First consumer of acdream's plugin automation surface, and the first slice of
the VTank-class plugin milestone
(docs/research/2026-07-29-vtank-plugin-automation-requirements.md).
MossTank shows a panel with a Buff button; clicking it casts every self-buff
the character is missing, skips what is already in force at an equal or higher
tier, and refreshes what is nearly expired.
The host/plugin line is the load-bearing decision here. The host publishes
spell DATA -- family, tier, difficulty, mana, duration -- plus a cast
primitive with a preflight gate. The plugin owns the POLICY. That is the
architectural conclusion the requirements research reached: VTank's engine
lived in plugin-land, built on Decal's primitives, and baking "best buff for
skill X" into the host would start pulling the engine inward one convenience
at a time.
Why the plan is driven off the spellbook rather than off trained skills, which
is the obvious reading of "buff every trained and specialised skill": the
client cannot honestly make that mapping. The link between a spell and the
stat it modifies arrives from the SERVER in the enchantment message and is
absent from the client's own spell table. What the client does know is which
spells the character has learned -- and a character only learns buffs for the
skills they use, so the spellbook reaches the same set without inventing a
mapping the client has no grounds for.
Surface added, all BCL-only so Plugin.Abstractions keeps its zero project
references:
* ICharacterInfo, ISpellCatalog, IMagicCommands, grouped behind one
IAutomationSurface so IPluginHost grows by one member rather than three.
* IEvents.Tick. Automation is sequences, not single calls -- a buff pass casts
several spells and must wait between them. Without a host tick a plugin
would need its own timer thread re-entering the host off its update thread.
* NoOpAutomationSurface for hosts with no live session, so a plugin keeps one
code path and checks IsAvailable.
Markup gained <button> and <label>; it previously supported only <meter>, with
a comment promising the rest. Buttons bind onclick to an Action property and
FAIL THE PANEL LOAD if it does not resolve -- a silently dead button is worse
than a panel that refuses to load, because the user clicks and there is
nothing to diagnose. Labels bind through a Func so a status line tracks its
binding instead of freezing at build time.
Enchantment reads use EnchantmentsInEffectSnapshot rather than the raw active
set: retail leaves a weaker same-family enchantment in the registry while a
stronger one is in force, and a plugin asking "am I buffed?" means in force.
BuffPlan is a pure function of (known buffs, active enchantments) precisely so
it can be tested without a session; 9 tests cover tier supersede, the
family-0 no-stack bucket that must not be de-duplicated, expiry refresh, and
plan stability across the rebuilds the tick loop performs.
Solution builds clean; 14,421 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three separate fixes landed today, each addressing a specific bug the
user observed during live play:
1. NPC clothing changes by camera angle (InstancedMeshRenderer)
- Group key was (GfxObjId) only, so every humanoid NPC using the
same body mesh piled into one instance group; only the first
instance's texture was used for the entire DrawInstanced batch,
so which NPC's palette "won" changed as frustum culling and
iteration order shuffled entries.
- Now keyed by (GfxObjId, PaletteHash ^ SurfaceOverridesHash)
so only compatible instances batch; each unique appearance gets
its own draw call. Perf hit is small (humanoid NPCs each emit
one more draw call); visually every NPC is now stable.
2. GpuWorldState dedup on respawn
- Server re-sends CreateObject for the same guid on visibility
refresh / landblock crossing / appearance update. AppendLiveEntity
was blindly appending each time, so GpuWorldState accumulated
multiple copies of the same entity, each with its own
PaletteOverride / MeshRefs. That alone wasn't the clothing bug
(that was #1) but it would have caused other overlap problems
downstream.
- Added RemoveEntityByServerGuid + WorldGameState.RemoveById;
OnLiveEntitySpawnedLocked calls both before creating the new
entity so respawns replace cleanly.
3. Motion wire format — run animation sync with retail observers
- ACE's MovementData constructor only computes interpState.ForwardSpeed
on the WalkForward/WalkBackwards branch; every other ForwardCommand
falls into `else` and passes through WITHOUT speed set, giving
observers speed=0. Sending RunForward directly meant retail
clients saw us "run in place" while position drifted forward.
- Wire: always WalkForward + HoldKey.Run for running. ACE
auto-upgrades to RunForward with creature.GetRunRate() for
broadcast — correct command + correct speed at observers.
- Added per-axis FORWARD_HOLD_KEY / SIDE_STEP_HOLD_KEY /
TURN_HOLD_KEY so every active axis carries HoldKey.Run when
running (matches holtburger's build_motion_state_raw_motion_state).
- Added LocalAnimationCommand to MovementResult so our own
client still plays the RunForward cycle locally while the wire
stays WalkForward. Wire vs. local animation command are now
decoupled.
- Walk-backward wire command changed from WalkForward@-0.65 to
WalkBackward@1.0 (holtburger pattern).
- Strafe speed changed from 0.5 to 1.0 on wire AND local physics
(matches retail sidestep pace).
4. Jump height default + env-var tuning
- Default jumpSkill bumped from 100 → 200 (jump ≈ 3m at full
charge, closer to retail feel for a mid-level character).
- ACDREAM_RUN_SKILL and ACDREAM_JUMP_SKILL env vars now override
the defaults so the user can tune per-character until we parse
PlayerDescription and plumb real skill values through.
5. JustLanded signal on MovementResult
- Tracks airborne→grounded transition so future animation code
can fire the landing cycle when we land. Just a bool flag for
now — no consumer yet (the proper action-queue path will use it).
Not in this commit: jump animation itself. An earlier attempt to
SetCycle(Jump=0x2500003b) fed an Action-type motion into the SubState
cycle resolver, which produced a "torso" mis-render. Reverted. The
proper fix is porting the retail motion action-queue semantics into
AnimationSequencer — see docs/research/deepdives/r03-motion-animation.md
for the spec. That's the next session's work.
470 tests pass, build clean.
Adds WorldEntitySnapshot, IGameState, IEvents abstractions; WorldEvents
implements replay-on-subscribe with per-handler exception swallowing;
WorldGameState tracks entities; AppPluginHost exposes all three; stubs
wired in Program.cs to keep build green ahead of Task 9 live wiring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Addresses code quality review of a7f0732:
- LoadedPlugin now holds the AssemblyLoadContext explicitly so Task 10
can call Unload() for hot reload (Critical)
- LoadedPlugin.Error is Exception? to match PluginDiscoveryResult and
preserve stack traces; synthetic failures build FileNotFoundException
and InvalidOperationException (Important)
- PluginLoader falls back to ReflectionTypeLoadException.Types if
GetTypes() can't fully resolve (Important)
- Hardcoded abstractions assembly name is now a const (Minor)
Addresses code quality review of 9161868:
- PluginDiscoveryResult.Error is now Exception? rather than string?,
preserving stack traces across the plugin boundary for logging
- PluginDiscovery.Scan orders subdirectories by ordinal string comparison
so plugin load order is reproducible across platforms
Addresses code quality review of c082ecf:
- Require takes a literal JSON field name, no more fragile PascalCase->camelCase transform
- Parse_MissingRequiredField_Throws asserts exact message, not substring
- Remove unused using System.Text.Json.Serialization
