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Design choices

Why Perlin Studio is built the way it is. The decisions are short; the long-form reasons live in docs/internal/decisions.md for contributors.

No build, no dependencies

The studio is plain scripts that attach a global each, loaded in order. That keeps three properties: it opens by double-clicking index.html (file://), any static web host serves it as is, and the <perlin-noise> element can be embedded from a single file. ES modules would break the first of these (module scripts are blocked under file://), and a bundler or framework would break all three. What you read in the repository is what runs.

One noise, two renderers

The CPU path (a worker running perlin.js) is the reference. The GPU path (perlin-gl.js, a WebGL2 shader) is a port of the same maths — same permutation table, same gradients, same warp, tiling, layers and colour modes — so a preset gives the same picture on both and a seed means the same thing. A shader-native noise would have been shorter and a little faster, but it would have split every seed into two different images. The GPU path is opt-in and checked against the CPU by a script, not trusted.

Loops by construction

The seamless loop is not a cross-fade. In loop mode the noise is four-dimensional and the two extra axes trace a circle, so after one revolution every input is back where it started. The angle is folded into [0, 1) before any trigonometry, so progress 1 is computed exactly like progress 0. The cellular noise types loop differently — each point circles inside its own cell — for the same reason: an exact return, not an approximation.

Relief lighting from three samples

The surface slope for relief lighting comes from the same three-sample stencil as the Flow colour mode, rather than from analytic derivatives. Analytic derivatives would have to be carried through the domain warp, the second layer and the tiling; the stencil costs more samples but works with every feature and is the same code on both renderers.

No service worker

The installable app has no offline cache on purpose. The site is small, always served fresh, and a cache would add a version to bump with every release. See Install as an app.

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