Both agents read the protocol, their mission and the shared tooling from their
OWN checkout, and both work on topic branches -- so without an explicit sync
they follow whichever version of the rules existed when the branch started.
Found concretely: tools/audio-capture and two protocol revisions were on main
while the decoder worked for hours from a branch that had neither. The port had
merged on its own initiative and did have them, which is exactly the kind of
divergence nobody notices until the two disagree about what the rules say.
Two results and one retraction, all from the same session.
REFUTED: 'an ~8-10 s idle returns to the title' does not apply to the main menu.
Held untouched it stayed put for >= 60 s, correlation never leaving
0.9245-0.9249. That timer is real but belongs to the TITLE. It was the only
reason 'B leaves the main menu' was classed as authored, so Q5's B rule is
upgraded to measured-ordering: B is delivered (canary logs vk=5801) and is the
only input in >= 100 s before the return.
The PRESS (A) plate: the boot title presents build 4 WITHOUT the plate first --
green-glyph 154, against 159 on the committed no-plate capture and 753/977/1493
on plate titles -- and the plate arrives after. That is the port's third option.
RETRACTED: four durations taken the same day. classify_array costs 1503 ms per
frame; running it per frame against an 8 fps x11grab drained the pipe at
0.64 fps, so every classified frame was stale and increasingly so. It
manufactured 'plate 24.66 s after the title art', 'B->title 15.58 s', 'B->title
25.60 s' and 'A->menu 20.26 s'. The tell: a transition, a press and a fade do
not share a duration, and the two B figures GREW across a longer run.
A backlog preserves ordering and destroys durations, which is why the sequence
results above stand and every timing does not. The ring's period is unaffected
and that was checked, not assumed -- ring_period ran at 15.03 fps against a
requested 15.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
Answers the port's ask: ptbtneff01 is ANIMATED while a button is focused, not
drawn once and held. The existing page said 'the ring SPINS' from one frame at a
large angle, which is equally consistent with a static draw at a fixed angle.
No angle is quoted anywhere. The 360-bin angular estimator written for this
FAILED its own control -- a synthetic 30 deg came back as 0 deg (peak 0.596)
while 90/180/270 came back exactly -- so it was not used. What settles it needs
no angle: total annulus brightness is conserved to 0.4 % while individual
angular bins swing by 24, i.e. brightness moving AROUND the ring, which excludes
a pulse. The temporal-std map is a clean annulus, falling to ~1 both inside and
outside the stroke, which excludes positional jitter.
Period from the profile's autocorrelation: eight evenly spaced peaks, mean
2.177 s over nine revolutions. Even spacing is the internal check a drifting
instrument cannot pass. That is 120 units = 60 frames = 2.00 s at a true 30 Hz.
Also measured, same run: the ring is the ONLY moving thing on the settled main
menu -- temporal std is exactly 0.000 on every unfocused button, the labels and
the footer. And the ring's centre, located from the std map at game
(520.7, 339.7), matches the declared leaf offset's prediction of (521, 340).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
The audio work was three parts and I shipped two. The transcode-fidelity method
and the pinned 5.1 downmix landed; the null sink -- the only one that answers
"what does the GAME play" -- I deferred to "the next natural rebuild window" and
then rebuilt both images four times without doing it.
pulseaudio-utils is now in both, with tools/audio-capture wrapping it: a null
sink is a real device as far as an application is concerned, so Canary and Godot
open it normally and parec records what they emit.
This unblocks the decoder's Q8. The cue-to-event bindings are currently a name
match against the authors' own identifiers -- a plausible guess, not a
measurement -- and capturing what the game plays on a menu move converts them.
`audio-capture run` reports the peak level and warns when the capture is silent,
because silence is the failure that looks like success: a WAV of exactly the
right duration, full of zeroes, because the application opened a different sink.
A duration check alone passes it, which is how a confident wrong number gets
made.
The container was replaced at 11:07:38 UTC, 25 minutes after 3db09a3 wrote
"the decoder container has no disc". /disc is a real read-only bind mount
(device 2050 against /'s 92), 6.2 GB, 74 entries under dat/, and
`sylpheed-cli screen list` returns 12 GP_TITLE builds.
The reusable half is the instruments. `find / -xdev` cannot cross into a bind
mount on another device, so its "no ISO, no default.xex, no GP_TITLE.pak"
is what it returns whether or not the disc is there. `sylph-doctor` only ever
looks under /work and never consults $SYLPHEED_DISC, so it still reports
"no ISO" against a disc that works. Two instruments, one blind spot, read as
corroboration.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KNR5Y79D1T4bBr6gJQaWFP
Three defects, all mine, found by checking instead of assuming.
**They never exchanged a word.** SendMessage=0, ListAgents=0 across both new
sessions. PROTOCOL.md specified in detail what a message MAY and MAY NOT do and
never said how to send one or that the other agent was addressable -- they knew
that last time only because the human told them directly, and rebuilding with
fresh volumes wiped it. Policy without mechanism is prose. Now documented with
the two addresses, a worked example, and an instruction to introduce themselves
on the first iteration rather than waiting to have a question.
**The decoder lost the disc and the ISO.** They used to arrive inside the project
mount and silently stopped when /work became a clone. Silently is the word: the
disc-gated tests SELF-SKIP without SYLPHEED_DISC and report green, so a whole
test suite would have passed while measuring nothing. Both are now mounted
explicitly, the ISO at a stable path so run-canary does not depend on host
directory names.
**Both agents shared one Claude state directory.** They share the host's
~/.claude, and once both working directories became /work they resolved to the
same projects/-work/ -- two supposedly independent agents writing to one place,
which undoes the point of separate checkouts. Each now has its own volume, seeded
once from the host with credentials only, so a token refresh writes locally and
neither can corrupt the host's auth.
Also widened the pacing rule. It banned ScheduleWakeup by name; the decoder then
scheduled itself an hourly cron job -- not harmful, but the same instinct that
ended a run yesterday, through a door I had left open. Now: no self-scheduling by
any route.
Mount audit after the changes: shared and intentional are the exchange volume and
the read-only credential seed. Everything else -- repo, Claude state, cargo,
target, canary, disc, ISO -- is per agent or one-sided.
Sections 1 to 3 were almost entirely open questions. Everything a capture in
docs/re/captures/ actually shows is now written down from the chair: what is on
each screen, what the cursor does, and what each footer offers.
Boot: the publisher plate is SQUARE ENIX, the developer plate is GAME ARTS /
SETA / studio anima, both still pictures the game draws rather than video, then
the cinematic -- one A skips it, 57 s to the title against 193 s without.
Main menu: the five labels and where each goes, the wrap rule, and the caveat
that initial focus varied across four boots. Carries the footer warning from the
measurement in the same push.
Submenus: NEW GAME's DIFFICULTY and SELECT DATA; LOAD GAME's slot carousel,
Details panel and its five-button footer; the six tutorial lessons in two
groups; OPTIONS' four categories; EXTRAS' three items; and MISSION SELECT with
the locked-list explanation for the cursor that would not move.
What stays open is marked open, and it is now the residue no capture answers
rather than the residue nobody looked at.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013UxPvE5cz7zekXBKi7Xw2r
Refutation attempt, per the adversarial duty. Target: this page's own row "B on
the main menu goes to the title". Chosen because it is one of only two Q5 rows
with an empty evidence cell, and because it is the only exit from the main menu,
so the port will build on it.
Whole-frame colour test for the pad-glyph discs. The main menu carries ZERO
red-B pixels anywhere in the frame, on two independent captures, while the same
unchanged detector finds 514 on EXTRAS and 518 on DIFFICULTY. The control passes
twice: the A glyph reads 438/438/440/438 across all four screens, so it is one
asset at one size and a B of that family could not have slipped under a
threshold. The main menu's legend is "Select / OK"; every submenu adds "Back".
The claim SURVIVES -- a legend is not behaviour, and an absent glyph cannot
refute an observed press -- but it is downgraded to amber. The observation is
uncited and single, it is now the only Q5 row the game's own text contradicts,
and there is a named confound: the title-side screens auto-return after ~8-10 s
idle, which looks exactly like what was described. Reading 0x828A690C while
pressing B would separate them in one run; that run needs a disc this container
does not have.
Second finding, same method. MISSION SELECT's "sixteen d-pad presses never left
Stage 01" was a LOCKED stage list, not a broken one. The labels have three
brightnesses, not two -- locked 104, unlocked 183, focused 254 -- and the
all-story-unlocked capture is the control that separates the lower two while
holding row 1 at an identical 254. On that save the cursor reaches Stage16 at the
bottom of a scrolled list. The list is 16 long and shows 8 at a time.
