The turn that never happened
written 2026-10-02Every faction's cavalry finally got a horse, or a stag, or a wolf, or a flying boat. Putting the first real rider on the first real horse showed that the step joining a model to its skeleton had never turned anything to face the right way, and that every test had agreed it had.
Until now, cavalry on this board was not cavalry. Every faction's mounted unit drew as the same soldier on foot, carrying a dagger and a coin purse. There was no horse anywhere in the file.
Now there are 8, one for each faction: a knight on an armored warhorse, a ranger on a stag, a horned raider on a wolf, a soldier in plate on an armored ram, a skull-faced rider on a skeletal horse, a steppe rider on a shaggy horse, a man-at-arms on a white horse, and, for the storm-mages, a driver standing in a boat that skims the ground. Each one is two separately generated models, a rider and a mount, joined when the game loads them.
Anything set like 0.0665 was measured by a machine and generated into this page from the committed results. Everything else was written by a person.
Two models, one unit
The generator that makes this game's art can make a person, or an animal, but not a person on an animal. Ask it for a knight on a horse and you get one solid lump with no seam between saddle and leg. A lump like that cannot be animated: nothing says which part is the horse's knee and which is the rider's.
So every rider is generated standing, arms out, the pose a skeleton is easiest to fit to. Every mount is generated riderless, standing square. Each is fitted to its own skeleton, the rider is seated by an animation rather than being made in a seated pose, and the two are fastened together at the saddle. When the horse walks, the rider goes with it, because he is attached to the horse's back and not merely standing near it.
The horse needed a walk, too. The only four-legged skeleton the game owned came from a deer whose one animation was grazing. So the walk was written by hand, in code: each leg steps in turn, the way a real horse walks, and each hoof stays put on the ground while the body moves over it.
The turn that never happened
A generated model comes back facing whichever way the generator felt like. Before it can be fitted to a skeleton, which always faces forward, it has to be turned to match. The fitting step measured that angle carefully, recorded it, performed the turn, and wrote down that it had.
The turn did nothing. The software it runs in keeps an object's rotation in two forms at once, and the step wrote its angle into the one that was being ignored. Every model it had ever fitted came out exactly as the generator delivered it: a skeleton facing forward inside a body that was not.
This project had fitted 6 trial models months earlier, to prove the method worked before betting the art on it. 6 of them were visibly turned off their own skeletons. The worst was a spellcaster fitted 151 degrees round: his skeleton faced forward and his body faced the way he had come. Every one of them passed. The tests checked that every part of every body was attached to a bone, and it was, often to the wrong bone, on the wrong side.
It took a horse to notice. A horse has a head at one end and a tail at the other, and a horse whose skeleton walks one way while its body points another looks wrong in a way a soldier standing still does not.
A cape made of arms
With the turn fixed, the first rider sat on the first horse, and the moment he sat down, his hips swung out behind him like a cape.
A new model learns which bone moves each part of it by copying from a finished model that already knows: each part of the new body takes its orders from whichever part of the finished body is closest. The finished model was supposed to be standing with its arms out. It was standing with them down at its sides, frozen on the first frame of its own idle animation, which nobody had told it to stop playing. Its hands hung exactly where the new rider's hips were, so his hips took their orders from the wrists.
“Arms out” is a suggestion
Every rider was asked to stand with his arms straight out at shoulder height and his feet shoulder-width apart. The generator treats that as advice. One rider's arms came back 33 degrees lower than asked; another's legs were splayed 12 degrees wider.
A skeleton's bones go where the skeleton says. A rider with drooping arms gets a hand bone at shoulder height and a hand hanging well below it, so when the riding animation bends his elbow to take the reins, the elbow bends somewhere in mid-air and the hand swings in an arc around nothing.
Now every arm and leg is measured on both models before anything is copied. The skeleton is bent to match the rider for the copying, and then the rider is straightened to match the skeleton, using the very bones he has just been given. Every limb now ends up within 1.9 degrees of where it should be.
The shadows came too
The storm-mages' cavalry is not an animal. In the game's own rules it is a skiff, a small boat that skims the ground, so it was generated as an object, with a driver to stand in it.
The first skiff arrived standing on its own shadow. The generator had built the soft grey patch beneath the boat in its picture into the model as a solid slab, the full width of the hull. Later, the first wolf did the same. Nothing that measures a model's size catches that, because a boat with a floor bolted underneath is still one object of a sensible size. Both were caught by looking, and generated again with instructions that named the shadow outright. Across the whole batch that came to 19 models generated and 3 sent back, one of them for failing outright, and now a test fails any mount that stands on a slab.