sylpheed-port's BLOCKED ask #2. The gap was the one quantity in the transition
with no rule: measured at 0, 3 and 2 frames across three transitions, and I had
proposed it might be a load, which would make it emulator- and storage-dependent
and unauthorable.
Leg 1, bundle size runs the wrong way. If the gap were the incoming bundle
arriving, the biggest bundle would gap longest. Build 4 is 12 278 666 B and gaps
ZERO frames; build 5 is 6 977 437 B and gaps 3 and 2.
Leg 2, ran title->menu a second time from cold. The outgoing ramp is
byte-identical (63, 127, 191, 255) and the gap is 3 frames in BOTH runs.
Leg 3, and the two runs are not a null comparison -- which is the objection leg 2
invites. The captures refute it themselves: press-to-first-change differs by ~12
frames between them (~25 against ~10). Something in this transition really is
cache-sensitive and moved by 0.4 s, while the gap did not move at all. The
control comes from inside the measurement rather than from an assumption that
conditions differed.
So the gap is deterministic to the frame and not a load. It is also not constant
across transitions (0, 3, 2, 3) and not in the fade group -- the port reports 866
keyframes across 16 screens with 0 untimed. A deterministic game quantity with no
rule found; black_hold_units stays 0, and "not a load" must not become a reason
to author a constant.
The load proposal in screen-transitions.md is marked refuted rather than deleted.
Also fills in docs/game/navigation.md, which the standing brief asks me to keep
and which I had not touched while measuring four transitions: a player-side
section on what a screen change looks like, and three scripting traps -- that
`pkill -f xenia_canary` kills the shell that ran it (cost a launch today, and the
same trap is already in METHOD for pgrep), that screen_id.py reports `menu`
during the attract loop, and that it cannot tell EXTRAS from the main menu.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
The port flagged docs/re/data/boot-timeline-2026-08-29.tsv, whose label column
runs splash_dev before splash_pub, as a possible boot-order bug in its tree.
Three cold boots, t=0 at launch, no pad input, and the frames looked at rather
than only correlated: SQUARE ENIX 3.05-7.34 / 1.18-5.78 / 1.19-5.56 s, then a
~0.25 s black hold, then GAME ARTS/SETA/studio anima. Publisher first, 3/3.
The TSV is not wrong about any frame; its t=0 is ~7.7 s into the guest's boot,
so the publisher splash had been and gone before the stream opened. The tell is
in the file: its first twelve rows are byte-identical to four decimals -- one
held frame sampled twelve times -- and those exact numbers reappear in my run 1
at 8.42-10.94 s.
Second trap, new: ADV.wmv opens with its own SQUARE ENIX card, bloomed and below
centre, scoring 0.59-0.75 against live-splash-publisher.png. The classifier
fires splash_pub twice per boot and the second one is a movie frame. The real
splash holds perfectly still and scores 0.93-0.94.
And the dwells are DECODED, not measured: the publisher declares 240 units
(4.000 s) and the developer 195 (3.250 s), against measured 4.30/4.60/4.37 and
3.51/3.50/3.37. Measured over declared is 1.085 on average across six spans --
a 30 Hz timeline at 27.6 fps, which is the presentation rate this corpus has
measured independently three times. The port authors nothing here.
Instrument control run first: 11/11 content, 4/4 plate, the two splash
references rejecting each other at 0.035.
docs/re/boot-order-and-splash-dwell.md
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Nsxw1A9JseUw99Yw1ZRQzY
The one number the port said decides a structural question on its side: whether
`ScreenView` has to draw two builds at once. It does. The boot title shows
build 4 alone, and 2.13 s after build 4 stops animating it composites build 2
over it. Two independent boots agree to 6 ms (2.138 / 2.132), which is under one
sample interval.
Measure from SETTLED, not from first pixels. "First drawn -> plate" is 3.78 s in
one run and 4.26 s in the other, because the build-in animation itself ran 1.64 s
and 2.13 s -- that spread is the emulator's frame pacing, and it is exactly the
kind of number that looks like a measurement.
Ruled out before believing it: that the plate was pulsing all along, too dim for
a thresholded glyph counter. The counter reads EXACTLY 154 -- the committed
no-plate title's own value -- for every frame of a plateau nearly one full pulse
period long, with zero variation, and the surface mean is flat to +/-0.03 across
it. A cycling overlay moves both.
Also settled, and also not:
* the black hold between two screens is 0.14-0.30 s, which brackets the port's
authored 0.17-0.23 s and the file's declared 12 units. Their constant stands.
* the (A)->menu latency is STILL not available, and now the reason is known.
Both runs freeze one frame for ~1.4 s at surface mean 26.626 -- agreeing
between runs to six decimals, and reproduced in run 2 with stream restarts
disabled, so it is not the capture path. It is a guest load stall: the (B)
path, which loads nothing, has no freeze at all. Any figure from it would be
an emulator load time.
Refutation attempt, recorded whether or not it survived: navigation.md's "the
title is not input-ready for about ten seconds, and even then (A) registers
roughly half the time". At 7.29 s and 7.28 s after the title settled, (A) was
accepted first press in both runs, as was (B) on the menu. n=2 only makes "half
the time" unlikely (p ~ 0.25); it contradicts the ten seconds outright.
And the standing red banner is withdrawn: the interactive title IS reachable in
this container, twice, with no pad input, in ~3.5 minutes. Why it changed is NOT
established -- this container came up with no Xenia storage root at all, so run 1
created a profile -- and that is written as a correlation for the next session to
test rather than as a cause.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014voBspJ6kFncNErZJuZcLw
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
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
**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.