Regenerator committed beside the finding; it reads only files already in git.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013UxPvE5cz7zekXBKi7Xw2r
find / -xdev turns up no ISO, no default.xex and no GP_TITLE.pak; /exchange is
empty; SYLPHEED_DISC is unset; sylph-doctor agrees. Everything else in the
container is healthy -- xenia_canary is built, :98 is up, screenshot works,
Vulkan enumerates. There is simply no game to boot.
The cause is in the launcher. Before c58196b, sylph-agent bind-mounted the
human's working tree at /work, and the ISO and sylph_extract/ live in that tree,
so the disc arrived incidentally with the repository mount. c58196b replaced
that with `-v sylpheed-decoder-repo:/work` -- correct for the collision class it
was written for -- and nothing was added to replace the disc. sylph-decoder
still forwards SYLPH_ISO, but as a bare environment variable naming a host path
that does not exist inside the container. sylph-port mounts the disc explicitly,
so the one container that owns the disc and the oracle is the one without them.
This shuts the oracle, every sylpheed-cli call that names a pak, the disc-gated
tests, and -- because the XEX is on the disc -- the static PPC route too. It
does not touch the committed corpus, which is what this iteration worked from.
A second, smaller casualty of the same migration: no git identity is configured
anywhere, so the first commit in a fresh container fails outright. Both are
recorded with their fixes; neither is worked around, since the launcher runs on
the host and this container cannot restart itself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013UxPvE5cz7zekXBKi7Xw2r
The last structural fix for the collision class that has bitten three times. Both
containers now clone the repository into their OWN named volume instead of
bind-mounting a human's working tree, so an agent's local git config cannot
capture a human's commits, a credential helper cannot leak a container-only path
onto the host, and a `git add -A` cannot sweep another party's in-flight files.
Cloned once at startup and never auto-pulled: pulling under a running agent
moves files out from under whatever it is mid-edit, which is the same bug again.
Accepted knowingly: Claude Code keys per-project memory off the working
directory, so moving off the host path starts that memory empty. The corpus in
docs/ is the memory that matters and it travels with the clone.
Other changes:
* docker/agent -> docker/decoder; the launcher is sylph-decoder. Roles, not
"the agent", now that there is more than one.
* /reborn is gone -- one repository now, so the port reads HANDOFF from its own
checkout rather than through a live read-only mount of someone else's tree.
* Canary mounts separately at /canary; it stays a fork tracking upstream.
* A shared `sylpheed-exchange` volume at /exchange, with tools/ on PATH so
`share` is available in both.
* The decoder's credential file gets the .host-copy treatment the port already
had -- `credential.helper=store` rewrites by rename-over-target, which is
EBUSY on a bind mount and reports a fatal that is not one.
* Budget split deliberately: decoder 5 cpu / 6 GB, port 3 / 4, leaving room for
the planned Referee. "Half the host" was right when there was one agent.
Prompts move to docs/agents/ and are rewritten around the protocol: the oracle
is the running game, dynamic RE stays with the decoder, each iteration must
attempt to refute one claim of the other, and neither may verify its way out of
its own role.
**navigation.md rewritten from the player's chair.** It was written from the
inside out -- GamePart ids, pak names, sprite names -- which is how WE find
things, not what the game shows anyone. Now it describes what is on screen, what
you press and what happens, with internals as footnotes. Most rows are open on
purpose: it exists to be filled in by playing, and the in-game tutorials are the
resource for the flight half.
**tools/share** gives transient files provenance without giving them history.
Three kinds of thing were travelling down one channel with opposite needs: code
and decoded knowledge want permanence, cited evidence wants permanence, and
"look at this PNG" wants no history at all. The third kind bloats a repository
forever; passing it by message is worse, because the receiver gets bytes with no
idea which build produced them. `share put` records who, when, what, the sender's
commit, and whether their tree was dirty -- because a capture taken from a
modified tree cannot be reproduced from the sha, and the receiver deserves to
know that before building an argument on it.
**docs/agents/PROTOCOL.md** is the contract. The parts that matter:
Dynamic RE stays with the Decoder -- most of what is open is behavioural and
cannot be answered from the file. What the planned Referee adds is different:
bias enters at what you CHOOSE to capture, so a corpus captured to a fixed
protocol by someone with no hypothesis is worth more than one captured to settle
an argument.
A message may point, ask, prioritise and challenge. It may not change scope,
redefine ground truth, or carry a finding instead of writing it down -- including
a message claiming to relay the human, because a relayed instruction has no
evidence attached and this project has watched a wrong belief travel further and
faster than its correction.
Adversarial duty is explicit: every iteration, try to refute one claim of another
agent and record the attempt either way. Run your own instrument through a
control first. Disagreements go to the human with both positions, not to
whoever is more certain.
And no agent may verify its way out of its own role: the Port has no oracle, the
Decoder builds nothing, the Referee interprets nothing.
Merges the Godot port into the reverse-engineering repository, preserving both
histories -- 1019 commits of corpus plus the port's 31, brought in by subtree
merge and then moved into place so git can follow each file across the rename.
The reason is not tidiness. The two-repo split forced the exporter to depend on
the decoders by pinned revision, and that created a whole class of failure that
now disappears: a sha reachable only from a topic branch, orphaned by a
squash-merge, breaking a fresh checkout silently at build time. It also forced a
live read-only mount of one agent's working tree into another's container, which
is why a contract file could move mid-iteration. With a path dependency, a
decoder change and the exporter change it requires land in the same commit or
not at all.
Canary stays separate: it is a fork tracking upstream.
New structure for the long term:
docs/game/ how the game is NAVIGATED -- menus, modals, prompts, alerts,
and in-game flight. Written so nobody rediscovers it. Mostly
open questions on purpose; the in-game tutorials are the
resource for the flight half.
docs/port/MODDING.md
modding as a constraint on the exporter TODAY, not a later
feature: one logical asset in one file (the disc splits nearly
everything, and resolving that is the exporter's job), names a
person recognises, PNG/OGG/OGV/JSON only, base-and-overrides so
re-exporting is always safe, provenance in every file.
data/base + data/mods
generated tree and drop-in overrides, both gitignored
exchange/ transient inter-agent files, deliberately outside history
docs/agents/ the team protocol
Both the README and the navigation doc lead with the correction that cost the
most: the oracle is the real game under Xenia Canary. Reborn's renderer is a
hypothesis under test, it has been wrong, and treating it as ground truth
propagated into three documents and both agents before a human caught it.
Scripted modding stays possible without being built: no screen name is hardcoded
in GDScript and there is no native code in port/, which is what Godot Mod Loader
needs to be able to substitute behaviour later.
Two fixes to push-work and the policy that goes with them.
**Tags.** The port's exporter depends on sylpheed-formats BY REVISION, so a
commit of ours is part of its build -- and the commit it pinned lived on one
auto/* branch and nowhere else. Deleting that branch orphans it; squash-merging
it is worse, because squash creates NEW commits, so main appears to contain the
work while the pinned sha becomes unreachable and the port stops building for a
fresh checkout. Silently, at their build, long after the breakage.
push-work now pushes with --follow-tags, which publishes annotated tags
reachable from the pushed commits, and MISSION.md says to tag whatever the port
needs. formats-pin-2026-08-29 at 76653ca is the first, created after the fact.
**Credentials.** This script set credential.helper as --local config, which
PERSISTS in the repository. The repo is a bind mount the host also uses, so the
host's git inherited a path that exists only inside the container and every host
push failed with "unable to get credential storage lock". Now applied with -c to
the single push. Same fix already landed on the port side; this copy still had
the bug and would have re-leaked on the next push.
Committed with a pathspec so the agent's in-flight work is untouched.
Probed all 97 movies. 28 are wmapro 48 kHz 6-channel 5.1 -- ADV.wmv and every
S*.wmv story cutscene; the other 69 are wmav2 48 kHz stereo, every RT*.wmv and
hokyu_*.wmv. The split is cinematics vs in-mission radio chatter.
Both movies the menu milestone needs, ADV.wmv (the boot/attract intro) and
S00A.wmv (the new-game intro), are in the SURROUND group.
Why it matters: one ffmpeg command over dat/movie/ produces two different kinds
of result and records neither. The 69 stereo files pass through unchanged; the 28
surround files get downmixed 5.1 -> stereo by ffmpeg's DEFAULT matrix, folding
centre-channel dialogue into L/R at a weighting nobody chose and which is not
stable across ffmpeg versions. That is a content decision inherited by accident,
so it should be stated explicitly and recorded beside the command.
Credit where due: found by the human while checking a transcode, verified
independently here and widened from one file to the whole disc.
Two METHOD entries from the same episode, both about measurement rather than
format: don't probe a file another process is still writing (a half-written
transcode reported 33 s against a 137 s source, no error, nearly a filed bug),
and a difference-signal RMS is meaningless before cross-correlation alignment
(-34.2 dB against a -25.3 dB source looks like failure and is inconclusive).
Three things, all from parsing ptbtn0Nf.rat as a build.
