Reworks Campaign CH slice CH2 per the REJECT-review findings doc
(docs/research/2026-08-09-ch2-review-findings.md).
BLOCKER 1 — SpewBoxController never rendered a line and leaked its
pending queue. LinesProvider only ran through UiText.OnDraw, which
gates on Visible — and the box started invisible, so the provider (the
sole caller of SpewBoxState.Tick) never ran. Gave the controller an
explicit per-frame Tick(now) driven by UiRoot's global-message-3
broadcast (a zero-size GlobalTimeSink child, the same pattern
VendorUiController.DragOverGlobalTimeSink already uses), matching
retail's gmSpewBoxUI::Update. LinesProvider now only returns the
cache. Tests rewritten to drive root.Tick(...) instead of calling the
provider directly, plus new coverage for visibility-without-a-draw,
queue-drain-without-a-draw, and bounded-queue-across-many-ticks.
BLOCKER 2 — re-derived the HandleFailureEvent routing table from the
PDB-paired binary instead of the pseudo-C's ~33-char string previews.
tools/pdb-extract/sweep_weenie_strings.py sweeps every push imm32 in
VA 0x571990-0x575480, dereferences into .rdata/.data, and decodes the
full UTF-16LE literal. Added the 5 ids dispatched via else-if (missed
by case-label enumeration), resolved 0x4F8 (previously excluded),
fixed 18 wrong strings (16 the review flagged + 2 more — 0x4E9 and
0x518 — an automated diff between every swept literal and the landed
table found). Every changed row cross-checked against ACE's
WeenieError/WeenieErrorWithString enum doc comments; both oracles
agreed on every row, including a case where the review's own proposed
text for the new 0x4E8 row was itself wrong (it was 0x4E9's text) —
corrected via the else-if block's own instruction address plus the ACE
cross-check. Pinned table count: 344 (338 + 5 + 0x4F8).
SHOULD-FIX 1 — RuntimeCommunicationState.ResetSpewBox was dead code;
folded into the ChatIdentity generation-reset stage (same lifetime
boundary), with a reset assertion added to the existing populated-reset
test.
SHOULD-FIX 2 — AddText trimmed only the trailing end and invented an
empty-string early return; retail's AddTextToScroll trims both ends
(trim(&str, 1, 1, ws)) and has no empty guard. Both retired.
SHOULD-FIX 3 — ShowWeenieError bypassed the AddText chokepoint via
ChatLog.OnWeenieError (hardcoded LogTextType 0x00); routed through
Communication.AddText(Resolve(code, param)) instead, and
ChatLog.OnWeenieError is deleted — GameEventWiring's legacy no-router
fallback now resolves + calls OnSystemMessage directly.
SHOULD-FIX 4 — retail's HandleFailureEvent switch has no default case;
an unmapped id now resolves to a null Text (silence toward the
player) instead of the invented "WeenieError 0xNNNN" hex fallback,
with a diagnostics-only console log line for the id.
NITs — AP-TBD placeholders corrected to their real register rows
(AP-178, not the unrelated AP-177 lifetime row); filed AP-180 for the
windowId dual-destination gap and corrected three stale "lands with
CH2" comments; extended SpewBoxLayoutDumpDiagnostic from dats.Portal
to dats.Local and found the SpewBox element for real — LayoutDesc
0x21000011, element 0x10000048, size 450x72, MaxConcurrentItems
(ListBox property 0x10000028) = 4, not retail's code default of 1.
AP-178 narrowed accordingly; SpewBoxState.MaxConcurrentItems and
SpewBoxController's extent/anchor/OneLine are now authored rather than
placeholder (absolute screen position and colour remain open); fixed
the "19 ids... lists 18" miscount by retiring the stale paragraph in
the class doc rewrite; aligned the UseDone handler's silent-status
check with the other two WeenieError handlers.
Full Release suite: 11,914 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed (build 0
errors).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retail routes on-screen refusals ("You can't jump while in the air",
"You are too encumbered to carry that!") through a SEPARATE transient
screen surface (gmSpewBoxUI, ClientSystem::AddTextToScroll @0x00563C50)
that never touches the chat scroll — type 0x1A is exactly the bit every
ChatInterface window's default filter excludes
(ChatInterface::ChatInterface @0x004F4550). acdream had no such split:
every WeenieError rendered in chat at a single stand-in LogTextType
0x00 (CH1-era approximation, register AP-176), and locally-detected
jump refusals were silently discarded.
