Light Modes & Hue Sorting

Glowing light beams that look stunning in dark mode (such as ambient AI streaming beams) frequently degenerate into muddy grey smudges on light surfaces.

Additive Light Only Works on Dark Surfaces

On dark backgrounds, light beams combine via additive blending (CSS mix-blend-mode: plus-lighter): $$\text{Color}_{\text{Result}} = \min(1, \text{Color}_A + \text{Color}_B)$$ Where two beams intersect, luminance accumulates toward pure white ((1, 1, 1)), recreating radiant beams crossing in the night sky.

Why Glows Turn Muddy Grey in Light Mode

Light-mode canvases already sit near pure white:

• Additive blending fails on white backgrounds because pixels cannot get brighter.
• Blending transparent layers normally calculates the average color: Two hues separated by more than 120° on the color wheel (e.g. yellow and blue) average directly into dull grey!
• Instead of radiant illumination, light surfaces end up covered in dirty, desaturated smudges.

Light-Mode Adjacent Hue Ordering Pipeline

To maintain crisp vibrancy on light canvases, TuffEx enforces an adjacent hue ordering constraint:

• In light mode, overlapping light cones must restrict their angular hue delta to under 60° (e.g. cyan, sky blue, mint green).
• Complementary hues (blue and orange, purple and yellow) are strictly forbidden from co-occurring in the same spatial frame.

TxPrismGlow Dual-Hue Architecture

The TxPrismGlow component implements two completely isolated hue generation pipelines:

// Dark mode: Full spectrum dispersion accumulating toward white
export const DARK_HUE_ORDER = [0, 60, 120, 180, 240, 300];

// Light mode: Constrained to adjacent cool spectrum (< 60° delta)
export const LIGHT_HUE_ORDER = [210, 230, 250, 190, 220];

Automated test gates in prism-glow.test.ts continuously assert that light-mode hue orders never cross the 120° grey-collapse threshold.