1. THE RING SPINS. Its two keyframes differ in exactly one field: rotation_deg
ramps 0 -> 360 with position, scale, alpha and tint all constant. A spin in
place, the same shape as the GP_BUNK example already recorded.
2. THE ORACLE CONFIRMS THE GAME RENDERS IT. In the OPTIONS-focused capture the
ring's bright head sits in a completely different angular position from the
sprite's own -- caught mid-spin. This is a SECOND independent confirmation that
rotation_deg is drawn, now on a different screen and a different element from the
ptloop sweeps, and it raises rotation's priority: it is not a title-only concern
that sits off-screen at rest, it is the main menu's focus marker.
NO ANGLE IS QUOTED. A brightest-region centroid says ~250 deg, but the control
refuses that precision -- rotating the sprite by a known 30/90/180/270 and
re-measuring gives errors up to 19.8 deg. What survives the error bar is that a
<=20 deg error cannot manufacture a ~250 deg displacement.
3. WHICH PLACEMENT WINS -- correcting this page's own earlier caveat, which said
to use the leaf only for elements the parent does not declare. Right for a BASE
record, wrong for an f record: the parent declares NO element for ptbtn0Nf.rat at
all (zero of build 5's 16), so the f record's placement comes from its leaf for
BOTH elements, label included. The label's (-7,-7) is load-bearing -- the f
sprite is 13px larger per axis and -7 keeps them concentric (535+96/2 = 583 vs
542+83/2 = 583.5). Corroborated against the oracle: the focused-minus-unfocused
region is x 505..703, and the leaf predicts a right edge near 707 where the
parent reading predicts 714.
Also exposes UiBuild::records (name -> (offset, size) of a nested .rat leaf).
Nested records were parsed into a PRIVATE map, so a consumer holding a UiBuild
could not locate a leaf's bytes at all -- which is exactly what blocked the port
from reaching the ring.
The port is forbidden from reimplementing media assembly and Static.slb is
exactly that case: no RIFF, no seek chunk, no XACT container, just a packed run
of whole 2048-byte XMA1 packets, so a wave is defined only by (offset, packet
count) and the header has to be synthesized. That step now happens once, in the
crate that owns the format, instead of in each consumer.
`slb::xma1_wave_riff` wraps raw packets; `media::se_wave_riff` looks the bank up
and reads just the packets asked for. Both reuse the existing synth_xma1_fmt /
build_riff, which are already byte-identical to what tools/re-capture/
slb_extract_wave.py writes -- so this is exposure, not a second implementation.
It reads a TARGETED range rather than the whole bank, and that is load-bearing:
Static.slb is the ONE entry of sound.pak's 9 519 whose declared extent runs past
the end of the extracted segments -- by exactly 616 768 B -- so reading it whole
fails outright on this extraction. Every cue we need is in the first few hundred
KB. Recorded rather than worked around silently.
Verified as an artifact, not a compile: all three cues decode through ffmpeg to
mono 48 kHz PCM at 0.533 / 0.344 / 1.016 s, non-silent (rms 2085 / 2985 / 4327,
peaks 29813 / 16973 / 32767). The refusal path is exercised in the same run --
an impossible packet count is rejected rather than returning a short stream,
because a truncated XMA decodes to plausible-sounding garbage.
Also adds docs/re/captures/ORACLE-CAPTURES.md: an index of the nine canary
framebuffer captures already in this repo, and a plain statement that THEY are
the reference and `screen render` is not.
The port needed ptbtneff01.t32's placement and was about to author it from an
eyeballed PNG measurement. It does not have to: a `.rat` leaf needs no new
reader. Its first 32 bytes have a bundle header's shape -- "RATC", 0x3c
declaration-entry size at +4, element count at +20, design 1280x720 at +24/+28 --
so ui_layout::parse_build reads it unchanged.
The control is the base record, whose position is known independently: the parent
screen reports ptbtn01.rat resting at (542,162), and parsing the leaf alone
returns ptbtn01.t32 at (542,162). It reproduces all five buttons.
Positions are absolute design-space top-left. The ring rests at (500, 156/236/
316/396/476) for buttons 1-5 -- a uniform (-42,-6) from each button's own rest,
identical in the Japanese bundle. The bright label is a uniform (-7,-7).
Two things recorded rather than smoothed over: a leaf's placement DUPLICATES the
parent's rather than being relative to it, and the two copies are not always
byte-equal (ptbtn04's parent says y=401, its leaf says 402) -- the parent is what
compose honours, so the leaf is the source only for elements the parent does not
declare, which is exactly the ring. And `screen render --focus` is blind to the
ring for the same reason the port's exporter was: el.focused is name-based on
top-level elements and neither walks into the leaf.
1 SPLASH ADDRESSING (was blocking P3). No content predicate exists: design size
fails (every extra composable bundle sampled is 1280x720, like every screen) and
element count fails (fragments run 2..15, the splash halves are 3 and 7). But
GP_TITLE needs none -- `--all` adds exactly four bundles there and all four are
real screens, with the --all index equal to the pak entry index 1:1. And there
are TWO splash screens: 11/14 are the developer logos, 10/13 are the SQUARE ENIX
publisher wordmark, which the port did not have and which the boot shows first.
2 FADE-OUT (was blocking P3). It is (a), and it is bigger than the fade quad.
Every element ends on exactly ONE untimed keyframe, which rules out (b); that
block is where the screen plays out -- quad to a=255, buttons/labels/glows to
a=0, frames hold. (c) is refuted by a null test that discriminates: a black quad
alone holds the button/background brightness ratio constant, and through the
fade it falls 6.50 -> 1.94, 3.4x monotonic.
3 FOCUS (saves P5 rework). Over-vs-instead is unobservable -- the focused sprite
covers the base at 100.0% of base-visible pixels on three pairs once aligned
(true offset (7,7); the centre alignment reads a misleading 78-84%), and
compositing both ways differs by RMSE 1.1 inside the button rect. The real defect
is the focus record's SECOND element: ptbtn0Nf.rat declares ptbtneff01.t32 (a
42x46 glowing ring, focus only) plus the bright label, where the base declares
one sprite. That ring is the marker the port draws nowhere.
5 GAMMA. The capture is not neutral: capture ~ 255*(render/255)^g, g ~ 1.34-1.49,
and the chain says it is a ramp the GAME installed, not a capture artefact. So
RMSE against captures has a floor. Reach stated: the flat patches are all dark
(render ~0-60), so midtones and highlights are unconstrained.
4 ROTATION is a human's call and is recorded in MISSION, not acted on -- the port
rotating while the reference renderer does not would make verify-screen report a
large diff meaning "the port is right". The RE half is answered: rotation is
about the declared pivot, measured against a GPU capture.
The focus record's +20 element-count word is marked 🟡 not ✅ -- read on GP_TITLE's
ten button records only; the disc-wide check is written and still running.
Two runs were killed this session for looking stuck. Measured: 1 318 s serial,
no output while it runs. Also records that `build-reborn test` forces
--workspace and silently ignores a `-p`, so scoping needs the cargo
passthrough (`build-reborn t -p <crate>`).
Closes the reach caveat the `opt ` name fix left behind: 60 of 18 002 RATC
children carry no `opt ` block, and it was not established whether they lack one
or sit past our 128-byte window.
Neither. They are not children. `examples/ratc_optless_children.rs` re-runs
`ratc::parse`'s own guards over the disc and reports which one fired: all 60 are
"tag beyond the window", none is rejected by length, gap or charset, none is
child #0, and all 60 live in six bundles of one archive. Within a bundle the
distances back to the nearest tag are an exact arithmetic progression, step
60 600 -- ten different records finding the SAME tag, because there is only one.
Reading a bundle directly: children 1..10 are equal-size T8aD blocks under a
single `opt ` name, `pb_f15_eg_anm.tan`. `.tan` is a FRAME SEQUENCE. One block
declares the resource; its payload is a run of T8aD frames.
Disc-wide, over all 18 718 `opt ` names in all 33 paks: a RATC bundle names
exactly six kinds of resource -- `.t32` 14 756, `.rat` 3 311, `.prm` 367,
`.tbm` 224, `.sbo` 54, `.tan` 6. Six `.tan`, ten frames each = 60, the entire
population with nothing left over. The negative is closed, not narrowed.
Consequence recorded but deliberately not fixed: `ratc::parse` over-reports
there, listing a `.tan`'s frames as anonymous children. Nothing in the menu
milestone reads a `.tan` -- it occurs only in GP_READY_ROOM, which S1 ruled
out -- so no screen the port draws changes.
Also a METHOD entry for this container OOM-killing `slb_leading_segment_disc`
under default test parallelism (SIGKILL, no assertion; 8/8 pass with
--test-threads=1).
`ratc::parse` named each child by scanning backwards for the last printable run
of bytes before its magic. The format states the name explicitly instead, in an
`opt ` block: `"opt " | BE32 len | name | NUL | 3 bytes | magic` -- the same
block `ui_layout::opt_link` already read for a button's focus link.
