https://stepinto.dev/tags/mobile/Recent content in Mobile on Step Into DevHugoen-gbTue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://stepinto.dev/posts/the-danger-of-a-hidden-sun/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://stepinto.dev/posts/the-danger-of-a-hidden-sun/<p>I spent a weekend trying to make a 3D scene look less flat and ended up making it faster instead. The flatness and the frame drops turned out to be the same bug, viewed from opposite sides.</p> <p>I was helping out a friend on their app. The scene is a few hundred small buildings on a flat ground plane, rendered with <a href="https://github.com/google/filament">Filament</a> through react-native-filament, running on whatever phone the user happens to own. It has a performance budget system with tiers, and the lower tiers get simplified meshes, fewer decorations and smaller render arenas. It is the kind of app where you count draw calls.</p>