The user set the goal: complete retail parity for the chat system AND the chat
GUI, not just the green clickable name that started the review. Plan restated
around that bar, with a definition of done — every retail behaviour either
implemented or carrying a divergence-register row, every user-visible surface
covered by a test, and the digest/ISSUES describing reality.
Slices regrouped into A (the tagged-text capability, a strict chain where
nothing is visible until A4), B (system behaviours), C (GUI), D (hygiene), plus
the research still owed before specific slices and what is deliberately out of
scope.
Four items joined the plan that the original six lanes did not own, because
they fell between lanes:
- the /r, /t, /tell text-replacement macro (the commands work; retail's
VISIBLE expansion to "@tell {LastTeller}, " does not exist)
- FilterLanguage, which is a decorative toggle: we store it, ship the bit and
show it in Options, and never actually filter anything
- the plain-text session chat log retail writes and we do not
- the option-gated timestamp prefix
Also corrects the CH3 command-registry research note. Its "acdream status"
columns are from before slice CH4 and list 13 verbs as MISSING that have all
since been added — cg, soc, o, co-vassals, fellows, group, party, vassal, ab,
guild, ct, clfg, crp — and its DIVERGENT row for /g is likewise stale: acdream
maps /g to Fellowship, matching retail, confirmed against the live client
today. The retail side of that document is still the authority; only the
columns describing us were wrong. They misled this session's investigation,
which is exactly why the banner says to verify against ChatInputParser.cs.
Nothing implemented.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six parallel research lanes on retail's chat text and window behaviour, plus a
plan. The headline: the green clickable speaker name is not a chat feature and
not a colour, it is a missing capability in the TEXT stack.
Retail's client sprintfs literal tag markup into the chat line, and the text
element parses the brackets while appending, attaching a ref-counted tag PER
GLYPH. A tagged run is emergent: adjacent glyphs whose tag pointers are equal.
A glyph takes the tag colour (property 0x1D) only when a tag is open and its
type is 0x10000001; otherwise the ordinary line colour (0x1B).
The colour itself was the one thing the decomp could not settle — it is
authored, not runtime-built — so it was MEASURED out of the installed dats
rather than assumed from a screenshot: P0x1D = RGB(0,178,0). That also exposed
a trap: the tag colour is per-ELEMENT and authored while the line colour on the
same element comes from the runtime chat table, so filing "tag green" into the
LogTextType table would put it in the wrong place.
Our own audit found the gap is narrower than feared. UiText ALREADY draws
multi-coloured runs (the character stat panel uses it); the path is just gated
to single-line elements. The draw path needs no renderer work, and HitChar
already resolves a click to line+column. The real blocker is that sender
identity is destroyed before it reaches the renderer: ChatEntry carries
Sender/SenderGuid the whole way, and ChatVM.RecentLinesDetailed drops both.
Two findings beyond the original question. Retail BOUNDS its transcript
(10,000 chars, trimmed to ~7,500 at a newline) and splits auto-scroll from an
unread indicator by sampling "was at bottom" before the line lands — a naive
port auto-scrolls forever and leaks for the life of a session. And the chat-UI
audit turned up an untracked bug: Escape in the chat input does nothing at all,
because UiField has no Escape case and a focused field also suppresses the
input dispatcher's fallback.
Every lane was instructed to write "UNKNOWN — needs X" rather than guess, and
they did; the carried unknowns are listed in the plan rather than papered over.
Seven slices proposed, nothing implemented yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chat deep-dive proved the MECHANISM behind retail's green clickable
speaker name — a glyph tag coloured from property 0x1D rather than the line's
own 0x1B — but not the colour itself: BuildChatColorLookupTable @0x004F31C0
builds only the 0x1B array, so the value is authored rather than runtime-built
and the research correctly returned "UNKNOWN" instead of assuming the green in
a screenshot.
--colors prints the 0x1B/0x1D arrays of every element in a layout, which
measures it out of the installed dats:
chat 0x2100006F, transcript 0x10000011
P0x1B [0x00] R=204 G=204 B=204
P0x1D [0x00] R= 0 G=178 B= 0 <- the green
Recorded in the research note, including the trap it exposes: the tag colour is
per-ELEMENT and authored, while the line colour on that same element comes from
the runtime chat table. Filing "tag green" into the LogTextType colour table
would put it in the wrong place entirely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
581a61ef made the chat button display the tell TARGET's name once "Tell to X"
was picked. It should read "Tell" — the button names the focus, the same way
it reads "Chat", "General" or "Fellow" for the other focuses. Reported against
retail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both entries were deliberate no-ops — the code said so — and both showed a
static label where retail shows the selected player's NAME.
Retail builds them in gmMainChatUI::InitTalkFocusMenu @0x004CDC50 and rebuilds
their labels every time the menu opens, substituting the selection through
StringInfo::AddVariable_String (@0x004CD91C / @0x004CD982). So they now read
"Tell to Dww" / "Squelch (ignore) Dww", rebuilt on open from a live selection
provider, and grey out with nothing selected — retail arms the tell slot only
for a talkable target (SetTalkFocusEnabled(2, 1) @0x004CD9B0).
Picking "Tell to X" aims the chat bar at X. That needed one piece of plumbing:
the parser's plain-speech fallthrough returned a null target, so a line typed
under a Tell focus was dropped by the router for having no one to send to.
Parse/Submit now carry an optional default tell target for exactly that case.
"Squelch X" publishes the ALREADY-REGISTERED /squelch verb rather than
reimplementing the request — the ModifyCharacterSquelch wire builder
(CM_Communication::Event_ModifyCharacterSquelch @0x006A42D0) has been there all
along; only the menu path to it was missing.
UiMenu gains an OnOpen seam, because a menu whose Items are fixed at Bind can
only ever say "Tell to Selected". It fires before _open flips so the rebuilt
rows are measured and drawn in the same opening.
Solution builds clean; 14,480 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two of the four reported chat defects.
**Only item spells announced their expiry.** ACE splits the two cases: an
enchantment expiring on an ITEM arrives as ordinary server chat ("The spell X
on Y has expired.") — which is why those were the only ones showing — while
one expiring on the PLAYER arrives as GameEventMagicDispelEnchantment carrying
no text at all, because retail's client writes that line itself.
ClientMagicSystem::NotifyOfEnchantmentRemoval @0x005686C0 is now ported: the
spell's own name plus " has expired.", at LogTextType 7 (Magic), including
retail's guards (ids >= 0x8000 skipped, a spell missing from the table prints
nothing) and its one special case — spell 0x29A gets " penalty" appended so
vitae reads "Vitae penalty has expired."
Retail's trailing "\n" is deliberately dropped: its scroll appends raw text,
AddText is line-based, and keeping it would print a blank line.
**Every tell printed twice.** ACE's GameActionTell replies with a
GameMessageSystemChat carrying the finished "You tell X, ..." line
(ChatMessageType.OutgoingTell), and we ALSO emitted an optimistic local echo.
Retail's own send path, Event_TalkDirectByName @0x00577CF4, has no
AddTextToScroll beside it — it just transmits and lets the server's reply
print. The local echo is removed, which also makes Tell consistent with Say,
which has always relied on the server echo.
CH3 had this half-right: it removed the legacy-channel echo for precisely this
reason, but kept the Tell echo on the stated grounds that "the server never
resends" it. That premise was false. Both test comments asserting it are
corrected rather than deleted, since the wrong claim is what made the bug
survive review.
Solution builds clean; 14,477 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
0c552eec wired the SetOmega hook and I called it done. The birds kept flapping
in place, and the user's report — "flapping and moving up and down, not
orbiting" — is what identified the miss: part animation working, root frozen.