The scan agrees with it 17 918 times out of 17 942 and is wrong 24 times, every
one the same failure: the 3 trailing payload bytes are themselves printable and
beat the real name. For `pteff05.t32` those bytes are `38 41 58` = `8AX`, so the
full-resolution background of all five menu screens registered under a name no
element declares, resolved to no sprite, and `compose` dropped it through an
early `continue` that -- unlike the two arms above it -- records nothing. The
screen lost its background and `screen render` still reported "all resolved".
`8AX` was never a name. Docs that treated it as one are corrected here.
Disc-wide, and the control is the 17 918 the scan already got right: the `opt `
reading reproduces every one of them. Effect on the five screens is the
signature of the same art at twice the resolution -- mean brightness unmoved,
high-frequency detail x1.15..x1.30 -- which is what the separately-measured
`ui-8ax-fullres-background` result said the game draws.
Also closes a long-standing dangling reference: `pmbase.t32`, recorded as "on
the disc nowhere", is the `GP_STAGE_CLEAR` child the scan called `8AX`. RATC
sibling references now resolve 10 148 of 10 148.
Verified: 114/114 sylpheed-formats unit tests (including two new ones pinning
the `8AX` case byte for byte and the no-block fallback), and every disc-gated
integration suite in sylpheed-formats/sylpheed-cli.
Last iteration I claimed the splash's measured_paint_order [0,2,4,6,1,3,5]
records, between its glow and logo halves, the temporal order they were
seen in rather than depth -- because the halves never share a frame.
The no-overlap measurement is right (glows f94-115, logos f116-211). The
inference is wrong, on two independent grounds:
* Wrong source. That vector is not a read of the draw capture. It is a
read of the live screen object's CHILD ARRAY -- ui-screen-runtime.md
records it literally as "paint order (child slots)". A child list has
a definite order whether or not its children are ever drawn together,
so co-occurrence does not bear on it. The capture was the CHECK.
* The order is in the file anyway. paint_order_audit on GP_TITLE entry
11: derived == measured, 0 inverted pairs, 0 same-layer-key ties. The
glows and logos carry distinct T8aD keys (0xa100 < 0xa110), so the
file orders the halves statically, no capture involved.
I asked the question that started this iteration -- do the title and menu
orders have the same problem -- and the answer is that none of the three
does, for the same reason.
What survives is narrower and now recorded with numbers: how much of each
order its capture actually cross-checks. The title capture is stable (8
draws / 12 quads / 5 textures, identical in all five captured frames
across two logs) and confirms 7 of 24 positions; the menu capture is not
(texture 0x11C30000 present in frame 0, gone by frame 3); the splash
capture cannot cross-check its middle at all.
A counting trap worth the tool: count QUADS, not draws. The menu's draw 9
is indices=24 -- six quads batched from one texture. Counting draws reads
9 where 16 are on screen, and an earlier pass of this analysis briefly
"found" three quads for six declarations that way and concluded elements
were missing. They were batched.
METHOD: check what a "measured" value was measured FROM before reasoning
about its limits. The co-occurrence rule is real, and it is specific to
orders read from draw captures.
ui-prm-primitives recorded that where a .prm paints on a screen without a
measured order is unsolved. For the developer splash it is now measured.
Every frame opens with two full-screen draws before any sprite. The
second is untextured in all 212 frames with a constant vertex colour of
FF000000 -- opaque black -- matching palogo_eff0.prm's declaration
exactly: kind 0x10, pivot (640,360) -> 1280x720, one keyframe, a = 255.
So the splash backdrop is an opaque black full-screen quad from the
bundle itself, painted behind every sprite, which is why a splash render
needs --black rather than the default backdrop.
Not a general rule, and said so: the measured main-menu order puts
pteff02.prm at position 4 and pteff00.prm LAST, the latter being the
screen-transition fade.
And a correction to an existing row. measured_paint_order returns
[0, 2, 4, 6, 1, 3, 5] for the splash, described as "the .prm, then all
three glows, then the three logos". But the glows and the logos never
appear in the same frame -- 0 overlapping frames in 235 -- and two
elements that never co-occur have no observable relative depth. Between
those halves the vector records the order they were SEEN IN, not a
front-to-back relationship.
That does not make the render wrong, and element 0 is a real depth
observation since the .prm co-occurs with everything. But the type of the
claim matters: reading the vector as depth invites compositing all seven
elements at once, which is exactly what does not reproduce the screen.
METHOD: two things that never co-occur have no observable relative order;
when recording an order, note which pairs actually appeared together.
The activation decision is code, and MISSION already says the port
authors the sequence -- so the useful move is to hand over the sequence
measured rather than chase the code. From the 235-frame draw capture, at
1 frame = 1/30 s (2 units/frame, 1 unit = 1/60 s, both settled in Q1):
publisher: SQUARE ENIX logo f1-90 90 frames 3.00 s+ at 0.00
(gap, nothing drawn) f91-93 3 frames 0.10 s at 3.00
developer: both glows f94-115 22 frames 0.73 s at 3.10
developer: both logos f116-211 96 frames 3.20 s at 3.83
Three limits, stated with the numbers rather than after them. The capture
opens with palogo_sqex already at a=255, so the publisher phase began
before the window and 3.00 s is a FLOOR -- every "starts at" is relative
to the capture, not to boot. palogo_anima and palogo_anima_eff get 0
draws in all 214 frames, so a third pair's phase is not in this
measurement. And it is one capture, one run: the glow->logo switch being
a single frame boundary with no overlap is a strong shape, but each
duration is one sample.
What is solid is the part that matters: the 0.73 s and 3.20 s phases are
each within 2% of their element's declared span, so the durations are the
bundle's own and only the ordering is authored. That is the difference
between a port transcribing timing and inventing it.
Last iteration I withdrew "a bundle is a palette" because the evidence
did not choose between selective activation within one bundle and two
compositions shown in sequence. The alternative can be killed from the
disc, which I had not tried.
Hypothesis 2 needs a bundle declaring the GLOWS WITHOUT THE LOGOS. There
is none. Every GP_TITLE entry carrying palogo elements:
10, 13 (publisher twins) palogo_eff0.prm, palogo_sqex, palogo_sqex_eff
11, 14 (developer twins) palogo_eff0.prm + all three logos + all three glows
Four entries, and each developer entry declares the complete set of six.
So whichever bundle was active across frames 94-211 -- entry 11, entry
14, or both in turn -- it declared the logos and the glows, while the
game drew two sprites at a time in disjoint phases.
Therefore only a subset of a bundle's elements is drawn at any moment,
whatever the bundle-loading story is. The conclusion no longer depends on
resolving how many bundles are involved, which is why the texture-base
test's failure stopped mattering.
So the claim is reinstated -- this time by eliminating the alternative
rather than by assuming it away. What worked was not a better capture but
asking what the competing hypothesis would REQUIRE on the disc and
finding it absent.
METHOD: a hypothesis that predicts an artefact can be killed by looking
for the artefact, which is often far cheaper than measuring the behaviour.
Last iteration I wrote that a bundle is a palette whose elements are
selectively activated. The disjoint glow/logo phases have two
explanations and I asserted one:
1. one bundle, some elements run then others;
2. two bundle-loads shown in sequence (entries 11 and 14 are twins
declaring identical sprites).
The draw log's tex[base=...] looked like it would separate them. It does
not, and the control is in the same table:
publisher splash f1-90 0x11C30000, 0x10000000
glows f94-115 0x11C30000, 0x10000000
logos f116-211 0x11C30000, 0x10000000
The publisher splash is certainly a DIFFERENT bundle from the developer
splash, and it uses the same base. So 0x11C30000 is a reused upload slot,
not a bundle identity, and the test cannot choose between the two
hypotheses.
Survives: a bundle's declared elements are not what gets drawn.
palogo_anima and palogo_gamearts carry byte-identical keyframe times and
in the same run one is drawn 95 frames and the other none -- and
whichever twin was active declares both. The phases are strictly disjoint
(0 overlapping frames in 235).
Withdrawn: the mechanism. The practical consequence is unchanged --
compositing every element of a bundle does not reproduce what the game
shows over time -- but the why is not established and I stated it as
though it were.
What would separate them: a per-draw capture recording the bundle each
draw came from, or a file-IO log showing whether a second RATC entry is
read between frames 115 and 116.
METHOD: a shared resource address does not identify the resource's owner;
and state the mechanism as a separate claim from the observation, or the
weaker one inherits the stronger one's evidence.
Two checks on last iteration's "sequential, not simultaneous" reading.
First, the phases really are disjoint. If glows and logos ever shared a
frame the claim would be wrong. Across all 235 captured frames the count
of frames containing both is ZERO, and the switch is a single clean
boundary -- f110-115 draw 1280x720 + 262x108 + 525x90, f116 onward
1280x720 + 243x86 + 499x72. Two sprites either side, no transition frame.
