New route prefab (routes.rhai): cars, buses, motorbikes, cyclists, people,
deer or elephants move along waypoints, round a loop or there and back.
Each way keeps to the left of the line (or right), corners are rounded
into pieces of at most 45 degrees; there-and-back routes become loops with
U-turns, so the two directions never share a strip.
Engine: Prim::Travel / sprite.begin_travel / script travel(a, b, dur,
windows) ... end(): the mover is drawn at a piece's start and slides to
its end while it is on that piece, hidden otherwise. The renderer writes
keyframes per piece (named by a hash of their content) into one <style>
per view. Each piece is its own sprite with the lane strip as its sort
extent (ext_reset), mitred at the corners, so movers pass in front of and
behind trees, lamps and houses. Movers that look alike and never meet on
a piece share one drawing. iso-travel pauses (not hides) in still,
reduced-motion and ghosted views.
Studio: meta shape "path" draws point by point (snapping like runs) and
saves one object with pts; ending on the first point closes the loop.
MCP: pts in the object schema, route guidance.
Demos: streets gets traffic round the block, a bus, motorbikes, cyclists
and strolling people (replacing the one-axis cars); country gets cars on
the lane.
Tests: Rust 79 (each mover on exactly one piece at every moment, in every
rotation), Studio 125, web 99.
Pan/zoom gestures move the drawing as a CSS-transformed layer, a picture
at the scale last drawn. A long touchpad pinch showed an ever more
stretched, blurry view (3.6x at the end of a 1.2 s pinch), and every zoom
ended with a blur-then-snap 180 ms after its last step.
Now the view is drawn anew during the gesture once the picture is 30% off
in scale (at most every 120 ms; draw() keeps the gesture state), and at its
true scale 90 ms after the last step. Measured in Brave at 1.5x pixel
density: sharp ~130 ms instead of ~240 ms after a pinch, crisp on the way.
Cost at 6x CPU slowdown: 11.4 -> 14.6 ms per wheel step in the Studio,
9.1 -> 10.5 on a page, still no frame over 50 ms.
check_web: a long pinch is drawn anew on the way and sharp within 150 ms.
New stdlib module wildlife.rhai:
- Animals (new palette category): Deer (stag with antlers, does, fawns),
Wild boar, Fox, Elephant (bull with tusks, cow, calf), Rabbits. Low-poly
solids from faces (loft, tube), parts drawn back to front by depth, faces
edged in their own shade (class beast). Herds scatter round a spot, each
animal its own sprite facing about the object's rotation. Grazing
animals switch between two head poses (iso-pose2 groups), elephants curl
their trunks, rabbits hop.
- Birds and Butterflies as flocks: swim() takes a shape (bird, fly, bee);
wings flap out of step. Fish output unchanged.
- Beehives on stands with supers, lids, entrances and bees flying round;
Bush (round, flowering, berries); Flowers (bed in rows or meadow); Rocks;
Log or stump. g-meadow and g-soil ground materials.
- polyline() takes 3D points as documented (antlers).
Theme colours for dark and light, viewer CSS for poses, flapping, hopping.
examples/country: elephants in a paddock with a cut corner, deer at a
forest edge, boar, fox, rabbits, an apiary by a meadow, a pond, a lane,
fence and hedgerow at angles; Country demo in the web Studio and deploy.
MCP guidance, README, SCRIPTING, ROADMAP.
Tests: Rust 78, Studio 122; existing examples draw the same (only the
embedded theme CSS grew).
Object frames turn by any angle (quarter turns stay exact, so scenes along
the axes render byte for byte as before); a box in a turned frame is a
prism with its own corners. Rotation is kept as given (normalised to
0..360), no longer snapped to quarter turns.
Depth sort: sprites whose plan outline is not their box carry their convex
outline; when boxes overlap, an outline edge that separates two sprites
orders them. A long diagonal wall sorts right against both sides.
