AuroraCalm - Night Sky, Rebuilt

Living northern lights, rendered - never the same sky twice

Android

Health & Fitness

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Hi everyone, WHAT I WANTED To fall asleep under the northern lights without the illusion breaking. Every app I tried played a video loop. Beautiful for a minute - and then your eye finds the seam. Once you have seen it you cannot unsee it, and the moment you stop believing the picture, it stops calming you down. A sleep app that you are quietly auditing is not doing its job. So the rule from day one was: no loops. Every frame gets raymarched on your device over baked scene maps. The curtains never repeat. You never see the same night twice. There is no seam to find. WHAT ACTUALLY WENT WRONG ALONG THE WAY Two things, and both taught me more than the successes. The first was about scope. Four months ago I launched here with what was, honestly, a pretty sky and almost nothing else: one aurora, no worlds to choose from, no sounds, no breathing, no sleep tracking. The reaction was friendly and the question underneath it was always the same - "looks great, but what do I actually do with it?" That question built most of this version. The second was about where the difficulty lives. I assumed the hard part would be making it look right. It was not. It was making it look right on an Android TV box with 2 GB of RAM while the exact same scenes run on an iPhone and an Apple TV. Same worlds, same night, three very different machines. Most of the last months went into work that is completely invisible if it succeeds. THE BUG THAT COST ME THE MOST For weeks one aurora curtain, usually the rightmost, looked like it was spinning out of control. I went looking for a broken rotation, a bad angle, a timing race in the motion model. It was none of those. A fade constant was set to 0.30 seconds. That particular sheet needs 0.425 seconds to fade. So it glided for 0.30 and then simply stood still for the remaining 0.20 - and on the nearest curtain, which moves about seven times faster than the others, that glide-stop-glide read exactly like a band tearing loose. The other platform had the same constant at 0.6 and had never shown the bug. I had been staring at the algorithm for weeks. The answer was one number, in the other codebase, sitting there the whole time. Now the first thing I do with any platform-specific weirdness is open the other platform and compare. WHAT IT IS NOW - 8 worlds, each with its own terrain, water and colour - Mountains built from real elevation data, with snow and rock you can make out - and they brighten and darken with the sun's real position for wherever you are. An evening in Reykjavik does not look like an evening in Zurich. - Real rays and curtains instead of soft bands. They build, flare, and fade out again. - Water that picks up the light above it, and a moon that shows its actual surface - 20 sounds you mix yourself, each with its own volume - A breathing exercise that runs over the live scene - Sleep tracking - An alarm that wakes you with a slow sunrise instead of a noise On iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android phones and Android TV. WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW FROM YOU Does it actually make you sleepy, or does it just look good? Those are two different things, and it is the one question I cannot answer myself - I have been staring at these scenes for months. If you try it tonight, I would rather hear "nice, but I was wide awake" than nothing at all. Happy to go as deep on the renderer as anyone wants.