- behind WOW_STATIC_MERGE=1, never-fade doodads, fading doodads and interior props bake into one mesh per 133-yard cell and material — −0.99 ms at the Stormwind gates, a wash in Lower Blackrock Spire, GPU flat
- the merged faders fade in-shader on the reference's own fading draw state, so the ramp is as smooth as an individual doodad's
- interior props carry their light-probe slot per vertex, and the arrival cover waits for every unbaked blob so a reveal never shows a hole
- a merge census (WOW_MERGE_CENSUS=1) prices each population before it is built — WMO group geometry merges nothing and stays individual
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
