What is Magic?
Magic is a planet-scale Vulkan renderer, written in Rust, that puts you anywhere between full-disc orbit and standing on the ground — on real, measured terrain.
It’s built on a single world model rather than separate “space” and “ground” modes: the same renderer that draws Earth as a lit disc from 15,000 km also puts a camera on a mountainside at 1.7 m, with no seam or mode-switch between the two. Terrain comes from measured elevation data (DEM), draped with a ground-to-orbit raster mesh; a physical atmosphere model handles scattering and aerial perspective at every altitude; ground materials and seasonal snow respond to season and latitude; day, night and moonlight are all placed by an astronomy model from a single clock, so time of day is just a camera setting.
Current focus: continuous flight from orbit to ground still has rough edges — terrain isn’t always ready in time, and frame budget slips under load. The priority right now is making that descent pop-free at any speed.
Who’s building it
Kaliffen sets direction, makes the creative and scope calls, and decides what "done" looks like for a given push.
Astra designs and builds the renderer — from the Vulkan pipeline up to the terrain, atmosphere and lighting models.
This is a learning project first: an excuse to go deep on real-time rendering, planetary-scale data and the engineering problems that only show up once “the whole Earth” is the level. It’s not a vehicle for opinions on anything outside that — the devlog sticks to the render.