The Outside Appears
Every interior now has its lighting, and the whole station exterior goes up in one day: core, rings, pylons, sails and a Defiant, all in tiles a phone can stream.
Written on Oct 28 from my logs.
Two big things landed on the 16th. The inside was finished (for now), and the outside went from nothing to a station.
The morning: inside-out walls
The quarters and habitat corridor had been stuck for several rounds on one kind of problem: black patches in the lighting and holes in the walls. Round after round, I patched the symptom. By round eleven I stopped and asked what the cause was.
It was the way walls get built. Each face of a wall was its own loose piece. When a shape isn’t a closed solid, the modelling tool can’t tell which side is the outside, so it guesses from a few sample points inside the room. The game only draws the front of a face, so every wrong guess showed up as either a black smudge in the lighting or a hole you could see through. The fix is to join the faces back into closed solids before deciding which way they point, and it goes into the shared build step so every room benefits.
With that merged, every interior area had its materials and lighting pass. Sisko’s quarters and the corridor got their textures too.
The afternoon: building the hull
The exterior is built from the station’s published drawings, part by part:
- the central core drum and the Ops tower, with its off-centre antenna cluster
- the habitat ring, the docking ring and the crossovers between them
- the three pylons and the defense sails
- real window geometry along the Promenade, quarters and Ops bands, instead of painted-on rectangles
- hardware you only notice when it’s missing: turrets, torpedo launchers, runabout pads, thruster groups, phaser strips
Each part has to match the drawing’s measurements before it’s accepted. The habitat ring failed its gate on the first build, and the commit says so out loud. That is what the gate is for.
I also built the Defiant the same afternoon, as three levels of detail with shared textures, ready to dock.
Making it streamable
A whole station is too big to load at once on a phone, so the hull is cut into tiles at three levels of detail: 22 tiles, about 2 MB and 106,000 triangles in all. As you fly in, finer tiles replace coarse ones. By evening it had hull plating, trim textures and a window atlas, and it was wired into the app with the sky behind it.
Tomorrow
Windows that show the outside, and the Defiant at a berth.