The Curator's Guide

The Curator’s Guide to the Wending House

The Palace is one engine plus one data file. To add a room, a door, a book, or a riddle, you edit one file, _data/palace.yml, then commit and push. Nothing else needs to change.

Where things live

The curator’s office

Visit /palace/#curator to open the office. It is a checker and a skeleton key:

• Problems lists doors that go nowhere and rooms you can’t reach. Fix these before pushing.
• Notes lists one-way doors and doors whose turns don’t undo each other. These are often deliberate; mark them with oneway: true or twist: true to quiet them.
• Holonomy lists the twisted loops, one for each corridor outside a spanning tree from the Foyer, with the element of D₄ the loop leaves you turned by.
• Show all doors and objects opens every lock and ignores every clock, so you can inspect everything.
• Testing time: put ?hour=22 or ?date=2026-12-25 before the # in the address to pretend it is another time.

Visitors never see the office unless they type #curator.

A room

- id: 27                      # the room number (also its address: /palace/#27)
  name: The Map Room
  wing: instruments           # one of the keys under wings:
  shape: hex                  # square (default), hex, oct, round, or corridor
  decor: [shelves, lamp, window]
  at: [9, 4]                  # where it sits on the map grid (any integers)
  text: >-
    First paragraph.

    Second paragraph. <i>HTML is fine.</i>
  again: Shown in italics on every visit after the first.
  mirror: Shown only when the visitor arrives mirrored.
  notes:
    - {when: night, text: "Shown only at night."}
  widget: pendulum            # optional, see Widgets
  secret: true                # optional: not counted, never a random destination
  doors: [...]
  objects: [...]

Shapes are drawn as they’re named. A hex room shows one face of a hexagon ahead, two faces angling away at 60°, and slivers of the next two; oct does the same with 45°. A round room has a bowed back wall, and a corridor is long and narrow, with floorboards spaced in true perspective. Doors on the left and right go on the angled faces.

Fittings that match particular rooms: cases (glass cases of rules), bench (a drafting bench), glasshouse (panes and palms), cardtables, tilefloor (a fifteen puzzle in the floor), dial (the parity dial), lattice (a crystal with a dislocation and its Burgers circuit), bigtree (a 3-adic tree), gloom, cot, names (Funes’s names on the wall), fibfloor (a golden rectangle cut into squares, inlaid in the floor), woodcut (Kepler’s cannonballs, framed), chalkboard, desks, workbench, tiers and screen (a lecture hall), longtable, polytope (a hanging icosahedron), sand, sea, alethiometer, lowshelves.

When you write a room’s text, give it the fittings it describes. If the text says there are tables, put cardtables or longtable in its decor.

Decor (any combination): shelves, lamp (lit at dusk and night), window (shows the real sun or moon if it’s in front of you, and casts a beam on the floor), sky (the real sky as a dome on the back wall), stars, rug, stair (a spiral well), pool (lily pads in a hexagonal packing), pendulum, clockface (shows the visitor’s time), glacier (ice and icicles).

Rooms that change with the time

Every room already changes on its own. The light follows the visitor’s clock, lamps light at dusk, and a window shows the sun or moon when it is really in that direction. The sun also lays a beam across the floor, long in the morning and evening and short at noon, and objects cast shadows away from it. A full moon does the same at night.

To change a room’s contents with the time, give it phases. Each phase has a condition and adds to the room while the condition holds:

  phases:
    - when: "hours:0-1"
      text: "It is past midnight. A door that isn't there by day stands open."
      doors: [{to: 23, wall: front, oneway: true, title: "the midnight door"}]
    - {when: "night|dusk", text: "The lilies close.", decor: [stars], drop: [window]}
    - {when: ["weekday", "hours:8-17"], text: "Class is in session."}

A phase can add text, doors, objects, notes, and decor. It can remove decor with drop, rename the room with name, or swap its widget. Add replace: true to replace the text instead of adding to it.

The top of the file sets where the house is and which way it faces:

latitude: 44.26
longitude: -88.41
facing: 180      # in frame e a visitor faces south, so the windows catch the sun

The visitor’s frame turns this too: a quarter turn faces them west, and so on.

A door

doors:
  - to: 12                    # a room number
    wall: left                # left, back, right, or front (front means "behind you")
    title: "a door of silvered glass"   # shown in the door list
    turn: s                   # holonomy, see below
    say: "You step through the glass."  # a message as you pass
    when: night               # if false, the door isn't there at all
    needs: "has:golden-key"   # if false, the door is there but locked
    hint: "A small gold lock with a φ on it."   # shown while locked
    label: "?"                # the plaque, if not the room number
    look: mirror              # mirror, bars, dials, gold, or shelves: what the door itself looks like
    oneway: true              # quiets the one-way note in the office
    twist: true               # quiets the turns-don't-undo note

Special destinations:

• to: [18, 19, 21, 23] is a turning door. It leads to the hour mod 4th room in the list, so it changes every hour. Any length works; use 12 entries for a true clock.
• to: random leads anywhere that isn’t secret (the folded shelves of L-space).
• to: back leads to the previous room on the visitor’s walk.

Riddle doors stay locked until answered:

    riddle:
      id: galois              # remembered once solved, usable as "solved:galois"
      q: "How many arrangements will the lock ever reach?"
      a: ["8", "eight"]       # any of these, ignoring case
      yes: "The door swings open."
      no: "The dials stick."

Version 2: walking like Myst

Facings and close-ups. Each room is seen one wall at a time. Click the left or right edge of the picture (or press ← →) to turn, and press ↓ to turn around. Click a desk or bookcase to look closer, and ↓ or “step back” to return. Every view has its own address: #13 is room 13 facing its first wall, #13/e faces east, and #13/n/ahead is the close-up of what’s ahead.

Where things stand. Give an object a wall: (left, back, right, front) to put it on that side of the room. Without one, a room with up to three objects keeps them all ahead, and a room with more spreads them around the walls. Wall-mounted fittings (window, clockface, chalkboard, thermometer, and the like) hang on the back wall.

Floors and ceilings. floor: checker or floor: stone lays a floor in true perspective. ceiling: coffers, ceiling: vault, or ceiling: open (the real sky, for courtyards) replace the default beams.

The console. The tally bar shows your level and xp, your frame and sheets, the house’s date and time, the weather, your save code, and your mode. The bag holds what you carry; click an item to use it. With a map in the bag, a live minimap sits in the top-right corner. With the Primer, a hint sits in the bottom-left.

Modes. The porter’s desk at the Entry (room 0) offers three ways to walk:

• guided: master key, plan, finding aid, compass, lantern, and hourglass;
• wanderer: map, compass, and lantern;
• hardcore: nothing.

In hardcore, the plan is in the Gallery of Rules, the finding aid in the Archive, the compass in the Turning Room, the lantern in Funes’s room, and the hourglass in the Clock Room. Use mode:guided and the like as conditions. A door marked hardlock: true ignores the master key.

Experience. First visits, close looks, items, riddles, island puzzles, and new sheets all give xp. Ranks are set by xp: thresholds and can carry a gift: line, shown when the visitor reaches that rank.

