ac2af96b15
Captures all the "this looks wrong" findings from the Phase 5 visual
verification and assigns each to a future phase. Top-of-document is
phases done, then phases ahead in suggested order, then a quick
lookup table that maps user complaints to their owning phase.
Phases ahead:
6 Animation system (creature poses, walk/attack motions, breathe-idle)
7 Multi-floor interiors + dungeons (second floors, foundry interior,
subterranean rooms)
8 Player input → server (movement, interact, ack pump, combat)
9 Visual polish (portals, mesh-origin offsets, exact palette ranges,
lighting/shadows)
10 UI / HUD (chat, inventory, character panel, spellbook, minimap)
11 Sound (SoundTable, audio engine, 3D positional audio)
12 Streaming + perf (chunked landblock loading, frustum culling, LOD,
background net thread)
Each phase entry has: what it owns, what it requires, references in the
existing references/ tree, and rough effort estimate.
Document is intentionally a living roadmap — updated whenever a phase
lands or when a new defect is observed that doesn't fit the existing
buckets.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
197 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
197 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
# acdream — phase roadmap
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**Status:** Living document. Updated 2026-04-11 after Phase 5 visual verification.
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**Purpose:** Every observed defect and missing feature has a named phase that owns it. When something looks wrong, look here first to find which phase will fix it.
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---
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## Phases done
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| Phase | What landed | Verification |
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|---|---|---|
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| **1** | Terrain rendering, plugin host scaffold | Visual ✓ |
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| **2a** | Static stabs/buildings (126 entities) | Visual ✓ |
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| **2b** | Textured 3×3 landblock grid + FlyCamera + IGameState | Visual ✓ |
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| **2c** | Procedural scenery (419 trees/rocks/bushes) | Visual ✓ |
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| **2d** | Interior EnvCell walker (475 static interior objects) | Visual ✓ |
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| **3a/3b** | Directional sun lighting + per-vertex terrain normals | Visual ✓ |
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| **3c** | Per-cell terrain texture blending (alpha atlas) | Visual ✓ |
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| **4** | Full UDP codec + handshake + character login + WorldSession | Live ✓ |
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| **5** | ObjDesc: AnimPart + TextureChanges + SubPalettes + ObjScale + Placement.Resting | Live ✓ partial |
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**Phase 5 status:** characters, doors, signs, NPCs, statues all spawn and render with correct positions, scales, and per-entity textures + palettes. The Holtburg sign now stands upright thanks to Resting placement. The Nullified Statue of a Drudge renders at correct scale and color but in the wrong pose (deferred — see Phase 6).
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---
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## Phases ahead, in suggested order
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### Phase 6 — Animation system
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**Owns:**
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- Drudge statue rendering in aggressive crouch instead of upright "Resting" stance (creatures don't have a Resting placement frame; their idle pose comes from animations, not Setup placements)
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- All characters and NPCs rendering in Setup-default pose (T-pose-ish or default crouch) instead of breathing/idling
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- No walk/attack/gesture animations for any entity
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- Player character has no movement animation when WASD-flying
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**What it requires:**
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- `MotionTable` dat parser (animation frame keyframes per motion id)
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- `Animation` dat parser (the actual frame data)
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- Per-entity animation state: current motion id, current frame, time-since-frame-start
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- Per-frame interpolation between keyframes
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- Apply interpolated frame to PartArray.Frames per part (replaces our static `Setup.PlacementFrames[Default]` lookup)
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- Default-on-spawn motion: `Motion_Ready` or similar idle motion for every alive creature
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**Reference:**
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- `references/ACViewer/ACViewer/Physics/PartArray.cs::UpdateParts` — the per-frame motion application loop
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- `references/ACViewer/ACViewer/Physics/Animation/AnimSequence.cs` — sequence interpolation
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- `references/ACE/Source/ACE.DatLoader/FileTypes/MotionTable.cs` — motion table layout
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**Estimated effort:** 1-2 sessions. The motion system is the single biggest visual quality lever left.
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---
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### Phase 7 — Multi-floor interiors + dungeons
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**Owns:**
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- "Interior houses missing second floors" — our Phase 2d EnvCell walker only walks the ground-floor cells of a landblock and stops
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- "Doors that lead under something" — opening a door reveals subterranean cells we don't load
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- Dungeons (the Holtburg foundry interior, mines, etc.) — entirely missing
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- Building roofs and upper-story walls
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**What it requires:**
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- Walk EnvCell `0xAAAA0100+N` for the FULL range, not just N=0 (currently we stop early for some setups)
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- Recognize "stairs" / "floor transitions" in the cell graph and walk them
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- Handle dungeon landblock format: `0xAAAA0000` family with interior-only cell hierarchies
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- Possibly: load the dungeon when the player approaches a door that leads to it (streaming)
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**Reference:**
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- ACViewer's level loader and ACE's `EnvCell` parsing
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- WorldBuilder's dat browser for inspecting EnvCell structures of multi-floor buildings
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**Estimated effort:** 1 session, mostly debugging the cell-walk graph.
