Tutorial: Build a House

The first tutorial covered moving around and steering a bot. This one builds something you can walk into: a little house, one command at a time. By the end you'll have used most of the shape commands and know how to fix a build when it comes out wrong.

Get a Build to code

Everything here is drawn by a Build, a unit made of blocks. Place one by picking a block color from the toolbar and dropping a block in the world. Then switch to the Code tool (key 1) and click the block to open its code.

Type each step below into that code window, and press left alt/option (⌥) to run it. Enu re-runs the whole script every time, so you can keep editing and re-running as you go.

Four walls

A hollow box is four walls, a floor, and a ceiling all at once. fill = false is what makes it hollow:

color = white
box 12, 6, 10, fill = false

A door and some windows

A house needs a way in. eraser is a color that removes blocks instead of drawing them, so we erase a door-shaped hole in the front wall, and two smaller holes for windows. at places each hole at an exact spot:

color = white
box 12, 6, 10, fill = false

# a doorway
box 2, 4, 1, at = vec3(5, 0, 9), color = eraser

# two windows
box 2, 2, 1, at = vec3(1, 3, 9), color = eraser
box 2, 2, 1, at = vec3(9, 3, 9), color = eraser

A roof

Give it a red roof by drawing a thin box across the top:

color = white
box 12, 6, 10, fill = false

# a doorway
box 2, 4, 1, at = vec3(5, 0, 9), color = eraser

# two windows
box 2, 2, 1, at = vec3(1, 3, 9), color = eraser
box 2, 2, 1, at = vec3(9, 3, 9), color = eraser

# a red roof
color = red
box 12, 1, 10, at = vec3(0, 6, 0)

That's a house! Walk over and go inside through the door.

Make it yours

Now the fun part. Change things and re-run:

• Swap white for brown or blue to repaint the walls.

• Make it bigger: change 12, 6, 10 to 20, 10, 16. (You'll need to move the door and windows to match.)

• Add a chimney with a can:

  color = black
  can 2, 4, at = vec3(9, 6, 2)
  

• Put a ball on top for a fancy dome, or a whole second story with another box.

When something goes wrong

Building is mostly fixing. A few things that trip everyone up:

• The pieces don't line up. box and shapes with at measure from the build's corner. But wall, floor, and a plain box with no at start from wherever the drawing turtle is, and wall and floor move the turtle to their far end. If parts drift apart, give everything an at so they share the same measuring stick.
• You can't find your build. Fly up (double-jump, then hold jump) for a better view.
• You want to start over. Just change the code and run again. Enu re-runs the whole script from scratch each time and redraws it, so there's nothing to clean up by hand.

Next steps

• The full list of shapes is on the Drawing Shapes page.
• Make your house do something with Command Loops: a door that opens when you're near, lights that flicker, a bot that patrols.
• Browse the API Reference for every command Enu knows.