Save codes and warp words. The tally bar’s ⌘ button shows a save code that carries a visitor’s walk to another browser. Warp words are listed under warps: at the top of the data file:

warps:
  LAME: {room: 16, say: "The corridor narrows around you."}

Monodromy: sheets. Some loops change where you are, not just which way you face. Name the sheets at the top of the file (sheets: {sqrt: {mod: 2}, log: {}}). Then give a door a lift, such as lift: {log: -1}. Conditions like sheet:log=-3 or sheet:sqrt!=0 can then show doors, objects, and text. In room text, {sheet:log} prints the current value.

• The Great Spiral is a log stair: each loop through 15, 17, and 16 goes down a landing, and at landing −3 a hidden door opens.
• The Branch Cut (rooms 30 to 33) is a square root: once around the pillar puts you on the other sheet, and twice brings you back.

Live world. The weather comes from Open-Meteo, for the house’s latitude and longitude. It shows in the windows and on the thermo fitting, and it can hide the sun. The hourglass (and the clock chip in the tally bar) sets the house’s date, time, and speed. The sky, sun, sundial, pendulum, light, and timed doors all follow it. The sundial fitting and widget show the real shadow.

Combining things. An object with action: combine, uses: [a, b], and gives: c turns two carried things into one. The torn page in the Branch Cut works this way.

Version 3: the engraved view

On any browser with WebGL, the Wending House builds each room in three dimensions and prints it through an engraving pass:

• hatching that follows the surfaces: floors across, walls up, curved things around;
• ink outlines where depth jumps;
• paper grain and a vignette;
• muted color.

Lettering, the window skies, and the sky ceiling print on top, so they stay legible. The menu’s View button switches between the engraved 3D view and the flat woodcut drawings, which are also the fallback when WebGL is missing.

• Built from the same data. Walls come from shape, floors and ceilings from floor and ceiling, doors and plates from doors, and furniture from decor. Objects become small models on a desk or a low bookcase against their wall.
• Light is real. The sun comes in through the windows from its actual direction and casts real shadows, the sundial’s shadow among them. Clouds dim it, and above about 85% cover there’s no shadow at all. After dark, the moon does the same from its real position, as bright as its phase and the clouds allow; a bright moon throws shadows of its own. Lamps light at dusk and flicker. The lantern follows you. Night prints as a white-line engraving.
• Looking around. Click the left or right edge (or ← →) to turn; the camera swings round, as in Myst. Click near the top to look up and near the bottom to look down. Click furniture to look closer, and click a thing to open its own card, where the object turns slowly on a plinth.
• The cursor shows what a click will do:
  • an arrow for a door, a padlock for a locked one;
  • turning arrows at the edges, up and down arrows at the top and bottom;
  • a magnifier for furniture;
  • an open hand for things you can take, a pointing hand for things that open.

  A HyperCard-style label names whatever is under the cursor.

• Animation.
  • The pendulum swings, and its plane turns at Appleton’s rate on house time.
  • The lily pads bob.
  • The lamps flicker.
  • The icosahedron in the model room turns.
  • The alethiometer’s needle wanders.
  • Funes’s cigarette glows.
• Icons become models. Each icon name (carriage, orrery, rule, net, lock, cards, tiles, crystal, tree, book, books, scroll, lectern, clock, hourglass, compass, lamp, key, bell, astrolabe, pond, fraction, note, map, pendulum, hex, plant, turns, cross, planimeter) has a matching 3D model. Unknown icons get a plain box.
• For checking the light, ?raw=1 in the address shows the room without the engraving pass.

The 3D code lives in palace/palace3d.js. It uses three.js (MIT license), vendored in palace/lib/ so the site doesn’t depend on a CDN.

The Entry: a launch page

The Entry (room 0) is the front door and a working launch page. No porter; a letter on the desk opens on a visitor’s first arrival (edit it under letter: in _data/palace.yml; it’s signed “W. K.” for now). What’s in the room:

• The desk. The ring of keys and the full plan make you a guided walker. The folded map and compass make you a wanderer. Take nothing and you’re hardcore. The tray puts everything back. The walking style is read from what you carry, so it’s never a menu.
• The guest book and the bell. The guest book keeps a reader’s name in their own browser; the Primer uses it. The bell does nothing, mostly.
• The notice board (left wall) carries the problem of the week, the month’s calendar, the news, and a “wanted” list. The puzzle changes on Mondays by ISO week, drawn in turn from puzzles: (each has q, a, and source; last week’s answer is shown). Calendar entries come from events:: {date: "2026-10-14", time: "4:30 pm", title: "...", where: "...", href: "..."} (quote the date and times). News is news:, a list of {date, text, href}; the board sorts it by date.
• The link board (right wall) is the launch page. The site’s own tiles come from links: in the data. Visitors can add their own tiles, kept only in their own browser (palace-links), and can export or import them as a file. Bookmark /palace/#0/links to land on it, or tick “open the house straight onto this board.”
• The almanac (right wall) shows the weather now, a four-day forecast, sunrise and sunset, and the moon and planets at 9 p.m.
• The codes ledger writes and reads save codes, and takes warp words.
• Search. Press / anywhere, or use “/ go” in the tally, to jump to a room, thing, link, or warp. The ★ in the tally pins the current room to the top of search and the link board.

Mounted boards are ordinary objects with mount: board; they hang on their wall instead of sitting on a desk, and shelves leave room for them.

The Office: office hours

Room 35 is off the Entry, through the front door. For now it’s a sketch, waiting to be measured and modeled from the real one. Its door plate says open or closed, as does any room with hours: true. Post the hours in the data:

office:
  where: "Briggs Hall 4xx"
  note: "Or by appointment: write to me."
  unset: "Office hours will be posted here."
office_hours:
  - {days: [Mon, Wed], start: "14:00", end: "15:30", where: "Briggs 4xx"}
  - {days: Fri, start: "10:00", end: "11:00", note: "QRC drop-in"}

Times are on the house’s clock, so the hourglass can test them.

The Sundial Court and the open sky

Room 34 has ceiling: open. Any room with an open ceiling gets the real sky over it, drawn as a dome:

• by day, a sky coloured by the sun’s height, with the sun where it is;
• at twilight, a warm horizon toward the sun;
• at night, the stars to about magnitude 4.7, the constellation figures and names, the brightest stars’ names, and the planets;
• the moon in its true phase, its lit edge turned toward the sun;
• clouds in proportion to the cloud cover, drifting slowly;
• rain and snow falling into the court.

Click near the top to look up; in an open court the camera tips nearly to the zenith.

The sundial is laid out for the latitude the house stands at, on a baluster pedestal with two round steps, and reads from IIII in the morning to VIII at night. Click the dial to bring its reading forward. Nothing on it is corrected: it reads the sun’s own time, straight off the plate, and the note beside it says why that differs from the clock (longitude, the equation of time, daylight saving). On a clear night with the moon more than about a sixth lit, it reads by moonlight instead, and that too is read straight off the plate: moon time, which runs about 48 minutes later each night. Under heavy cloud, or with the sun put out in the storm glass, it says so and waits. South of the equator, the style turns to point at the south pole.

