they are seen at so their edges never lie along the horizon, and dissolving to a single far-field opacity so a sheet seen almost edge-on cannot alias.
• assets/look/storm_veil.shader — a post-process pass. Height fog describes the medium in front of a surface and leaves sky pixels alone; this is the sky's half of the same whiteout, and it carries the driving rain as three screen-space layers.
• assets/look/ironspine_grade.texture — the colour cube: cooled, desaturated, shadows lifted off black, so the rust and the sodium are the only colour in the frame.
• The PhysicalAtmosphere, HeightFog, Weather and Ocean systems, driven per frame from the band blend.