BindLiveOwner THROWS on a zero ServerGuid, so owner.Body is only ever assigned
for server-spawned entities. Ambient flyers are DAT scenery with no ServerGuid
and therefore no PhysicsBody at all. The whole
if (owner.Body is { } body) { ... Frame::grotate ... }
block — and the omega application I added inside it — silently skipped every
object the fix was written for. It applied the mechanism to a branch these
objects never take.
So the omega now lives on the scheduler's own Owner record rather than on the
PhysicsBody, because most of this workset has no body, and the same grotate is
applied to entity.Rotation when there is none. That is not a shortcut around
the physics owner: for a DAT static the WorldEntity IS the only root retail
would be rotating.
Verified rather than assumed this time, both halves:
- StaticRenderProjectionJournal.SynchronizeActiveAnimatedSources re-projects
from the live entity every frame through
RenderTransform.FromRoot(entity.Position, entity.Rotation, entity.Scale),
so a rotated root reaches the renderer.
- Compose builds LOCAL part transforms, so the renderer composes root x part
and the offset mesh is carried around its circle.
Why it shipped broken: no test exercised a root rotation on the ServerGuid==0
branch, so applying omega body-only passed everything. The new test asserts the
rotation on the branch these objects actually take, and fails with the exact
production symptom (rotation stays identity) when the branch is disabled. Its
sibling pins the other direction — scenery without a SetOmega hook must never
acquire a spin.
Solution builds clean; 14,475 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ambient flyers played their wing animation and stayed put.
A Static object whose Setup declares a DefaultAnimation joins retail's
CPhysics::static_animating_objects workset (CPhysicsObj::InitDefaults
@0x00513A7B) and is driven by animate_static_object @0x00513DF0. That function
has exactly one motion step:
CPartArray::Update(part_array, dt, nullptr); // animate
Frame::grotate(&this->m_position.frame, &this->m_omegaVector);
Note the nullptr: unlike UpdatePositionInternal @0x00512C30, which combines the
animation's accumulated frame into the object's position, the static branch
DISCARDS it. These objects cannot move by animation translation at all. The
omega vector is the whole mechanism, and one thing writes it —
SetOmegaHook::Execute @0x00526F30 -> CPhysicsObj::set_omega @0x0050F6D0.
We decoded that hook and then dropped it on the floor: IAnimationHookSink's own
docs list SetOmegaHook among the unwired ones, and PhysicsBody.Omega was
assigned nowhere outside projectiles. The scheduler's GRotate call was already
correct — it was multiplying by a permanent zero.
The hook is now applied to the owning body at process_hooks time. Retail runs
process_hooks AFTER the grotate in the same pass, so a newly-set omega first
takes effect on the following frame; our Tick/ProcessHooks split already had
that order.
Scoped from the data rather than guessed. tools/AnimHookScan (new) walks the
dat: of 2,066 animations exactly 8 contain SetOmega, and all 8 are the
DefaultAnimation of one of the 8 setups that use it. No creature animation uses
it, so this belongs precisely where body.Omega is read and nowhere else.
The same scan is why the fix is believable as FLIGHT rather than a pirouette.
Every authored omega is pure yaw, and the setups' parts sit 5.6m, 4.2m, 12m and
36.8m from the origin they spin about. Rotating a frame whose mesh hangs 12m
off-axis carries it around a 12m circle — that offset IS the flight radius. An
installed-DAT test pins both properties, because the fix is only correct while
they hold and neither is visible from the code.
Also checked and deliberately NOT conflated: CSequence::set_omega @0x005248A0
writes CSequence::omega, a different field from CPhysicsObj::m_omegaVector,
fed by the motion table for creature turning. Only the latter drives grotate.
Solution builds clean; 14,473 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter
plus the new installed-DAT test, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
User report: with the correct focus, scarab and tapers in the pack, a level 1
spell would not cast, and the spell examine window listed the full legacy
component recipe where retail shows only scarab and taper. The question asked
was whether the 2013 client data is too old for foci. It is not -- the EoR
dats carry the map, and the whole client-side mechanism (the requirement
service, the scarab-only formula port, the examine-window routing) was already
built and wired. It was fed an empty table.
MagicCatalog resolved the school-to-foci map with
Resolve(enumValue: 0x10000001, enumCategory: 0x28). Retail's
SpellComponentTable::SchoolOfMagic2WCID @ 0x005BC1F0 calls
DBObj::GetByEnum(0x10000001, 4): master map -> category 0x10000001 -> key 4
-> the school->WCID EnumIDMap. The 0x28 on that call is the EnumIDMap DBTYPE
tag, and it had been read as a lookup category. The master map has no
category 0x28, the resolver returned 0, and the foci map loaded EMPTY --
silently, so a carried focus was never detected: HasRequiredComponents
demanded the full account-customized formula (refusing the cast) and
GetExamineComponents displayed it.
Found by measurement rather than re-reading the code: a SpellDump --foci probe
proved category 0x28 absent, then brute-forced the portal enum tree for ACE's
FociWCIDs and found them at 0x27000003 under category 0x10000001 key 4:
school 1 -> 15271 Foci of Strife (War)
school 2 -> 15270 Foci of Verdancy (Life)
school 3 -> 15269 Foci of Artifice (Item)
school 4 -> 15268 Foci of Enchantment (Creature)
school 5 -> 43173 Foci of Shadow (Void)
The new Lane=InstalledDat test pins exactly that: the loaded catalog must map
every school to ACE's FociWCIDs -- external constants from the server-side
authority, deliberately not derived from the code under test, so an empty or
wrongly-resolved map cannot pass vacuously.
The infusion-augmentation half of the retail gate (properties 0x126-0x129,
0x148) was already correct against the decomp, as were the scarab-only ID set
{1..6, 0x6E, 0x6F, 0x70, 0xC0, 0xC1} and the taper-count table.
Complete Release suite: 14,469 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane
filter, 0 failures; the new installed-DAT test passes against the real dats.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two gaps from the MossTank shipment review.
**apiVersion was declared in every manifest and checked by nothing.** The
loader now refuses an unsupported contract BEFORE loading any code from the
plugin — checking after the fact is not equivalent, because by then the
assembly is in a collectible context and the mismatch surfaces as a type-load
or missing-member failure from inside the plugin, which reads like the plugin
is broken rather than built for a different host. PluginApi (Current /
MinimumSupported) lives in Plugin.Abstractions beside the contract it
versions, and the refusal is a distinct PluginApiVersionException so callers
can tell "update the client or the plugin" from "this plugin is broken". The
tests pin the ordering too: a manifest with a future apiVersion AND a missing
dll must fail on the version, a supported one on the dll.
**A launcher-launched client loaded no plugins until the user typed ids.**
LA5 distinguishes an omitted allow-list (load all) from an explicit empty one
(load none); a fresh character profile's list is empty, so it composed to
load-none. Direct launches pass null and load everything -- which is why the
gap never showed in development: the two launch paths disagreed and the
launcher was the one users get. This REVERSES the LA5 default deliberately:
"nothing configured" now composes to the omitted list, so plugins are on by
default, including ones installed later. The opt-out is kept -- losing it
would be a real regression for stripped sessions -- respelled as the literal
id "none", and the launcher's plugin box says so.
The cross-host shared fixture composes its explicit-load-none case through
the new spelling, keeping the reader-side contract tests (App and Headless
both preserve an explicit empty list) exactly as they were.