The positions behind it are good to about a hundredth of a degree for the sun and a few tenths for the moon. They include the moon’s parallax and atmospheric refraction, so the sun is seen a little above where geometry alone would put it near the horizon, just as a real shadow sees it. The moon’s phase comes from its real elongation from the sun, not from a mean month.

The court is a cloister: a Tuscan colonnade on every side, whose lean-to roof throws a hard line of shadow, two stone benches, and four terracotta urns of clipped box. The paving rings the dial.

The astrolabe: place, day, and weather

The astrolabe hangs in the Sundial Court; take it and it rides in the bag (its save-code bit comes after the mended page). It can:

• Carry the house somewhere else. Choose from a list (Reykjavík, Tromsø, Quito, Alexandria, Kyoto, Sydney, the South Pole), type a latitude and longitude, or press “Where I am”, which asks the browser once. Weather, the sky, the sun’s light, the sundial, the pendulum’s rate, and the almanac all follow. Away from home, light (dawn, day, dusk, night) follows the sun’s real height instead of the clock. “Home to Appleton” undoes it.
• Set the day and hour. This is the same control as the hourglass.
• Set the weather. The storm glass can fix clear, broken cloud, overcast, fog, rain, snow, or a storm, or go back to live weather. “Clear the sky” sets it clear in one press, which keeps the sundial and the stars working whatever the real weather is doing.
• Put out the sun or the moon. With the sun out, the court’s sky goes dark, so the stars, planets, and their tracks show by day; there’s no sunlight and no shadow. With the moon out, its glare and its shadows go too.

The home place is latitude, longitude, and (optionally) place: at the top of the data file.

Quality, skins, and looking around

The menu’s Quality button cycles draft, normal, fine, and ultra. Each draws more pixels than the screen shows and lets the browser shrink them, which smooths every engraved line. Each step also enlarges the shadow map and the textures, and the finer settings use finer engraving (the hatch spacing drops from 6.2 to 4.4 pixels). Fine is the default on a desktop-sized screen, and normal on a phone. Ultra wants a good graphics card. Changing the setting reloads the page. Full view (or F) fills the screen with the picture.

The Skin button switches the frame around the picture between two looks:

• Myst, the default: a dark room around a lit picture, journals of parchment bound in leather, brass buttons, and messages as a line of italic text.
• HyperCard: striped title bars, square close boxes, and hard shadows.

View switches between the engraved 3D rooms and the flat woodcut drawings.

Looking around. Drag anywhere in the picture to look; let go past half a quarter turn and you face that way. The edges turn you, and the top and bottom look up and down; in an open court looking up tips nearly to the zenith. Keys:

• ← → or A D turn.
• ↑ or W goes through the door ahead.
• ↓ or S turns around, or steps back from a close look.
• Shift with ↑ ↓ (or Page Up, Page Down) looks up and down.
• / searches.

The cabinet of dials

Under the court’s colonnade (on its left-hand wall) stands a glass-fronted cabinet (dialcabinet in decor). Click it to open it and step up to it, then click one of the small models to carry that dial out to the middle of the court. Each visitor’s choice is kept in their browser. Click the dial in the court to step up and look down at it; its reading appears in the panel beside the picture.

• The horizontal dial. Sun time, straight off the plate, as before.
• The armillary sphere. An equatorial dial: the polar rod’s shadow on an evenly divided band.
• The mean-time dial. A horizontal plate with one figure-eight (analemma) for each clock hour, and a bead on a pin. The figure-eights are computed for the place the house stands, from the sun’s real position at that standard-time hour every few days of the year. So the bead’s shadow tells the clock’s own standard time, with longitude and the equation of time already worked in. Dashed lines mark the solstices and equinoxes.
• The glass sphere. A ball on a column at the equator side of the court throws a spot of sun on the paving. A brass meridian line and month marks show sun noon; a red figure-eight shows where the spot falls at clock noon through the year. This is the cathedral meridiana, in a courtyard.
• The noon cannon. A burning glass over the touch-hole. When the sun crosses the meridian on a clear day and you’re in the court, it fires: a puff of smoke, a boom, and a toast. Its reading counts down to sun noon.

What each dial teaches. Under the reading, each dial has a fold-out About… note: what kind of instrument it is, its history, how to read it, and where the facts come from. These live in _data/palace.yml under dials:. Each type (horizontal, armillary, meantime, meridiana, cannon) has a name, a blurb, notes (paragraphs) and sources (title and URL). Edit them there; a key you leave out keeps the built-in text.

The big court, and walking in it

The Sundial Court is now a wide court, 22 m across, with a longer colonnade, more urns, and the dial in the middle. Two keys on any room in _data/palace.yml control this:

• size: 22 sets the room’s width in meters (the default is about 8).
• walk: true lets visitors walk anywhere on the floor: click the paving to walk there, or use W/↑ and S/↓ to step forward and back. They stop short of the dial and the walls. Doors still work as usual.

The Great Hall, its stair, its elevator, and the tower

The Great Hall (off the Entry’s back wall) is a homage to the Commons Room of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. The plan follows what is written about the real room, since no floor plan is published: a ring of vaulted bays round the tower’s core, the elevators behind tall iron gates (with the Bridges inscription), a stone turret stair, an enormous fireplace, a walkway at the third-floor level with rooms off it, and rooms off the floor beneath.

Each level is its own room. Room 42 is the floor of the hall, and room 64 is the walkway. Each draws the whole hall, but only its own doors can be used; the other level’s doors are drawn as part of the view. The stair (65) and the elevator (66) are rooms of their own too.

Moving about in the hall is Myst-style. You stand only at fixed places, and glide between them along clear paths: click the floor where you want to go, or use W and S; A and D turn you. You can’t end up inside a pier, a table, or a parapet. When you come in through a door, you start at the place nearest it, facing into the hall.

The turret stair has a landing at every floor, with its door and a lamp. W and S, or a click on the stair going up or down, carry you round the spiral to the next landing. Only the door at your landing can be used. The landings are the undercroft (closed), the hall floor, the walkway, and the fourth floor (closed); add more as the house grows.

The elevator is a walnut-and-bronze car with a folding gate, a dial, and a button for each floor: B (closed), 1 (the hall), 3 (the walkway), and 36 (the Overlook). Press a button and the gate folds shut, the needle swings, the car hums, and the gate opens on that floor’s landing. Step out through the door ahead.

At the top of the tower (floor 36):

• The Overlook (67): tall windows on every side with the land laid out below in the light of the hour, and a reading lounge.
• The Roof and the Observatory (68): the real sky overhead, an arcade all round, and a domed observatory. Click its telescope to look at what’s up: the Moon in its phase, the planets, Jupiter’s four great moons where they really are, Saturn’s rings at their true tilt, and some showpieces such as M31, M42, the Pleiades, and Albireo.
• The Map Room (69): a table map of the land below, from OpenStreetMap, which you can look at closer and zoom.
• The Weather Station (70): barometer, hygrometer, anemometer, rain dial, wind repeater, thermometer, rain gauge, and barograph, reading the real weather, plus the week’s record.
• Closed rooms: 71–74.

The house lamps (in the Light panel) set the hall’s light: by the clock, low (dark and firelit), or all lit.

Closed for renovation (Oct 2026). The hall (42), its walkway (64), the stair (65), the car (66), and the tower rooms 67–70 carry closed: renovation while the movement engine is sorted out in the four open rooms. Delete those lines to reopen them.

