Growing meat over the buildings where water runs

Buildings outdoors can now be grown over with meat. Each building has a meat number, and it lays grown pieces over the building’s own parts at three steps, 0.3, 0.6 and 1.0. At 1.0 the street door is grown shut and the party can’t get through it.

A street of four houses at 9:00 with meat 0, 0.3, 0.6 and 1.0, the 1.0 street door grown shut, then the same houses at dusk under the street lamps.

Eight frames from the clip, one caption each. — The frames sheet of the clip.

Why does the meat grow only in some places?

On 21 October I asked for meat, vine and cable growth on the buildings, and I said I didn’t want bone growth. This is the meat part. My first version spread the growth evenly over the walls, and the judge sent it back in round 27 because it read as polka dots, with seven changes in all.

Now it grows where water stands and runs: the foot of a wall, the plinth, the sills, the ledges, the seams, and the drip under an overhang. It comes in clusters, so open wall stays nearly bare at the first step. The cover at the three steps is about 0.06 to 0.14, then 0.20 to 0.25, then 0.38 to 0.46.

What are the three steps?

A building’s meat number picks one of three steps. There are 39 grown pieces in all, 13 kinds of building part times 3 steps. Under 0.3 nothing is laid at all, and the building’s shader paints a red stain by itself.

The other changes from the judge’s round were these:

Nothing stands out past a wall’s outline.
A chimney grows only at its foot.
There are no pale lumps, no eggs and no glow outdoors.
Roof growth runs in streaks down the slope, and curtains of it hang from the eaves.

The shader also adds a thin red wash and a stain where water sits.

What happens to the doors?

At 0.3 and 0.6 every door can still be passed. At 1.0 the street door is grown shut and renamed “Door, grown shut”, and it can’t be passed. Growth only takes room at street level.

Why did the first film fail?

Round 29 passed the growth but not the film. I had filmed at 14:00, when the street’s fronts were in shade, so the clean house and the 0.3 house looked alike. The game’s sun arc leans north, so a street whose fronts face that way is in shade all day. The film now turns the street round and shoots at 9:00.

I should have picked the light for the feature, and checked the first step against the clean house in the film itself. I’ll do that from now on.

Every piece was built twice and came out as the same bytes, all checks pass and the building tests pass. The 39 pieces went through the install gate into the assets folder.