Joints (line_meet, end_cut, cut_box in util.rhai): where a piece off the
axes is involved, corners are mitred and T-junctions slanted; fences put a
corner post or pillar in its own sprite and mitre stone bases; Y joints let
the lowest id run through. Streets: every end part is a cut e + k*w, so
side streets come in at any angle (slanted sidewalk gaps), two streets meet
in a mitre with seam patches; fixes a curve's outer sidewalk that was
skipped when its kerb and back lines had different point counts.
Studio: runs and drags keep to x/y or snap to 45 degree diagonals, Ctrl
gives any angle; a road run turning 45 degrees gets a 45 degree curve;
Rotation is a number box. Streets demo: a diagonal lane with a hedge.
MCP guidance, SCRIPTING/README/ROADMAP.
Tests: Rust 76, Studio and web checks green.
Roads take sidewalks (none, both, left, right): 12 cm high paving with
kerb faces drawn where they face the viewer. Road curve (radius, angle,
left/right) carries a street round a bend; centre lines are true arcs
when cut and offset, so curve joints are seamless. A road ending on
another road's centre line opens that road's kerb and sidewalk (T
junction); two roads ending at one corner close it. Roundabout: ring
radius and width, one or two lanes, up to four arms with flared kerbs,
splitter islands, give-way lines on the entry side (traffic on the left
or right) and a central island with apron.
Studio: a road run drawn corner by corner gets a curve in each corner
(prefab meta `corner`). Tooltips list the streets each one meets.
Engine: open `polyline` primitive (Prim::Poly open) so dashes run on
round curves. examples/streets and a Streets demo in the web Studio;
MCP guidance, docs. ROADMAP: backlog 5-7 done; multi-select and the
hosted copy marked done.
Tests: Rust 72, Studio 113, web 95.
With Windows "Animation effects" off, browsers report prefers-reduced-motion, and the viewer
turned every animation off and hid the animation button, so presses, belts and robot arms
stood still in Brave and Firefox with no way to start them. Now that preference only picks
the starting mode ("off"); the button stays (its tooltip says why it is off) and the
viewer's choice wins and is remembered. The CSS still-picture rules apply only until the
viewer turns animation on (.iso-anim-on).
Also: switching light -> off -> smooth redraws the scene so the animations paused by script
run again (they ignore CSS play states).
Checks: web 93/93 (reduced motion: starts still, one click runs it, kept after reload),
Studio 109/109, 70 Rust tests. Tried in real Brave (system setting) and Firefox.
- Robot arm (category Industry): picks goods off the end of the nearest conveyor within its reach
and puts them on the start of another conveyor within reach, or on a pallet a quarter turn on
(pick / put: auto or a side). One move per item coming in (cycle 0) or a set cycle; waits while
the line before it stands. The belt it feeds carries its goods at its pace and starts its loop
when they land (feeds carry a time offset `ph`), so arm and belts stay in step.
- Drawn as a 16-pose flipbook: two-link inverse kinematics per pose, each pose shown for a
sixteenth of the cycle by a stepped CSS animation (iso-flip; pose 0 alone when unanimated).
Poses pointing away from the viewer are drawn before the base, the others after it.
- New sprite method beam(a, b, n, w, mat): a square bar between two 3D points, six faces culled
and shaded like face(). Native, so the factory demo renders in 4.7 ms instead of 18.8 ms.
- Factory demo: a palletiser at the end of the carton line, a loading robot passing drums from the
incline onto the loading belt into the truck. MCP instructions on robot arms.
Checks: 70 Rust tests (arms and belts in step, waiting arm, beam faces from every side),
Studio 109/109, web 90/90.
- Producer (category Industry): a press making cartons, crates, drums, sacks or parts at a set
rate per minute; its ram goes down once per item, a green / red light shows running / stopped.
- Conveyor: drawn the way it runs (new prefab meta `directed`: the Studio turns the piece from
where the drag starts), belt width, height, rise (inclines), speed, goods and spacing; legs,
rails and a drive motor. Corners join without overlap (the receiving belt runs through, the
feeding one stops at its side).