The keys behind all this:

• A gothic hall: ceiling: gothic with size, length, height, core, gallery, and walkway. level: 0 or 1 says which floor of the hall the room is, and see: <id> names the room whose doors are drawn but not used.
• Fixture doors: a door with fixture: lift-front, lift-back, turret, or turret-up belongs to the gates or the turret rather than a wall.
• Arriving: on a door, landing: k says which stair landing you arrive at, and car: k which floor the car is at.
• A stair: landings: [{y, name}, …]. Its doors carry stop: k (not on, which YAML reads as true).
• An elevator: floors: [{n, name, closed}, …]. Its doors carry stop: k for the floor.
• Windows: windows: all puts windows in every free stretch of wall (winW, winH, and winSill size them).
• Decor: panorama, lounge, observatory, maptable, and wxstation.

Going up into the sky

In the court, look up (or move to the top of the picture) and click the sky: The sky: go up into it. The view tilts up to the real sky over the house for the moment shown, and a panel opens in the corner of the picture with three tabs:

• Tonight: the sun and when it rises or sets, the moon’s phase, which planets and bright stars are up and where, the constellations overhead, and the next meteor shower.
• Explorations: switches for the constellation figures, names, planet tracks, an altitude-and-direction grid, the celestial equator, the ecliptic (the sun’s road, in gold), and the pole. There is also a time-lapse (ten minutes or an hour a second, and Back to real time) and links to the planet book and the astrolabe.
• Notes: short notes on what the lines mean and where the star data come from (Olaf Frohn’s d3-celestial).

Drag to look around. The box at the top of the panel closes the notes and leaves you up in the sky; click the sky to open them again. Come back down (in the panel, or at the bottom of the picture) brings you back to the court. The Explorations tab also has switches for the sun and the moon: put the sun out to see the daytime stars.

The compass in view

If you’re carrying the compass, press C (or click it in the bag) to hold it up: a brass bearing tape across the top of the picture shows which way you’re looking, with the true bearing and how far up or down you’re looking. It reads true north, and agrees with the sky. In a mirrored room the needle won’t settle. Using the compass in a turned or mirrored room still sets you straight, as before, and holds it up too.

What the dial’s picture shows

The picture in the notes now matches the dial standing in the court:

• the horizontal dial, seen from above;
• the armillary, drawn as the sphere itself (horizon, meridian, polar rod, and the equatorial band with its hours), turned so the sun stands to one side, with its ray past the rod and the shadow on the band, and the band unrolled underneath to show its equal hours;
• the mean-time dial’s figure-eights;
• the meridiana’s line and noon figure-eight;
• the noon cannon from the south, with the burning glass’s focus creeping along the barrel to the touch-hole at sun noon.

The house’s notices, from the log book

Signed in as the archivist, the log book has a tab called The house. It edits:

• office hours (days, times, where, a note) and the office details;
• the calendar’s events;
• the news;
• the weekly problems.

Problems take turns by ISO week number. You can pin one to a week (2026-W41), and Print this week’s problem sheet makes a one-page handout with room to work and last week’s answer. Post the changes writes catalog/house.json. The house reads that file on every visit, and it overrides the same keys in _data/palace.yml, so you never need to edit the YAML by hand for these.

Filling in entries and covers

In the entry form, Fill in from the ISBN, barcode, or DOI uses whatever number is in the scan box or the entry’s own fields. Find details from the title and creator searches by name. Find a cover offers covers from Open Library, Google Books (asked for its largest size), and, for records, the Cover Art Archive. With keep a copy of the cover in the log ticked, the chosen cover is downloaded, shrunk, and saved with the entry’s pictures, so it never depends on another site. Some image hosts don’t allow this; if so, the entry keeps the cover’s address instead.

The photographic view

The View button now cycles three ways of seeing: engraved, photographic, and the flat woodcuts.

• The photographic view drops the engraving. It renders with a filmic tone curve, light reflected from a soft room of light (so brass, varnish, and glass catch it), screen-space ambient occlusion in every corner and under every object, and a touch of vignette and grain.
• Surfaces, in every view: wood, leather, brass, stone, plaster, and cloth now carry procedural colour, bump, and roughness maps. In the engraved view they give the hatching something to follow.
• Quality: a new top level, max (four pixels drawn for every one shown, larger textures, finer engraving), joins draft, normal, fine, and ultra. It wants a good graphics card.

Renovation: what’s open

For now only four rooms are open: the Entry (0), the Office (35), the Sundial Court (34), and the Archive (22). Every other room has closed: renovation: its doors stay where they were, boarded across with a pinned note, and a click reads the note aloud. Change the note under renovation: at the top of the data file. To open a room again, delete its closed: renovation line. (closed: true still hides a room and its doors completely, as for the lecture wing.)

Linking books

A linking book is an object with action: link and to: a room. With mount: pedestal it stands on a brass stand in front of its wall, its panel glowing faintly. Its page shows a moving picture of the destination: the last view the visitor had there, or the room’s name in the dark if they’ve never been. Touch the panel to link, with a fade to black and a rush of air. The Office has one to the Archive, and the Archive has one back.

The Archive and the log book

The Archive’s shelves are the catalogue itself (catalogshelves in decor). Every catalogued book, paper, record, disc, piece of ephemera, or artwork stands there with its title on the spine, filling the eye-level shelves first. Click the shelving to step up to it, a book to take it down and read its entry, and the bottom of the picture to step back. The card catalogue (cardcatalog) and the log book on its podium (mount: center, action: logbook) both open the catalogue.

The catalogue lives at /palace/catalog/. Anyone can read it, search it (by any word, or by scanning a barcode), and filter it by kind. The data is one file, catalog/index.json at the top of the repository, with photographs in catalog/images/. The Entry’s 20 reference books are its first entries.

Writing in it: the archivist’s key. GitHub Pages can only serve files; it can’t run a login. So writing goes straight to GitHub. Signing in means pasting a GitHub fine-grained personal access token into the catalogue’s Archivist page. The page sends it only to api.github.com, and every entry you save becomes a commit. Nobody without a token that can write to the repository can change anything, and the public page itself holds no secrets.

• Make the token at GitHub → Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Fine-grained tokens.
• Give it only the wkusner.github.io repository, with Contents: Read and write, and an expiry date.
• On the Archivist page, choose “until this tab closes” or “on this device.” If a token is ever exposed, delete it on GitHub and make another.
• Each saved entry is a commit to master on GitHub, so pull in GitHub Desktop before you push your own changes. GitHub rebuilds the site in a minute or two; until then you see your new entries straight from the repository.
• The repository is public, so every entry is public too, including ones marked “keep off the public site”. That flag only hides an entry from the page. If you want truly private entries later, the log can point at a separate private repository (the Archivist page has the settings), though visitors then can’t see any of it.

Entering things. Choose Write an entry. A USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner works anywhere on the page: scan a book and it opens a new entry and looks it up. On a phone or a Chrome browser, the Camera button reads barcodes too. What it looks up:

• ISBNs from Open Library and Google Books (title, authors, publisher, date, pages, subjects, description, cover);
• other UPC and EAN barcodes from MusicBrainz, for records, CDs, and tapes;
• DOIs from Crossref;
• by title and creator: books from Open Library and Google Books, records from MusicBrainz, papers from Crossref.

