[Week 23] Asset Loading and Memory

I continued revising the models and their lighting. The station power bay now has separate reactor, machinery and exterior-light materials, with an animated plasma effect tied to its operational state. The police pilot cell was added and then revised.

There were also renderer changes for macOS and Windows, along with warp corrections. I added a regional status calculation that follows the player's actual location. It distinguishes claimed, disputed, unclaimed and uncharted space, and reports the relevant wanted status.

The renderer now budgets asset preparation and memory use. Prepared meshes and textures have limits, uploads are bounded, and the renderer can reduce detail or release assets when space is needed. On machines with shared memory, CPU and GPU allocations also count against a combined allowance.

Warp destination assets can stream during travel. Cells and debris have simple fallback geometry while their meshes are unavailable, so presentation does not depend on every destination asset finishing at once.

I'm still working on cache maintenance: a shared location for disposable caches, usage reporting, and controls to remove old formats or trim the cache. The current changes coordinate access between processes and defer cleanup until no active session is using the cache.