Floor 70
finish schedule

Jonas asked for a city "super sick and realistic" behind the pixel room. The room still renders at 640 × 360 and is scaled 3× with nearest filtering. The city is pre-rendered in Blender Cycles from Babel's own data and drawn at native resolution behind the world view. The world SubViewport is transparent where the curtain-wall glass is, so the city is sharp and the room is pixel art. Both frames below are single 1920 × 1080 captures of that composite from Godot (tools/art/look_city.tscn).

L-4Parallax: the camera moves ±3 m

L-5The plate: one strip, three depth layers

Every breakable box and piece of set dressing in Floor 70 and the training arena is now a voxel model on the characters' own grid (0.064 m, 2 screen pixels per voxel), so props and people read as one hand. Details are voxel paint: planks and gaps, steel straps, stencils, shipping labels, dents, rust runs, PV tags. The physics is unchanged, with the same box collider, hp and mass. When a prop breaks, the pieces are Blockwork blocks in the prop's own colour. Built by tools/vox/env_props.py with Armature's sculpt helpers.

P-5In the game: Ki, Shō, the lookout, Ketsu (1920 × 1080 captures of the real main scene)

Captured at 2560 × 1440 (a 3× world) and at 1700 × 1000 (a non-integer window, 2× world). The world scale is always a whole number with nearest filtering, no MSAA, FXAA or TAA is on, and Blockwork, the props and the rigs are crisp. The blur was the lettering. Signs and posters baked their text into 64 px/m textures inside the 640 × 360 world, where a linear filter shrank them to 30 px/m before the 3–4× scale-up. Now the world keeps each sign's panel, frame and housing (pixel art) plus an invisible text mark, and SignText sets the lettering at native resolution in the sign's own font, projected onto the sign by the level camera. The mark decides per pixel whether the text shows, so a thug in front hides the lettering along with the panel. Lit signs take their light from the world pixel under each glyph.

Fourteen new models from Jonas's floor picks, made with tools/vox/floor_props.py at the sizes of Drywall's tagged boxes. The tagged boxes switch to the models automatically (Props.dress_tagged runs in Stage before static batching, and the level batches the props one MultiMesh per model). Server racks alternate: every third one has the laundry out on its exhaust.

F71 moods: the floor is one level up and a few minutes later than F70, so the city plate stays at dawn throughout. The rooms run through:

• the farm: cool office tubes in grey morning light
• the cold aisles: server blue
• the patch room: warm tungsten
• the cooling plant: steam cyan
• the window: first sun raking in low
• the core cage: lit cyan by the core, then blacked out when the core breaks (Drywall's blackout)

L1. The characters get their own key and rim light, on a render layer that only the cast draws on. It follows Guilty Gear Xrd's per-character light and TF2's rims. The key is a weak warm light from the camera side. The rim is a cool light from behind and above, and it lands on the tops of heads, shoulders and fists. The floors keep their mood, and the gang stops sinking into the brick. On the Web at 1440p the paired A/B is within noise: −0.33 to +0.35 ms per spot over three runs, with no draw calls added. ?nocharlight switches it off.

C2 and H1. The garment is the crew, and one orange item marks the gang. Each role keeps its shape in every crew. The spawn tag is Hitlag's Enemy.crew, and VoxelRig.set_crew swaps in <model>_<crew>.vox at spawn.

• Toll Crew (F70): hi-vis lime over black hoodies, bone stripes, an orange beanie, a VISITOR lanyard.
• Karaoke Committee (the F70 Doorman and gallery): plum satin, gold piping, headphones round the neck, an orange rag.
• Netters (F71): utility orange, a bone band, white hard hats, cable coils in nail-polish colours.

Shape pass (Gallery's round 2; Jonas asked for "a circle guy, a triangle guy, a square guy"). Each role now has one primary shape that should read in solid black at 1×:

• Soldier ▲: narrow at the top, the hoodie's hem flaring, baggy cuffed trousers, long feet.
• Runner ▶: a short, 3-deep body leaning 25° even at rest, with the gold bag twice its old size as the broad end.
• Ballast ●: a ball of a body on short legs with a sunk head, concrete paint-tin fists and cement sacks.
• Doorman ■: a square torso under a flat white riot helmet with a smoked visor, on pillar legs. He stays square without the door.
• Netter ⌒: the hunch is built into the model and the head is pushed out. The pack is 1.4× as the hump, and the mast is the highest point.
• Lookout ⚲: a new model, with a big round head in headphones on a thin body and long legs.
• Big Rat ▮ (R2): the coat hangs open on a white vest with lapels, and its edges drop straight. The bone trophy is a hump on the far shoulder, and the forearms are taped.
• Enforcer ▼: pauldrons 1.2×, and the waist a row in on each side. The gloves are unchanged.