Pick a match and it fills the form; then check it, add photographs (shrunk to 1600 pixels), and Write it in the log.

There are seven kinds, each with its own fields: book, paper or article, physical media (LP, CD, DVD, cassette…), digital media, ephemera, object, and art. Every entry can also have a location, a condition, when and where it was acquired, subjects, notes, and a room in the house. Revise and Strike it out edit and delete entries. The Archivist page can download the whole log as JSON or CSV.

Sound and weather

Sound starts with the first click; browsers allow nothing before that.

• Rooms: a quiet room tone indoors, and the carriage clock’s tick in the Entry.
• Weather: rain (muffled indoors, loud in the court), gusting wind as strong as the real wind, birds by day and crickets on warm nights in open courts, and thunder in storms with lightning in the windows.
• You: footsteps when you walk, a creak and a thump at doors, pages when a book or card opens, and a rush of air when you link.
• Music: the house’s own music plays softly: slow chords and a few bell notes, in a mode for each part of the house.
• The clock: its gongs are fuller and lower now, with detuned pairs, a soft mallet, and the hall’s reverb.

The music box on the Entry’s side table goes in the bag. It sets the music (the house’s own, the music box, or none) and the loudness of everything, weather, music, and footsteps separately. It also opens the clock’s chimes.

Weather shows plainly now. Rain runs down the window glass, falls in long streaks in the court, rings on the wet stones, and darkens and shines the floor. Snow drifts past the glass and lies on the court. Fog closes in, and storms flash.

The light

The Light button (and using the lantern from the bag) opens a small panel:

• Your lantern: shaded, low, steady, or bright. It goes with you and matters most in dark (gloom) rooms and at night. L steps through it.
• The house lamps: by the clock, low, or all lit (what the old Lamps button did).
• The shutters: open, half closed, or drawn. By day they take the daylight down indoors, in every room until you open them; they do nothing at night or under an open sky.

Reckoning: calendars, timekeepers, and numerals

• The calendar cabinet (Archive, action: calendars): today in sixteen calendars (Gregorian, Julian in Roman style, Hebrew, Islamic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese era, Coptic, Ethiopian, Indian national, Thai Buddhist, Maya, Babylonian, Egyptian civil, French Republican, ISO week and Julian Day). The one you keep dates the whole house: the clock chip, the almanac (which also has a switch), and the notice board. Calendars whose day begins at sunset turn over at sunset. The Babylonian one is reckoned, not observed.
• The case of timekeepers (Archive, action: timekeepers): choose what stands on the Entry desk in place of the carriage clock: an hourglass, a water clock (Karnak style, draining through the real night), King Alfred’s candle clock, an incense seal clock, a wadokei (temporal hours from today’s real dawn and dusk; it can strike each toki), a French decimal clock, or a clock of Italian hours. The carriage clock’s chimes only sound while it is on the desk.
• The numerary (Office, action: numerals): a number in about sixty systems, ancient, East Asian, positional bases, tallies and cords (khipu, Kaktovik, Cistercian), scripts of the world, Braille and Morse, and two you can play (base-7 solfège and base-12 pitch classes). Any system with a plain-text form can number the rooms.
• The lantern’s salts (Light panel): sodium, strontium, lithium, calcium, copper, boric acid, barium, potassium, or caesium colour the flame.
• Code: systems.js (calendars), numerals.js (numerals), and reckoning.js (the views and timekeepers). The lists “for later” sit at the bottom of each view.

The music box’s workshop

Clicking the music box (in the Entry, or in the bag) opens a full-screen workshop with six drawers. Its own manual is the sixth drawer; this is the short version.

• Compose: twelve kinds of generated music (ambient, waltz, phasing, rāga, gamelan, koto and shakuhachi, taqsīm, chorale, change ringing, overtone drone, lounge, near-silence), with tempo, density, swing, root, about sixty scales (Western modes, Japanese, Chinese, ragas, maqamat, gamelan, Ethiopian, EDOs, Bohlen–Pierce, the harmonic series), six tunings for the Western ones, fifteen synthesized instruments in three roles, and eleven ambiences. While it plays, the house’s own music steps aside (snd.mode: studio).
• Moods (a row of buttons over Compose): Ambient, Lo-fi beats, Upbeat lo-fi, Café jazz, Rainy day, Drone, Wind, Water, Bells, Change ringing, Storm, Sleep (brown noise), Focus (pink noise). Each sets the music, players, room, ambience, and noise in one click.
• Noise: white, pink, brown, deep brown, blue, violet, grey, green, and velvet, with breathing, stereo width, and a muffle filter; it runs with or without the music. Tape adds wow, flutter, a darker tone, and saturation.
• Room: impulse responses: thirteen presets (several are image-source rooms), rooms made by mirror images or as tails, WAV files, and rooms measured with a microphone and speaker using ten probes (exponential and linear sweeps, click, MLS, Golay pairs, noise, chirp, Costas hops, an anti-harmonic multitone). Four senses of convolution: causal, anti-causal, symmetric, zero-phase. Saved rooms live in the visitor’s browser (IndexedDB), not on the site.
• Lab: convolve, deconvolve, correlate, autocorrelate, and reverse any two signals (clips recorded from the box or the microphone, files, rooms, probes, test signals).
• Sources: sound files, the live microphone, internet radio (through the room when the station allows CORS), and embedded players from YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, Vimeo, and Bandcamp.
• Sonar: echo ranging with an A-scope and waterfall, Doppler motion sensing (with a theremin), and two-device ranging (BeepBeep).
• Code: musicbox-dsp.js (signal processing, testable in Node), musicbox-gen.js (scales, instruments, generators), musicbox.js (the screen), musicbox-manual.js.

The Office’s furniture

There are three original pieces, designed for the house (furniture.js for the cards and drawings; the models are in palace3d.js as balanceRocker, nestingStool, and staircaseCabinet):

• The balance rocker. Its runners are arcs of one 600 mm circle centred near the sitter’s centre of mass, so it reclines at a touch. A sliding brass weight sets its resting angle. Click it to lean back.
• The rocking footstool, on 900 mm arcs.
• The staircase cabinet: a slotted egg-crate whose cells (360 mm) step down as the partition 4 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1, with linoleum doors in muted red, ochre, and blue, walnut drawers, and tambours.

Clicking any of them opens drawings. The full build specification is in the project doc claude/Wending-Furniture-Designs.md. The cabinet sits at 0.76 of the way along wall slot 0; the rocker is in the window corner.