Second, and larger: a third of the bundle is never drawn. Entry 11
declares three logo/glow pairs and only two appear.
palogo_gamearts / _eff 95 / 22 frames
palogo_seta / _eff 95 / 22 frames
palogo_anima / _eff never
palogo_anima declares the SAME keyframe times as palogo_gamearts. Two
elements with byte-identical data, 95 frames and 0 frames in one run.
Reach: the capture covers frames 1-214, so this is "never in the window".
So a bundle is a palette, not a script. Its elements say what to draw and
for how long; which of them run, and when each starts, is decided outside
the placement data. That is the same conclusion the boot-order work
reached from the other end -- the driver is code, not data -- now with a
per-element measurement behind it.
For the port, concretely: compositing every element of a bundle does not
reproduce what the game shows over time. It is the right thing for a
static screen that settles, and it is not a timeline.
METHOD: two elements with identical data and different outcomes is the
strongest possible evidence that the decision is elsewhere.
Tested whether the splash timeline, played, reproduces the capture --
the last gap in the animation model. Half of it does.
Durations match. At 2 units/frame under the shifted reading, from the
235-frame draw capture of the developer splash:
glows drawn f94-115 (22 frames = 44 units) declared ~0..45 = 45 97.8%
logos drawn f116-211 (96 frames = 192 units) declared 15..210 = 195 98.5%
Each element is on screen for its declared span to within 2%.
Starts do not. Every glow declares the same times 15,30,45 and every
logo the same 15,30,190,194,206,210, so on one clock they would overlap
almost entirely -- and they do not overlap at all. The glows run 94-115
and the logos 116-211, strictly sequential, the logos starting the frame
after the glows end. Fitting one origin needs f0 ~ 93.5 for gamearts_eff
and ~103 for gamearts, about 19 units apart, and aligning one throws the
other off by ~9 frames at both ends.
The obvious candidate is refuted. parse_placements reads each group
header as (element index, keyframe count) plus one undecoded LEAD-IN
WORD -- exactly where a per-group start offset would live. It is
0x00000000 for all seven elements, glows and logos alike.
Reach: not the keyframe times (identical within each family), not that
word (zero), not declaration order (which interleaves logos and glows
where the observed sequencing groups them), not the RATC child order.
What remains is that the sequencing is code-driven, which agrees with
what the boot-order work concluded independently.
For the port: a group says how long an element animates and what it does,
not when it starts relative to its neighbours. The observed order on the
developer splash -- both glows, then both logos -- is measured for one
screen, not a decoded rule, so the sequencing has to be authored.
METHOD: when a model reproduces durations but not positions, the missing
piece is an origin, not a rate.
The model's sharpest prediction, tested with its control. The draw log
says that on the developer splash the _eff glows are drawn on frames
94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so at the moment the reference capture
was taken EVERY glow is already finished -- including the two that have
plateaus and which rest_plateau therefore renders visible. Suppressing
them should help on the splashes and hurt where a screen genuinely
settles.
publisher splash +0.9604 -> +0.9982 +0.0377
developer splash +0.9659 -> +0.9980 +0.0321
title (control) +0.9500 -> +0.9480 -0.0020
main menu(control) +0.9460 -> +0.8544 -0.0916
EXTRAS (control) +0.9440 -> +0.8370 -0.1070
Both splashes jump to about 0.998; all three persistent screens get
worse. The control is what makes this a finding rather than a
coincidence: the same edit helps exactly where the model says it should
and hurts exactly where it says it should not.
So rest_plateau is not over-drawing in general -- it over-draws on
TRANSIENT screens. A plateau mid-animation means the element is held at
that point in the timeline, not that it is on screen once the screen has
settled. Where a screen settles, the held pose IS the settled pose and
the rule is measurably right.
And that answers the question left open several iterations ago -- what
"rest" means for a transient element. It does not mean anything: the
splashes never rest. A static composite of them can match a chosen frame,
and about 0.998 is what these captures' frame is worth, but the format
does not answer a question the screen never poses.
For the port: play the timeline for the two splashes, which the settled
keyframe timing now supports, and composite statically for title, main
menu and EXTRAS.
METHOD: an edit that improves one set of cases is only interesting once
you have shown it damages the cases where it should.
The weakness in the rest-rule finding was that `last` had been SCORED on
only two elements. It cannot be scored on more -- only two ambiguous
elements sit on a screen with a live capture -- but the entry -> hold ->
exit model makes a prediction that can be checked on all 2 305: what does
each element's FINAL keyframe look like?
final keyframe invisible (a = 0) 1 618 transient: gone at rest
final keyframe visible, at max alpha 675 faded in and stopped
final keyframe visible, BELOW max alpha 12 genuinely unclear
Of the 687 that end visible, 472 have monotonically non-decreasing alpha
-- a plain fade-in that stops, [0, 255] over two keyframes in the
commonest case (pjex_eff.rat, pghud_speed_cut.t32) -- and another 203 end
at their maximum after dipping.
So `last` is structurally defensible for 2 293 of 2 305 (99.5 %), against
a dwell rule that returns a mid-movement frame by construction. Observed
correct for 2, structural for 675, model-consistent for 1 618, unclear
for 12.
The assumption carrying the 1 618 is stated rather than buried: that a
plateau-less element's animation has finished by the time the screen is
settled. The draw log establishes exactly this for the two splash glows
(drawn frames 94-115, logos 116-211) and establishes nothing for the
rest.
Default still unchanged. The case is now observational, structural and
model-based rather than two data points, but it would move 1 896 elements
and the decision belongs with whoever owns the renderer.
The shifted keyframe-time reading looked like it implied something
simple: the final pose is reached at a definite time and nothing follows,
so rest should just be the last keyframe and the plateau heuristic could
go. Tested by applying it to EVERY element:
title +0.9500 -> +0.6819 -0.2681
main menu +0.9460 -> +0.6416 -0.3044
EXTRAS +0.9440 -> +0.5745 -0.3695
publisher splash +0.9600 -> blank (zero variance, corr undefined)
developer splash +0.9643 -> blank
Refuted, and the failure supplies the model. A group is entry -> hold ->
exit, and the exit is the screen's DISMISSAL. While a screen is displayed
it has not reached its last keyframe; it is sitting at the hold. So
rest_plateau is the correct primary rule, and the last keyframe is the
post-exit state -- correct only once the screen is gone, which is why
applying it everywhere blanks the splashes.
This does not contradict the shifted reading. That reading says when each
pose is reached; it says nothing about the group being played to
completion while the screen is still up. The step between them was mine.
And it explains why last wins for the two plateau-less elements: an
element with no hold is a transient, it flashes and is over, and at any
settled moment it is gone -- which is its last keyframe. The draw capture
says the same independently: on the developer splash the _eff glows draw
on frames 94-115 and the logos on 116-211, so the glows are already
finished when the logos are up.
Three independent observables -- animation timing, static composites, and
the per-frame draw log -- now agree on one rule: plateau where there is
one, last keyframe where there is not.
METHOD: a blank render is a NaN correlation, not a low score, and that
NaN was the strongest form of the result; and when a model predicts
something the measurement refuses, suspect the step you supplied between
them.
The open question was whether "last keyframe" holds beyond the two
elements I could score against a capture. It cannot be scored disc-wide --
only two ambiguous elements sit on a screen with a live capture -- but the
blast radius can be measured, and it argues the same way.
genuinely ambiguous elements 2 305
the two rules AGREE on 409 (17.7 %)
they DIFFER on 1 896 (82.3 %)
dwell (current): invisible pose 1 711 (74.2 %), zero-scale 195 (8.5 %)
last : invisible pose 1 618 (70.2 %), zero-scale 43 (1.9 %)
Two things follow. It is not a marginal choice: the rules disagree on 82%
of the affected elements, so "either is fine" is not available. And the
current rule produces 4.5x more degenerate poses -- a zero-scale pose is
collapsed to nothing, i.e. an element's PRE-ROLL before it has grown in,
which is definitionally not a rest. 195 elements currently rest at a frame
they are only passing through, against 43 under last.
That is an argument from the data's own structure rather than from the two
captures, and it points the same direction.
Kept honest: it is indirect. Fewer degenerate results is not the same as
more correct results, and last still returns an invisible pose 70% of the
time -- right for a transient element, wrong for a persistent one. The
default stays put; the numbers are in HANDOFF for whoever decides.
Scored candidate rest-pose rules by rendering and correlating instead of
arguing, and both results correct something I had published.
First, the exposure. The guessing fallback is reached only by an element
that is plateau-less AND multi-keyframe -- a single-keyframe element
short-circuits at `match len { 1 => first }`. Per screen:
title (4) 24 elements 2 plateau-less 0 reach the fallback
main menu (5) 16 5 0
EXTRAS (6) 18 5 0
publisher splash (10) 3 2 1
developer splash (11) 7 2 1
So on the three screens the port cares most about, rest() never guesses.
