gig-line/Docs/reviews/0.1.4-review.md

0.1.4 façade review — signoff

Four demo-map captures from the facades-0.1.4 branch, after the module kit, the textured materials and the theatre marquee went in. All seven items signed off 2026-11-09 (owner review of the local renders).

Reference photographs to compare against: Art/reference/hollywood/ and Art/reference/el-capitan-* (local, not committed). Regenerate the set with Tools/render_screenshots.sh --verify; measure it with python3 Tools/visual_loop.py --compare --iteration 5.

Signoff

• 1. Block from the north sidewalk — hero between its neighbours, sidewalk and road read correctly
• 2. Street level — colonnade, shopfronts and window rhythm hold up at eye height
• 3. Crossing — zebra bars, kerb line and the frontage behind
• 4. North buildings — TCL and Tussaud's framed across the boulevard
• 5. Materials — stone reads as coursed stone, glazing as glass, not flat colour
• 6. Theatre trim — marquee and blade sign proportions believable at street level
• 7. Approve v0.1.4 (kit + materials + theatre trim); remaining geometry moves to the next version

1. Block from the north sidewalk

Expected: the neoclassical hero façade between its neighbours, both sidewalks and the road in the foreground. Metric: 0.68 similarity, edges 0.28× reference.

2. Street level

Expected: the hero colonnade with adjacent frontage buildings either side, shopfronts at pavement level, 4.96 m bay rhythm. Metric: 0.33, edges 0.27×.

3. The designated crossing

Expected: continental zebra bars on the asphalt at s=130 m, south frontage and colonnade behind. Metric: 0.42, edges 0.34×.

4. North-side buildings

Expected: TCL Chinese Theatre and Madame Tussaud's across Hollywood Blvd, full height in frame. Metric: 0.34, edges 0.14×.

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Appendix — what was checked, and what was broken

Verified

• Behaviour, packaged build, -qaselftest: walk 761 cm in 2 s (Z steady 456), reset 0 cm, pause/unpause, seam transect 1456 samples / 0 holes, wall probe 0/35, façade occlusion probe 0/9 — all PASS. Run twice: the harness is time-based and one loaded run reported a false failure (walk 246 cm, pause FAIL), an immediate re-run passed — re-run before believing a single FAIL.
• Placement, probed from the live map against Geo/verification/2026-11-06-el-capitan-block.md: 6922 −24276…−17700, 6902 −17749…−14591, hero −14644…−12028 between them, theatre −12082…−8210, 6822 / 6806 / 6800 −7854…−1437, TCL −22889…−18442, Tussaud's −27071…−22799. Blockout affine residual 0.0 cm.
• Budgets: hero 148 parts / 3 044 tris · kit 16 meshes × 12 tris · 625 kit actors ≈ 7 500 tris · 8 × 512² textures (196 KB) · 67 tool tests pass.
• Topology: every kit piece manifold, no loose geometry.

Defects found this cycle

Every one of these rendered convincingly; the placement ones were caught by coordinate probes, not by looking.

Sev	Defect	Root cause
Blocker	Frontage shifted ≈119 m X / 2.4 m Y, hero outside its gap	Blockout regenerated without --origin
Blocker	Kit placed ~12 km from its buildings	Used mesh-local bbox; actors carry the offset
Blocker	Marquee on the far side of the boulevard	Blender +Y is Unreal −Y
Major	Marquee canopy 5 cm above the pavement	Absolute Z; pavement is 4.56 m above datum
Major	Window bays invisible, inside the solid wall	Piece modelled entirely at +Y
Major	Glazing wasn't glass	Grey M_Kit_* from the FBX import, never overridden
Major	Hero windows floated 1.44 m in front of the wall	Wrong Y in the builder
Major	Parapet medallions were discs on the coping	Built with the Z-axis cylinder helper
Major	Hero had no usable collision	Complex-only; traces use simple
Minor	"No smoothing group information" on every import	mesh_smooth_type="OFF" in six exporters
Minor	save_map() returned False silently	LFS .umap read-only, importer never chmod'd
Minor	North-buildings import silently no-op	Missing import sys
Minor	Kit folder held 24 assets (8 orphan materials)	No stale-asset sweep
Minor	Edge-density metric counted PIL's border ring	FIND_EDGES leaves a 128 ring
Minor	QA wall probe grazed the theatre wall	Scan row 1 cm from the building line

Limitations worth knowing

• Kit pieces are boxes; dentil spacing, abacus and plinth dimensions are recorded assumptions, not measurements.
• Textures are generated, not authored — no decals, signage text or weathering.
• The vision pre-check stays advisory: it has rejected shots the owner approved.
• The low edge ratios in the metrics are partly structural — a wide block view against a tight façade crop always scores low. Weigh the images, not the scores.
• Performance has not been re-measured since 0.1.0; the 625 kit actors are unmeasured (tracked in TODO.md under 0.1.5).