Saki and the Collector. Saki ⧗ is the hourglass. The top is a slate coat worn over the shoulders like a cape: a square yoke, a bone 3 on the back, and it hangs to the knee behind her. It is a prop, so she can shrug it off. Her waist is where the boiler suit's arms are knotted, and the suit's legs flare to wide cuffs. She has bone hand wraps, a scar, and her hair pulled back with a grey streak. Her one orange item is the vault key's lanyard. She is built on the ganger skeleton, so Armature's saki_* poses fit as authored. The Collector ◆ wears a slate puffer that is widest at the middle, with his head sunk into the collar and the hood lined in orange. He carries THE BOOK, an oxblood ledger, under his near arm.

F73. Fifteen models are written in tools/vox/market_props.py and baked, from the F73 picks:

• the fish stall carrying the three-token price board (lift credit, Toll tokens and bus tokens)
• the ice bed and the gutting table
• the Stairwell Kings' landing desk and their water pump
• the hawker's cart
• the rice cooker, remade as one older than the tower and repaired many times (F71's router cooker is now the same model)
• a washer with the lift-credit reader
• the Nerps! oxygen bar and its cylinders
• the prayer-app shrine with its QR code and real incense
• a drone mail slot
• a fish crate, a fish and a hen

F73 light and water (Afterimage's note). The water takes the room's light, and its patches came in three greens. Under warm light they read as camouflage, and the sluice's teal made the foam mint, a cyan that belongs to High Water. Two changes fix it:

• The light: the mood keys move towards neutral, the warmth stays in the lamps' pools, and the sluice is slate grey-blue.
• The water: its palette uses close values in a grey drain green with bone-grey foam, so the streaks of the current carry the read.

F75. These models are written in tools/vox/crown_props.py:

• The vault door: stepped steel with twelve bolt heads and a maker's plate. VaultDoor still spins the brass handwheel a notch at every hard hit, and the dents darken the model.
• The security wall's steel door: riveted, with a vision slot, push bar, kick plate, hazard strip and lock block.
• The ledger room: shelves of the old ledgers and THE BOOK's lectern.
• Saki's desk: black walnut, a blotter with a Final Notice on it, a banker's lamp, a note counter, cash, ledgers and a phone.
• Saki's chair: black leather with a high back.

F74, the gang's own street (tools/vox/street_props.py, on Drywall's level-lab tags):

• The garden: raised beds with greens, chillies and bean canes, the rain tank, a bench, trellises with vines and hanging pots.
• The hot-bed capsules: round hatches, a lamp inside, the rota taped on.
• The mall directory.
• The food court: tables with dinner left on them, and the bolted seat rows. One seat model repeats at a 0.6 m pitch along any row.
• The pachinko hall: the islands, the back bank, and the dead machine turned shrine.
• The gym: paint-tin weights, benches and the heavy bag.
• The ring: an off-white canvas with PV-orange ropes on the near side and Tower Three slate at the back, under its lighting truss.
• The cinema: the torn screen and the champion's belt.

This is the select running live. The tower is built in code from voxels.

• Inside: each floor's own level sits on its back wall, people walk the floors, and a small CCTV camera with a blinking REC lamp is bolted where Opticals' feed looks from.
• Outside: the gangs' build-outs are bolted onto the core's wings, in faded paint, with lit windows, AC units, awnings, dishes and tanks. There is scaffolding with people on it, gangways, laundry, drain pipes and cable sags. The signs are the Oh-Di clinic, a TOWER 3 blade sign and the 水位上升中 ticker. On the crown are water tanks, antennae with blinking tips, red beacons and the HIGH WATER billboard. Rain falls, the drowned city stands behind, and foam marks where the sea meets the tower.
• Selecting: the selected floor slides out like a drawer, and Opticals' CRT swings out on its arm to show that floor's feed: infrared when the floor is dark, torn when it is flooded. Confirm dives the camera into the tube.
• The finale: the sea rises floor by floor over the crown.