This slice ports the full mechanism per
docs/research/2026-08-09-chat-retail-interface-text.md:
CORE (AcDream.Core/Chat):
- WeenieErrorMessages.Resolve now returns (text, RetailLogTextType) from
a 338-row transcription of ClientCommunicationSystem::HandleFailureEvent
@0x00571990 (Appendix A's 339 cases minus one, 0x4F8, deliberately
excluded — its case body is a tangled decompiler artifact, not
resolvable with confidence). Spot-checked ~20 rows directly against
the raw decomp (case 0x2b/0x36/0x3a/0x4e/0x4ec/0x4f3/0x4f4 and the
jump family), beyond the ~10 the brief asked for, because the first
pass surfaced two transcription classes the research doc's markdown
silently ate: (1) 7 ids marked "shared string global" resolved by
reading the case bodies directly (0x24/0x48/0x49 reuse the jump-
refusal globals; 0x4DE/0x4DF/0x55A/0x55E are pure param passthrough);
(2) 19 "arg3 + literal" CONCATENATION ids whose leading space (and
therefore their %s marker) the markdown table's cell-trimming ate —
fixed by re-reading each case body, several requiring a SECOND
non-truncated data_XXXXXXXX dump elsewhere in the same oracle file to
recover text the ~33-char inline preview cut off. One retail typo is
preserved verbatim: 0x4F4's second placeholder is literal "$s", not
"%s" — only the first substitutes.
- ClientTextRefusals: the 11 process-lifetime string globals, all
byte-recovered from the PDB-paired C:\Users\erikn\Downloads\acclient.exe
(MATCH verified via check_exe_pdb.py) via raw UTF-16LE prefix search —
5 were truncated in the research doc's own transcription and all 5
turned out to end "...combat mode"/"...this position", not the
shorter "...combat" a truncated read would suggest.
- SpewBoxState: the gmSpewBoxUI pending/visible queue port (insert-at-0,
dedupe-against-index-0-only, MaxConcurrentItems overflow, per-entry
expiry, one-frame enqueue/drain decoupling). Placed in Core (not
Runtime as the brief's default) because AcDream.UI.Abstractions
references Core but not Runtime, and SpewBoxVM needs to wrap it
directly — the same constraint ChatVM already satisfies against
ChatLog.
- Folded the 4-entry WeenieErrorText.cs into the full table; deleted it.
RUNTIME (AcDream.Runtime):
- RuntimeCommunicationState.AddText(text, type, windowId): the
AddTextToScroll chokepoint. type == ClientLocal -> SpewBox only, never
chat; everything else -> the existing transcript, tagged with type.
- GameEventWiring gains an `onInterfaceText` delegate hole (Core.Net
cannot reference Runtime, so this follows the file's own established
pattern for every other Runtime-owned sink). Rewires 0x028A/0x028B/
UseDone through the full table + router; fixes 0x02EB
CommunicationTransientString's routing type from a CH1-era 0x00
guess to retail's hardcoded ClientLocal (Handle_Communication__
TransientString @0x0057D460).
- LiveSessionEventRouter's 0xF7E0 ServerMessage handler now routes
through AddText with the wire chatType verbatim instead of always
writing ChatLog directly.
- PlayerMovementController gains OnInterfaceText, applied by
RuntimeLocalPlayerMovementState to every controller it installs.
Reports ChargeJump/jump refusals exactly as ClientCombatSystem::
CommenceJump @0x0056AF90 / DoJump @0x0056B110 do — confirmed via
their compiled dispatch that ONLY 0x24/0x48/0x49 produce text;
0x47 (GeneralMovementFailure, fully-constrained/no-stamina) and any
other code are retail-SILENT (DoJump's jump table has exactly 4 real
targets), which contradicts this task's brief ("0x47 -> the
constrained/stamina row per §4.2") — the brief's reading of §4.2
described what jump_is_allowed COMPUTES, not what CommenceJump/DoJump
DISPLAY for it. Implemented the decomp-verified silent behavior.
APP (AcDream.App / AcDream.UI.Abstractions):
- The 5 composition sites that already used RetailLogTextType.ClientLocal
now call Communication.AddText instead of Chat.OnSystemMessage
directly, so they reach the SpewBox instead of the transcript.
- SpewBoxVM (UI.Abstractions) + SpewBoxController (App), modeled
directly on PortalWaitNoticeController. Position/font/colour/
MaxConcurrentItems are placeholders: SpewBoxLayoutDumpDiagnostic
exhaustively swept the installed client_portal.dat's entire LayoutDesc
id range (0x21000000-0x21000075, 101/118 ids populated, sanity-checked
against 3 known ids) and found ZERO elements of class 0x10000016 —
gmSpewBoxUI is mounted from C++ code, not any authored LayoutDesc, so
the dump cannot recover these values.
REGISTER: AP-176 retired (its WeenieError half is now the full table
port); its OnCombatLine half was never in this slice's scope and is
split out to AP-179 so that divergence keeps a row. AP-177 (invented
line lifetime) and AP-178 (invented position/font/colour/max-items)
filed for the presentation placeholders above. AP-175 (PopUpString ->
chat instead of modal) is untouched, not duplicated.
Suite: 11,890 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed (was 11,835/4/0; +55 net
new tests, 0 regressions).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik