The page.tsx grew to 1,058 lines — two custom GLSL shaders, a procedural starfield, foreground cloud wisps, atmosphere gradients, and a Shoreline reveal — and the starfield was still pixelated at certain scroll positions. Chose procedural starfield over PNG (Option A — guaranteed crisp at any viewport size). The cloud breathing drift turned out nice — each PNG layer drifts laterally at a different speed via UV displacement, so if you linger at any numeral, the clouds slowly shift past each other. "Kind of cool" was the exact reaction, and that's honest: it's one of those effects you only notice if you stop scrolling.
The shader stack by the end: CloudMaterial handles luminance-based alpha with UV drift and scroll-driven warm tint. AtmosphereMaterial transitions from #0a0612 night through deep purple to warm gold across three scroll phases — cruise, dive, reveal. Bloom at luminance threshold 0.15 with 1.2 intensity for the god-ray glow. Camera controller interpolates position, rotation, and FOV based on scroll phase, with the tilt steepening after 45% to sell the nose-dive. The Shoreline reveal drops a camera-tracked Y-positioned image that fades through cloud parting.
Three commits. Ten days. Seven conversations that kept crashing from image-dimension 400 errors. Pushed the last commit at 11:48 PM. The gap between the vision in my head and what renders in the browser never fully closed — but the gap got smaller with every scroll audit session, and the shader architecture for chasing it is all there in those 1,058 lines.