v0.2.0

The valley gets its places

Following v0.1.2. Twenty commits, almost all of them things a child asked for while playing on the phone: the playground rebuilt, a café you can walk into, boats on the pond, a pool with a turnstile, a horse that gallops, animals that walk, and a map that says which way to go.

The playground

The pad is a fifth larger and laid out in bands, so it reads as a place rather than a heap. Two swing frames with two seats each, a three-metre slide with a leaning ladder that gathers speed on the way down, a trampoline twice the first size that actually bounces — the first one never did: its test compared the child's height from the wrong origin, and the check mirrored the same mistake — a basketball hoop with three balls that are thrown at the ring rather than kicked, benches with bins, a running fountain that fills the bottle, four flower beds, three lamps that come on one by one as the sun sets, and a clipped hedge round the lot that is solid block by block. Nothing can be built on the pad any more, and anything already planted there when a save is loaded is moved just outside; a sapling had grown into a tree standing in the trampoline.

The café

A building, not a shed with a plank: a door, windows all round, a bar along the back with what is on offer laid along it — cake, a bun, a teapot and cups, coffee, a jug of water — shelves and a menu board with a picture beside each line, three stools, three tables with chairs, a sofa with cushions and a low table, pendant lights; outside, an awning and a sign, two tables under umbrellas, pots, a menu board, two lamps and a bin. A meal sits the child down at the nearest seat and puts a tray with a steaming cup on their table. The camera stays inside: the walls are on a layer of their own that the camera respects and the furniture is not. The café moved eighty metres to flatter ground.

On the water

Five rowing boats, each its own colour, wait round the shore of the big pond in wading depth. A boat is a mount that rides only on water: it carries a child across at twice swimming speed and sets them down where the bed comes up, leaving the boat floating at the far shore.

The pool moved beside the football pitch — ten metres past the western goal, parallel to it — and grew to 28 by 18 metres, with steps at the shallow end and a block to jump from at the deep. It is fenced, and the way in is a turnstile that costs five coins, with a ticket booth whose sign shows the price as a coin and five pips. Going out is free.

The horse and the animals

The horse is a fifth bigger, with a saddle and stirrups, a bridle and reins, a blaze, socks and hooves. Its legs, head and tail are parts of their own: it trots up to half pace and gallops above it, the head nods and the tail swings, and the stick chooses the gait. It is solid where it stands and the rider sits on the saddle rather than inside it.

Every animal walks on its legs now — diagonal pairs at a trot, hops for the squirrel — turns at its own rate, breathes when it stands, and steers round the playground and the café instead of walking through the slide. The dog looks like a dog: deep chest, long muzzle, big hanging ears; it asks for a stick you are holding with a soft bark every few seconds and stops once given one. The cat's meow is a cat's, with a cat's resonances, and its purr is a train of pulses a phone speaker can actually play; the first purr was a 42 Hz tone, which it cannot.

Seeing where things are and where they go

The map is baked on a worker thread, so opening it no longer freezes the game — it used to sample the height field three hundred thousand times on the main thread. Every destination is a picture on every size of the map, and a place off the edge sits on the rim pointing at itself, with the worn paths drawn between them. While the kick button is held, a faint dotted arc shows the ball's whole path, computed with the kick's own arithmetic so it cannot lie; a basketball near the hoop shows its arc to the ring the same way. The goals have a real net of strings on a sloping frame, and four floodlights light the pitch after dark.

Underneath

Terrain and forest are baked off the main thread, which is where the hitch every sixty-four metres came from. Every button on the play screen is an icon rather than a word. Russian declines: a dog wants a палку, not a палка. The perf line in a debug build now names the slowest main-thread step of each window, so the next hitch on the phone comes with its cause attached.