2026-09-19 18:44:23
Anonymous:
Dock: the sign is an alarm sign now, not a shop sign (owner: 'more like a panic sign')
hold the flood/rooms.md ..
@@ 55,7 55,8 @@
- **Your ship:** a small space shuttle, about 12 metres long and 8.4 metres across the wings, standing in the south middle of the room with its nose to the north and its tail 3 metres from the force field it came in through *(size and position are my choices)*. It is made of plain shapes for now. It is solid, and there is room to walk all the way round it.
- **Press E** while locked on the ship, from any side of it: go home. The trip ends, you keep all you carry, your health and air are refilled, the game saves. Exactly what the old "ship airlock" did.
- A trip starts with the astronaut standing beside the ship's hatch steps, on its left side.
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- **Neon sign:** on the north wall, to the right of the doorway as seen from inside the room, in the middle of that stretch of wall. It is made the way neon signs are made: every letter is red glass tube bent to shape, held a hand's width off a dark board on short posts. The words are set one to a line, **EMERGENCY** over **LOCKDOWN**, in capitals about 0.9 metres high, on a board about 6.5 by 3 metres that hangs with its foot against the wall and its head leaning out on two brackets, so it faces a viewer who looks down at it. The tubes glow, their light washes over the board behind them and falls red on the floor in front. It blinks like a struck tube: a stutter, a second of steady light, half a second dark. It cannot be locked on or used. It hangs on the wall, so it drops out of sight with that wall when the view is turned to look from the north. *(Owner, same day, on the first version, flat lettering in a plain frame: "I am sure you can make the neon sign look better. Give it a proper font, place it better on the wall, that kind of thing. right now it looks almost like a 16 bit game." The capitals and the two lines are the implementer's choices.)*
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- **The sign:** on the north wall, to the right of the doorway as seen from inside the room, in the middle of that stretch of wall. It is an alarm sign, not a shop sign. The words are set one to a line, **EMERGENCY** over **LOCKDOWN**, in heavy block capitals with cut corners, 0.8 metres high, made of thick bars of red light. They sit on a black face inside a deep metal housing, about 6.4 by 2.9 metres, bolted to the wall and angled down at the room, with yellow and black hazard stripes along its top and bottom. The whole message flashes hard, full on and full off, about once a second, and throws red light on the floor in front. A rotating red beacon stands on each end of the housing, half a turn apart, and sweeps the room the whole time. It cannot be locked on or used. It hangs on the wall, so it drops out of sight with that wall when the view is turned to look from the north.
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- *How it got here (owner, all 2026-09-19).* First version, flat lettering in a plain frame: "I am sure you can make the neon sign look better. Give it a proper font, place it better on the wall, that kind of thing. right now it looks almost like a 16 bit game." Second version, letters of bent glass tube on a dark board leaning out on brackets, with a soft glow and a stutter like a struck tube: "they both looks much better, but the neon sign now looks a little bit too much like a commercial sign. Like it's from Las Vegas brothel or Broadway Street. I want it to look more like a panic sign." This is the third. The capitals, the two lines, the hazard stripes and the beacons are the implementer's choices.
- **Nothing else:** no enemies, no jobs, no items.
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**New building blocks this card added:** a side of a room can be a force field instead of a wall (a side like that has no door); a wall can carry a neon sign of any words in capitals, that is only there to be seen; a large thing can be locked on from anywhere around its body, not only near its middle. **For the whole game:** light that is brighter than white now glows (neon tube, force field rails, lamps, stars) while ordinary lit surfaces stay as calm as they were, and edges are smoothed.
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**New building blocks this card added:** a side of a room can be a force field instead of a wall (a side like that has no door); a wall can carry an alarm sign of any words in capitals, with its hazard stripes and rotating beacons, that is only there to be seen; a large thing can be locked on from anywhere around its body, not only near its middle. **For the whole game:** light that is brighter than white now glows (neon tube, force field rails, lamps, stars) while ordinary lit surfaces stay as calm as they were, and edges are smoothed.