That is why three different rules render builds 4/5/6 to identical
correlations -- the code is unreachable there, which I nearly read as
"the choice does not matter".
Second, where it does fire, the last keyframe is markedly better:
publisher splash dwell +0.9600 last +0.9982 maxalpha +0.9600
developer splash dwell +0.9643 last +0.9758 maxalpha +0.9643
That refutes my own earlier refutation. I had killed the last-keyframe
rule by arguing it makes palogo_anima_eff invisible while its two
siblings stay lit, which looked like an artefact. The capture says
otherwise: making it invisible is what improves the match. The sibling
symmetry was my expectation, not evidence.
Caveat kept in front: both captures are single frames of a transient
animation, so this fixes which pose matches THOSE frames, not which is
canonically at rest. Default unchanged -- better on both screens where it
fires and identical on the other three, but it would move 2 305 elements
disc-wide on two measurements. Reachable via SYLPHEED_REST_RULE=last.
Also confirmed: all 195 zero-scale rest poses are inside the corrected
2 305 ambiguous population; none is a single-keyframe element.
METHOD: score a rule where it can differ, or you measure nothing; and an
argument from symmetry is a prediction, not a refutation.
Two corrections from one experiment.
A keyframe group is entry -> hold -> exit, and the exit ends invisible:
on the five port screens the final keyframe is invisible for 21/24
(title), 8/16 (main menu), 12/18 (EXTRAS), 2/3 and 6/7 (splashes). So the
screen as seen is the HOLD, which is why rest_plateau is the right
primary rule and why "rest = last keyframe" would empty every screen.
That suggested a fix: an element with no hold has no representative pose,
so draw nothing rather than guess an endpoint. Tested through compose's
visible mask and correlated against the live captures:
title +0.9500 -> +0.6839 -0.2661
main menu +0.9460 -> +0.9037 -0.0423
EXTRAS +0.9440 -> +0.9094 -0.0346
Refuted on all three, and the reason invalidates a number I published. An
element with a SINGLE keyframe has no adjacent pair, so the plateau test
marks it plateau-less -- but its one pose is unambiguously its rest.
Suppressing those removes backgrounds and full-screen layers, which is
the title's -0.27.
no plateau (as published) 3 807 (24.57 %)
... single-keyframe 1 502 trivially at rest, not a guess
genuinely ambiguous 2 305 (14.88 %)
So rest() guesses for 2 305 elements, not 3 807 -- the figure I gave the
port overstated the defect by 65%. Corrected in HANDOFF and the page.
METHOD: a predicate over adjacent PAIRS silently misclassifies a
one-element list; and acting on a claim is a better test of it than
re-reading it -- this flaw survived a census, a write-up and a handoff
row, and died the moment the rule was used to change a rendering.
The case for reading +36 as "the time the NEXT pose is reached" rested on
one element's fade-out shape, then on one element's hold duration. Both
splash halves supply more, and they agree.
element screen observed hold as decoded shifted
palogo_gamearts developer splash 83 f 8 f 80 f
palogo_seta developer splash 83 f 6 f 80 f
palogo_sqex publisher splash >=77 f * 6 f 102 f
* the capture opens mid-hold at frame 1, so 77 is a floor.
The readings predict opposite structures. For palogo_gamearts, as decoded:
hold 8f, in 80f, hold 2f, out 6f, out 2f -- an eighty-frame FADE-IN and a
two-frame hold. Shifted: in 8f, hold 80f, out 2f, out 6f, out 2f. The
capture shows an 83-frame hold and no fade-in at all.
The elements that cannot discriminate are not contradicted:
palogo_gamearts_eff observed in 7f / hold 7f / out 8f, and both readings
give 8f phases -- with four blocks the shift only relabels which phase is
which. So the glows, which is where Q1's linear law was measured, say
nothing either way rather than arguing against.
The decoder's default is still unchanged, and the reason is now
articulated rather than assumed. The single thing opposing the shift is
rest() on ptlogo_eff3, where the shifted reading makes the longest-dwell
fallback return the bloom's 200% peak. That fallback is unsound whenever
it runs -- it returns an endpoint of a movement, neither of which is held
-- and checked: the shift does not fix it either. So the objection was
never evidence about the times. Timing had three discriminating
measurements; pose selection had a heuristic guessing.
For the port: animation timing should use the shift; static composites are
unaffected and the five screens' correlations stand. Classified measured,
not decoded -- three elements in one screen family, not a disc-wide check.
The answers for the port's five screens were spread across a dozen
documents and none of them said how good the result IS. Measured:
screen build drawn corr vs capture alignment
title 4 15/24 +0.9500 dy=0 dx=0
main menu 5 11/16 +0.9460 dy=0 dx=0
EXTRAS 6 13/18 +0.9440 dy=0 dx=0
publisher splash 10 2/3 +0.9600 dy=0 dx=0
developer splash 11 6/7 +0.9643 dy=0 dx=0
Every one aligns at exactly zero offset over a +/-2 px search in both
axes, so placement and scale are right and the residual is tone and
detail rather than geometry.
The drawn/total counts are not slack. Each undrawn element has a reason
already documented: kind & 0x4 ghost instances (4 on the title), .prm
primitives off by default (2 per menu, 1 per splash), loop* animations
off by default and off-screen at rest (2 per menu screen), and the 8AX
name mismatch (1 per menu screen) whose art reaches the screen anyway via
ptbase. 4+2+2+1 = 9, 2+2+1 = 5, 1. Nothing unexplained.
The residual is ranked for a consumer: tone first (gamma 1.34-1.49, the
game's own display ramp), then 8AX resolution, then one drawable
paint-order tie on EXTRAS alone, then rotation-decoded-but-not-rendered
which does not affect these five at rest.
Reach stated: these are static composites at the resting pose against
single frames, so nothing here speaks to animation, and a whole-frame
correlation is a sanity figure rather than a per-element check.
Last iteration I wrote that build-reborn test cannot finish in a working
session, from having watched it run 3h26m. That was the stronger claim
and I made it without measuring the work.
Timing `mesh info` on each of the 166 .xpr containers with a 25 s cap:
files scanned 166
exceeding 25 s 19 Hangar, 17 Stage_*, ptc_pack
Stage_S02 to completion 144 s, rc = 0
Nothing hangs. Nineteen heavy containers at roughly two minutes each is
about 45-60 minutes for one pass, before the 147 fast ones. The 3h26m
observed was that hour of work running at a load average of 9-14 --
inflated by the two duplicate runs I had left going, which did not merely
coexist with the slowness but multiplied it.
The practical conclusion is unchanged and only the wording softens: an
hour-scale suite is not an iteration-scale gate, and every "green" I
reported from it this session was partial. But an hour-scale gate can be
run deliberately, whereas a hung one cannot be run at all, so the
distinction is worth having right.
File list committed as reference data so the cost is attributable without
re-scanning.
METHOD: a slow thing observed under contention looks like a stuck thing;
measure the work before choosing between "cannot finish" and "takes an
hour".
Two findings from checking whether last iteration's partial green had
finished. It had not, and the reason matters for anyone using the gate.
build-reborn test contains twin_pairs_do_not_share_a_buffer, which
decodes every .xpr in hidden/resource3d -- 166 files, 1.4 GB -- through
the full Xbg7Model anchoring path, and is NOT #[ignore]d. Its sibling in
the same file walks the same 166 files and IS ignored as known-failing,
which makes the binary's cost easy to underestimate. Measured: one
instance accumulated 3h26m of CPU at 89% without finishing.
So every "green run" reported in this corpus from a workspace or
sylpheed-formats test is necessarily PARTIAL unless it says the suite
terminated -- including the ones I reported this session. The honest form
is the suite count and elapsed state, not the word "green". Not proposing
to #[ignore] or subsample it: that changes what the suite asserts and is
the project's call, not an audit side-effect.
And the mess is mine. Two cargo test -p sylpheed-formats runs launched
detached in earlier iterations never exited, because they were sitting in
that test:
pid 103375 4h12m elapsed child mesh_consistency_disc 3h26m CPU 89.3%
pid 99965 4h39m elapsed child pak_idxd_disc 1h16m CPU 93.8%
Load average 14.18 on 12 cores. Killed, after checking the legitimately
running workspace suite and leaving it alone; load fell to 9.68.
What this does NOT explain, because it is tempting: the session's
emulator troubles. screenshot cost 0.49 s with both runaways live and the
emulator stopped, against 10.8 s measured earlier with the emulator
running. The 92x figure really was emulator contention; the runaways were
a background tax on top. The black surface and the unreachable title
stand as measured, with their own controls.
METHOD: a detached job you never check can outlive many iterations --
setsid was added so a timeout could not kill them, which also means
nothing does; and know whether your verification gate can terminate.
