Stephen <mca### [at] aolcom> wrote:

> And I have noticed that people who do what you are doing....

Rough layout and then piecewise elaboration and improvement?

> I disagree with all the comments about the "hidden" passage. I think
> that you have got it just right. It is magical, you know. And doesn't
> need to be realistic.
>
> But I think the carpet should be scaled a bit wider

I have sort of wondered exactly how this was supposed to work:

The whole of the centre of the floor had disappeared into the wall opposite to
the fireplace, and the rough steps led down into a kind of passage that ran in
the direction of the unfinished house.  "This is the entrance," said Jennings,
"it works from a concealed button on the wall.  Electricity is used.  You see
why the sides of the floor are left bare; the carpet has quite disappeared.

Trying to translate this gadget from the book into something visual, I recall a
quote from someone working on the movie Jacob's Ladder speaking to the author -
"Just tell me one thing: How may carpenters do I need to build "the void"?

>and the floorboards
> changed a bit. They look like laminate. If you look at the floorboards
> in Warp's Tips http://warp.povusers.org/povtips/ you will see what I mean.

I started out by copy-pasting his code - I think perhaps it's the scale of the
texturing, the distance of the camera from the floor, or the smoothness of the
floorboards that may give rise to that effect.  I've got a few things that I'm
modifying in the floor code, so I think that will incrementally improve as I
work through all the facets to weed out all of the glitches and artefacts, and
polish things up.

> Anyway, great work so far. :-)

Thanks very much, Stephen - a lot of the things I've played with in the past
have been a bit simplistic, and I've often looked at the work of the Masters
here and wondered how I would ever do anything like THAT, so it means a lot to
hear that I'm catching on.

So here I am, 1900 lines, a dozen include files, and a WIP directory with over
500 files and >150MB of sample images, etc....   and maybe a little carpal
tunnel inflammation  ;)

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