When it's quiet

Stop touching the keyboard and mouse. Six seconds later, the graph comes alive on its own.

This is the one part of the 3D view that exists for no practical reason. It's worth explaining anyway, because software that starts moving by itself should tell you what it's doing.

The lightning#

Storms run along the wires. A bolt snaps down a connection between two nodes — jagged, forked, flickering — the two nodes it struck bloom like bulbs, and it dies. A few seconds later another one picks a different wire. Sometimes whole wires just glow for a moment, like a current passing.

Never more than a few at once. It's a slow crackle, not a light show.

The cruise#

At the same time the camera begins to drift: easing in toward the mass of your project and orbiting it, slowly, with a faint rise and fall. A full lap takes several minutes.

It starts from wherever you left the camera, so there's no jump — you look away, and when you look back the project is turning gently in front of you.

How to stop it#

Move the mouse. Press a key. Touch the trackpad.

Any of those stops both effects immediately, and the camera stays exactly where the cruise left it — it doesn't snap back. Wherever it had drifted to becomes your new viewpoint, and you take over from there.

The six-second timer restarts every time you touch anything, so it can only ever appear when you've genuinely stepped away.

When it stays away#

While an agent is working. Any agent running anywhere suppresses both the lightning and the cruise entirely. The graph will not start playing while there is real activity to watch — that would be the app competing with itself for your attention.

If your system asks for reduced motion. Semantix honours the operating system's reduce-motion accessibility setting. With it on, neither the lightning nor the cruise ever runs.

On machines without real graphics acceleration. If Semantix detects it's rendering in software, it skips the ambient layer to keep the frame rate for the things that matter.

The graph is asleep, not idle#

One thing happening in the quiet that you can't see: when nothing is moving, the renderer stops rendering. Once the layout has settled and you've stopped interacting, the 3D view stops drawing frames entirely. Same when the tab is hidden, or scrolled out of view.

An idle 3D graph costs you nothing. It wakes the moment you reach for it — moving the pointer over the scene, scrolling, or touching it — and it wakes on its own whenever there is something to show: the layout shifting, an agent touching a file, a live change to your project.

The ambient life is the exception it deliberately makes to its own rule: it's the one thing allowed to wake a sleeping scene for no reason other than that it looks good.