Gathering of Zion · Architecture and experience report · 22 October 2026
Carthage: a building, a town, a final afternoon
Replace the floating prison-room stage with an explorable two-story stone jail, a connected yard, a well, a stair, and a surrounding county-seat streetscape. Let the player understand the place before the final account unfolds.
Status: the source-informed procedural architecture module is integrated into the game. Browser verification has walked from the courtyard through the front door, up the stair into the bedroom, and back outside using actual WASD input, without teleporting the player. Static batching reduces the module to 94 meshes before companion and crowd models. This is a playable architecture milestone, not a completed AAA level, a certified measured survey, or a claim that every neighboring building has been identified.
What the evidence establishes
The official site describes a ground-floor jailer living area and cell, with a more-secure cell and the jailer's bedroom upstairs. It also identifies fourteen steps between floors. This makes the essential correction clear: Carthage's “dungeon” is an upper-floor criminal cell, not the underground confinement familiar from Liberty Jail. Official site and accessibility description.
The National Park Service identifies the second-floor bedroom as the place where Joseph and his companions were allowed to remain while awaiting a hearing. The structure is a stone jail with an attic above its two occupied stories. NPS site history.
A Church history manual publishes a cutaway locating the bedroom, criminal cell, ground-floor domestic rooms, and northwest debtor cell. That is a useful interpretive diagram, not an original construction blueprint. A separate site-history account dates the summer-kitchen addition to about 1850; it is therefore omitted from this 1844 build rather than copied uncritically from modern photographs. Published cutaway; Restoration and room-history account.
The jail's widely reported exterior footprint is approximately 29 by 35 feet; the game uses 8.84 by 10.67 metres. That dimension is reported in the architectural history literature, not newly measured here. The upper-floor height, several partition positions, stair run, furniture placement and street spacing are gameplay approximations. The National Register record is verified, but its linked nomination PDF currently reports that the file has not been digitized; this report does not pretend to have inspected unavailable archival plans. Published dimensions; National Register record 73000703.
Floor-plan interpretation
North is up in these new schematic production diagrams. Rectangles communicate room relationships and playable circulation, not a surveyed restoration drawing. Dashed routes indicate walkable paths. The upstairs southeast bedroom and exterior east-side well supply the critical spatial relationship.
The final afternoon: source and cinematic direction
Build the principal June 27 sequence in late-afternoon light. The supplied paintings are valuable emotional and compositional references, but their torchlight and visual arrangements cannot be treated as eyewitness photographs or blueprints. A torchlit night approach can only appear as an explicitly identified artistic remembrance, not the default time of the historical attack. JSP account of June 27 and its evidence.
- Before confinement: enter from a quiet town street, pass the well, cross the domestic ground floor, and climb the stair. Exploration establishes ordinary life, scale, doors and sightlines.
- Human company: sit within the bedroom, hear Taylor's hymn through a separately reviewed recording, examine an ordinary letter and attend to the companions. Do not use crowd noise as a substitute for their distinct performances.
- Pressure from outside: distant movement and converging footsteps become visible through real windows. Reused Whitmer rigs are clearly marked temporary crowd stand-ins, never an assertion that the historical Whitmers formed the mob.
- Attack as testimony: the blocked doorway, stair noise, smoke and window supply the geometry. The current prototype need not become a shooting minigame. A choreographed, non-graphic account should be skippable and replayable through a respectful memory mode, not a reward for killing attackers.
- Continuation: preserve silence and room for grief, then transition to the separately labeled imaginative continuation. Historical death remains tragic even when the game ends in hope.
Fine-grained attack choreography has conflicting reconstructions. Avoid making uncertain shot counts, elapsed seconds, precise wound sequences or the watch's mechanics into infallible game facts. Surviving accounts and physical evidence need separate annotations. Physical-evidence study and its interpretive hypotheses.
Implemented architecture contract
| System | Implementation and remaining qualification |
|---|---|
| Connected place | Two occupied stories, open entrance, fourteen stair treads, separated cells/domestic spaces, upstairs bedroom, yard, well, fences, trees and surrounding streets. No fabricated basement. |
| Walkable height | getGroundHeight(x,z,currentY) follows a continuous stair surface and preserves the occupied upper floor. Collider vertical ranges allow ground and upper partitions to coexist. |
| Camera visibility | setInteriorView(position,cameraPosition) removes the roof for interior play and cuts away the upper structure for ground-floor views; exterior appearance returns outside. Separate ceilings remain visible to an inside first-person camera and cut away when an overhead camera needs the view. All camera modes remain available. |
| Actor and objective placement | actorPositions places Taylor, Hyrum, Richards and Dan Jones; objectivePoints moves the existing bedroom interactions upstairs. Jones's departure and Taylor's hymn still require chronological script refinement rather than implying all events happened simultaneously. |
| Street authenticity | County-seat context is procedural and deliberately schematic: unpaved roads, timber fronts, boarding-house and dry-goods motifs. It is not a surveyed 1844 address map, and it excludes later monumental courthouse architecture. |
| Resource ownership | The host world owns geometry and shared materials. The module disposes its own canvas labels. It creates no new downloaded media and does not alter source GLBs. |
Release gates and next art pass
- Walk the front-door-to-bedroom route without teleporting; return through the same stair and doorway.
- Verify walls and furniture collide on the correct floor, stairs work in both directions, and every story objective is reachable.
- Inspect the east window from bedroom and yard; verify the well relationship, guardrails and no unintended player fall during ordinary exploration.
- Check all three cameras, especially tight-room third-person clipping and roof cutaway restoration.
- Before claiming a precise 1844 reconstruction, obtain site-curator review, a measured plan, and a documented period street map. Approve furniture and door swing against those records.
- Complete rigged crowd staging, companion seating, hymn takes, subtitle timing, spatial audio and respectful attack choreography as a second performance pass.