Ten slices, six planned and four the gate rounds added, all shipped through CI
and accepted live: the update flow "works, it updates as it should", launcher
self-update "pass", the client's exit back to the character selector "pass".
The plan now records what the gate rounds found that the plan could not, since
every one of the four was invisible to the automated suite:
- headless play and character refresh had never run once — the launcher passed
the graphical host's argument shape to the headless host, which reads
arguments[0] as a command;
- refresh was harmful as well as broken, opening a second connection the server
treats as a new login;
- Stop WAS the ungraceful exit, killing the client five seconds in;
- Play was below the fold behind the settings form.
And three findings worth keeping: the verification cache cannot see a same-size
same-timestamp change (measured — the CI runner's /tmp is ZFS, 141 of 200
same-size rewrites kept an identical mtime), testing the launcher exercises the
INSTALLED client rather than your source, and a locally built launcher stamps
1.0.0 and therefore can never be offered an update.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All six slices are committed locally with the full solution green at 14,370
tests. Records the one thing a gate tester will hit that is NOT a Campaign LU
defect: the installed client predates the #420 character-select crash fix, so
Play still dies until a release carrying it is published.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every launcher-started play session on 2026-08-19 died a few seconds after
login. The user's own session evidence shows it three times in a row:
started -> connected -> characterList -> exited code 1 "crashed", with
client.err.log carrying
System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. (Parameter 'key')
at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.FindValue(TKey key)
at AcDream.App.UI.UiButton.OnDraw(UiRenderContext ctx)
UiButton allocated its per-face-segment media-state array as `new string[n]`,
leaving every element null, while the single-face sibling _faceMediaState was
correctly seeded to "" (DirectState). NextMediaState returns `current`
unchanged on three of its four arms — including retail's own "committed state
authored with an empty media array keeps the previous media playing" rule — so
on a multi-segment button whose committed state carries no media the null
survived the first SyncMediaStates and reached
ElementInfo.StateMedia.TryGetValue(null), throwing mid-paint and taking the
process down.
Seed the array with "" at construction. That is what the constructor's
existing comment already claimed the media machine did ("the media machine
begins on the element's BASE media"); only the segment array was left out.
Verified by reverting the one-line fix: the new regression test throws
ArgumentNullException from UiButton.ActiveFile, the same frame as the live
crash. AcDream.App.Tests UiButton filter: 41 passed, 3 skipped.
Found while investigating Campaign LU item 4 ("launching the selected
character doesn't work") — this is why nothing worked. Also lands the Campaign
LU plan doc, whose recon section records the mechanisms the remaining slices
build on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