Standing places, looking closer, and the Primer (v4, October 2026)

• Standing places (nodes). Every ordinary room (not the court, the hall, stairs, or the car) has a middle and a standing place about 2 m in front of each wall. You stand at one at a time and turn on the spot. Hovering the floor shows a ring where a click will take you (“Walk over to the desk”). W walks toward what you face (middle → wall → look closely at the desk); S goes back to the middle. Clicking a desk or bookcase from across the room walks you up to it; clicking it again looks closely. You arrive in a room at the standing place by the door you came in through, facing into the room. State: S.node (a wall slot, or null for the middle).
• Looking closer is a mode of its own: only the thing answers clicks. To step back out, click anywhere else, press Escape or S, or use the ↩ Step back button that appears at the bottom of the picture.
  • Desks: at a desk, the drawers open and close, and each holds a few things.
  • The staircase cabinet: its doors swing, its drawers slide, and its tambours roll up.
  • The balance rocker: click it to sit; click again to lean back or sit up. ↩ Stand up gets you out.
  • A redraw (the clock ticking over, the weather) no longer drops you out of a close look.
• The court has standing places too: a ring round the sundial, places out in the court, and the cloister walk. The cloister is entered only through the gaps in the colonnade. Clicking the paving glides you to the nearest standing place, and W and S step forward and back along the paths, as in the Great Hall.
• The Primer is the field guide. Things with a note or an info field show a pulsing glint when you stand at their wall. Touching it writes the note into the Primer (S.notes), and the Primer’s Notes tab lists them by room. Everyone except hardcore players starts with the Primer; hardcore players find it on the Entry’s return tray. Use info: on any object for a field-guide line separate from its note.
• Settings. The menu bar now holds Map, Primer, Finding aid, Full view, and Settings. View, quality, skin, ink, light, sound levels, the music box, annotations, and How to walk are in Settings.

Materials and light (v4 part 3, October 2026)

• The materials library (materials.js) is a list of entries: woods, stones, bricks, cloths, leathers, metals, plasters, and tiles. Each entry is both a card (name, origin, a paragraph, a few facts) and a recipe the engine bakes into three seamless textures: colour, bump, and roughness. Nothing is downloaded. An entry’s tile is the size in metres one texture covers. Recipes: wood (rings, arches, pores, ray fleck when cut: quarter), boards, parquet (herringbone of L-by-1 blocks), stone (kind: marble, granite, slate, travertine, sandstone, oolite), flags, checker, brick (bond: stretcher, english, flemish, herringbone, basket), weave (a draft matrix, with colour orders as in houndstooth), felt, leather, metal, iron, plaster, and tile (plain, truchet: diagonal, or truchet: arcs). To add a material, add an entry; it appears in the cabinet and can be used by any room.
• Rooms use it. A room’s old floor: words now mean library entries (planks → oak floorboards, stone → limestone flags, slate → green slate, checker → black and white marble). A room can also name any entry: materials: {floor: oak-parquet, walls: brick-flemish}.
• The cabinet. In the Archive, on the back wall, the plan chest opens the library: samples by family, a large sample you can rake the lamp across, the facts, the weave draft for cloths, and the rooms where it is used. Visitors can lay a sample on the floor or walls of a room they have seen, and put the room back afterwards. That is kept in their browser (S.mats), not in the data.
• Real sizes. Every textured surface gets texture coordinates in metres, measured on the piece, so grain, bricks, and weave come out the same size everywhere. Wood grain runs along each piece’s longest side.
• Contact shadows in the engraving. The engraved view now darkens, and so hatches, the corners, the undersides of tables, and the gaps between books, as the photographic view already did. On at normal quality and above.
• Eyes that adjust. Each standing place meters its own light (a centre-weighted average, read from a 16 × 9 shrink of the picture) and the exposure eases toward it, so a dim corner opens up and a sunny window closes down. Settings → Seeing → Eyes turns it off. A room can bias it with exposure: 1.2.
• Fittings. Ordinary rooms have a moulded cornice (fillet, cove, bed moulding, fascia), a picture rail in tall rooms, a skirting with a bead, brass sconces on long clear walls (they glow when the lamps are lit or at night), and a plaster rose where a pendant lamp hangs.

Next steps taken (October 10)

• Primer lessons for the open rooms: the Entry (true north and the compass rose), the Office (the blackboard’s Green’s function), the Archive (why there is a five-end satin but no six), and the Sundial Court (the equation of time). The docked Primer shows them.
• Loose pages. A page in pages: marked apart: true doesn’t come with its thing; it lies somewhere as an object {kind: page, page: <item>}. The hourglass’s page is loose in the Office now. Found, it slips into the Primer, even before you carry the hourglass.
• Close looks survive the clock. While you look closely, sit, or are up in the sky, the ten-minute rebuild waits until you step back.
• Walking round by keys and touch. Stepped up to a thing: ← → (or A D) go round it, Shift ↑ ↓ rise and fall, + and − come nearer and go back; on a touch screen, pinch. S steps back from every close look, a desk’s included.
• Motion. Settings → Motion: calm close looks don’t zoom. It follows the system’s reduced-motion setting until you choose.
• Lighter drawing. A still room with only flickers and glints in it redraws about twenty times a second instead of sixty.

Clean-up (October 9)

• The old play styles (guided, wanderer, hardcore) are gone: no mode chooser, no mode chip, no mode: conditions. Save codes keep a zero in that byte, rebuild Primer pages, and still read codes written when the item list was shorter.
• Every way out of a close look ends it the same way (endPeek in palace3d.js): the orbit, the buttons, the seat, and anything that opened for it. In a close look the picture’s edges no longer turn you, a drag only looks, and the wheel never scrolls the page. Hidden glints and floor rings no longer answer clicks.
• One grammar for things: from across the room, a click walks you to the wall; at the wall, a click steps up to the thing (or opens the desk); then you use it. S, Escape, and Step back all step back one level.
• The tray takes back only the keys and the folded map; drawer and case things go back where they came from. Things you already carry say so. Pages that grew into something larger say so in the Primer.
• Device pop-ups lose their turning model when closed (the 3D context is freed), and the exposure meter reads far less often.
• Text brought up to date: the help, the Entry’s description, the toasts that say where things are, the finding aid’s title, a rank gift, the plan’s page. Settings no longer repeats the menu bar or the bag.

Close looks as their own pictures, devices that grow, and doorways (v4 part 4b)

• Close looks are staged. Looking closely at a desk, a pedestal device, a desk instrument, or the dial narrows the lens (a zoom), frames the picture, sinks everything away from the thing into shadow, and puts its name at the top. Stepping back zooms out again.
• Device pop-ups carry the device. A device’s pop-up (the carriage clock, the numerary, the calendar cabinet, the case of timekeepers, the almanac, the astrolabe, the materials library) has its model at the top right, to drag round and scroll nearer. see: [titles] on an object adds a “See also” list; each opens that thing’s pop-up, with “Go there” when it lives in another room.
• Devices grow instead of doubling. UPGRADES in palace.js: the folded map plus the missing sheets of the plan (in the Archive) fold into the full plan; the astrolabe with an empty throne (in the court) plus the storm glass (in the Office) becomes the astrolabe with its glass. Only the finished forms are in the porter’s drawer and case. You never carry both forms; the lesser one is left behind, and a found part you no longer need stays where it is.
• Doorways. The skirting stops at each door, and a stone sill lies flush with the floor. A door that leads out to open ground has a step down beyond it; coming in from open ground, a step up. A door can say step: up or step: down itself.

• The Office blackboard now begins with the fundamental solution in the sense of distributions: −∂ₓ²E = δ, E(x) = −½

  x

  , and −∂ₓ²(E ∗ f) = δ ∗ f = f.