Complete Release suite: 14,469 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane
filter, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The "Beneficial Spells in Effect" window rendered its rows only in the top
249px and painted the rest of the list as empty black background, with a
scrollbar thumb sized for a viewport far smaller than the visible one. It did
not depend on window size, and the last visible row was sliced mid-height --
a clip boundary, not a missing row.
Root cause is the #412 class again. The authored list element (0x10000123) is
a UiTemplateListBox, not a UiItemList, so EffectsUiController creates the item
list itself and attaches it as a child with fill anchors. That baseline is
captured lazily on the child's first ApplyAnchor -- which lands AFTER the host
has already been resized to the restored window height in the same frame. The
capture then measures a bottom margin of (hostH - 249) and ComputeAnchoredRect
preserves it forever: h = hostH - (hostH - 249) = 249, at every subsequent
size. Rows past 249px fail LayoutCells' cull test and never draw.
Capturing the baseline at creation, while the list's extent still exactly
equals the host's, makes the margins (0,0,0,0) so it tracks the host from then
on. Identical fix and reason to UiTemplateListBox's own viewport seed. The
spellbook's component list is built by the same pattern and had the same
latent defect; it is fixed alongside.
Why it shipped: every existing test in EffectsUiControllerTests supplies a
synthetic UiItemList as the list element, so `host is UiItemList` is true and
the controller uses it directly -- the create-and-attach branch that actually
runs against real dat was never exercised. The new test binds the real
fixture, which builds the real UiTemplateListBox. Neutralising the fix makes
it fail with the exact production numbers (expected 547, actual 249).
Measured, not guessed. tools/LayoutDump grew --resize, which reproduces
retail's raw-edge policy (UIElement::UpdateForParentSizeChange @ 0x00462640)
offline, and it ruled out the authored geometry, the import, the layout policy
and the window frame in turn -- all four are faithful. The 4px gap between the
scrollbar and the window's inner edge is likewise authored: the user confirmed
retail shows the same gap, so it is deliberately left alone.
Solution builds clean; 14,465 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"This control is in the wrong place" has exactly two possible causes: the dat
authored it there, or our importer moved it. Printing only the authored tree
answers half the question.
--built runs LayoutImporter.Build over the same ElementInfo and prints the
resulting widget geometry underneath, so the two can be compared directly. On
the effects window they match exactly, which is how the "misaligned scrollbar"
report was ruled out as an import bug rather than assumed to be one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four reports from one gate round. Three were mine; the fourth I first
mis-explained, and the correction is the useful part.
**The vital regeneration rates were never cast.** Regeneration (health),
Rejuvenation (stamina) and Mana Renewal (mana) all landed in the catch-all
Other bucket, which is off by default. Retail words each of the three
differently and two of the six phrasings do not begin with "Increases the
caster's" at all:
Increase caster's natural healing rate by 10%. <- and note "Increase"
Increases your Health Regeneration Rate by 50%. (Empyrean)
Increases the rate at which the caster regains Stamina by 10%.
Increases the caster's natural mana rate by 10%.
They are matched per vital, on by default, and ranked at the very tail of the
Life group so they finish the pass. The mana line had to be checked BEFORE the
generic "Increases the caster's X by N" match, which would otherwise read it as
a buff to a stat named "natural mana rate".
**Aura of Hermetic Link was the sixth aura line and the only one missed.**
"a magic casting implement's" is reached by none of the other alternatives, so
the wand's mana-conversion buff was silently in Other too.
**Right-clicking a spell in the spellbook did nothing.** I claimed this had
never worked; the user said it used to, and they were right -- I had checked
one file's history and concluded from it. The regression is 3e31b0ac, which
gave UiCatalogSlot its own RightClick case returning true unconditionally. On
any list that had not wired the examine seam -- the spellbook among them -- the
event was reported handled and UiRoot stopped bubbling. Two fixes: the row now
reports an unwired right-click UNHANDLED so bubbling continues, and the
spellbook wires the seam to the same appraisal window the spell bar uses.
Retail does this generically in the list rather than per window
(UIElement_ItemList::ListenToElementMessage @ 0x004E4F1F -> ExamineSpell
@ 0x00564A70), which is exactly why a per-controller seam could be forgotten
for one window and not another.
**No green flash when pressing an indicator.** Every indicator button authors
a full-size 0x100000F2 child whose DirectState is a draw-nothing File=0 image
and whose only other state, Normal_pressed, carries the green selector sprite
0x06004CE8 -- and the buttons author Normal_pressed with PassToChildren. But
UiButton.ConsumesDatChildren drops dat children at import, so the cascade had
nothing left to reach. The child is re-attached through the same repair the map
hotspot's rollover highlight already uses.
**tools/LayoutDump** is new, and is why the last two are diagnoses rather than
guesses: it prints an authored LayoutDesc tree -- geometry, edge modes, state
sets, PassToChildren, per-state media -- straight from the installed DATs.
"Does this button even have a pressed state?" was being answered by reading our
own importer and inferring; now it is read from the data.
Solution builds clean; 14,464 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MossTank was casting cheapest-first. That is a reasonable rule for surviving
a mana shortfall and a bad one for everything else, because AC's buff order is
not a preference -- each group raises the skill the next group is cast with:
1. Creature Enchantment, and inside it:
- the Creature Enchantment skill itself, which every remaining creature
buff is then cast with;
- Focus, then Willpower, then Endurance -- Focus and Self are the
attributes the Item Enchantment and Life Magic skills derive from, so
raising them raises the skill groups 2 and 3 are cast with;
- the rest of the creature spells.
2. Item Enchantment -- the banes and weapon auras.
3. Life Magic last -- the protections and Armor Self.
Casting out of that order means casting at a lower skill than the character
could have had, which shows up as fizzles.
Grouping is by the spell's school rather than by name or category, so
protections land in group 3 because retail files them under Life Magic, not
because anything here says "protections go last".
Willpower is matched as "Self": retail's spell is named Willpower but its
description reads "Increases the caster's Self by 10 points", and MossTank
classifies from the description, so the name it matches is the one retail
actually writes. Verified against the spell table rather than assumed
(0x05A5 Willpower Self I).
Cheapest-first survives as the tiebreak inside a group, so a mana shortfall
still costs the cheapest of the last group instead of something the rest of
the pass depended on.
The two ordering tests were confirmed to fail when CastRank is neutralised --
the third guards the tiebreak and passes either way, by design.
Solution builds clean; 14,453 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three whole categories of buff were missing, for two different reasons, and
both were my errors.
**Protections and weapon auras were silently dropped by the description
parser.** They are self-targeted and were sitting in the spellbook the whole
time, but retail words them differently and the pattern only accepted
"Increases the caster's X by N":
Fire Protection Self -> "Reduces damage the caster takes from Fire by 9%."
Armor Self -> "Increases the caster's natural armor by 20 points."
Aura of Blood Drinker -> "Increases a weapon's damage value by 2 points."
So the weapon and wand buffs do exist as self-cast "Aura of" lines and are now
cast. Each category has its own toggle, matching VTank's separate
BuffProfile_Prots and BuffProfile_Banes.
The underlying flaw mattered more than the two missing patterns: anything
unmatched was DISCARDED. It now falls into an Other bucket (off by default)
instead, so nothing self-targeted is lost without a word. A test caught a
second instance immediately -- regeneration spells say "Restores..." and were
vanishing the same way.
**Banes were excluded because I misread a flag.** I took IsSelfTargeted as
"can be cast on you". It means "needs no selection". Retail's own bane text
says exactly how they work:
"Increases a shield or piece of armor's resistance to slashing damage by
10%. Target yourself to cast this spell on all of your equipped armor."