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---
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### Phase 8 — Player input → server
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**Owns:**
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- "I can fly around in acdream but I'm not actually MOVING in the game world from the server's perspective"
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- Standing still while live → server eventually drops us (no ack pump → no heartbeat)
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- Can't pick up items, click NPCs, talk to vendors, cast spells
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- No combat
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**What it requires:**
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- Outbound `PlayerAutonomousMove` GameMessage from acdream → server
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- Outbound `Ack` pump (background timer that sends `AckSequence` packets every ~250ms)
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- Outbound interact: `Use`, `UseWithTarget`, `PickUp`
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- Outbound chat: `SendTell`, `SendChat`
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- Map acdream's WASD camera position to server-space player position
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- Resolve character collision against terrain (so the server accepts the move)
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**Reference:**
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- ACE.Server `Network/Handlers/MovementHandler.cs`, `UseObjectHandler.cs`
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- holtburger session/send.rs for the outbound side patterns
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**Estimated effort:** 1-2 sessions. The ack pump is small; the move-and-interact protocol surface is large.
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---
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### Phase 9 — Visual polish
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**Owns:**
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- Portals rendering as black squares (probably needs special material handling — clipmap + animated UV)
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- Some entities with mesh-origin offsets that look wrong (non-Resting setups still float or sink)
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- Skin/hair/eye palette ranges on characters that aren't quite right
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- Lighting shadows and reflections
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- Better color tone overall
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**What it requires:**
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- Portal-specific shader path or texture animation system
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- Per-Setup mesh-origin diagnostic and fixup (or accept and document)
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- Verify palette range offsets/lengths against retail screenshots
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- Optionally: shadow maps, dynamic lighting
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**Estimated effort:** 1 session. Mostly tuning and edge cases.
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---
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### Phase 10 — UI / HUD
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**Owns:**
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- No chat window
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- No inventory display
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- No character info panel
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- No spell book
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- No minimap
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- No nameplates above characters/NPCs
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**What it requires:**
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- 2D rendering layer (Silk.NET supports this via ortho projection + a separate shader)
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- Font rendering (port a TTF rasterizer, e.g. FreeType bindings via Silk.NET, or use bitmap fonts)
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- Layout system or fixed-position widgets
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- Bind to GameState events for inventory updates, chat messages, etc.
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**Estimated effort:** 2-3 sessions. UI is unbounded.
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---
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### Phase 11 — Sound
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**Owns:**
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- No audio at all
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**What it requires:**
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- `SoundTable` parser (each weenie has a SoundTable for footsteps, hits, voice)
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- Sound dat decode (probably WAV-like format)
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- Audio engine (NAudio or OpenAL via Silk.NET.OpenAL)
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- Per-entity 3D positional audio
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- Music
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**Estimated effort:** 1-2 sessions.
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---
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### Phase 12 — Streaming + perf
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**Owns:**
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- Currently we render a fixed 3×3 landblock window. Walking out of it would crash or show emptiness.
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- No frustum culling. Some parts of the world are always submitted.
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- No LOD. Distant trees use the same vertex count as near ones.
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- Single-threaded packet pump. Could miss packets under load.
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**What it requires:**
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- Chunk-based terrain loading (deferred Phase 3d work — port WorldBuilder's `TerrainRenderManager`)
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- Visibility scan as the player moves; load nearby chunks, unload far ones
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- Frustum cull chunks before submitting draw calls
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- Background thread for net I/O so render thread is never blocked
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- Async dat decoding to avoid hitches when new entities arrive
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**Estimated effort:** 1-2 sessions for streaming, additional polish ongoing.
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---
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## Things explicitly out of scope
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- **Server emulation** — we use ACE for server, never reimplement
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- **Account creation** — direct user to ACE's auto-create or manual DB
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- **Anti-cheat / GMS / live-ops** — irrelevant for personal use
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- **Cross-platform** — Windows-only is fine; Silk.NET is cross-platform but the dat assumptions assume retail Windows install paths
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---
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## "When will my specific complaint be fixed?" — quick lookup
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| Observation | Phase |
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| Drudge statue in wrong pose (crouch) | **Phase 6 (Animation)** |
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| Characters in T-pose / wrong idle | **Phase 6** |
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| Houses missing second floors | **Phase 7 (Interiors)** |
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| Doors leading underground / nowhere | **Phase 7** |
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| Foundry interior missing | **Phase 7** |
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| Portals are black squares | **Phase 9 (Polish)** |
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| Holtburg sign half-buried | **Phase 5d FIXED** ✓ |
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| Statue too small / wrong size | **Phase 5c FIXED** ✓ |
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| Characters naked | **Phase 5a FIXED** ✓ |
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| Wrong colors on characters / statue | **Phase 5b FIXED** ✓ |
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| Foundry statue not appearing at all | **Phase 4.7 FIXED** ✓ |
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| Skin/hair color slightly off | **Phase 9** (likely a palette range tweak) |
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| Walking around doesn't move me on the server | **Phase 8 (Player input)** |
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| Can't talk to NPCs | **Phase 8** |
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| No chat window | **Phase 10 (UI)** |
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| No sound | **Phase 11** |
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| Can't walk to the next landblock | **Phase 12 (Streaming)** |
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If you see something not on this list, tell me and I'll add it.
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