One Allocator for Space: Parent-Relative Worlds, Level Instances, and Portals That Light Themselves
A folder in the hierarchy panel that would not move its children turned into a rewrite of how Pulsar represents space. Parent-relative transforms resolved on the GPU, dirty-subtree propagation, camera-relative precision, rigid frames, one allocator behind portals and sublevels, level instances you can drop into a scene, and portals that now take their lighting and their materials from the world they show. This is how each piece works, what we measured, and the places where our own tests lied to us.
Portals Aren’t Cameras: How Helio Folds Space in WGSL
How Helio renders portals as transition maps across a discrete fourth spatial axis, transforming geometry directly into the shared G-buffer through GPU-driven culling, nested spatial clipping, indirect draws, and temporally stable motion vectors.
Sublevels: One Coordinate Space Behind Moving Chunks, Streamed Worlds, and Portals
Helio's Sublevels system is one shared GPU table of rigid transforms. Moving a group of a thousand objects, streaming a world chunk in and out, and rendering a portal all reduce to the same operation: claim a slot, tag the members, write one matrix.