Finding things, close looks, and one of each (v4 part 4, October 2026)

• Everyone starts empty-handed. The porter’s desk has the letter, a folded map, the Primer, and the ring of keys (the master key). Take what you like. Modes are no longer chosen; the tally’s mode word just describes what you carry.
• Locked drawers and cases. An object with kind: case, a lock: (an item, usually master-key), and holds: [items] is a container. Locked, it says so; open, it shows each thing inside with a model you can drag round and scroll nearer, its page, and Take or Put back. The Entry has two: the porter’s drawer (the full plan and the finding aid) and the case of instruments on the right (compass, lantern, music box, hourglass, astrolabe). The originals of the hourglass and astrolabe still live in their own rooms.
• Primer pages. pages: in the data gives a page (title, text) per item. Taking the item writes its page in; the Primer has a Pages tab with the model and a Use button. To separate pages from things later (puzzles), give a page its own object.
• The Primer below the picture. Click the Primer’s line in the corner, or Settings → Primer, to keep it open under the picture: the room’s lesson, what you have noted here, and buttons for Notes, Pages, and the story. Close ▴ folds it back into the corner.
• One of each. Removed: the reading room’s blank map and card catalogue, the hardcore copies of the plan, compass, and finding aid, the lantern hook and loose music box in the Entry (both in the case now), and the Office’s calendar card (the Entry’s notice board is the calendar). The menu bar shows Map, Primer, and Finding aid only once you carry them; the bag shows the plan instead of the map once you have both.
• Close looks you can walk round. A pedestal device (the numerary, the calendar cabinet, the case of timekeepers, the materials library) is stepped up to first: drag to walk round it, scroll to come nearer, and use its buttons (Use it, Take it). In a desk’s close view, clicking an instrument or a thing to carry does the same. The dial (and the noon gun) in the court can be walked all the way round. Things you read or ring (letters, the guest book, the bell, boards) still answer at once.
• The sky. In the court, “Look at the sky” (the top edge, or the sky itself) takes you straight up into the dome. Drag to look around it; “Come back down” returns you.
• Debug helpers (with ?debug): __use(title), __acts(title), and __view3d._hit(labelPart).

Moving and looking

Doors: you take a few steps toward a door before going through, and rooms dissolve into one another. You arrive facing away from the door you came through, so it is behind you.

• Standing and turning. In an ordinary room you stand near the middle, so A and D turn you in place rather than swinging you round the walls.
• Walking. Where a room lets you walk, hovering the floor shows a ring where you’ll stop (“Walk here”); W and S step.
• Close views answer only themselves. Looking closer at a table or shelf, peeking at the dial, or going up into the sky is a focus. While focused, clicks reach only that thing; a click anywhere else reads “Step back” (or “Come back down” in the sky) and returns you. Escape does the same.
• The sky takes two clicks. The first looks up; the second goes up into it. Tables: click one to look down at what’s on it. The Entry’s takeable things lie on the green baize of the return tray and vanish from it as you take them. Drag to look around anywhere.

The palette is warmer: sepia ink on cream paper, with each surface’s own colour kept as a muted wash. The wing colours are oxblood (foyer), ochre (court), and plum (archive). The small models are drawn with finer curves.

The gardens

Through the court’s front gate (36–41), all open to the sky with hedge walls (hedges in decor) and gravel or lawn floors (floor: gravel, floor: lawn):

• The Knot Garden (36) is a trefoil in clipped box that rises over and dips under at each crossing (knot).
• The Hedge Maze (37) has turnings that carry you round a quarter turn or turn you inside out (doors to itself with turn: r and turn: s). Its heart (41, secret, with a fountain) opens only to visitors who arrive mirrored (needs: mirror).
• The Sunflower Bed (38) is Vogel’s spiral of 610 seeds (phyllo). Its sunflowers face the real sun by day and the east by night (sunflowers).
• The Moon Garden (39) has flowers that open at dusk (moonflowers). It also has an armillary sphere set up as an equatorial dial: its polar rod points at the pole and casts a real shadow on the hour band (armillary).
• The Orrery Lawn (40) has a brass orrery with every planet where it really is today (orrery), and the ephemeris.

The planets

“The planet book” in the Observatory, “The ephemeris” on the Orrery Lawn, and the almanac’s “All the planets…” button open a table for Mercury through Neptune. For each planet it gives:

• where it is now;
• the constellation it’s in;
• its magnitude;
• when it rises, is highest, and sets;
• its elongation from the sun and how much of it is lit;
• its distance and the light time.

Under the table is a small orrery. Positions come from JPL’s Keplerian elements, with light time, precession to the date, and refraction; they agree with pyephem to a few hundredths of a degree. In any open court at night, each planet’s path among the stars shows as a dotted track, a dot every four days for forty days either side of now, so retrograde loops show as kinks.

The carriage clock

It stands on a side table on the Entry’s right wall and keeps house time, with live hands and a ticking balance. Its card offers:

• the chimes: Westminster, Whittington, St. Michael’s, ting-tang, ship’s bells, the hours only, or silent;
• volume;
• whether it’s heard only in the Entry (faintly next door) or through the whole house;
• whether it chimes at night;
• a repeat button, and buttons to play each quarter.

The sequences are the standard chime tables, sounded on synthesized rod gongs. Browsers allow sound only after a click on the page.

Furniture and fitted rooms

There are a few decor words for fitted rooms:

• wainscot panels the walls to dado height, stepping around doors.
• porter fits out the Entry: a hall bench, a coat stand with a coat and hat, an umbrella stand, and a runner toward the reading room.
• officefit fits out the Office: a partners’ desk with a green leather top and a brass gallery, your chair and a visitor’s, a green-shaded lamp, a filing cabinet, a blackboard, bookcases on the right wall, a reading chair, and a rug.
• cloister is the court’s colonnade.

Desks and tables everywhere now have turned legs, moulded tops, and drawers with brass knobs. When you measure the real office, give the furniture’s positions and sizes and they’ll go into officefit.

Annotations: marginalia, sources, bibliography

The Annotations button in the menu bar opens a window under the picture with three tabs. Each room can fill any of them:

  marginalia:
    - "A note in the margin, in your own voice."
  sources:
    - "Where the room's idea comes from."
  bib:
    - "Author, <i>Title</i>, year."

Marginalia are shown in italics with a pencil mark, sources as a list, and the bibliography as a numbered list. HTML is allowed, so a source can be a link. Leave a tab out and it says there is nothing in that margin yet.

Conditions (when and needs)

A condition is a word, a word with a value, or a list (all must hold). Use | for “or” and not: for “not.”

Examples: when: "night|dusk", needs: ["rank:2", "has:golden-key"], when: "not:mirror".

Holonomy: the turns

Each visitor carries a frame, an element of D₄, the eight symmetries of a square. It is drawn as the small F in the top bar. A door’s turn multiplies the frame on the right as you pass through. Elements are written in r (a quarter turn) and s (a mirror): e, r, r2, r3, s, rs, r2s, r3s. Strings like sr are multiplied out for you.