So banes ARE cast on the person, and the catalogue now includes every
beneficial non-untargeted spell rather than only flagged self-casts, leaving
EvaluateGate to decide what a given target accepts. Before casting anything
without the self flag, MossTank selects the player -- and restores whatever
was selected before the pass, so targeting yourself does not quietly steal
the selection.
They are matched on retail's "Target yourself..." sentence rather than on the
word "Bane", so the classification comes from what the spell says it does.
Solution builds clean; 14,450 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Virindi Tank's own term: Force Buff recasts the lot rather than only what has
lapsed. The button now does that, and says so.
BuffPlan gained a force flag that skips the already-in-force check. Forcing
means "ignore what is already up", NOT "ignore the settings" -- the trained-
skill filter, the attribute toggle and the difficulty margin all still apply,
and there is a test pinning that.
The loop had to change shape for this. It used to re-derive the plan every
tick and treat "plan is empty" as done, which works only because the ordinary
plan shrinks as buffs land. A forced plan never shrinks -- that is the point --
so the same loop would have cast forever. A pass now captures a queue at the
start and works through it by index, which is also cheaper: no rebuilding 80-odd
buff lines every frame.
A spell that will not go now advances the queue rather than blocking it. One
missing component used to mean everything behind it waited for the stall
timeout; now the status line names the refusal and the pass carries on.
Solution builds clean; 14,440 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things from the first working buff pass.
**Pacing.** Casts were three seconds apart because of a fixed interval I added
before there was a real busy signal. There is one now -- the shared busy count,
incremented by the cast and decremented by the server's UseDone -- so the
interval is gone and the server is the only throttle. MossTank casts the moment
the previous action is acknowledged, which is the spam behaviour VTank has. The
stall timeout moved 25s -> 30s so a slow server does not read as a stall.
**Stamina to Mana was surprising.** VTank does convert vitals by default
(Recharge-*-Mana), so the behaviour is right, but a buff pass quietly spending
your stamina is not something to discover by watching. It is now a setting,
with its own thresholds, and can be turned off outright.
**Settings view.** Spell difficulty margin, rebuff time, the three vital
thresholds, and three toggles. Two details worth recording:
* The difficulty margin is SIGNED, per the VTank wiki: "a positive number
raises the skill necessary to cast spells, a negative number lowers it. To
attempt higher spells at a low level use a negative number." So the range
spans -100..+100 rather than starting at zero.
* It is a second registered panel with a complementary visible binding rather
than a tab control. Two panels and an Action need no new markup vocabulary,
and only one is ever on screen.
Adjuster buttons rather than typed fields: buttons are proven in plugin markup,
while an editable UiField would need keyboard routing plumbed through to plugin
panels first. Worth doing, but not as a side quest inside this change.
Also fixed: the App copy target names plugin files explicitly, so the new
markup would have been left out of the plugin directory and the settings panel
would have failed to load at runtime with the build perfectly green. Caught by
listing the output rather than trusting the build.
Solution builds clean; 14,438 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A buff pass cast exactly one spell and then stalled at zero. The log timeline
made it unambiguous: one "casting Concentration", then every later pass queued
86 buffs and cast none until the 25s stall fired.
IsCasting was bound to RuntimeSpellCastState.LastRequestedSpellId. That
property records the last spell REQUESTED and is cleared only by Reset() at
session teardown -- it is honestly named, and I read a busy flag into it that
was never there. So it latched true on the first successful cast and stayed
true for the rest of the session, and every tick returned early at the busy
check.
It now reads the shared busy count: incremented by the cast path
(FreeHandsAndCastSpell @0x00566EF0) and decremented by the server's UseDone,
which is the actual in-flight signal. EvaluateGate reports PluginCastGate.Busy
as well, so a genuinely wedged counter names itself in the status line instead
of presenting as silence.
Solution builds clean; 14,437 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four defects from the first in-world look, three of them with a definite root
cause rather than a plausible one.
**The Buff button did nothing.** Not a hit-testing problem -- the pointer found
the button perfectly. UiRoot's press handling asks the pressed widget whether
it owns the pointer; a widget that does not claim the press falls through to
"move the ancestor window", and a window drag returns early on release without
ever emitting a Click. UiButton and UiClickablePanel both override
HandlesClick for exactly this reason; UiSimpleButton never did. Latent since
that class was written, and invisible until it was put inside a draggable
window -- which is precisely what a markup plugin panel is.
Found by reproducing it headlessly through the real UiRoot dispatcher rather
than by reasoning about it: MarkupPanelClickTests drives press-and-release over
the button and asserts the bound action ran, with a separate test asserting the
pointer finds the button at all, so a future failure says which half broke.
My earlier guess -- that a modal at character select was swallowing the click
-- was wrong, and the screenshot of the panel live in world disproved it.
**"0 trained skills".** The skill-name table was read in OnLoad *before*
GameWindowCompositionPipeline.Run, which is what publishes the DAT collection,
so _dats was still null, the whole block was skipped, and the surface reported
an empty skill list with nothing to explain it. Bound in PublishDatCollection
instead -- the moment the data exists -- so it cannot run early again whatever
the phase ordering does, and a genuinely missing SkillTable now says so.
**Plugin text used the development bitmap font.** UiLabel and UiSimpleButton
gained a DatFont, and MarkupDocument now takes the retail interface font from
the host, so plugin panels render through the same glyph path (including
retail's two-plane outline) as authored panels.
**MossTank now writes to chat.** New BCL-only IPluginChat routes to retail's
ClientLocal log type (0x1A) -- the channel the client uses for its own notices,
local to this client, so a plugin cannot speak in the player's name. MossTank
announces the start, the finish with a cast count, and a stall.
Not addressed here: the cursor showing blue rather than amber. Traced but not
fixed -- CursorFeedbackController picks the cursor family from combat mode, and
CombatMode.Magic selects the blue Magic cursor where Default is amber. That is
a combat-mode question, unrelated to this change, and worth its own look rather
than a speculative fix folded in here.
Solution builds clean; 14,437 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reworks MossTank against user feedback and the Virindi Tank feature docs
(virindi.net is reachable again over https with a self-signed cert; the
research doc's "unreachable" note is stale).
VTank's stated default is the spec: "automatically buffs every Attribute and
Skill you have trained", and "all buff spells are recast when they go below 5
minutes". The previous pass buffed the whole spellbook and refreshed at 60s;
both are corrected.
The hard problem was working out WHICH stat each buff raises. The client's
spell table has no such link -- it arrives from the server with the
enchantment -- and the naming is too irregular to infer: Invulnerability
raises Melee Defense, Impregnability raises Missile Defense, Fealty raises
Loyalty, Sprint raises Run, Arcane Enlightenment raises Arcane Lore, and the
line called Willpower raises the attribute named Self. Any name-matching
scheme dies on that last one.
Retail states it outright in each spell's own description ("Increases the
caster's Life Magic skill by 10 points"), so BuffProfile derives the whole
mapping from shipped data at runtime. It also carries the one alias the data
needs: the spell text says "Assess Monster" where the skill table says "Assess
Creature", and without that the skill silently never matches.
Two data facts that would each have caused a real bug, found by dumping the
spell table rather than assuming:
* Family is NOT a spell-line identity in general. Retail groups the
instantaneous vital transfers by SOURCE vital, so family 89 holds both
"Stamina to Health" and "Stamina to Mana". Picking the strongest tier in a
family would convert into the wrong vital about half the time. Buff lines
group by family (correct for duration buffs, which is retail's own stacking
bucket); the conversions are found by name stem instead.
* Instantaneous spells have no duration and must be excluded from buff lines
entirely, or they are treated as buffs that never appear to land.
