OpenHouse

The model lives in a store that knows nothing about rendering: every length in millimetres, and every piece with a height and a floor offset from the first commit. The metric/imperial switch changes only the display, and conversion happens once, at the render boundary, where millimetres become metres and CAD-style Z-up becomes three.js’s Y-up.

Nothing is drawn by a second, 2D system: Plan is an orthographic camera locked top-down over the same scene components, so a footprint on screen maps one-to-one onto the floor; Orbit is a perspective camera. The planned 2D drawing library never became a dependency.

The payoff came the next day: the first cut of Walk mode shipped as a first-person third camera, touching four files, with no new renderer and no change to the model. Gravity, step-up, jumping and collision followed over the next three days, and they left the model alone too.

The first room is a real barn-style room with knee walls and a sloped ceiling, where a tall piece that fits against one wall won’t fit where the ceiling comes down. One slope description, an off-centre flat with a different pitch on each side (about 40° and 41°), drives roof height, gable walls and trim clipping.

Door casing on a gable wall is cut against the slope plane with three.js local clipping planes, as real raked trim is cut, so it follows any change in pitch. The starter layout sets a buffet just clear of a door’s swing arc, and a comment in the code marks the two as coupled, so moving one means checking the other.

Tray ceilings and closet notches followed for a second built-in room. That work is in the repo, not yet live.

One function describes each piece’s solid boards as boxes, mirroring what is drawn: dividers, shelves and doors for a cube shelf; a top slab and two pedestals for the pedestal desk; shelves, legs and feet for the printer stand; one solid block for anything else.

In Walk mode, with the walker’s eye 127 mm off the floor, that lets you stand on a desk, walk under it, bump your head on a shelf, and climb steps only up to 4 cm. In the editor, a monitor dropped onto a desk lands on its top, not the floor.

Walk-mode walls follow one monotonic rule: a move may never increase how far outside the room’s rectangle you are. That makes the outer walls solid (the small wall notch isn’t carved out yet) and also recovers from bad states, because from outside the only allowed moves lead back in. A separate rule frees a walker already clipped into furniture.

On day one, dragging failed without an error: a piece could be selected but not moved. The camera controls took the pointer-down even with pan and rotate off, and react-three-fiber’s on-demand render loop froze updates made outside React. The fix turns the controls off entirely in Move and Rotate and renders continuously; each drag records exactly one undo step. That fix is live.

Two later fixes are in the repo, not yet live. A capture-phase listener extends right-drag panning to Move and Rotate, waking the controls only while the right button is held. And drop push-out checked every piece in the house although positions are room-local, so a desk was pushed 448 mm off its wall by a desk in another room at the same local spot. The fix checks the same room only, tested against a control: a same-room overlap must still push.

The script gates on the strict TypeScript compile, builds, and aborts if the build has no index.html. It streams the build to a shared host over ssh, swaps the new assets folder in by rename instead of overwriting in place, and confirms the live URL answers HTTP 200 before reporting success.

The tooling around it fixes what a cloud-synced folder broke. Build output and the Vite cache live outside the synced tree, which raced Vite’s dependency optimizer; tools run through node because the sync strips execute bits; .gitattributes forces LF endings after a cross-platform move. The dev-server manager stops only the process listening on the project’s registered port, and Vite’s strictPort makes a collision fail loudly.