Neon signs

A NeonSign writes a word on a facade as a lit neon tube: GARAGE over the garage doors, TÉLÉPORTEUR over the teleporter cabin, DÉPÔT DE FRET on the cargo depot. The text follows the game's language, and a small light tints the wall around it.

Placing one

1. Open the building's scene, select its root, Add Child Node → NeonSign.
2. Move it onto the facade. The text is read from the node's +Z side (the blue arrow, in local space): turn it so that +Z points at the street, not at the wall. Leave a few centimetres between the node and the wall: the letters are extruded depth around it.
3. Give it a text_key (below).
4. To have it come on at dusk and go off at dawn, add a Photocell under it.

There is nothing to do for the network: the sign belongs to the building's scene, so every client draws it when the building appears. The dedicated server, which draws nothing, drops it.

Its text is a translation key

text_key is a key of tools/localization/localisation.csv, written %%SIGN_<NAME>. Add the line with its English and French text:

%%SIGN_GARAGE,GARAGE,GARAGE,
%%SIGN_TELEPORTER,TELEPORTER,TÉLÉPORTEUR,

The sign shows the translation, and changes when the player changes language. A key missing from the file shows as itself, without its %% (SIGN_GARAGE), and test_localisation_keys fails.

No default text

text_key has no default value on purpose. Godot does not save a property whose value equals its default, so with a default text, the scene of a sign showing that text would hold no text at all, and the day the default changed, the sign would change with it.

The game still shows the key

The game reads .translation files that the editor builds from the CSV when it notices the change. If a new sign shows its key, give the editor's window the focus (or reimport the CSV) and relaunch.

Settings

Setting	What it does	On the village signs
color	Colour of the tube; its light takes the same	amber (garage), cyan (cabin)
glow	Emission energy of the tube. Above about 1, the environment's glow makes it bloom	1.5 to 2.5
letter_height	Height of a capital letter, in metres	0.14 (a label on a machine) to 1.4 (the garage)
depth	Thickness of the tube	0.04 to 0.2
font	Font of the letters	Xolonium
Light › light_energy, light_range, light_attenuation, light_offset	The light on the wall (below)
Distance › fade_distance	Beyond it the sign is not drawn and its light fades out	300 to 400 m

A soft patch of light, not a disc

Inside its range, a light's brightness goes as 1 / distance^attenuation; over the last third of the range it is then forced down to zero. At an attenuation of 1 (Godot's default) the light has hardly faded when that cut comes, and the cut draws a sharp round edge on the ground.

To get a patch that melts away:

• light_attenuation around 2 (the physical inverse square; 2.2 to 2.7 on the village signs);
• light_range far enough that the cut falls where the light is already faint;
• light_energy raised to make up for the faster fading;
• light_offset puts the light in front of the letters: a few metres lights the ground in front of the building rather than the wall.

The same holds for any OmniLight3D or SpotLight3D (their Attenuation and Range). A SpotLight3D has one more edge, the rim of its cone: an Angle Attenuation below 1 softens it.

Why not a Label3D

A Label3D cannot make a neon: its colour cannot go above 1, so the glow never catches it. The sign builds a TextMesh (real extruded letters) with an emissive material instead.

The tube and the light are internal children, rebuilt by the script: they never get saved into the building's scene. No generated mesh ends up in your diff, and two signs never share one text.

Tests

test/unit/test_neon_sign.gd checks, for every building that wears a sign, that it reads its own key, and for a sign on a facade, that its +Z points away from the middle of the building. It also checks that the tube glows, follows the language and switches off. A new building with a sign goes in its BUILDINGS list, and in ON_FACADE when the sign hangs on a facade.