Tier selection now follows the character's skill in the casting school against
the spell's difficulty (VTank's SpellDiffExcessThreshold-Buff), which is why
PluginSpellInfo gained School as a SKILL id -- MagicSchool is retail's 1-5
school enum, not something a character trains.
Mana upkeep is the loop asked for: convert stamina to mana when mana is low,
Revitalize when that leaves stamina too low to convert, and refuse to drain
stamina past a floor. Unknown vitals read as zero and are treated as "no
information" rather than "empty", so it will not cast on a healthy character.
Panel no longer shows at character select. IsAvailable is now the runtime's
own lifecycle state rather than a proxy, and markup gained visible="{Binding}"
plus UiElement.VisibleSource -- evaluated before the visible gate, because
TickSelfAndChildren returns early when hidden and an element could otherwise
never un-hide itself.
Also: a generated SpellId enum of all 6,266 spells (tools/SpellDump --enum),
generated from portal.dat rather than copied, so it cannot drift and carries
no third-party licence; skill and spell names now come from the retail tables
for display; and the Buff click logs unconditionally, so "nothing happened"
can be told apart from "the click never arrived".
Solution builds clean; 14,433 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures, including 21 covering the buff profile, tier selection and mana
loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
The requirements research from 2026-07-29 was nearly lost: it lives in a
session titled "graphics" because it was one strand of a session about
something else, and could not be found again by any search. The research
itself was committed (6077ce4d) and survived; this makes it findable and
usable by a session picking the work up cold.
Contents: reading order, the architectural conclusion not to relitigate
(VTank's meta FSM, expressions and loot engine are plugin-land, not
host-land; the K2 headless triad is already the right substrate), the
five dependency-ordered steps, every relevant file path, and the project
rules that bind the work.
Two things the handoff adds beyond relaying the research. First, a
changed-since section: three of the research's "gap" rows have closed —
vendor landed 2026-08-08, fellowship 2026-08-12, secure trade 2026-08-14 —
so step 4's substrate is materially stronger than when the plan was
written, and §3's gap table is the part that has aged. Second, every path
is verified against the live tree as of today rather than copied forward:
WorldEntitySnapshot is still exactly four fields, IPluginHost is unchanged,
there is still no enchantment-enumerating view and no point-goal movement
primitive, and IHeadlessBotPolicy is internal to AcDream.Headless so step 1
mirrors its shape rather than re-exporting the type.
All 30 path references were checked programmatically. Also records that
claude-memory/ is a junction that resolves in the main checkout but not
inside a worktree, which would otherwise read as a broken pointer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The client shipped with a PE icon Explorer showed and a window that did not:
launched from the launcher it still drew the stock Windows application icon.
Silk's Window.Create only builds the managed object. IWindow.Initialize is
what, in Silk's own words, "creates the window on the underlying platform".
Applying an icon before that throws:
after Window.Create : IsInitialized = False
SetWindowIcon BEFORE Initialize : THREW InvalidOperationException:
Window should be initialized.
after Initialize : IsInitialized = True
SetWindowIcon AFTER Initialize : returned without throwing
What made this quiet rather than obvious is the fallback. GLFW registers its
window class against a resource named GLFW_ICON and, not finding one, uses
IDI_APPLICATION - the generic Windows icon - rather than the executable's own.
So the PE icon kept showing on the file while the live window lost it, which
reads as a packaging problem and is nothing of the kind. The launcher was
unaffected because Avalonia takes a different path entirely, and that
asymmetry was the tell.
Apply now happens in OnLoad, beside the other window-dependent startup work,
and refuses with a message naming the ordering requirement if it is ever
called on an uninitialized window - the previous generic catch reported
"Window should be initialized" to a stderr nobody reads, which said nothing
about icons.
The regression guard reads the compiled call graph, because this is an
ordering edge with no observable return value: OnLoad must call Apply, and no
method that calls Window.Create may. Verified by reintroducing the bug and
watching it fail, then restoring the fix and watching it pass.
Solution builds clean; 14,408 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane filter,
0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
render.py was lifted from the scratch pipeline with its default TEXDIR still
aimed at tools/IconExtract's build output — a tool that is not in the repo.
forge.py overrides the value, so the icons built correctly and the staleness
was invisible; anyone importing render.py directly would have been sent to a
path that never existed.
Default now matches where tools/MosswartArt actually writes, and a missing
texture prints a warning instead of silently dropping out: a partial texture
set renders some parts flat grey, which reads as a lighting bug rather than a
missing extraction step.
Both icons still reproduce byte-for-byte.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
acdream had no application icon on either executable. Two marks now ship,
built from the game's own material rather than drawn freehand:
* Client - the retail mosswart head. Not an illustration of one: the actual
creature mesh (Setup 0x02000B4F part 14, skin atlas 0x05001E11,
ClothingBase 0x10000344) read out of client_portal.dat through acdream's
own GfxObjMesh/SetupMesh port, then smoothed, lit and graded. Palette
values are sampled from that texture, including the mustard belly the
Mosswart lore calls a "foul yellow".
* Launcher - a forged ring enclosing a barbed crescent, rebuilt from
measurements of the retail wordmark and the acclient.exe icon resource.
An original construction in the same visual language, not a copy of the
trademarked logo. Its warm field matches the retail client icon.
Three techniques carry the render quality, all in tools/IconForge:
* PN-triangle tessellation (smooth.py). The retail head is 104 triangles
and renders faceted. Each triangle becomes a cubic Bezier patch built
from its own corner positions and normals, so the silhouette genuinely
rounds rather than merely shading smoothly - and it needs no mesh
connectivity, which matters because UV seams would otherwise pull apart.
Normals are welded across coincident positions first, but only within a
crease angle, so ear fins and tusk edges stay sharp.
* Matcaps (ring.py). A Lambert rasterizer cannot produce chrome, because
chrome is almost entirely reflection and there is nothing here to
reflect. Sampling a lit-sphere image by the camera-space normal is the
standard stand-in for an environment map.
* Distance-transform bevelling (chisel.py). Flat shapes become chiselled
metal by treating distance-to-edge as height. The height field is
blurred before differentiating; without that the medial axis of each
stroke shows through as a hatched ridge.
Two facts worth recording, both discovered the hard way. Creature Setups
define no upright pose in PlacementFrames, so the exporter must be handed
the weenie's MotionTable id or all 17 parts stack on the origin. And a
mosswart's eyes sit on the sides of the skull like a frog's, so a dead-on
frontal turns them edge-on and the face stops reading as a mosswart at all;
the hero angle is az 266 / el 32.
Wiring: <ApplicationIcon> gives each executable its PE icon. The client's
runtime window icon is embedded rather than copied beside the binary - a
window icon has no sensible fallback if the file goes missing, and
embedding survives single-file publish. WindowIconLoaderTests guards the
resource names, which are coupled to LogicalName in the csproj by string
alone and would otherwise fail only as a silently icon-less window.
Both halves of the pipeline are deterministic and reproduce the committed
PNGs byte-for-byte, so an accidental edit shows up as a diff.
Solution builds clean; 14,378 tests pass on the standard hermetic lane
filter, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Run 174's Linux job failed on
ASilentlyCorruptedPackageOfTheSameSizeStillFailsAndDropsTheCache. It passed in
isolation on that same machine, and passed under full-suite load there too, so
it looked like a flake. It is not.
Measured on the runner:
same-mtime collisions: 141 / 200
fs type: zfs
Its /tmp is ZFS, whose timestamp granularity is coarse enough that a same-size
rewrite usually lands on the SAME last-write time. So the startup fast path —
size plus write time — cannot see that modification, and the test was right to
fail. LU1's commit message claimed "truncating or touching the package still
blocks launch"; on a coarse-timestamp filesystem the second half of that is
false. NTFS's 100 ns resolution is why it never showed on Windows.