Nothing had ever verified that a number written in prose matches the
reference data file committed beside it. The figure is written once from
a run; the prose is edited around it afterwards and the data file is
regenerated independently, so drift is silent.
All 19 headline figures across four censuses -- the eff-bit census, the
plateau census, the top-level rotation census and the eff-bit alpha test
-- currently agree with their data files.
The checker had to be numeric, and the first attempt is the reason it is
a script rather than a grep: comparing strings reported almost every
figure as a mismatch, because the data files write 14709 where the docs
write "14 709" with a thin space, and the docs round 33.66 to 33.7. A
consistency check that fails on formatting trains you to ignore it, so
the tolerance is explicit: exact against the data, within 0.05 against
the doc to allow rounding.
Also ran the full disc-gated workspace suite (build-reborn test, which
wires SYLPHEED_DISC -- without it the disc tests self-skip and green
means almost nothing), covering this session's three decoder changes:
rotation_deg on Keyframe, the scale-0 fix in blit/fill_quad, and the
flags field on T8adImage. 122 passed / 0 failed across the four suites
that had completed; the long disc-gated integration tests
(records_roundtrip_disc, first_header_word_is_record0_hash) were still
running and are not counted here.
A per-sprite premultiplied-vs-straight-alpha flag would matter a lot to a
port and has a sharp static signature: premultiplied means RGB <= A
everywhere. Over the 170 decoded GP_TITLE textures that pair to a flag
word:
bit SET n= 61 mean %(RGB>A) 55.52 median 52.52
bit clear n=109 mean %(RGB>A) 33.66 median 30.17
Premultiplied requires ~0% for the flagged group. Both groups are far
from it and the flagged group violates MORE -- the opposite of the
hypothesis. Refuted.
What remains is a weak association: flagged sprites carry more
bright-RGB/low-alpha pixels, which is what glow art looks like. But the
best single threshold classifies 76.5% against a 64.1% base rate -- a
12-point lift with badly overlapping distributions. A tendency, not a
rule, and reported with its base rate so it cannot read as more.
Noted for whoever returns: "0x02 selects an additive blend" was refuted
by blending those sprites additively and finding every measure worse
against the capture -- but that ran through a title render since fixed
twice (rest_plateau, and the 8AX background the composer drops). The
refutation may well stand; it was measured through a renderer with known
other errors, so it is worth one re-run if blit ever gains additive
blending.
Parking the field. Four candidate meanings are dead -- additive blend,
eff name in both directions, transient element, premultiplied alpha --
none produced a positive account, and the bit blocks nothing: the port's
screens composite at 0.947 correlation against a capture without it. The
negative space and the sound attribution method (child order, not size)
are written down so a later attempt starts here.
METHOD: report a classifier's lift over its base rate; and park a field
after N failed hypotheses, saying what was eliminated.
Last iteration I killed the biconditional and reported that the one-way
reading survived: all 10 bit-set sprites on GP_TITLE build 4 are eff
names, so "bit set => eff name". Checked over the disc, that is false.
sprites with a resolvable preceding name 14 709
bit SET & name has 'eff' 2 338
bit SET & name lacks 'eff' 2 657 <-- counterexamples
bit clear & name has 'eff' 1 399
bit clear & name lacks 'eff' 8 315
P(eff | set) = 0.468
P(eff | clear) = 0.144
The implication fails more often than it holds. What survives is an
association -- 3.3x enrichment -- and build 4's 10/10 was a local naming
habit in an 18-element bundle, not a format rule.
The counterexamples are the useful part: pv_loading_ring0,
pv_loading_light0-3, pv_loading_line, px_bunk_line, px_top_extra. Rings,
glows, lights, thin lines -- effect-like artwork that does not carry the
eff naming convention. Consistent with the bit marking effect sprites by
authoring intent rather than by name, which is a description and not a
decode, and is labelled as such.
Names here come from the string immediately preceding each T8aD,
validated 17/18 on build 4 against the RATC child order; the single
mismatch is the known pteff04.t32 -> registered as 8AX case, so this is
the element (opt) name rather than the sprite's registered name. That
mismatch is itself an independent confirmation of the 8AX finding,
reached from the opposite direction.
METHOD: a pattern perfect on one screen can be near-chance on the disc;
and when an association survives a refuted implication, the
counterexamples are the finding.
The bit at +0x04 was recorded as a real field with its meaning "not
diagnosed", noting ptlogo_back2eff is 0x8830 "despite its name". That note
rested on a size match -- and its size is ambiguous, which is the trap
this corpus already records.
First, a sound attribution. T8aD headers appear in the bundle in RATC
CHILD ORDER, verified on GP_TITLE build 4 against an independent property
-- each header's decoded dimensions versus the dimensions the named child
should have: 18 of 18 match, 0 mismatches. Two of those eighteen share a
size (ptlogo_back2eff and ptlogo_back2eff5, both 1133x280), so a size-keyed
lookup cannot separate them; ordering can. Index 12 is back2eff5 (0x8832,
bit set), index 14 is back2eff (0x8830, bit clear). The documented
counterexample is real and correctly attributed -- now on evidence.
Two candidate meanings tested and refuted:
bit <=> name contains "eff" REFUTED: ptlogo_back2eff is an eff
name with the bit clear. All 10
bit-set sprites are eff names, so
the implication holds one way only.
bit <=> the element is transient REFUTED: pteff03/pteff03a carry the
bit and run to t=250, ramping to
a=255 and holding.
Up close, the exception pair differs in two header words: +0x04
0x8832/0x8830 and +0x08 0x8083/0x8081 -- layer keys 32899 and 32897. They
are NOT duplicates: their alpha summaries agree to one decimal (4.5%
opaque, 86.7% clear, mean 19.3) but a pixel compare gives max abs diff 21.
Two renditions of one image at one size, which is why the summaries were
not trusted.
Still not diagnosed, and said so -- but the search space is two smaller
and the attribution beneath it is now sound.
METHOD: T8aD headers sit in child order, use that not the size; and
identical summary statistics are not identical data.
Last iteration left two candidates for why trace_gpu_stream produced no
file: the CLI flag not reaching the cvar, or BeginTracing failing
silently. Neither. Following the code instead of guessing:
BeginTracing only sets trace_state_ = kStreaming ("Streaming starts on
the next primary buffer execute"). The file is opened later, in
ExecutePrimaryBuffer, inside
#if XE_ENABLE_TRACE_WRITER_INSTRUMENTATION == 1
and trace_writer.h defines that as 0 under NDEBUG, 1 otherwise -- the
trace writer exists only in debug builds.
Confirmed against the binaries, with a control. The format string
"{:08X}_stream.xtr" lives only inside that guard:
build/bin/Linux/Release/xenia_canary 0 occurrences
build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary 1 occurrence
/sylph-home/re/canary-build/.../Release/... 0 <- what run-canary uses
The debug binary is the control: it proves the test finds the string when
it is present, so the release zero means something.
So trace_gpu_stream is a no-op in this container's emulator -- the cvar
parses, BeginTracing runs, and nothing can open a file. The kill -9 was
not the cause either, though it would have destroyed a trace had one
existed.
The route exists but is not cheap: a debug build with the writer compiled
in sits at build/bin/Linux/Debug/xenia_canary, 253 MB against Release's
18 MB, so a much slower boot plus a trace of every GPU packet on a disk
at 95%. Recorded as available rather than attempted -- what it would
confirm, the DC_LUT write, is already a well-supported inference, and the
cost is out of proportion to the gain.
METHOD: a cvar existing does not mean the feature is compiled in; and
test a compile-time gate against the binary, with a control.
Tried to turn the gamma-ramp inference into a direct observation.
canary's trace_gpu_stream records gamma ramps as their own command type
(kGammaRamp, index 11 in TraceCommandType), so a boot trace should show
the write. Two bounded runs produced NO trace file at all -- nothing under
the prefix, no .xtr anywhere, no scratch/gpu/.
Bounded deliberately: the disk is at 95% (50 GiB free) and a trace of all
GPU packets during boot includes video decode, so the runner carried its
own watchdog that killed the emulator the moment output passed a 2 GiB
cap. It never fired -- there was nothing to cap -- and disk stayed at 95%
throughout. Bounding from inside cost nothing and removed any need to
gamble on how coarsely I could poll.
What the attempt did establish. BeginTracing() runs at GPU init when the
cvar is set (graphics_system.cc:237), but EndTracing() runs only from
GraphicsSystem::Shutdown() -- so the kill -9 this session has used
routinely can never finalise a trace. The second run was stopped with
SIGTERM and exited cleanly; still no file, so that is not the whole
story. Two candidates remain unseparated: the CLI flag not reaching the
cvar, or BeginTracing failing silently. The next run removes the
ambiguity by setting trace_gpu_stream in the config FILE instead.
