asc_stars — ASCENSION: the star field and its reveal

Controls how far the stars are brought up out of the dusk as night falls.

The stars are shader-resident: star_layer in preseed/shaders/asc_sky.shader draws two jittered twinkling layers plus a faint milky band on the sky dome, gated by a starGate that reaches lower down the sky as night rises. What this module owns is the runtime ramp that scales them.

Owns

• REVEAL — the daylight floor and the night gain for star brightness.
• The stars property on the shared asc_sky_mat material. That property, and nothing else on that material.

Reads from the orchestrator

sun, the signal published by asc_sky:

field	use
sun.nightMix	0 = day, 1 = full night — drives the reveal
sun.skyGuid	which material to write

Boundaries

• night and game_t on asc_sky_mat belong to asc_sky. Writing them here would fight it every frame.
• The star geometry, twinkle and milky band live in asc_sky.shader, which is shared with the sky. Changing the look of the stars is a shader edit; changing when they appear is this file.
• Known limitation in that shader: star_layer cells the sky on atan2(x, -z) and the cell grid does not wrap at the ±π meridian, so there is a seam on the −Z axis — which the final two shots tilt toward.