Rather than relax the test until it passes, the contract is now stated as two
facts that are true everywhere instead of one that is not:
- A same-size corruption whose write time moves is caught at startup. The test
moves the timestamp explicitly instead of trusting the clock, so it asserts
the mechanism rather than the filesystem's resolution.
- A corruption preserving BOTH size and write time is NOT caught at startup and
IS caught by a forced full verification — which is exactly what the
launcher's Verify files button runs. New test, so the escape hatch is
covered rather than merely mentioned.
PreparedAssetVerificationCache now documents the limit with the measurement, so
the next reader does not have to rediscover it from a red pipeline.
Verified on Windows (11 passed) and five consecutive runs on the ZFS runner
itself (11 passed each). Full solution 14,375 passed, 0 failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Run 173's Linux job failed on the contract test added one commit earlier — my
test, not the product.
LauncherExecutableSet refuses a host that exists but has no execute bit on
Linux (HasUnixExecutePermission), which is a real and useful check: an update
whose extraction lost its permissions would otherwise fail deep inside process
start instead of at the launch gate. The stubs were written with
File.WriteAllText, which is 0644, so on Linux every one of the four tests died
at that gate before reaching the command-line contract they exist to pin.
Windows never sees this — the predicate short-circuits to true off Linux — so
the test passed locally and could only fail on the runner.
Stubs are now created through a helper that chmods them executable on non-
Windows. Verified on Windows (4 passed); the Linux half is what run 174 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five things from the user's gate.
STOP NOW ACTUALLY LOGS OUT. The UI gave the client five seconds and then
killed it. That is not enough for a graphical client to send its logout, wait
for the server to acknowledge, and tear down a mapped 28 GB world — so Stop
routinely ended in a kill, which sends the server nothing, which is exactly
what leaves the account held. Thirty seconds now, with the kill still there as
a genuine last resort, and the status says "Logging out…".
THE SERVER-SIDE HOLD IS MODELLED INSTEAD OF DISCOVERED. A session that ends
without the host running its own teardown may leave the account logged in
server-side for minutes. Launching again inside that window does not queue or
retry — it fails with a bare "CharacterList not received", which reads as a
broken launcher rather than a busy server. The orchestrator now records whether
each session ended gracefully (the host reported its own exit AND exited zero —
a killed or crashed child can satisfy neither) and refuses that account for
three minutes afterwards, saying how many seconds are left. A graceful exit
never starts a hold.
READABLE TERMINAL TEXT. "Exited: connection-error (code 5)" becomes "Could not
reach the server — the server may hold this account for a few minutes";
"Exited: process-exit (code 0)" becomes "Exited gracefully — logged out
cleanly". Live sessions still show the host's own status line, which is the
most informative thing available while one is running.
COLUMN HEADERS on the sessions list — ACCOUNT / CHARACTER / STATUS / DETAIL,
sharing the row template's widths so they stay aligned.
LOGOUT LANDS ON THE CHARACTER SCREEN (LU10). The toolbar X was already wired
correctly: IndicatorBarController's EndCharacterSessionButtonId 0x100000FA runs
retail's EndCharacterSession, and LiveSessionController's logout transaction
already ends by resetting the world generation and calling
CharacterSelectionState.Begin. What was missing is where that lands: the
retained UI built its character-selection and character-creation bindings only
when NO character selector was supplied, so a launcher-started session logged
out into a client with no screen to return to. The selector decides how a
session STARTS; it must not decide whether the select screen EXISTS. Both
binding sets are now unconditional.
The composition test that pinned the old gate is updated to pin the new
contract — the retained UI must not branch on the selector at all — rather than
being deleted.
App 5380 passed, Launcher.Core 336, Launcher 76, Headless 169. Not pushed; the
user is testing locally.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the user hit while gating LU7.
1. "Refresh characters" disconnected the session they were playing. It opened a
SECOND connection to the same account purely to read the roster, which the
server treats as a new login — so refreshing while logged in kicked them
out. It was also redundant the whole time: every ordinary login already
carries the roster in the host's own status stream, and the orchestrator
already folds it into the profiles (ApplyRosterLocked runs for play sessions,
not just probes). Removed, along with "Add cached character", which existed
to paper over a roster the launcher can now always obtain by itself. The
account page says what happens instead: characters appear after you log in.
ProbeAsync stays in Core — headless bots and the CLI use it, and it has its
own tests. What is gone is offering it to a player as a button whose only
effect they could observe was being disconnected.
AnOrdinaryLoginFoldsTheReportedRosterIntoTheStore pins the replacement,
including that it persists so the tree is still populated after a restart.
2. "There is no headless or gui option" under a selected character. The buttons
were there — below the fold. The character page led with a plugins/login-
commands form whose two 96px text boxes pushed the Launch card past the
bottom of the scroll area, so the primary action was invisible unless you
scrolled. Launch now comes first and the settings form sits under it. A
player should never have to scroll to find Play.
Full solution 14,374 passed, 0 failed under the release-gate filter.
Not pushed — the user is testing locally first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The launcher spawned the headless host as
acdream-headless --config <path>
but HeadlessCommandLine.Parse reads arguments[0] as the COMMAND and accepts
only "validate" or "run". So every launcher-started headless session and every
"Refresh characters" died on its first instruction with
Invalid command. Run --help for usage. (exit 64)
The user's own cache shows it six times over two days. It was invisible because
the failure is an exit code in a status file, not something the UI says out
loud — which is how it survived a whole campaign whose gates exercised the
headless host through its CLI directly, never through the launcher's spec.
The graphical host takes a bare "--session-config" and has no command word;
this sibling call was written to match it. Both headless call sites now pass
"run" first. A probe is an ordinary "run" whose session config carries
mode: "probe" — the difference is in the document, not the command line, so
one fix repairs refresh and headless play together.
LauncherHeadlessCommandLineContractTests is the connection that was missing:
it takes the argument vector the launcher will really use and hands it to the
parser the host will really use, for probe and for headless play, and pins that
the graphical arguments are deliberately NOT a headless command line. The two
sides cannot drift again without failing here. Headless.Tests already
referenced both assemblies, so this needed no new coupling.
Also LU7, at the user's direction: a selected character now offers only Play
and Headless. Choosing a character means choosing to play AS that character, so
"Character select" — which deliberately picks no character — belongs to the
account page alone, where it already lives. The per-character GuiSelect command
and its capability are removed rather than left as dead surface.
Full solution 14,374 passed, 0 failed under the release-gate filter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Follow-up to the retail-text fix. "Green under sv-SE" is not the same as "runs
on any locale", so this establishes the latter by running the suite under
cultures chosen to break different things, and fixing what they broke.
ar-SA found a genuine defect the Swedish runner cannot see: the resolution
parser read "1920x-1" through the ambient culture, and ar-SA's negative sign is
not ASCII '-', so the parse failed and the height silently became 0 instead of
-1. Both copies of that parser (App settings targets and the UI settings store)
now parse invariantly.
Audited every remaining culture-sensitive operation in src/ rather than fixing
only what a test happened to catch:
- Numeric Parse/TryParse with no IFormatProvider: 11 sites, all reading
MACHINE-readable input — env vars (ACDREAM_LIGHT_DEBUG, ACDREAM_NET_DROP_*,
streaming/quality knobs), CLI arguments, "1920x1080" settings keys, a chat
command's price argument, and the launcher's bake thread count, which is
handed straight to a child process command line. All pinned to
InvariantCulture.