Web cost (cold headless Chrome, 1904×985, RTX 3070 via ANGLE/D3D11, tools/art/dollhouse_bench.tscn):

• Open versus closed (paired A/B): −0.00 to +0.03 ms of frame interval.
• One-time cost: the build takes 90–110 ms and opening takes 1.6 ms. The first draw spends 1.7 s compiling shaders, down from 6 s once everything moved onto one self-lit voxel shader with no scene lights. Readout will create the dollhouse where that stall can't be seen.
• Desktop: about 100 draw calls and 1.0 ms of GPU at 1080p.

All four are in-engine renders (tools/art/tower_lab.tscn -- look=voxel|schematic|flap; D3 is Opticals' monitor_wall on optics-lab). They use the real plates and the C6 states of a demo run: F70 dark, F73 flooded and burnt, F74's rig down. None of them touches tower_select.gd yet. The pick becomes a visual layer behind Readout's selection, with one hook from him.

When a contract ends, the floor is boiled down into a small record kept with its LEVEL REGISTER entry. The record holds four things. First, where water stands or has left tide marks, and where soot and blast scorch are, all read off Sim's cells and scar grid in 5-pixel slices along the floor. Second, whether the power is out, and where the emergency red hangs. Third, what came down: dropped decks and breached walls. The cutaway draws that record over the floor's plate. Flooded floors hold water to a tide line. Burnt floors carry char along the floor, flame tongues up the walls and soot pooled under the ceiling, with a few embers still in it. Blacked-out floors stay dark except for the one red lamp. Collapses show as ragged holes with their rubble heaped below. Each floor's overlay is baked once into one texture, about 1.5 ms, one floor per frame as the cutaway opens. After that it costs one textured rect a frame, plus a dim and a pulse on dark floors. The newest run's damage replaces the last.

Every playable floor is rendered from the level itself: orthographic, straight on, end to end at one scale. The floor is shot in eight segments so the moods follow along the lane, and it's transparent above the ceiling and through the glass. Each plate is 1520 × 184, twice Readout's 760 × 92 band. The floor fills the lower half, and his line art keeps the ceiling above it. F72 has no level, so it stays his drawing. The plates are in assets/ui/cutaway/f70–f75.png, made by tools/art/cutaway_plates.tscn.

The Sim's cell state is a 0.5 m RGBA8 texture: wet, charge, heat and fuel gas. Blockwork samples it on every floor block, and the rules read the same cells, so what you see is what the rules read. The Sim binds it at floor start. The states live in value and texture, never in a new hue. Charge is a cold white, and embers are a warm white; night vision keeps both.

• Wet: blocky mirror puddles with a lit lip and glints, damp round them.
• Charge: single blocks flash for one 12 Hz frame, and the seams hum, shimmering block by block. The flashes are dense enough, and the hum bright enough, to hold up under the night-vision grade.
• Heat: char with a grey ash rim round the burn, and a few glowing seams in the hottest cells.
• Gas: drifting bands at knee height, in a 4 × 4 ordered dither.

Web cost (headless Chrome at 2560 × 1440, a cold browser per run, ?quiet, and Slipway's wall-clock frame timing). It's a paired A/B at three beats per floor, with states bound and unbound in alternating 2 s windows:

• F73: +0.18, −0.07, −0.13 ms. With every cell at 0.8 in every channel (the worst case): +0.13, −0.30, +0.17.
• F71: +0.07, +0.23, 0.00 ms. Worst case: +0.27, +0.06, −0.10.

Every surface is sampled in 0.125 m blocks. The shader picks each block's colour from a pattern: board-formed concrete with joints and tie holes, carpet tile with a quarter-turned pile and a corporate band every 6 m, terrazzo chips, plywood grain rows, steel plate with seams and rust. A one-pixel rim is lit on top edges and dark on side edges, from the BoxMesh UVs, and draws every brick's mortar line and every fracture piece's outline. Blender props arrive already remeshed into blocks, with AO baked per block.

A-2 · A-3 · A-4Destruction and mood

A-5 · A-6 · A-7Style tiles, prop kit, signs

The same Blender props, chamfered (0.02–0.03 m, two segments) with Cycles AO baked into the vertex colours. Structure uses StandardMaterial with object- or world-space triplanar trim textures drawn in GDScript: formwork with drips, carpet tiles, panel seams with rivets, stone chips. They are 128 px over 4 m, so one texel covers one screen pixel. This route is the intro's pipeline, run at game scale.

