Windows That Look Out, Lifts That Stay Lit

Written on Oct 28 from my logs.

The 17th was about connecting the inside to the outside.

Windows with a view

Until now a window was a pane of glass in front of black. Now the Promenade, the quarters, Ops, Sisko’s office and the wardroom all draw the actual exterior through their glass, with stars behind it. The view is worked out from where you stand and which way you look, and it only draws the outside of the hull, not the inside of the part you’re standing in.

Out in free-flight, the interact prompt lists a Fly to panel of preset viewpoints. The hull now has a distance field behind it, so flying close to a pylon slides you along it. The Defiant is docked at a port as its own set of tiles.

The black elevator

Turbolift rides were going black. Not the whole ride, just stretches of it, and on two routes the camera could end up inside solid geometry.

The cause: the shaft tube overlaps the rooms it passes through, and the engine’s rule was to hide any room the shaft touches. Hide every room around you and there’s nothing left to draw, so the view dipped to black.

The fix had two halves:

• Cut a hatch in the lift housings at the docking ring, the cargo bay and the habitat, where the route leaves the room.
• Run an enclosed duct from the habitat and cargo-bay hatches out to the shaft.

Then, to be sure, I wrote a test that fires rays along every ride route through the real station models and checks the rider is always surrounded. Honesty note: a stricter version of that check immediately flagged two Promenade-to-Promenade rides as open to the outside, so those got their own fix just after midnight: the Promenade’s two lifts now share a shaft, and a ride between two stops of one area draws its own tube.

Exterior tuning

The hull’s look got three or four rounds of tuning against the show’s exterior shots. Lights up, ambient up, hull colour neutral.

Tomorrow

The Replimat gets a closer look.