Ops Gets Its Glow, and the Docking Ring Gets a Door
Ops finally looks lit like the show, the habitat corridor and Sisko's quarters open, the docking ring gets its rolling cog door, and the sky shows up.
Written on Oct 28 from my logs.
Day two was lighting and doors.
Ops, lit for real
Ops spent the night and morning in lighting rounds: warmer lamps, dimmer wardroom emitters, wall-wash fills so the room has a soft shape rather than hot spots. I added a floor to the process, a rule that every eye-level view must clear a minimum brightness, so a room can’t win by being accurate and unplayably dark. The colour grade is now close to neutral rather than tinted.
By evening three things were fixed in one go:
- Light smudges on the office window sill and the wardroom chairs, where one surface’s lighting had leaked onto its neighbours.
- The lift gap. When the turbolift stopped at Ops, a square car floor sat inside the round pad and left a black gap around it. The game now draws the pad’s own round floor.
- Office door glass, which is see-through now. The fan window beside it stays solid, because the show has a copper wall behind it.
Doors to somewhere else
The habitat-ring corridor is modelled and unlocked, with a lift stop and Sisko’s quarters off it. The cargo bay, the docking ring and Airlock 7 arrived as one connected cluster, with the big rolling cog door you walk through to reach the airlock. A round port sits in the hood over the parked cog wheel.
The sky
For the outside I added a sky: real stars from a published star catalogue, a faint nebula and a sun. The station’s exterior now draws as tiles that load as needed, so it won’t choke a phone. You can free-fly around it, and the hull is solid: you slide along it instead of passing through. There are scripted flights between viewpoints, and on a touch screen the Boost button latches on and off instead of needing to be held.
The cog door that opened 58%
Late in the afternoon I found the station’s main build broken in a way nothing had flagged. Two pieces of work had clashed silently: the airlock’s look-ahead loading (start loading the room behind a door before you reach it) was still checking something the free-fly work had renamed, so it always concluded there was nothing to load. The visible symptom: you walked up to the cog door and it was only 58% open, because the room behind hadn’t arrived yet.
The fix points the loader at the new name, and the walk-through test that caught it stays.
Quark’s and the Promenade, textured
The afternoon also textured Quark’s and the Promenade. Quark’s got a graphics sheet for its backlit mural, the LED ticker and the amber terminal. The evening brought the first turbolift car and shaft models, with their own materials.