asc_clouds — ASCENSION: the volumetric cumulus deck

Controls the cloud layer the camera climbs through and then glides out over: the density field, its self-shadowed lighting, and the sunset palette it is lit with.

Owns

• CLOUD_WGSL — the fill compute shader that bakes a 144×40×144 rgba16f volume: cumulus profile (flat base, noise-eroded billowy tops), a wind offset, the ragged sun-side clearing, and two density taps toward the sun for self-shadowing.
• The fill-uniform contract. Both sides live in this file — the WGSL that reads U[0..15] and the Lua that packs it — so the mapping can never drift between two places.
• The palette: duskMix, the lit / SHADOW_COLOR / NIGHT_LIT colours, and the ±8 % Music.level() brightness pulse.
• The raymarch parameters passed to Vol.frame (AABB, step size, gains).
• The "asc" volume key, and therefore the whole spawn / fill / frame / destroy lifecycle.

Reads from the orchestrator

argument	from	use
sun.elev	asc_sky	duskMix — the golden → rose shift
sun.nightMix	asc_sky	night blend + emission falloff
sun.dir	asc_sky	fill uniform U[1..3], the lighting direction
cam.pos / cam.rot / cam.fov	asc_shots	the raymarch's inverse view-projection

The camera dependency is why this aspect runs after asc_shots every frame.

Boundaries

• preseed.volume registers the texture, both uniform buffers and the fill shader under the single key "asc". Exactly one module may own that key — this one.
• Vol.fill re-bakes all 829 440 voxels every frame (36×10×36 workgroups). It is the dominant GPU cost of the part.
• The volume grid is stretched over an 840×34×520 world AABB, so voxels are ≈5.8 × 0.85 × 3.6 units — very anisotropic and coarse in XZ.