The homelands, pass by pass
Once the five defenses worked, the places they happen in needed work. On 15 September the M4 pass gave each of the five seats an authored layout: named buildings and props, each with a collision class, sockets where work happens, lanes kept clear for walking, and regions of ground.
A bug hid in that change. The layouts compiled with no problems while an older save put its Human inside a new house’s solid footprint, unable to move: the check only asked whether the player stood in the right zone. A save standing inside a new building is now moved to clear ground on load, the same way every time.
The same day the brief widened. The lands and buildings were all very bare, and a longer loading time was an acceptable price for fuller ones.
Rejected, then accepted with a note
The first richer homelands were rejected. The second pass, V2, expanded the buildings, roofs, trees and rocks of all five homes, moved regional colour onto the existing ground mesh instead of laying a second turf floor over it, and baked sun and moon shadow maps while loading. Its bank of homeland models holds 144 assets: 684,172 triangles, 87.1 MB. V2 was accepted, with a note that it could go further and a question about the Fens.
The Fens is a marsh the fairies hold: a place on the map, not a playable people. It had missed V2’s ground and lighting work. On 16 September it gained 12 models of its own (five stilt huts, four boardwalks, three lanterns), reed banks, and pools that follow the actual sides of the boardwalks. Its water is floor colour plus highlight strips within 9 mm of the floor. There is no second pool sheet and no new surface to walk on.
V3 fitted furnishings to the loaded buildings: stores, planters, offerings and fishing baskets, 60 groups placed against wall, ledge, deck and ground supports. V4 added architecture: porches and roof brows on the Human houses, buttresses on the Dwarf forge, shelters and platform canopies in the Greenwood, arches at the Dark Elf barrows, layered hides and ridge yokes on the Ork tents, 57 groups in all. The fitting rejected eight V4 additions because they would have closed a door or a window.
What the counts do not say
V3 and V4 added 117 groups between them and still read as incremental. The review of V4’s twelve stills found fuller planting and more detail, and also broad plain foregrounds, building masses that look alike, and tree crowns cut off at the top of the frame. The lesson written down afterwards is that triangle and group counts do not measure a picture: composition has to be judged at the camera the player actually has.
Only V2 is accepted. The Fens, V3 and V4 were reviewed as standing stills, with no villagers, no HUD and no moving camera. The laptop’s heat ended several capture runs early, and one V3 view has no capture record; it is kept as an unknown, not relabelled. Richer homes cost loading time, which was accepted, and frame rate, which was not.