And a trap I nearly fell into. The startup config dump showed
trace_gpu_stream = false after I passed --trace_gpu_stream=true, which
reads as "flag ignored". It is not evidence either way: the gamma run
passed --log_mask=12 --log_level=3, its dump printed log_mask = 0 and
log_level = 2, and Kernel Debug logging was demonstrably ON -- that run
is where VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma was captured. The dump reflects the
config file and can neither confirm nor refute a command-line override.
(It does not undo the earlier user_language conclusion: absence of a NAME
from the dump still shows a cvar is unregistered.)
The gamma-ramp write therefore remains an inference, unchanged.
Continues the previous iteration, where the game was measured calling
VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma at video init. The remaining link -- does it then
WRITE the ramp -- is a GPU register operation (XE_GPU_REG_DC_LUT_RW_INDEX
in CommandProcessor::WriteRegister), unlogged and invisible to kernel
logging. Two facts from the source close it without instrumenting.
1. The swap-path gamma stage is a PURE LUT. apply_gamma_table.xesli is
the whole transform: index by input*255, fetch from a 256-entry ramp
buffer, output. No sRGB encode, no second transfer function.
2. The table DEFAULTS TO IDENTITY. CommandProcessor::Initialize fills it
with value = i * 0x3FF / 0xFF, and its own comment says the linear
default is "what games set when starting with the sRGB (return value 1)
VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma". An unwritten ramp is a no-op.
So the only transform is a LUT, the LUT is identity unless written, the
game queries the display gamma at init, and the capture differs from our
composite by gamma 1.34-1.49 -- which identity cannot produce. The guest
wrote a non-identity ramp.
Labelled an inference, with its weak joint named: it assumes our
composite reproduces the PRE-RAMP framebuffer, which it does not exactly.
What carries it is the shape -- a systematic ~1.4 fitted on flat patches
across three screens is not a compositor bug. The obvious alternative, a
fixed sRGB stage in the presenter, fits neither direction: an encode
(^0.45) brightens and we measured darkening; a decode (^2.2) darkens far
more than 1.4.
Direct observation remains available and cheap, and needs the emulator
only to boot: a GPU trace records gamma ramps as their own command type,
or one log line at the DC_LUT register write would settle it outright.
Not done.
METHOD: a default value is evidence; and name the weak joint of an
inference in the same breath as the conclusion.
Last iteration's corrected experiment, run. Boot with --log_mask=12
--log_level=3 (Kernel logging on, Cpu/Gpu off), which changes nothing
about the output and so cannot perturb the capture harness the way the
gamma-cvar experiment would have.
VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma is called once, at video init:
d> VdGetSystemCommandBuffer(701CF830, 701CF804)
d> VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma(701CE1F8(00000000), 701CE1F0(0))
d> VdSetDisplayMode(40000000)
d> VdGetCurrentDisplayInformation(701CF110)
The control is in the same log: 359 VdRetrainEDRAM and 358
VdGetSystemCommandBuffer lines, so an absent call would have been
visible. Per the export's own comment the returned type is "used in D3D
SetGammaRamp/SetPWLGamma" -- the game asks the question a ramp-builder
asks, at the moment one would ask it.
Still open, and stated: whether it then WRITES the ramp, and whether the
measured gamma 1.34-1.49 is that ramp. The write is a GPU register
operation (DC_LUT), invisible to kernel logging; a GPU trace records
gamma ramps as a command type (TraceWriter::WriteGammaRamp), which is
where to look next.
Worth its own METHOD line: this had been parked behind "needs the
emulator to reach a menu" for several iterations, and it needed the
emulator only to BOOT -- video init happens in the first seconds. A
blocker that stops one experiment does not stop every experiment in the
same area.
I had parked the tone-curve finding behind "this may be the emulator, not
the game: canary applies kernel_display_gamma_type = 2 (BT.709) on
output", with a planned run setting it to 0 and re-fitting. Reading the
source kills both the confound and the experiment.
VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma_entry is a kStub GETTER the guest calls
(xboxkrnl_video.cc). Its own comment: "Used in D3D SetGammaRamp/
SetPWLGamma to adjust the ramp for the display." The cvar is a value
REPORTED TO THE GAME, which then builds its own ramp. Canary's role is
downstream: the guest writes DC_LUT, command_processor.cc reads it into
gamma_ramp_256_entry_table_, and the swap path applies it via
swap_apply_gamma_pipeline_layout with apply_gamma_table.ps /
apply_gamma_pwl.ps compiled in.
So there is no emulator-side BT.709 post-process to subtract, and any
gamma in a captured frame is a ramp the game installed.
What is NOT established, and the reach is stated: that this game installs
a ramp at all, or that the measured 1.34-1.49 is it. The run logs cannot
say -- kernel exports log at Debug and this harness masks Kernel logging
(log_mask = 13, per boot_menu.sh's own comment), so their silence is
guaranteed regardless of what the game did.
The planned experiment was wrong in design: changing the cvar changes
what the GUEST is told and therefore which ramp the GAME builds, so it
could never isolate a stage that does not exist -- and it perturbs the
capture harness, since skip_intro classifies movie-vs-static on an
absolute rmse threshold that a brighter frame biases. The right run
changes nothing about the output: LOG_MASK=12 LOG_LEVEL=3 and look for
the call and the DC_LUT writes.
Also for the port: the ramp depends on the display type the game is told,
and canary hard-codes TV/BT.709 where hardware uses a console setting. So
this is a display profile, not a fixed property of the game.
METHOD: read what a cvar does before building an experiment around it;
and an absence in a log is only evidence if the log would have shown it.
I had parked this as "needs a per-draw capture recording texture base
addresses". It did not. 8AX (1280x720) and ptbase (640x360 at 200%) are
the SAME artwork at two resolutions, which is exactly why comparing
either against a capture is inconclusive -- and why comparing their
DIFFERENCE is not. Compute 8AX - upscale(ptbase), the detail only 8AX
has, and ask whether the capture contains it.
Both candidates are first mapped into the capture's tone domain with the
measured gamma; without that the residual is dominated by the tone
difference and the test is blind.
main menu corr +0.0475 controls +0.0032 shift, -0.0075 flip 68% of ceiling
title corr +0.0634 controls +0.0095 shift, +0.0086 flip 68% of ceiling
Two independent screens, both at 68% of the theoretical ceiling
(sd of the 8AX-only detail over sd of the capture residual), 7-15x their
matched controls. The controls preserve spatial correlation and destroy
only alignment, so they are what "no signal" looks like.
So the recommendation changes: resolve the name and draw 8AX at 1:1.
Upscaling ptbase 2x is wrong, not merely softer. Still do not draw both --
an opaque layer over an identical one costs fill and hides later changes,
and ptbase's element is the one carrying the keyframes, so a consumer
needs its timing with 8AX's pixels.
Also recorded and withdrawn: a cruder pixel-pair test gave 0.00-0.72 for
upscales, 0.98 native and 1.01 for the capture -- apparently decisive.
Additive noise raises both terms of that ratio equally and drives any
value toward 1; fitting a noise term, both "native + noise" and "bilinear
+ noise" reproduce the observed numbers. The conclusion is right, that
test does not establish it, and it is in REFUTED because the number looks
conclusive and is not.
Not shown: whether ptbase is also drawn underneath. 8AX is ~86% opaque
and carries the same art, so it would hide it either way.
The brief's rule is to commit reference data beside the finding so the
port can be built without a disc. Nothing had ever checked that the docs'
cited artifacts actually exist. doc_link_check.py walks every markdown
file under docs/, resolves each relative link, and reports targets that
are missing -- and separately targets that resolve to a ZERO-BYTE file,
which looks fine in any listing.
links resolving 1038 -> 1049
missing targets 16 -> 5
empty targets 0 -> 0
+11 resolving and -11 missing against 11 edits: the counts pair, which is
the confirmation the pass did what it claimed and touched nothing else.
Two of the sixteen were the evidence for the UI layout decode itself.
structures/ui-rat-layout.md is what the port is built on, and its two
figures -- backing "the tutorial PAUSE menu rebuilds pixel-accurately
from its sprites" and "the same method reproduces the main menu" -- were
written as captures/ui-layout/... from a file in structures/, one
directory too shallow. The headline evidence for the decode could not be
opened from its own document.
Eleven links had the wrong relative depth with the target present. Each
was rewritten only where exactly one candidate path resolved, so nothing
was guessed; the first pass left three alone because equivalent spellings
(captures/../captures/x) failed to collapse, and a second pass normalised
them.
Five remain genuinely absent and are left rather than invented: two point
at MEMORY.md outside the repo, one at a header in the separate
xenia-canary-native tree, and two name documents that were never written
(weapon-datasheet-runtime.md, canary-build-verified-env-confound.md).
None is port-relevant. A missing document is a different problem from a
bad path and is not something a link fix should paper over.
