The RE agent escalated this rather than picking, correctly: folding centre
into L/R changes how dialogue sits against the music, which is an aesthetic
judgement about the game and not a container detail.
Decided: explicit ITU fold, centre at -3 dB, recorded in the manifest with the
rest of the transcode command. Pinned rather than defaulted because a default is
a decision nobody made -- invisible in the output and free to change between
ffmpeg versions.
**The pin.** Pin a TAG, never a bare sha. A sha reachable only from an auto/*
branch is orphaned when that branch is deleted or -- worse -- squash-merged,
because squash creates new commits: main looks like it contains the work while
the pin becomes unreachable and this project stops building for a fresh
checkout, silently, at their build. formats-pin-2026-08-29 exists for the
current state.
Also says plainly why NOT to float to a branch, which was the tempting fix:
Cargo resolves a git dependency once and writes the sha into Cargo.lock, so
floating gives staleness you cannot see instead of staleness you can read.
push-work now pushes --follow-tags so annotated tags travel with the branch.
**Audio.** docs/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md separates three questions that were being
asked as one: is the transcode faithful (no engine, no device -- a file-vs-file
difference measurement), does Godot route it (AudioEffectRecord on the Master
bus writes a WAV from a headless run), and what does the GAME play (a PulseAudio
null sink, which needs a rebuild).
It leads with the three ways the fidelity measurement lies, because all three
were hit on the first attempt and each produces a confident wrong number rather
than an error: unaligned subtraction, mismatched channel layouts, and probing a
file another process is still writing.
The 5.1 disc fact deliberately is NOT copied here -- it lives in the RE corpus
at docs/re/structures/movie-audio-channels.md and is linked, so there is one
copy to keep true rather than two that drift. Same reason HANDOFF is a summary
with links.
The downmix itself stays flagged as an unmade decision, not quietly resolved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pin was 4.3, chosen without checking; 4.7.2 is the current stable (released
2026-08-18). Getting this right matters more here than usual because the project
diffs Godot screenshots against a reference renderer, so the engine version is
part of the measurement.
No Godot MCP server. Not because they are bad -- the mature ones need a LIVE
editor plus a WebSocket plugin and a Python server, which is a daemon, an editor
process and a second runtime added to an unattended loop. And their headline
feature, scene-tree introspection and node manipulation, is built for someone
hand-authoring scenes in the editor. This port GENERATES screens from exported
JSON: the agent writes a loader, not a scene tree, so the feature that justifies
the complexity does not apply. What it actually needs to verify itself -- run
headless, screenshot, diff against sylpheed-cli screen render -- is already a
bash job.
Third-party skill packs are the opposite trade: pure context, no runtime. Worth
revisiting, deliberately not installed now, because a skill is instructions
injected into an agent running with approvals disabled -- a supply-chain
decision, not a default -- and because P0/P1 need no advanced GDScript. The
agent may propose one, naming the milestone it unblocks, for a human to vendor
and review.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The port is deliberately separate from the reverse-engineering project: its own
repository, its own clone, its own container. Two writers in one working tree
means files change under whoever is mid-edit and a `git add -A` by one sweeps up
the other's work -- which happened today in the Reborn tree, so this is set up
not to repeat it.
The wall: Godot never reads a disc format. An offline Rust exporter converts the
user's disc into JSON + PNG + Ogg, and the Godot project reads only that. No
GDExtension, no Rust in port/. Beyond the practical reason -- Godot cannot read
IPFB, RATC, T8aD, XMA or WMV -- there is the design one: modding is a goal, and
if the runtime reads the original formats then modding means reverse
engineering, whereas if it reads JSON it means opening a file.
The decoders come from sylpheed-formats PINNED BY REVISION (8b6dbcf), not
vendored and not reimplemented. `sylpheed_formats::media` in particular already
owns every case where one playable thing is not one archive entry: entries that
span segment files, banks with several sub-waves, and the cutscene voices, which
are one continuous XMA stream chunked into VOICE_*.slb entries whose boundaries
do NOT match the cues. That last one is the easiest thing in this project to get
subtly wrong, so the mission says outright not to re-derive it.
docs/MISSION.md is the objective (P0-P7, each gated by an artifact rather than
by compiling). docs/BLOCKED.md lists what cannot proceed until the RE agent
answers Q1-Q10, and says plainly that none of it may be guessed -- this agent
has no emulator and no oracle, so a value it invents is indistinguishable from a
decoded one a month later.
The container is deliberately small: 3 cpus / 4 GB against the RE container's
6 / 7, and an image with no C++ toolchain, no Vulkan stack and no emulator. Two
full-size containers do not fit on this box beside a desktop.
Its launcher sets the git identity through GIT_AUTHOR_*/GIT_COMMITTER_* rather
than writing [user] into .git/config -- the config route captures every commit
made in that tree, including a human's, which is how six of today's commits
ended up attributed to the RE agent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
