carrington.light.blackout

The grid dying, in four waves, each shaped like the shot that photographs it.

The seam

Nobody exposes a function. Whoever builds a light that is part of the grid names it prac_* (yard practicals), win_* (lit windows, at the station and in the town) or beacon_* (aircraft warning on the pylons), and this module finds them by those names.

What "killing" one means, exactly, so a builder can meet the contract:

• every Light / SpotLight / DirectionalLight on the entity and on every descendant is set to zero and disabled;
• the entity's mesh is hidden if it is a leaf, or if it is a win_* or beacon_* — those names mean the emissive thing itself. A prac_* carrying children is taken to be a mast: its light dies and its steel stays in the silhouette.

Nothing is despawned and every kill is reversible, so stage.seek() backwards puts the station's lights back on.

What it cannot reach: an emissive material inside a merged mesh. If a window wall is one quad of a hundred-part merged station mesh, hiding it would hide the station, so the slice that authored that material has to take its own emissive_intensity down at the blackout beats. Only entities named by the convention are this module's to kill.

The four waves

win_* serves both the station and the town, and they go out thirteen seconds apart. They are told apart by position: within 200 m of the origin is the yard, everything else is the town.

Armed from time, not from beats

The schedule is a table keyed on film time and arm(t) reads it every frame. A beat fires exactly once and stage.seek() past one never fires it at all — a module that only listened to beats would show every inspection of Act IV a station whose lights never went out. Seeking backwards past a wave re-arms it and restores what it killed.

A wave that has finished is re-swept once a second, so a practical another slice spawns late — or a population that resolves a frame after the beat — does not come back on.