- A conveyor starting on a producer's output side carries its goods at its rate; one starting at
another's end carries on with what that one carries. The gap is speed / rate. A stopped press or
belt stops the goods after it. Tooltips show speed, rate and source.
- The goods ride a group moving one gap per loop (no reordering), first fading in, last out.
- Script API: world_of(o, u, v), info_row(key, value); objects_on falls back to half of p.d.
- Theme: industry colours, LED colours (the marker's LED had none).
- examples/factory + Factory demo in the web Studio; MCP instructions on production lines.
Checks: 68 Rust tests (conveyor joints, feed and spacing, every view of the factory demo),
Studio 108/108 (draw direction, feed from a producer, rate change), web 89/89.
Measured with the new tools/bench_web.py on the web Studio's house demo, CPU slowed 6x:
- Idle: running CSS animations repainted the whole drawing every frame (99% of the main
thread in a window). Animations now step on about ten times a second by default
("light", 5% idle); the new toolbar button switches light / smooth / off and the browser
remembers it; [build] animation sets the default for built pages; view.animation().
Pan and zoom gestures pause them. Status LEDs pause off-screen and with the rest now.
- Pan 28 -> 10 ms, zoom 69 -> 11 ms per step: gestures move the drawing as one compositor
layer (transform) and set the viewBox once they end; --iso-k is set on the tags group
only and only when it changes; the stage box is read once per frame.
- Hover 22 -> 15 ms per move: the tooltip is placed once per frame on its own layer and
measured only when its text changes; the Studio's x/y readout updates ten times a second
in a contained box; hover work in the Studio runs once per frame.
- Long object lists skip layout of rows out of sight (content-visibility).
- WASM built with opt-level 3: engine render 11.7 -> 9.4 ms for 10% more download.
Checks: Studio 102/102 (animation modes, pan as a layer, contained readout), web 87/87.
Selection: S.sel stays the object picked last; S.selIds holds everything
selected.
- In the object list, Ctrl+click adds or removes an object and
Shift+click selects a range.
- On the map, Ctrl/Shift+click toggles an object and Shift+drag draws a
box that selects what lies wholly inside it (locked and hidden objects
are left out).
- Ctrl+A selects everything that is not locked; Esc selects nothing.
- Clicking a wall or fence a second time selects every piece of the same
type joined to it; another click goes back to that one piece.
- Dragging one selected object moves them all, together with the windows
and doors on them, as one undo step. Arrow keys, R (turns the group
about its middle), Ctrl+D, Delete, Lock and Hide all work on the whole
selection.
- When all selected objects share a type, the property form edits them
all; fields where they differ show "mixed".
- The agent's system prompt lists the selected objects.
The viewer outlines several objects with selectObj([ids]) and passes the
click event to onPick. A batch op now answers `ids`, one per operation,
so the copies from a group duplicate get selected.
Pond (Nature): natural, round or square, with a stone or grass edge,
fish, lily pads, spreading ripples and reed clumps. The fish come from a
new Swim primitive (script: s.swim). One matrix maps the object's frame
to the screen. Each fish turns round its ellipse with a CSS rotation,
so off-screen pausing and reduced motion apply as for the other
animations. The house demo gets a koi pond in the back garden.
Tests: ponds in every shape and rotation have the right number of fish,
no NaN and no depth-sort cycles, and stay inside their rectangle.
check_studio covers list and map multi-select, a group drag undone in
one step, joined-fence selection, a mixed-value form applied to all, box
select, delete and undo, Ctrl+A, Esc, and a new pond's fish.
Joints: line_joint (util.rhai) applies the house-wall rules to fences and
site walls, so pieces never overlap and the depth sort stays clean.
- A corner is closed: the thicker piece (or, if equal, the one along
world x) runs through, and the other stops at its face.
- On a straight run, two pieces share one post.
