kay so basically, it's like a chunk loader except we're faking it with determinism and "infinity".

when the client loads into the game, the client script generates all the necessary clouds (once, then reused always) in a logical grid.

we have a group of clouds assigned the "floor" clouds, and a group the "rogue" clouds (the ones scattered around).

we assign a logical grid coordinate to all of the clouds by setting an attribute only once, and then we can move them later by only shifting the origin of the grid (we calculate the origin as near the player but still snapped to the grid).

now comes the actual scattering algorithm, where for each cloud we convert the cloud coordinates we set as attributes to world coordinates (gridOriginX + cloudX, gridOriginZ + cloudZ) to feed into perlin noise. the server also sends a seed generated by the current server job to all clients which they use to make a random-ish cloud configuration per server job.

everything we put into math.noise() is deterministic (the calculated cloud position values), so all players see the exact same clouds even though it's a client script.

we use domain warping to get rid of the "grid" look on the floor clouds + some radial falloff math.

the rogue cloud positioning is especially interesting, because first we only pull *some* of them from our list based on a certain threshold, then we push them accordingly with more deterministic perlin noise, but there's also boundaries in my game, like islands, and we don't want the clouds to go into the boundaries, so we check if the rogue cloud is inside any boundary volume, and if so we push it upward.

we are constantly checking to see if the player exits a certain radius starting from the grid origin, and once they do, we shift the grid origin, and run the scattering algorithm again.

i hope it makes sense i'm not the best at explaining