Gate 1 (2026-07-04): "better in general" + three residuals — monsters
pushed INTO the player, attacks with stale facing, position
"flashing/flapping instead of gliding". All three are ONE mechanism:
the legacy NPC UpdatePosition handler hard-snaps position, orientation,
and velocity/cycle UNCONDITIONALLY, fighting the armed sticky every UP
(ACE's authoritative rest pose sits ~0.6 m out and its server-side
facing lags the strafing target; the client stick holds 0.3 m + live
facing — oscillation at UP cadence).
Retail is immune by architecture, not by tuning: UP corrections flow
through the InterpolationManager into the SAME per-tick
PositionManager::adjust_offset chain where StickyManager::adjust_offset
OVERWRITES them while armed (0x00555190 chain order; 0x00555430 assigns
m_fOrigin). A server correction can never fight an armed stick
frame-by-frame. The remote-player branch already has exactly that
(queue -> combiner -> sticky overwrite); the legacy NPC path snaps
outside the chain.
Fix: suppress the NPC UP position/orientation/velocity-adoption snaps
while the entity is stuck (PositionManager.GetStickyObjectId() != 0) —
the retail chain semantics translated to the snap architecture.
LastServerPos/Time + cell bookkeeping still record; server truth
reasserts on the first UP after unstick, bounded by the 1 s sticky
lease. Register row TS-44 (same commit); retires with the S6/R6
interp-queue unification of the NPC path.
Apparatus: ACDREAM_PROBE_STICKY=1 — per-guid [sticky] lifecycle lines
(STICK / UNSTICK / LEASE-EXPIRE / TARGET-status teardown), per-armed-
tick steer lines (signed gap dist, applied delta, heading delta, live
resolve), and [sticky-snap-skip] at the suppressed-snap site.
PhysicsDiagnostics.ProbeStickyEnabled owns the flag (rule #5).
Full suite 4038 green. Awaiting gate 2 (pack melee vs retail).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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