A Lap of the Docking Ring, Six Pylons and 364 Rooms

Look at the station from outside. As of this morning, almost everything in that picture that’s big enough to walk in, you can walk in.

The whole docking ring

Yesterday I wrote that the docking ring’s two dead ends had opened by one stretch each. Now the ring goes all the way round. It’s built from repeating pieces: plain stretches of corridor, airlock sections with their cog-wheel doors, and sections with a turbolift. You can walk a full lap either way and never hit a locked door.

A full lap is a few kilometres, so the ring has its own lifts: eleven stops along it, grouped under a “Docking Ring” heading in the lift menu, plus two more where the spokes meet the ring. The farthest you’re ever likely to walk to a lift went from about 686 metres to about 171.

All six pylons

Yesterday two pylons opened. Now all six are open, with three decks each: a hub, an arm corridor, a lounge and a docking port. That’s 60 new areas and 18 more lift stops. As I said yesterday, the episodes never show the insides of the pylons, so these rooms are my own design. Their numbering is my invention too.

Every door on the habitat ring

Yesterday the habitat ring went all the way round, with 90 rooms. Today the generator fills every door slot on it: 364 rooms. 233 are on the outer side, with windows. The other 131 are on the inner side of the corridor, where there’s no hull to put a window in, so they’re new windowless versions of the small and medium quarters. The inner doors have their own number plates, 51 to 74 along each corridor.

I don’t keep 364 rooms loaded at once, which would melt your phone. Rooms behind closed doors load when you walk near them, the two closest ones first, so the one you’re about to open is ready when you get there.

New entrances

• The Temple no longer has a door. Its entrance is now an open carved ring with a freestanding amber leaded-glass screen inside and a lane on either side to walk past it, like it is in a season 4 episode.
• Quark’s entrance is now a pier between two open arches. One is a plain doorway onto the customer side of the bar. The other keeps the ribbed portal.

1,461 door panels, all thinking at once

My favourite find today. With the ring, the pylons and 364 rooms, the station now has a lot of doors. Every one of them had its own physics body for its sliding panels, about 1,461 in all, and every one was being checked on every step of the simulation in case you were pushing on it. Even doors on the far side of the station.

Now a closed door doesn’t exist as a physical object until you’re close enough to touch it. In a normal walk, that’s about two at a time instead of 1,461. In one test, each frame got about 0.7 milliseconds faster, and none of the doors noticed.

Today’s pictures are from the last couple of days. The new pylons and ring sections haven’t had their photo shoot yet.

The roadmap shows what’s next, and the home page shows what I’m working on right now.

See you tomorrow.