feat(chat): CT-B4 — @log, and the research block that was a wrong question

CT-B4 was filed as "the plain-text session chat log, path and rotation
UNKNOWN, needs a live check." Both unknowns dissolve once you read the
handler: there is no automatic session log. Retail's @log is a COMMAND.
DoSetOutput @0x0057E4F0 takes a filename, StartCopyOutputToFile @0x0057C8A0
does the fopen(name, "a+"), and running it again with no argument closes it.
Nothing rotates because it appends forever, and nothing has a fixed path
because the player names the file.

The path question that DOES exist — where a bare name lands — was answered
all along by retail's own help text, which CH4 extracted verbatim into our
help table a fortnight ago and nobody read: "a log file named Aclog.txt in
your Asheron's Call directory." A blocked question sat on top of a committed
answer.

We cannot use the install directory: the launcher replaces it atomically on
update, so a log written there is wiped by the next update or blocks it. The
client's own log directory is the equivalent that survives. Rooted paths are
honoured verbatim, as retail's fopen would. Register CT-5.

The verb was registered in the help table but NOT in the command catalog, so
/log printed help and did nothing — and the CH4 conformance registry recorded
it as a "server passthrough" precisely because that shape is indistinguishable
from an unimplemented client command. It never went on the wire at all. Both
are corrected, with the totals moved in the same commit rather than left to
drift.

Moving it into the catalog also moves which help table answers for it, so
retail's real text moved to the catalog-verb table in the same change. Without
that, /help log would have silently started printing acdream's own invented
one-line summary — caught by the coverage test, and now pinned by a test that
names the text.

All five replies are byte-decoded from the PDB-paired binary rather than read
off Binary Ninja's previews, which truncate at ~33 characters and would have
lost the second half of every one of them (including the two spaces retail
puts after "Copying chat to %s.").

The writer attaches on OPEN, not at startup — retail's help is explicit that
only what appears after the command is copied — and detaches from the
transcript it actually attached to, so a session teardown cannot leave a live
handler writing into a file the player believes is closed. What gets written
is the composed display line with the shared timestamp, because retail's
fprintf sits inside AddTextToScroll: downstream of composition, upstream of
glyph layout. Logging the raw entry text would have produced a file of bare
fragments with no speakers.

acdream's logs carry no inline tag markup where retail's do, since tags live
beside the text as spans here rather than inside it. Registered as CT-6 rather
than reconstructed purely to write it to a file.

Register: CT-5, CT-6.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Erik 2026-08-21 11:28:20 +02:00
parent 89db9a794c
commit 0e0a77c9b1
16 changed files with 831 additions and 18 deletions

View file

@ -1,14 +1,17 @@
# Campaign CT — complete chat parity (system + GUI)
**Status:** Groups A, B, C and D COMPLETE 2026-08-21, each user-gated. Two
items deliberately not shipped: CT-B3 (word filtering — dropped by user
direction, register row CT-2) and CT-B4 (session chat log — research-blocked).
**Status:** Groups A, B, C and D COMPLETE 2026-08-21, each user-gated.
CT-B4 landed 2026-08-21 after the research block turned out to rest on a wrong
premise (see the slice). One item deliberately not shipped: CT-B3 (word
filtering — dropped by user direction, register row CT-2).
**Carried forward:** multi-frame state media. Retail's unseen-text indicator
blinks because its `Normal` state authors SIX image frames; our importer keeps
one file per state, so nothing authored can animate. The indicator is
state-driven and correct today and gains the blink for free once that
capability lands. It is the first known customer, not the only one.
**Carried forward:** ~~multi-frame state media~~ **DONE 2026-08-21.** The
importer now keeps the whole authored sequence and `UiMediaSequence` plays it.
Measuring the real data (`LayoutDump --media 0x1000048C`) corrected the
behaviour as well as enabling it: the indicator blinks three times over three
seconds and then hands off to `Ghosted`, hiding itself. Retail's is a transient
attention-flash, not a badge that stays lit until you scroll down. Register
rows CT-3, CT-4.
**Goal, set by the user 2026-08-21: complete retail parity for the chat
system AND the chat GUI.** Not "fix the green name" — that was the symptom
@ -127,9 +130,29 @@ Nothing is user-visible until A4.
`TabooTable::CreateCheckString @0x00681570` normalises a candidate before
`StringMatchesFilter @0x00681600` compares it, which is how retail catches
obfuscated spellings.
- **CT-B4** The plain-text session chat log (`ClientSystem::s_pLogFile`). We
write none. **Research-blocked**: path and rotation are UNKNOWN and are not
in the decomp — needs a live check or a dat/filesystem probe.
- **CT-B4** ~~The plain-text session chat log~~ **DONE — and the premise was
wrong.** There is no automatic session log to have a path for. Retail's
`@log` is a COMMAND: `ClientCommunicationSystem::DoSetOutput @0x0057E4F0`
takes a filename, `StartCopyOutputToFile @0x0057C8A0` does the
`fopen(name, "a+")`, and running it again with no argument closes it. So
"path and rotation UNKNOWN" was asking a question the design does not have:
the player names the file, and there is no rotation because it appends
forever.
The path question that DOES exist — where a bare name lands — is answered by
retail's own help text, which the CH4 help table already carried verbatim
without anyone reading it: "a log file named Aclog.txt **in your Asheron's
Call directory**". acdream cannot use the install directory (the launcher
replaces it atomically on update), so a bare name lands in the client's own
log directory. Rooted paths are honoured verbatim. Register row CT-5.
Landed with it: the verb registered in the catalog (it had a help entry
since CH4 but no catalog entry, so `/log` printed help and did nothing),
retail's `.txt`-for-extensionless rule, all five reply strings byte-decoded
from the paired binary, and the writer attached at OPEN so only text after
the command is copied. The line logged is the composed display line with the
shared timestamp, because retail's `fprintf` sits inside `AddTextToScroll`
— downstream of composition, upstream of glyph layout.
### Group C — chat GUI
@ -166,7 +189,6 @@ Nothing is user-visible until A4.
Blocks nothing in Group A, but decides whether other tag shapes exist.
- Whether retail's transcript supports text selection distinctly from the
entry field (blocks CT-C4's scope).
- The chat log file's path and rotation (blocks CT-B4).
- Whether a chat-specific sound cue exists — a grep came back empty, which is
weak evidence, not proof of absence.