The frame changes what the visitor sees:

• Doors move to the walls the frame sends them to. A quarter turn puts the left door ahead, and so on.
• A mirrored frame reverses the room’s name, plaques, and labels, and shows the room’s mirror: text.
• Doors and objects with when: mirror (or frame:…) exist only in that frame. That is how a hidden door works: it is reachable only by walking a loop whose holonomy is a reflection.

A door and its return should usually carry inverse turns (r and r3, or s and s). A loop of doors whose turns multiply to something other than e is a twisted loop. The office lists them all.

When a visitor jumps by memory instead (the map, the back button, or a typed address), the frame resets to the one they had the last time they stood in that room.

An object

objects:
  - kind: device              # device, book, paper, ref, talk, notes, figure, model, page, unwritten, note, link, key
    icon: rule                # see the list below; defaults by kind
    title: "Slide Rule Cabinet"
    short: "Rules"            # optional shorter label for the picture
    href: "/slide-rules/"     # where clicking it goes
    by: "Author"              # for books and references
    note: "One line about it. HTML is fine."
    when: night               # optional condition
    hide: true                # optional: leave it out of the catalogue

Special objects:

• kind: unwritten is a book or device that doesn’t exist yet. It sits on the shelf with a dashed outline. This is the house’s to-do list.
• kind: link with to: 1 is a Myst linking book: clicking it carries the visitor to room 1 (with an optional turn and say).
• kind: key with item: golden-key can be picked up. Name items under items: at the top of the file.
• action: map, action: catalogue, or action: ranks opens that view.
• action: primer with item: primer is the Primer. Once picked up, it gets a button in the menu bar.

Icons: rule, net, planimeter, cross, plant, turns, cards, lock, tiles, crystal, tree, book, books, unwritten, scroll, lectern, clock, key, pond, fraction, note, map, pendulum, hex, door, box.

A room draws at most six objects in its picture; the rest are listed beside it (“+N more on the shelves”).

Widgets

A room can hold one working instrument under its text:

Write widgets as widget: clock or widget: {type: euclid, a: 89, b: 34}.

The Primer

The Primer knows which rooms the reader has seen. Each time it opens, it tells a little story about the reader by name and teaches the lesson for the room they’re standing in. Then it offers a picture of a door to a room they haven’t seen, and touching the picture takes them there. Lessons live at the bottom of the data file:

primer:
  "16": {teaser: "the slowest gcd is made of Fibonacci numbers",
         lesson: "Euclid's algorithm cuts off squares...",
         q: "How many steps for gcd(89, 55)?", a: "Nine..."}

teaser finishes the sentence “had not yet seen Room, where …”. q and a are a question and a hidden answer. Rooms without a lesson are still offered; they just get less of a story.

Linking pages instead of doors (Oct 10)

For now the house is travelled by linking pages, not doors. The switch is one line at the top of palace.yml: travel: books. Delete it and the doors come back exactly as they were.

• Doors are gone from every room, both in the 3D view and in the doors list, which becomes “Linking pages”. Stairs, landings, and lifts still work.
• The Primer holds the pages. Take it from the porter’s desk; from then on every room you stand in writes its own page. The Primer has a “Linking pages” tab: pick a page and touch its moving picture to go. The dock has the same button.
• Loose pages are objects with kind: linkpage and to: <room id>. Touching one binds it into the Primer and puts that room on the map. Hide it once held with when: "not:link:<id>". Without the Primer, a loose page is only a picture. - {kind: linkpage, to: 35, icon: linkpage, wall: back, title: "A linking page: the Office", when: "not:link:35", info: "…"}
• The map shows only rooms whose pages you hold, with no corridors, and clicking one links there. With the Primer, the map button and the corner map appear even without the folded map.
• Linking books (action: link) still work, and now also bind their destination page into the Primer.
• Two loose pages sit on the porter’s desk to begin with: the Office and the Sundial Court. The Office’s linking book leads on to the Archive.

Wings and ranks

wings:
  instruments: {name: "The Instrument Gallery", color: "#8C6A2E"}
ranks:
  - {name: "Visitor", at: 0, color: "#D9D2C0"}
  - {name: "Reader",  at: 4, color: "#7A9E7E"}

A rank is earned by the number of distinct rooms remembered. Its index (0, 1, 2, …) is what rank: conditions test.

Time and light

The house uses the visitor’s clock, or the hourglass’s or astrolabe’s. Light runs dawn, day, dusk, night, and the Lamps button overrides it. The window shows the sun by day and the actual phase of the moon by night. The Clock Room’s door changes each hour, and the Observatory’s trapdoor opens at dusk.

The look

The pictures are drawn like woodcuts: black hatching on paper, with a rough cut to every line. At night they turn into white-line engravings. The windows around them are HyperCard’s: striped title bars, square close boxes, hard shadows, and a dithered desktop.

Color is a second block, printed over the black. Each wing’s color is its spot color, and it shows up on the room number, the drop cap, the rug, the lamp shade, the sky in the window, the water, and the darkest fills of the objects. Keep wing colors muted and few; the house looks best with four or five. The Ink button switches any visitor to pure 1-bit black and white.

What visitors’ browsers remember

Visits, the walk, the frame in each room, pockets, solved riddles, Funes names, the reader’s name, pinned rooms, the astrolabe’s place and weather, and the lamp, ink, and quality settings are all kept in the visitor’s own browser (localStorage, key palace-v1). Nothing is sent anywhere, except the place’s coordinates to Open-Meteo for the weather. Visitors’ own link tiles are kept separately (palace-links). “Forget my walk” in How to walk clears it.

Recipes

• Add a new device page. Put the device in its own folder, as with the others. Then add an object with href: "/its-folder/" to the room where it belongs, and add a line to puzzles.md and the header menu.
• Add a talk or paper from assets/. Add {kind: talk, icon: scroll, title: "Venue, Month Year", href: "/assets/file.pdf"} to the Lecture Hall (24), or kind: paper to the Seminar Room (25).
• Hide a room behind a mirror. Give one door on a loop turn: s, then give the hidden door when: mirror. Check the office: the loop should show up under Holonomy with a reflection.
• Post office hours or an event. Edit office_hours: or events: in _data/palace.yml and push. The office door plate and the notice board update themselves.
• A door that only opens on a full moon: needs: "moon:full" with a hint.
• Retire an unwritten book once it exists. Change kind: unwritten to kind: device and add its href.
• A shelf that opens the log book at a search. {kind: ref, icon: books, title: "…", action: logbook, search: expositions} opens the catalogue with that search typed (the Archive’s shelf of expositions works this way; its entries are tagged expositions in catalog/index.json). The catalogue also takes #search/<words> in its address.
• After changing any script, bump the version. The script tags in index.html (and the import("./palace3d.js?v=…") line in palace.js) carry ?v=; change it everywhere so browsers fetch the new files instead of mixing a new page with old cached scripts.
• Ask Claude. “Add a room for X to the house” is enough. The data file and this guide are in the QRC project notes too.

Sources of the idea

Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory; Borges’s Library of Babel and Funes; Eco’s labyrinthine library and Foucault’s pendulum; Christopher Manson’s Maze, with its numbered rooms and shortest path; the Myst linking books and HyperCard stacks; Garth Nix’s Great Library of the Clayr, with its ranked librarians and stacks carved into a glacier; and Pratchett’s L-space, where all libraries are connected.