Making a building look's outline read at 25 meters

The house look, the cream-and-steel company housing, now has four pieces that change the roofline: a water tank on stilts, louvred ridge ventilators, a stack on the gable end and a stepped false front over the door. It also covers 98 more members, so shops, galleries and stairs are galvanized plate and cast concrete instead of timber and brick. None of it is installed in the shipped assets yet. The film runs on a private build.

Why does the outline need its own pieces?

The first wave of the house look changed colors, but the plans are the same as steampunk’s, so the silhouette was too. A look should read differently from 25 meters, where trim doesn’t show.

The four pieces are laid by a rule, not placed by hand.

• The tank has 2.4 m stilts. There is one per flat-roofed building of two decks or more, standing on a corner deck square.
• The ridge ventilators sit over each middle square of a ridge three squares or longer, never on an end square and never within 1.6 m of a chimney. They lift the ridge 0.88 m.
• The end stack is one per gabled building, at the apex height read from the gable’s ridge anchor, and it stands 1.6 m over the apex with four pots in two pairs. Lean-tos and dead buildings don’t get one.
• The false front sits on the street face’s parapet nearest the street door. The middle is 1.5 m high and the shoulders are 0.9 m.

The rule is written twice, once in the kit’s study and once in the game’s BuildingHouseDetails, which runs last when a plan is laid. A change to one is a change to the other, and a test of the game’s side passes 80 checks without the members and 125 with them.

Why did the water tank move?

The judge sent the first film back. The end stack read clearly at 25 m and the ridge ventilator only just, like a second chimney block. The tank was in the middle of each roof, and on the four-storey tenement it shrank to a nub behind the parapet. The false front was a 0.95 m block that looked like a plant plinth.

The judge gave a rule for it. From 25 m a roof piece set back s meters behind the parapet loses about 0.46 times s of its height. In the middle of the roof that costs 1.8 m plus the parapet, and at the corner nearest the street it costs about 0.7 m. So I moved the tank to the corner and didn’t make it taller. The second rule is that anything under about 1.2 m over the roofline is detail, not outline. That’s why the false front went from 0.95 m to 1.5 m with 0.9 m shoulders, across the whole door bay. At 25 m it now looks like a step over the door. It’s still modest.

I kept the sizes a little over real on purpose. Stilts are 2.4 m against a real 2.0 m, and the ridge ventilator is 0.88 m against 0.7 m. Both are within 0.4 m of real, and reading at 25 m matters more.

The same round caught the outside stair and gangway still in rust brown, which is steampunk’s color. They are gray-green steel now, and the dead rust is only for dead steel. The cog sign became a plain board in this look through a small table, SIGN_BY_LOOK, that swaps a sign shape by name for one look. The tankard stays, since it says tavern and not steampunk. The judge also noted that no shot showed the house street door, one painted steel leaf 1.48 m wide, so the film has one now.

Why did the crack test fail on pieces I didn’t touch?

After the revise the assembly check reported new open edges: 1 on one plan and 4 on each of two more. None of them was on a new piece. They were on the core eave and conduit members, where a ray meets a back face lying exactly on a front face, and which one wins depends on the order of the ray tree. The same mesh could pass or fail depending on how it was built. I gave the crack test a mode that counts those coincident faces apart, and the house’s assembly check subtracts them. Every one of the 17 plans now reports 0 new open edges, and nothing floats.

The 9 members the revise changed rebuilt with 0 faults and passed 9 of 9, twice, and again in Godot. A sample of 14 unchanged members rebuilt to identical bytes. The kit build at landing is 516 members with 0 failed.

Also done

• Still brown in the house look: the porch pergola, the oriel boxes and the shopfront frames.
• Still on the list: a pipe run along bridge parapets, new sign shapes, and the steampunk house’s narrow door, which isn’t installed yet.