The dead that ran out of clock

The clock

The generator's watchdog gives every stage 45 minutes. A prop is done in a fraction of that. A character takes nearly all of it: the generator draws several candidate shapes and keeps the one with the most symmetrical face, builds the model, paints it, and then paints the face. On the night this wave ran the graphics card was shared, and a character needed very nearly the whole allowance.

4 characters were stopped by the watchdog with the face still being painted and the model finished behind it. The generator's own message says finished steps are kept and that restarting resumes from here, and there is no way to ask it to. The only way forward was a new seed, which is a different monster, so the finished work was discarded and bought again. The skeleton was stopped twice. The ones that arrived were not better for the wait; they were the ones that finished a few minutes inside the allowance.

What the checks cannot see

Every cast that came back passed every check the pipeline has: one mesh, the right number of parts, nothing past its footprint. 9 were thrown away anyway, by someone looking at the picture.

The staircase came back as a square plant pot with tapering sides and no steps. The entrance came back as two pillars and a skull on a flat sheet that ran far past them, and, the second time, with a flat wall standing beside it. The spike trap came back with bright blue spikes. All of those prompts had said, in writing, no ground and no base. A generator asked not to draw the floor is a generator being asked to think about the floor, and it did.

Each was cast again with the defect named in the prompt, the way the first asked for what it wanted. Most came back right. The bone pile never did: in 5 casts it stood on a slab of earth, then crumpled into thin shards, then stood on earth again, then on a flat grey sheet, then turned into a rock. It was replaced by a skull on an iron stake, a piece that stands up without a floor to draw. Every rejected cast is kept in the repository beside the ones that shipped.

A pose nobody drew

All 4 monsters were asked for a strict T-pose, the arms straight out, which is the shape the skeleton underneath is fitted to. None came back in one: the arms hung between 18 degrees and 37 degrees off it.

The step that fits a model to a skeleton does not trust the picture it is given. It measures where each arm and leg points and turns the skeleton's limbs onto the model's before it copies any weights, then turns the model back, and reports how far it is from where it was asked to be. Every limb of every monster landed within 2.0 degrees of its target, and the skeleton animates the mesh as it was cast, not as it was asked for.

The side views that stopped coming

Every character this programme had generated before, 52 of them, came back with three pictures of its sides, drawn before its shape was built. This build drew none for any of the 4 monsters. The check that counts the files in a delivery stopped the first fetch and said so.

The new build lets its engine decide whether to draw them, and nothing in our request says. The check now expects the delivery that is actually made, for characters only, and will stop again the day the old behavior comes back. Whether the backs of these monsters are worse for the missing pictures was not measured; they are seen from above and in front, and the question is open.

The fall

The fifth take is a death: the monster goes over backward and lies still. It is written as code against the skeleton, and the first version rested the skeleton's joints on the floor, which is exactly right for a skeleton. The wight in plate and the bonelord with a barrel chest are thicker than the line through their joints, and they lay partly under the ground.

Nothing in the skeleton knows how thick a monster is. The take now rests the joints a hand's width above the floor, and a test poses the real skin of every monster at the end of its fall and requires that none of them goes through it.