Light the windows with the real campus

sermuns commented

2026-10-19 21:41:36 +00:00

Owner

Follows #61. The campus is uniformly moonlit at night (#39 changed the street
lights, not the buildings), and every shell is a flat wall with a flat cap. The
presence feed gives each building a live number, and the 14-day window gives its
own peak. At 03:00 the campus is nearly empty; at 11:00 it is full. That is
exactly the signal a window grid wants.

Proposal: give the mapped buildings windows — a grid of small emissive quads on
the facade, one per floor bay — and light a fraction of them at night from the
building's live presence / peak. The result is not a literal room-by-room
occupancy display; it is the campus breathing: a few lit windows in B-huset at
midnight, most of A-huset at ten in the morning, Kårallen bright through lunch.

Why it fits:

SceneSpec is built once, but the lit fraction changes every ten minutes; a
small instanced window batch with a per-instance lit flag can be updated
without touching the shell soup.
The renderer already has per-object albedo and a lit pipeline, so an emissive
window variant is a pipeline twin, not a new renderer.
The buildings that matter are the ones the feed covers: A, B, C, D, E, Fysik,
Studenthuset, Kårallen, Terra, TEMA, I, Zenit and Vallfarten.
The same window grid is a daytime improvement: the shells currently have no
scale cues at all.

Scope: the grid and the night light. Do not try to model individual rooms or
furniture behind the glass. If the feed is stale or absent, fall back to a dim
fixed fraction rather than a lie.

A building's windows are a better place for this than NPCs: the campus can look
inhabited without inventing people, and the number stays true to the source.

Related

#61 the feed
#39 the street lights
#7 the lighting
#48 the snow that lands on the roofs
#14 facade colours
#13 roof shapes

Follows #61. The campus is uniformly moonlit at night (#39 changed the street lights, not the buildings), and every shell is a flat wall with a flat cap. The presence feed gives each building a live number, and the 14-day window gives its own peak. At 03:00 the campus is nearly empty; at 11:00 it is full. That is exactly the signal a window grid wants. Proposal: give the mapped buildings windows — a grid of small emissive quads on the facade, one per floor bay — and light a fraction of them at night from the building's live presence / peak. The result is not a literal room-by-room occupancy display; it is the campus breathing: a few lit windows in B-huset at midnight, most of A-huset at ten in the morning, Kårallen bright through lunch. Why it fits: - `SceneSpec` is built once, but the lit fraction changes every ten minutes; a small instanced window batch with a per-instance lit flag can be updated without touching the shell soup. - The renderer already has per-object albedo and a `lit` pipeline, so an emissive window variant is a pipeline twin, not a new renderer. - The buildings that matter are the ones the feed covers: A, B, C, D, E, Fysik, Studenthuset, Kårallen, Terra, TEMA, I, Zenit and Vallfarten. - The same window grid is a daytime improvement: the shells currently have no scale cues at all. Scope: the grid and the night light. Do not try to model individual rooms or furniture behind the glass. If the feed is stale or absent, fall back to a dim fixed fraction rather than a lie. A building's windows are a better place for this than NPCs: the campus can look inhabited without inventing people, and the number stays true to the source. --- **Related** - #61 the feed - #39 the street lights - #7 the lighting - #48 the snow that lands on the roofs - #14 facade colours - #13 roof shapes

sermuns added the

feature request

hard

labels

2026-10-19 22:13:48 +00:00

sermuns added this to the Living campus milestone

2026-10-19 22:18:51 +00:00

sermuns commented

2026-10-19 22:46:19 +00:00

Author

Owner

This is the best of the presence follow-ups: no new data, a bake-time window grid, and a per-instance lit flag that updates without touching the shell soup. The fallback to a dim fixed fraction when the feed is stale keeps it honest. Keep it to the grid and the night light — no room-level occupancy.

sermuns referenced this issue

2026-10-20 08:49:25 +00:00

Draw a real sky, horizon haze and sky ambient #79

sermuns referenced this issue

2026-10-20 08:49:27 +00:00

Add a near shadow map for moving casters #81

sermuns referenced this issue

2026-10-20 08:49:28 +00:00

Bloom the emissives and night lights #84

sermuns referenced this issue

2026-10-20 08:49:34 +00:00

Fade between day and night #92