- At a T, the stem stops at the other piece's face without a post of its
own.
- A fence that ends at a site or house wall stops at the wall's face.
Fence designs (prop style): mesh, wooden boards, steel bars, mesh on a
stone base, cobble wall, and brick wall with pillars. Board, stone and
brick joints are drawn on the face turned to the viewer. Brick pillars
are separate sprites.
Studio: line prefabs (walls, fences, hedges, roads) can be drawn as a
run by clicking corner after corner. Double-click or Enter ends the run,
clicking the first corner closes it, and Backspace drops the last
corner. A run is one undo step. A drag still draws one piece. Corners
and ends snap onto the ends and lines of the pieces they meet, and a
marker shows where the next corner will snap.
The house demo gets a brick front wall with gate pillars and wooden side
fences in place of the old east fence, which ran over the road. Tests
cover every design's corners, Ts, straight runs and wall stops, with no
depth-sort cycles in any rotation, plus site walls. check_studio draws
and closes a fence run, undoes it in one step, snaps a dragged spur,
and picks a design.
A press with the middle (or any other non-left) mouse button never reaches
the Studio's drag, place or select handlers: dragging pans the view even
on a selected object or while placing, and a click selects nothing. A
middle click no longer starts the browser's autoscroll.
check_studio covers a middle-drag on the selected truck (it stays put,
the view moves), a middle click on another object (the selection is
kept), and a middle-drag while placing (nothing is placed).
House parts (stdlib isokit/house): house_wall drawn along a line, with ends
that adapt at corners, T-junctions and straight runs so no two walls
overlap; window and door that sit on a wall and cut its opening (door
styles panel, glass, double, sliding, opening; swing and hinge by
rotation); floor (boards, tiles, carpet, stone); roof (hip, gable, flat,
optional solar); stairs.
Furniture (stdlib isokit/furniture): chair, sofa / armchair, table with
chairs, desk with monitor and chair, TV, bed, cupboard, bookshelf, kitchen
run, bathtub, shower, toilet, washbasin, plant, rug, floor lamp.
Cut-open levels: on gf / 1f the walls in front of a room are cut low
(rooms are found by their floors), the roof becomes an outline on the
floor, and storeys above are left out. A part's storey comes from z
(storey_h, default 3 m).
Scripting: objects_of, objects_at, objects_on, mount_of, mounted, frame,
to_world, to_local, local_of. Prefab meta: shape (line / rect), mount,
storey.
Studio: drag to draw lines and rectangles (walls, roads, fences, hedges,
floors, areas, buildings, roofs). The Room tool draws a floor plus walls,
without doubling walls that already stand on an edge. Windows and doors
snap onto walls with a hover preview, and they move, turn, copy and
delete with their wall in one undo step. New parts land on the storey
the view shows. Palette categories collapse, and the palette scrolls
apart from the object list.
The MCP instructions explain house building, and list_prefabs shows
sits_on. examples/house is a furnished bungalow; the web Studio gets a
House demo button. Tests: wall corners and junctions, zero depth-sort
cycles in every view, cut levels, and the house demo in every view;
check_studio covers the room / window / door / storey flow, check_web
the House demo.
Found while recording a demo with Qwen3.8 on the inference server:
- When the model wrote its answer and then called select_object, it was
asked again with nothing left to say and rambled ("the user hasn't sent
a message yet"), sometimes in Chinese. A step of page tools only
(select_object, set_view) after a written answer now ends the turn; the
system prompt says so, and to answer in the language of the latest message.
- The system prompt names the world directions of the user's screen right
and up, and the 2:1 foreshortening, so "left of the hall" and shapes meant
to be read on screen come out right (asked for a giant W of people, the
model now draws it upright and readable).
- mock_llm.py "show me X" + check: answer and select_object in one step end
the turn without another request, and the history stays valid.
A 401/403 with an HTML error page (nginx) showed as "HTTP 401: 401
Authorization Required 401 Authorization Required nginx". Now: "The endpoint
wants an API key: enter it in ⚙" before one is set, "The endpoint refused
the API key (...)" after.
