PCG House Details Guide

Purpose and starting point

Use the house actor's Self Details, not a generated mesh instance. Open /Game/Lambeer/World/Maps/L_PCG_BuildingPreview/L_PCG_BuildingPreview and select an existing house, or place /Game/Lambeer/World/Environment/Procedural/BP_PCG_ModularHouse. The actor uses PCG_ModularHouse as its normal Building Graph. Search a control name in Details when needed; clear the search to see all categories again.

1. Choose Footprint Source, set the outline or width/depth, and set Number of Floors.
2. Configure ground-floor exterior Doors, windows and a stair if there is more than one floor.
3. Choose automatic rooms or closed Room Guides; then set the roof and materials.
4. Run Regenerate Building (or leave Auto Regenerate on), read Validation Status and Generated Room Summary, and save the level.

Coordinates and angles are house-local. Floor 0 is the ground floor, Floor 1 is 320 cm above it, and Floor 2 is 640 cm above it. The fixed Floor To Floor Cm value is read-only. Changing an actor's world position does not change its local room/door/stair values.

Current vs proposed: all controls described on this page exist in the current source. The house bakes visible geometry in the Editor; it does not regenerate when PIE begins. Structural house destruction/locks are later work. Finish tiles have their own gameplay removal/replacement and persistence rules in FEAT-BUILDING.

Layout and footprint

Slab edge: the bottom structural slab extends to the exterior wall edge, including concave L corners. Decorative floor finishes stop at the interior wall face.

Exterior openings and stairs

Each generated doorway uses a separate 100 × 200 cm frame and a fitted open leaf. The Door Start Metre and Spline Entrance fields are visible legacy migration values; use the Doors array for current editing.

Automatic room program

With Use Room Guides off, enable Layout → Rooms → Generate Rooms to generate partitions, separate doors and connected circulation. The search uses rectangular private rooms and is bounded; a reduced result means the tested candidates could not fit the target under current constraints, not that no possible architectural plan exists.

Read the result: Generated Room Summary lists the target and actual bedroom/bathroom counts per floor. It reports the ground-floor kitchen/living area and configured circulation width. Validation Status reports whether generation was valid.

Guided rooms, doors and windows

Use this mode when you want to draw the rooms rather than have the system choose them. Enable Use Room Guides on the house. This automatically requests room generation; the automatic Bedroom/Bathroom numbers become informational targets and never remove your authored guides.

1. Draw closed room outlines along wall centre lines. An exterior room line follows the exterior wall centre, 12.5 cm inward from the outer footprint; clear dimensions are smaller after the 25 cm wall. Leave common circulation or draw Corridor guides. Two rooms may share one wall when their boundary segments coincide exactly, with no interior overlap; the generator emits that wall once.
2. Give each room a type and floor. For an upper room, set Floor 1 and click Make Linear And Set Floor Height to place it at local Z=320 cm.
3. Place Door Guides where rooms meet the common space or another room, and Window Guides near exterior walls. Snap Opening To Nearest Valid Wall aligns either type explicitly; Auto Snap Invalid Opening Guides retries failed regeneration automatically. Check the result: the nearest valid wall can be a different side when a marker is closer to it. A ground-floor exterior Door Guide replaces the exterior Doors list for generation.
4. If any Window Guide exists, automatic windows are suppressed on every floor and only marked windows are used. Keep Windows enabled. Corners, partition junctions, doors and stairs still need a valid full-size opening; if none fits, generation retains the previous house and reports the error without moving markers.
5. After reshaping a house, set Footprint Source = Spline; editing FootprintSpline while Rectangle is selected does not change the house. Run Make Footprint Linear And Planar if a dragged point changes height, then Regenerate Building. Spline gable roofs also need Fit Roof Wings To Footprint as a starting design. Read Validation Status and Generated Room Summary before saving the map.

Roof, finish layers and materials

Building → Inspection: reveal the interior without regeneration

Hide Roof hides the roof sheets, both gable materials, attic louvers and top ceiling. Hide Floor 1, Hide Floor 2 and Hide Floor 3 independently hide the corresponding storey's walls, partitions, openings, floor slab and finishes; an inter-floor slab, its upper Floor Finish and its lower Ceiling Finish hide together with the upper floor. A stair belongs to the floor where it starts. Uncheck a box to reveal the same baked pieces again. These checkboxes change Editor visibility only: they do not rebuild PCG, change the piece count, alter collision or remove finish records. PIE restores the complete house regardless of inspection checkboxes. Floor 2/3 controls have no visible effect when that storey does not exist.

