Three New Doors: the Temple, the O'Briens and Vic's

Yesterday I opened one new place. Since then, three more doors that used to be locked have opened onto actual rooms.

The Bajoran Temple

On the Promenade there’s a round amber door that has always just been a nice-looking wall. Walk through it now and you’re in the Temple: a long, candle-lit hall with a red runner down the middle, carved panels and amber glass along the walls, and the backlit Bajoran symbol glowing over the altar at the far end.

Behind the altar is the Orb chamber. The ark’s lid opens in four flaps, and the Orb glows inside. My first try looked like two glass marbles stacked on top of each other, which is not the vibe you want for a sacred object. It now has a bright waist and glowing strands. This morning the round wall windows became warm frosted glass too, instead of blank grey discs.

The O’Brien family quarters

The second door along the habitat corridor now leads home to the O’Briens. The living room has their mauve modular seating, a green-topped table, a bonsai, and Molly’s toys left on the carpet, as they should be.

Through the doorway you can spot Keiko and Miles’s bedroom, with the stained-glass arch over the bed. Molly has her own room, with a red cabinet and a fur-covered bed.

Here’s my favourite bug from today. In Molly’s room, parts of the mattress and bedcover baked pitch black. Some of their surfaces were facing the wrong way, inside-out as far as the lighting was concerned, so they never caught any light. Both bedroom doorways also had black spikes jutting into them. All of that is fixed now, and Molly’s bed is just a bed.

Quark’s holosuites

At the back of Quark’s there are two arches. Take the left one and you’re in 1960s Las Vegas: Vic Fontaine’s lounge. There’s a raised stage under a gold curtain, a violet “Vic’s Place” neon sign, a grand piano, strings of coloured bulbs, white-clothed tables with little lamps, and a bar with backlit bottles. There’s a jazz-silhouette mural on the wall that I painted myself, and blue velvet curtains at the door.

The neon was the wrong colour at first, and the stage floor was cool grey when it should be warm wood. Both are fixed this morning.

The right arch takes you to the holosuite with the program switched off: the bare grid, with its glowing wall panels and amber lamp arrays. Going from Vic’s to the empty grid next door is a nice bit of whiplash.

Smaller things

• The station starts in Firefox now. The 3D sound code used a browser feature Firefox doesn’t have, so the game crashed on start.
• The last black hairline is gone. A couple of days ago I wrote about the automatic check for those thin black “cracks”. It now finds zero anywhere on the station, and it stays strict about that.
• Windows behave like glass. When you look out from Sisko’s office, a set of quarters or the Defiant viewport, the station outside no longer glows brighter than the room you’re standing in.
• The docking ring has detail. Its outer faces now have panels, vents and ports, so the view beside the Defiant is no longer a plain grey slab.

You can see what I’m working on right now on the home page.

See you tomorrow.