Add doors, exits and staircases

Rooms alone are a picture. Doors are what make them a graph. Until a floor has doors and at least one final exit, MassComs cannot compute a route across it — and a route that reaches the wrong door is worse than no route at all.

1. 01

   Run door detection, or place doors by hand

   Door and exit detection is a separate pass from room tracing. It runs as part of Full AI Analysis and is not triggered by the room trace on its own. If you only traced rooms, you have no doors.

   Detected doors appear marked as such. As with rooms, treat them as proposals: a detected door in a wall that is actually a window changes a route in a way that matters.

   Door detection is deliberately non-blocking. The full analysis reports itself finished once rooms, boundary and zones are done, while the door pass keeps running in the background — the Zones & safety panel goes on showing Detecting doors and exits… after the rest has settled. Give it time before concluding that no doors were found.

   Field or control	What it does
   Add doors	Places an ordinary internal door connecting two spaces.
   Add exit door	Marks a door as a way out of the building.
   Fire exit	The stronger designation — a final exit that evacuation routes should terminate at.
   Staircase entrance	The point at which a route leaves this floor. Required for any multi-floor routing.
   Detected door	A door proposed by detection rather than placed by a person. Review these individually.

   

2. 02

   Connect the rooms that actually connect

   Every doorway that people use should exist as a connection. Missing doors produce routes that go the long way round; invented doors produce routes through walls.

   • Walk the plan mentally room by room and ask: can I get from here to the corridor?
   • Pay attention to double doors, lobbies and airlocks — these are frequently traced as one space and missed.
   • Doors that are locked in normal use but released on alarm still count as connections. Doors that stay locked do not.

   !

   A door that is normally locked and not released by the fire system must not be marked as an exit. A route to a locked door is the most dangerous single error you can make in this builder.

3. 03

   Mark final exits correctly

   Distinguish between a door to outside and a designated fire exit. Routes should terminate at fire exits; other external doors may be convenient in daily use and unsuitable in an evacuation.

   ✓

   Confirm it worked

   Every zone on the floor should have at least one fire exit reachable from every room in it. Preview a route from the room furthest from any exit to confirm.

4. 04

   Configure staircases for multi-floor routing

   Place a staircase entrance on each floor the staircase serves, then use Configure staircase to link them. The dialog asks for a Staircase name and offers This is (pick an existing staircase) so the same physical stair on another floor is recognised as the same stair.

   This linkage is what makes a route on the second floor able to say "take stair B down" and have the ground-floor leg continue from the right place. Without it, each floor's routing is an island.

   Field or control	What it does
   Staircase name	Use the name on the building's own signage. It is read by people who are moving.
   This is (pick an existing staircase)	Links this floor's entrance to the same staircase already defined on another floor.
   Arrives at assembly point	Where the staircase route ends up once it reaches the ground.

5. 05

   Set the evacuation strategy per room

   Rooms carry an Evacuate via setting for multi-floor routing, with two options: Direct to assembly point (ground floor) for rooms already at ground level, and Via staircase (upper floors) for rooms that must descend first.

   i

   Getting this wrong on a ground-floor room sends people to a staircase they do not need. Getting it wrong on an upper floor produces a route that walks into a wall.

   ✓

   Confirm it worked

   Spot-check one room per floor per staircase. If the previewed route descends the stair you expect and arrives at the right assembly point, the linkage is correct.

6. 06

   Preview routes and walk the doubtful ones

   Preview from several rooms per floor. Choose deliberately: the room furthest from an exit, a room behind a door you were unsure about, and a room on the top floor that must use a staircase.

   !

   Walk any route you would not personally be confident following in smoke. That is the standard, not whether the line looks plausible.