A custom light() quantises light into three bands and breaks the band edges with a 4 × 4 Bayer dither on the 640 × 360 grid. Shade is tinted cool, light warm. Every mesh gets an ink hull one pixel wide: boxes grow along sign(VERTEX) so their corners stay closed, and other meshes grow along their normals. The voxel rigs are switched to the same ink shader, so the characters and the world are drawn in one hand.

Jonas: "we could start adding lighting, it'd add a lot too, windows and a city parallax in the background". This section compares the techniques in route A's frame (the other routes use the same layers: B raw, C dithered).

26-1Lighting on Compatibility and the Web

26-3Measured cost (Web export, Chrome, and desktop)

A bench build of this mock (art_mock.tscn as the main scene through an art_bench feature tag) runs each configuration for 5 s while the camera pans ±4 m. The machine is the dev PC (RTX 3070) in Chrome via ANGLE/D3D11. On the Web, frame time is locked to vsync, so the useful columns there are whether it holds 60 and its worst frame. The desktop run is uncapped (vsync off) and shows the headroom.

Web frames are vsync-locked, so 16.7 ms means "made it". I also tried to read main-thread render CPU time on the Web (viewport_get_measured_render_time_cpu), but it returned implausible values (tens to hundreds of ms at a steady 60 fps), so those numbers are not reported.

The shading choice does not decide Web performance. Draw calls and first-use shader compiles do: B's 125 ms hitch is the same problem as the known 1.5 s freeze at the first collapse. Whatever route is picked, its shaders join Drywall's Warmup. An integrated-GPU laptop has not been measured; that is the next check once a route is chosen.

26-4Windows and the city: five techniques

26-6Parallax: the camera pans 8 m

26-7The view from Tower 3, rendered from Babel's data

Scroll sideways. Night and dusk, 140°, the Pinnacle (Takam Tower, 700 m) left of centre, and the ridge on the right. It is boxes and one window shader, lit by one uniform. Neighbours closer than 160 m are left out; the interior-mapped near layer plays them.

I searched the local asset library first. Proposed download list: none. Every route is buildable from code plus what is already in the local library. Drywall's round-1 finding holds: kit meshes as they come "read as two games" next to the voxel rigs. The useful way to bring a pack in is as geometry fed through our own finish (remesh, flat or bake), never as-is.

Provenance. Once a route is picked, the asset provenance list gets a section "Environment (tools/art/)". It lists the props (authored by Claude as Plumb, written as code in props_blender.py, Blender 5.0 headless, primitives, bevel, remesh and AO bake, no image or 3D generation), the shaders, the Babel panorama (rendered from the setting data by babel_pano.gd), and any Kenney geometry with its credit. Like the voxel characters, these are written as code by an AI assistant.

Jonas picked C, the High Water recruitment film, and asked for better assets than voxel ("clashes with the brand look"). The proposal already on the table is glossy code-modelled CGI for the ad with a closing cut to "actual footage". That fits one pipeline: every hero asset is a Blender script, and each script exports a glossy finish for the film and a block finish for the game. The ad and the game then show the same object, which makes the cut to "actual footage" a joke about the same thing.

Pipeline: tools/art/*.py (Blender headless, -b --python, about 20 s for 8 props × 3 finishes) → build/art/props/*.glb → Godot. The blender MCP bridge was not running, so everything here ran headless. The Hyper3D and Hunyuan generators on that bridge are never used. About 12.5 h for the film's heroes, shared with Opticals: they own shots and lighting, and Plumb owns models.

1. Route: A, B or C, or a cross (for example A with C's outline only on characters and thrown bodies). I recommend A.
2. Gang colour: the brief says Petty Vermin are orange and rust. The level greybox uses PV pink neon. I used orange throughout; confirm, and Drywall's Pal.NEON[0] changes with it.
3. Moods per section: night, flicker, blackout after the Toll, as proposed in 26-1? Dusk could instead be Floor 75's (Saki's glass floor).
4. Hero pipeline: may Plumb model the film's enforcer body per bone, as above, with Opticals owning shots?
5. Kenney geometry through the remesh: allowed (CC0, credited), or strictly our own props?