houses

A wall of timber-framed plague-city houses, painted in the fragment shader and therefore infinite. One quad per parallax band, locked to the camera; the district scrolls past inside it at scroll_x / scroll_y. Nothing recycles because nothing ends.

Structure, outward from the plaster: a BAY (one house width by one storey, irregular in both, with its own plaster, lean and vertical phase), quartered by a mid-rail and a king post into PANELS with a brace across some of them, a shuttered OPENING in one quarter of some bays with light escaping between the slats of the lit ones, and a slate COURSE every few storeys.

Two things then decide how the band READS rather than what is in it. A brush pass pushes value around in strokes so the plate looks painted. haze mixes the whole band toward fog, which is what makes it a distance rather than a texture — a far band is nearly all fog, a near band nearly none.

gap_chance turns a fraction of bays into ALLEYS: the band opens, the alley fills with lit fog, and the band behind shows through. That property is the difference between a district with depth and a stack of walls.

key_light grades the band by how high in the FRAME a pixel is (a cold sky above the rooftops); underlight is the firelight coming back up out of the street. Neither is a scene light: the sprites in this game are unlit.

Worn by art.backdrops.band_mid (z -18, parallax 0.42) and art.backdrops.band_near (z -7, parallax 0.72).