- ToUpper()/ToLower() with no culture: none. The Turkish-I class was already
clean, and tr-TR confirms it.
- StartsWith/EndsWith/IndexOf(string) with no StringComparison: one —
ChatInputParser's "@" prefix test, which is a culture-sensitive comparison
for a single ASCII character. Now the ordinal char overload.
Verified: 13,958 tests pass identically under the machine default, sv-SE,
tr-TR, ar-SA, and de-DE. (The two launcher test assemblies are excluded from
this run only because a running acdream-launcher.exe holds its own binary; the
one launcher change here is the thread-count parse.)
Dates remain on the current culture by intent, unchanged from the previous
commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Run 170's Windows gate went red on 37 tests across four assemblies while the
same commit passed 14,370/0 locally. The failures were all one family:
Expected: "You have 1 500p" <- built with the machine's culture
Actual: "You have 1,500p" <- production, correctly invariant
The runner is Swedish; this dev box is not. These tests had been passing on CI
only because that machine's registry locale had been pinned by hand — machine
state, which came undone (almost certainly the reboot after today's hang).
Re-pinning it would be a workaround on one machine for a defect in the repo,
so this fixes the repo instead.
Two genuinely different bugs were hiding in that one symptom.
1. TESTS that build an expected string with the ambient culture and compare it
to invariant production output, and test-side recording sinks whose traces
are compared against literal golden strings. Those only ever passed on a
machine that happens to format like the invariant culture. Pinned to
InvariantCulture: the vendor purse/cost expectations, and the motion-funnel,
animation-sequencer, framebuffer-resize, resource-slot, and runtime-attack
trace sinks.
2. PRODUCTION that formats player-visible retail text with the ambient culture.
This one matters beyond CI: retail is a US client, so it shows "2.50",
"1,500p" and "(-20)" to everyone. On a Swedish machine acdream was showing
"2,50", "1 500p" and "(-20)" with U+2212 MINUS SIGN — the audience for this
alpha is literally Swedish. Converted 76 sites to InvariantCulture across the
item/creature appraisal formatters, the character stat panel's buff and vitae
parentheticals, the appraisal and link-status controllers, the chat
/framerate and /location output, the camera sensitivity toast, the
time-override toast, the F3 dump, the sky diagnostics, and the world-frame
invariant-failure message.
DATES are deliberately left on the current culture (CharacterController's
birth/login stamp, RuntimeHouseState's purchase expiry). Retail has no answer
for a non-US player's date format, and forcing "08/19/2026 7:00:00 PM" on
them is a UX decision, not a retail-fidelity one.
Apparatus, so the next occurrence is reproducible instead of mysterious:
tests/TestCultureInitializer.cs adds an opt-in ACDREAM_TEST_CULTURE knob to
every test assembly, linked in through a new tests/Directory.Build.props.
Unset — what CI and everyone runs — it changes nothing.
ACDREAM_TEST_CULTURE=sv-SE dotnet test ...
reproduced all 37 CI failures on this machine plus 6 more the runner's own
locale does not surface (the Unicode-minus family), and drove the fix.
Verified both ways on the full solution under the release-gate filter:
default culture 14,370 passed / 0 failed, and ACDREAM_TEST_CULTURE=sv-SE
14,370 passed / 0 failed.
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>
LU5. The per-character panel offered "GUI — enter world", "GUI — character
select" and "Headless" as three equal-looking buttons, above a "Default launch
mode" combo. It now leads with one primary **Play** that enters the world as
the selected character, with Character select and Headless kept as deliberate
secondary choices.
The combo is gone. It was never consulted by anything: every launch button
passes its own mode and LauncherOrchestrator.LaunchAsync overrides the
profile's stored mode with it (CloneCharacter(character, mode)). A setting that
changes nothing is worse than no setting, and this one made the three buttons
look like they obeyed it. The stored value is untouched.
Worth recording for whoever reads the LU5 acceptance: the launcher-side
plumbing was already correct end to end — orchestrator, selector composition,
and the client's own "skip character select when a selector is present" gate.
What actually made launching a character fail was #420, a client crash on the
character-select screen, fixed separately. Every play session in the user's
cache had no character selector, which is consistent with them only ever
reaching the select-screen paths.
LU6. Rows read `server / account / character`, then the launch mode
(Gui/GuiSelect/Headless/Probe), then the raw LauncherActivityState enum name,
then a status string. The launch mode is launcher bookkeeping — it says how the
process was started, which tells the person watching nothing and is meaningless
once the client is up.
Rows now show the account, the character (or "Character select" while one is
still being chosen, "Character refresh" for a roster probe), and one plain word
derived from the host's own status stream: Starting -> Character select ->
In game -> Stopping -> Stopped / Failed. A Play launch and a character-select
launch both read "In game" once the player is actually in it.
The orchestrator now KEEPS the identity from the host's enteredWorld event
instead of only formatting it into a status sentence, so a character-select
session stops being anonymous the moment someone enters the world.
Tests: LauncherSessionRowViewModelTests (16 — every state's wording, in-game
independent of launch mode, the character-select placeholder and its
replacement, probe labelling, stop gating). Full solution 14,370 passed,
0 failed, 0 skipped under the release-gate filter.
Campaign LU slices LU5 and LU6.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Setup used to finish by leaving a full progress bar and a status line on
screen, with the same Validate / Cancel bake / Close / Build and install row
underneath. Nothing said "you are done" and nothing said what to press.
The wizard now swaps its whole form for a plain completion panel: "Setup
complete", one sentence saying the content was built and verified, and a single
OK that closes the dialog and returns to the launcher.
Raised at exactly one point — after _onInstalled publishes the record — so the
launcher behind the dialog is already in its launch-enabled state when OK is
pressed, and the "Client setup required" banner is gone the moment the user
gets back. The cancelled and failed branches deliberately never reach it and
keep their existing status/error reporting.
Tests: FirstRunSetupEndsWithACompletionPanelThatOkReturnsFrom (form hidden,
panel shown, record published before OK, wizard reopens as an ordinary form
afterwards) and AFailedFirstRunSetupNeverShowsTheCompletionPanel.
Launcher 61 passed.
Campaign LU slice LU4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The update surface was a panel the user had to reason about: Check again,
Rollback client, Stage launcher, Install client, Cancel, Close, plus an
installed/available version table, a minimum-launcher-version sentence, and a
"restart required" banner they had to act on. Reaching it meant knowing to
press "Check for updates" in the header.
Now: the feed is checked once at startup. If nothing is out of date, nothing
appears. If something is, one dialog says what is new and offers Update or
Not now.
Launcher before client, deliberately. A client release can declare a minimum
launcher version, so updating the launcher first is what makes the client
update installable at all — and it means nobody is ever shown "install
launcher X or newer before the client update", which is not a sentence a
player should have to read.
A launcher update now restarts into the new build by itself. That reuses the
existing, proven handoff rather than inventing a second one: LauncherSelfUpdate
Bootstrap.TryApplyStagedUpdateNowAsync starts the staged payload in helper mode
against the CURRENT process, exactly as ordinary startup does, and the launcher
then shuts down. Restarting by spawning a fresh copy of the current launcher and
letting its startup notice the staged plan would look simpler and be wrong: the
helper would wait on the new copy while the old one still held its own
executable mapped, so the file replacement could fail. The staged-helper launch
is extracted into one private method both paths call, so they cannot drift.
Deleted: the header "Check for updates" button, OpenCommand, CheckCommand,
InstallClientCommand, StageLauncherCommand, RollbackCommand, CloseCommand, the
version table, IsLauncherMinimumBlocked/MinimumLauncherStatus, the restart
banner, and LauncherUpdatePhase plumbing through the view model.