Example: on a two-floor L house, enable Hide Roof and Hide Floor 2 to inspect the ground-floor rooms from above. Uncheck Hide Floor 2 to inspect the upper floor with its roof still hidden; finally uncheck Hide Roof.

Building → Materials: choose the surface, then assign its MI

Assign a Material Instance in the named house field. Empty means use the existing mesh material or the fallback shown below. Material fields change appearance; finish tier fields control gameplay tier. Generated procedural surface component slots show role names instead of anonymous Element 0–3; use the house fields as the primary setting.

Example: set Wall Material to an interior plaster MI, enable Exterior Wall Finish and assign Exterior Wall Finish Material to a brick MI. The room-facing wall and the visible outside then use different materials. Set Floor Finish Material to tile and Ceiling Finish Material to painted plaster to separate the two faces of a floor slab.

Generation, output and recovery

Three worked setups

1. A two-floor rectangular house with automatic rooms

1. Choose Rectangle, Width 10, Depth 8, Number of Floors 2. Add one Door with Edge 0 and Offset -1.
2. Turn on Compact Stair, Auto Place Compact Stair, Generate Rooms, Windows and Allow Fewer Rooms. Request Bedrooms 3, Bathrooms 1, Ground Floor Bedrooms 1. Keep the default 9 m² bedroom, 3 m² bathroom, 12 m² kitchen/living and 100 cm corridor minimums.
3. Regenerate. The saved rectangle example reports one bedroom/bathroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. Check the actual summary after any edit; it can change if the footprint, stair or minimums change.

2. An L footprint with a chosen roof direction

1. Choose Spline and edit FootprintSpline into a closed L. Keep linear points at local Z=0. Set Number of Floors to 2.
2. Choose a valid ground-floor Door edge and start offset. Turn on Compact Stair and Auto Place. Set the preferred Spline Stair Location/Yaw, then regenerate and read the status and actual room counts.
3. Use Fit Roof Wings To Footprint as an initial guide, then edit each wing Centre/Yaw to keep the desired cross-gable direction. Set Roof Pitch 30° and Roof Overhang 50 cm; regenerate after changing the wings.

The saved two-floor L retains its original footprint, entrance and stair preference; the bounded automatic search currently produces one upstairs bedroom plus a downstairs bathroom and kitchen/living area against a target of three bedrooms.

3. A house with rooms drawn by hand

1. Start from PCG_GuidedRooms_Example or another house. Enable Use Room Guides. Add closed KitchenLiving, Bathroom and Bedroom guides on Floor 0. Draw their wall-centre lines without overlap and leave common circulation.
2. For explicit placement, turn off Auto Connect Room Guides and put Door Guides at each needed wall opening. Add a Window Guide at a safe exterior wall centre; this replaces automatic windows house-wide.
3. Regenerate from the house or any guide. Read Validation Status, correct the exact offending guide/marker if needed, then save the map.

Source, persistence and verification

Source of truth for controls: Source/Lambeer/Building/PCG/LambeerPCGBuilding.h/.cpp, LambeerPCGRoomGuide.h/.cpp, LambeerPCGBuildingLayout.cpp, LambeerPCGSplineLayout.cpp, LambeerPCGRoomPlan.cpp and LambeerPCGGuidedRooms.cpp. FEAT-BUILDING remains the canonical design/decision record; this page explains its Editor controls.

Room and opening guides are editor-only. Save the level after a valid generation. Baked house geometry is used at runtime; individual authored finish tiles use stable house/tile identities and the existing world persistence path. Structural house HP, locks and demolition are outside this authoring guide. The bounded room/stair searches are Editor work, not a runtime performance budget.

Verification: latest Editor and Game builds, 39 PCG/Building/Persistence automated tests, four preview-house geometry probes and save/reload checks pass as recorded in the validation record. Only the owner may start PIE. Walking every route, using stairs and checking multiplayer finish removal/rejoin in PIE remain owner acceptance checks.

Implementation state: current controls are implemented; no new controls are proposed on this page. If a Details field or result differs after later code changes, verify the current source and update this guide with FEAT-BUILDING.