With the pilot finally shooting, the experiment completed both halves. Sample A
at counter 12 over 120 entities gave 2 offsets where exactly 12 entities share a
value; the counter then went 12 -> 11 and NEITHER survived. So within +-0x400 of
an entity's position triple there is no 4-byte word whose shared-value population
tracks REMAINING OB.
The limits are recorded as part of the result, because they bound it: the test
asks which entities share an EXACT 32-bit value, so a single bit ORed into a word
that also carries health or a timer would never show up - a bit-level version of
the same differential is the follow-on. Anything outside the window, or on
entities that entities2 cannot see (it types by position CHANGING, so stationary
objectives are invisible), is untested too, and the populations differed a lot
between samples - 120 against 194.
Separately: REMAINING OB went 12 -> 11, the first decrement of this whole
investigation, while pilot.py logged 411 fire=1 samples and the HUD reached YOU
KILLED WARPLANES 0003. Stated carefully - it does NOT show the counter counts
kills, since an earlier run had the hostile population fall by a third with no
movement; it shows some kills close something the counter tracks.
Two robustness fixes: ob_flag retries an empty entity sample (one void run was
caused by exactly that), and Pad releases everything on interpreter exit - a
file-backed pad PERSISTS after its writer dies, so a tool killed mid-press would
leave a button held and the game would walk through menus on its own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
Measured, not argued: command a 45-degree-off-the-nose error and watch whether it
shrinks, both axes, both sides, two pulse widths, with the opposite sign as a
control. Yaw's sign is correct (45 -> 11.3/32.7 at 0.6 s, 41.6/33.8 at 1.2 s).
Pitch's is inverted - the pilot's own sign GREW the error every time
(48.3/55.6/70.7/91.7) and the opposite shrank it every time (30.7/41.5/15.7/9.6).
A method artefact is recorded because it gave the opposite answer first: a 3 s
full-deflection pulse overshoots a 45-degree error so far that BOTH signs look
wrong (45 -> 164 and 45 -> 178). A long pulse cannot answer a sign question.
Verified against the game rather than by inspection. Before: fire=1 in 0 of 13521
samples, |aim yaw| pinned at 90.0, target 36-43 km away. After: 43 of 1732, aim
down to 2.3 degrees, range median 6.3 km, and the HUD's own ammunition counters
moving - NOSE BM 06000 -> 05723, MAIN MPM 00300 -> 00298.
Also fixed a leftover of the same FIFO era: pilot.py called pad.f.write("tap A
90") for the target-select double tap, which raised AttributeError once Pad
stopped having an `f`. Pad gained tap()/dpad(); ctrl_probe.py and target_probe.py
still use pad.f and now say so in place.
Still open: YOU KILLED is 0000 after 250 s of firing and REMAINING OB is still
012. The craft shoots, closes and selects; whether it destroys anything is next.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
flight_probe.Pad opened /tmp/sylph-vgamepad.fifo, "the vgamepad server's FIFO".
That server was removed when the uinput pad was replaced by Canary's --hid=file
driver, because a uinput device is not namespaced and scripted presses leaked to
the host's desktop. The FIFO is now an ordinary 91-byte file nothing reads, and
/tmp/xenia_pad.txt - the file the emulator polls - was 0 bytes while the
"autopilot" was flying. So every axis, trigger and button from pilot.py,
autopilot3.py, aim_probe.py and flight_probe.py went nowhere, silently.
The corpus already carried this trap for the SHELL scripts
(canary-scripted-input-traps.md, "every call here failed silently"). This class
was missed, and every flight tool imports it.
Verified against the oracle rather than by inspection, on runs confirmed
animating at both ends of every phase: before, full stick produced 0.00 degrees
of heading change over 4 s while the ship travelled 350-735 units, and the
attitude matrix at pos-0x70 was byte-identical; after, LX=-1 turns 12.72 degrees
and LX=+1 swings the flight direction from [1,0,0] to [0.13,-0.14,-0.98], with
the matrix moving 0.44/0.31 under stick and 0.0000 at neutral.
That also REFUTES the "stale attitude matrix" suspicion from the earlier pass -
pos-0x70 is live and tracks the ship; it only looked dead because nothing was
turning the ship.
Still open and said plainly: with the pad fixed a 150 s pilot run still fires 0
times, with |aim yaw| still exactly 90.0 and the target 36-43 km away. Steering
works now, so what is left is the stick SIGN against the pilot's error convention
or a target selection that commits to something too far to close. Both are
finally testable.
findrot_global/findself/findspeed/selfstate still write to the dead FIFO and now
say so in place; they are not repaired because none has been re-run since.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PMRJjbxLqZtsb5Vb7KunPE
Reads the live world out of guest RAM and drives the pad from it. Working:
loop-rate memory reads, whole-RAM float scanning with numpy (1270 orthonormal
3x3 blocks in 6.2 s), entity enumeration by unit type (116 live instances in
Stage 02), pad control written straight into the vgamepad FIFO (the CLI spawns
a process per command and its tap/hold sleep inside the server, so neither is
usable in a control loop), unattended mission entry, and the Hangar loadout --
the "Recommended" control is AUTO SELECT, which at 5 % progress is a no-op
because only two weapons are developed and both are already mounted.
Not working, and the reason the craft is not yet flown: the class 0x820af030
is NOT the live entity. It has one object per spawned thing and carries the
unit-ID string, which is why it looked like the entity list, but every one of
its 384 words is constant across a 29 s in-flight capture. No transform lives
in it or one pointer hop from it. Input correlation (hard left yaw vs hard
right, looking for a turn axis that reverses) does find self-like objects at
cos = -0.99, but they cluster in what looks like a camera volume rather than
the craft, and with no definition pointer near them the trick of learning one
entity's layout and applying it to the rest has nothing to anchor on -- so the
33418 moving triples in a firefight cannot be split into enemies, friendlies
and bullets, and there is nothing to aim at.
Two dead ends are recorded so they are not repeated: RT is not the throttle
(the two-state speed scan therefore found nothing), and comparing orientation
matrices 2 s apart is outside the small-angle regime, which is what produced
"angular velocities" of 30000.
Also corrects the claim in unit-struct-runtime.md that 0x820af030 holds live
state. The definition class 0x820af844 and every value derived from it are
unaffected.
autopilot2.py (a PD controller using body angular velocity from consecutive
rotation matrices) is committed but has never had a valid config to run
against, and is marked as untested.