On isokit.buildfor.life, entering https://inference.p0.contact/v1 in the
agent window's settings made the page call the inference server directly,
which browsers refuse (its nginx answers the CORS preflight with 401):
"The browser could not reach ... (Failed to fetch)".
- the relay meta names its upstream (data-upstream; build_web.py
--agent-upstream, the deploy passes the inference server): that URL now
goes through the relay and is saved as "follow the site's default"
- an unreachable endpoint says what to do: the relay's URL on a site with
one, else isokit studio or isokit.buildfor.life
- check_web.py: relayed upstream and the unreachable message
✦ Agent in the Studio's top bar opens a floating chat window. The model
(any OpenAI-compatible endpoint with tool calling; default B4L's inference
server, https://inference.p0.contact/v1) gets the 15 MCP tools plus two page
tools (select_object, set_view) and the Studio's state (selection, level,
rotation) in its system prompt. Answers and reasoning stream in; tool calls
show as rows with arguments and results; object ids link to the object;
Stop ends a turn; Undo takes the agent's edits back. The window moves by
its title bar and resizes at its top-left corner.
- studio/agent.js: shared by both front ends (waits for studio.js's
isokit:studio event); MCP over /mcp or isokit.mcp in the web Studio
- isokit studio: /api/agent/{config,models,chat} relay the calls on their
own threads (ureq, chunked and flushed per read), so the key stays on the
machine and the endpoint needs no CORS; settings from ISOKIT_LLM_URL /
_KEY / _MODEL or agent.json in the user's config folder
- web Studio: calls the endpoint from the page with a key kept in the
browser; build_web.py --agent-url names a same-site relay as default; the
deploy builds with /llm/v1, which deploy/Caddyfile forwards to the
inference server (its nginx refuses the CORS preflight)
- tools/mock_llm.py + tools/agent_checks.py: the agent window checks in both
check_studio.py and check_web.py
The status bar ends with "isokit <engine version>"; the web build adds
the commit (linked on Gitea), its date as a tooltip and a "+" when built
from a tree with uncommitted changes (build_web.py writes a
<meta name="isokit-build"> from GITHUB_SHA or git). /api/meta now carries
"engine". studio/favicon.svg (isometric cube in the accent green) is
served by `isokit studio` (also on /view) and copied into the web build.
check_web.py and check_studio.py check both.
Gitea Actions workflow builds dist/web (rustup + wasm32 target, prebuilt
wasm-bindgen CLI at the Cargo.lock version, tools/build_web.py) and
publishes it to /var/www/isokit.buildfor.life on s1 with the blog's
two-directory rename swap and the same VPS_* secrets as cnx_vinyl.
deploy/Caddyfile mirrors the vhost applied on s1 (no-cache so the
unversioned wasm glue never goes stale at Cloudflare).
A standalone "Rust stable GNU" install ahead of ~/.cargo/bin made cargo
fail with E0463 (no wasm32 std). The script now puts CARGO_HOME/bin first,
checks for rustup and the wasm32 target, and says what to install.
- isokit-wasm: wasm-bindgen build of the engine; a project in memory behind
the same JSON API as `isokit studio`, plus the MCP tools
- isokit-project: Store trait (FsStore folder, MemStore memory) under a
generic Workspace; Project::from_files; shared Studio API module (api.rs)
used by serve.rs and the WASM build; web_time for clocks in the browser
- studio.js runs on a pluggable backend (window.IsoKitBackend); no Studio
keys while a dialog is open
- web/: projects in IndexedDB, new/demo/delete, zip export/import (stored and
deflated), folder import by drop or picker, folders opened live via File
System Access with outside edits followed, code editor, page build and
preview, two tabs in step, isokit.mcp() and WebMCP registration
- tools/build_web.py -> dist/web (static), tools/check_web.py (44 checks)
grabowski