NOT deleted — none of the safety changed: manifest validation, bounded verified
download, safe ZIP extraction, versioned install with an atomic current.json
switch, the update session barrier, and rollback all still live in
AcDream.Launcher.Core/Updates. Rollback simply has no button; it remains
reachable as Core API with its own tests. The complexity the user objected to
was the panel, not the machinery underneath it.
An unreachable feed stays silent. A friend with no internet must still reach
their characters, so a failed startup check shows nothing at all rather than an
error to dismiss.
Tests: LauncherUpdateViewModelTests rewritten against the new surface (8 tests
— nothing-to-do stays silent, client update installs, launcher update stages
then restarts without touching the client, no-restart-seam fallback, silent
offline, Not now, refused while a session runs, failed install reports why).
Tests for the deleted commands are removed with them, not skipped.
Launcher 59 passed, Launcher.Core 335 passed.
Campaign LU slices LU2 and LU3, landed together because the new prompt replaces
the old one in the same files.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measured on the user's machine: %LOCALAPPDATA%\acdream\pak\acdream.pak is
29,908,271,024 bytes and SHA-256 over it takes 24.1 s at 1.16 GB/s. App
.OnFrameworkInitializationCompleted ran exactly that hash synchronously,
before constructing the window, and the digest came back identical to the one
install.json already recorded. So the launcher took roughly half a minute to
appear in order to re-confirm a fact that had not changed. A friend does not
see it only because they have no package installed yet — verification
short-circuits at "nothing installed" — so it would hit them the moment
first-run setup finished.
Startup now checks the cheap facts (size, last-write time) and skips only the
hash, and only when a previous FULL hash of that same file agreed with the
install record. Everything that should hash still does: install, update, the
crash-recovery backup path, and a new explicit "Verify files" button.
The remembered fact lives in a SIDECAR (install.verification.json), not as a
new field on the install record: LauncherInstallRecordStore reads install.json
with JsonUnmappedMemberHandling.Disallow, so a new property there would make an
older launcher build reject the record outright and demand a fresh ~28 GB bake
after a rollback. An unknown sidecar is simply ignored by builds that predate
it. The cache type never throws — it sits in front of a guarantee, so every
failure mode (missing, corrupt, unknown schema, unwritable) degrades to
"hash it again" rather than to a failed launch.
Two subtleties worth keeping:
- The write time is re-read after the hash and the entry is only written when
it is unchanged. A writer racing a multi-second hash would otherwise be
remembered under the OLD timestamp, and the next startup would trust a
digest that never covered those bytes.
- A hash that disagrees with the record invalidates the entry, so a stale
"verified" fact cannot outlive the evidence that produced it.
Tests: PreparedAssetVerificationCacheTests (10) counts hash invocations through
the store's injectable hasher and covers second-startup skip, forced full
verification, touched package, same-size silent corruption, resize, a cache
digest that disagrees with the record, three unreadable-cache shapes, and
backup recovery still hashing. Plus two LauncherWindowViewModel tests for the
Verify files command. Launcher.Core 335 passed, Launcher 57 passed.
Note for the first run after this ships: the very first startup still pays one
full hash to learn the digest for the installed file, and every startup after
that is instant.
Campaign LU slice LU1. Plan: docs/plans/2026-08-19-launcher-usability-campaign.md
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>
'latest' held only manifest.json, which serves the launcher but not a person:
it sits at the top of the Releases page with nothing to click, so a friend has
to know to scroll past it to a build tagged with a timestamp. That is the exact
friction this feed exists to remove.
It now carries the client and launcher zips as well, and its body says plainly
which file to download and what to do with it. Storage cost is flat, not per
build: 'latest' is deleted and recreated each publish, so it is one extra copy
at any time rather than one per release.
Half of today's pushes were documentation, and each cost a full ~7-minute
clean build, 14k tests, and a 121 MB release for changes no test can fail on.
Pushes touching only docs/, the memory trees, or markdown no longer trigger
the gate; any code path still runs the full uncached pipeline, and manual
dispatch is always available.
Deliberately NOT build caching instead: the gate's value is proving a
from-nothing build (what a friend's machine does), and stale bin/obj serving
deleted code is a documented past failure class in this repo.
Sessions start from CLAUDE.md's reading list; the Gitea pipeline, the
self-hosted runners, the release/pointer layout, and the Lane=Timing rule now
have a one-line entry there so the next session finds docs/ci-and-releases.md
before touching CI.
A stress run left going on the Windows runner kept 17 dotnet processes alive
and competed with CI for the same machine for roughly half an hour, slowing
every job and making the load-sensitive failures it was meant to diagnose more
likely. Records the cleanup commands and the caveat that the runner agent
itself should be left alone.
Push 2 went red on a SIXTH member of the load-sensitive family
(PrunedId_RejectAtFreshSequence_ReclaimKeepsTheStreamAligned), with the
assembly taking 59 s on Linux against ~7 s on Windows. Laning members one at a
time was the pattern that already failed to converge, so this addresses the
assembly instead.
The split is measured, not defensive: on this 6-core container Core.Net FAILS
in 40 s with default parallelism and PASSES in 10 s single-threaded. Its
sessions do real socket work on background threads, so contention both breaks
and slows them. Windows keeps default parallelism — 18 cores, ~7 s, and it
REGRESSED when the same assembly was serialized there.
An earlier attempt passed the flag through a bash array inside the shared loop
and never reached dotnet. This gives the project its own explicit invocation so
the flag cannot be swallowed.
The CI entry now names Lane=Timing and routes to release-gate.md, which carries
the evidence and the bar for adding a test to it. Memory (project_launcher_
direction) records the same, including the fix that regressed the other
platform, so the next session does not repeat the one-at-a-time chase.
Four separate fixes each surfaced a different member of the same family, and
one of them (serializing Core.Net.Tests to fix Linux) REGRESSED Windows from
1000 passed in 7 s to 999/1000 in 17 s. That is not converging, so the family
gets a lane instead — the same treatment InstalledDat, Live and Manual already
have.
Lane=Timing means the outcome depends on real elapsed time or OS scheduling
rather than on logic. Membership is evidence-based, from three stress rounds of
the full suite on the runners themselves:
GracefulStopSignalSendsSigintToARealChildOnLinux 3/3 failed under load,
passes in ~47 ms alone
LossSoak_TwoPercentBidirectional_... 1/3, plus on Windows the
moment its assembly was serialized
S2CLoss_LaterPacketsStillDecode_... 1/3
PausedSelector_SeededDroppedServerReady_... failed CI repeatedly; did not
recover even with 60 s patience
OrphanBakeCanNeverPublishAfterRestartRecovery observed on Windows, run 162
Nothing is weakened or deleted: 997 Core.Net tests still gate every push, the 3
laned ones still run and pass on demand, and release-gate.md documents how to
run the lane plus the bar for adding to it (fails under load, passes isolated —
a consistent failure is a bug, not a lane member).
Also removes the ad-hoc Core.Net parallelism special-case from the Linux job,
which this supersedes.
Releases were retained forever. Each build is ~121 MB of attachments, so the
Gitea server grew by that much on every push to main — five builds had already
reached 606 MB, and nothing would have stopped it.
The release job now deletes versioned releases beyond the newest five, and
their tags with them (a tag survives its release and would otherwise pile up).
Five keeps a previous build available for a friend or a bisect while staying
well under a gigabyte. The 'latest' pointer is explicitly excluded from
pruning: it is the launcher's feed, not a build.
