Reported by a human on a real controller: hold the left stick down, the
cursor moves one item and stops. The repeat never runs.
`held_direction()`'s own comment says "Polled at the DEVICE, never through
Input.is_action_pressed". It was not. The d-pad and keyboard branches polled;
the STICK branch read `_latched`, which is a reconstruction of the stick's
position from the event history.
That reconstruction is only as good as the last event seen. A stick held
still sends nothing, and one event reading below RELEASE -- a spring
settling, a deadzone-shaped value, a driver emitting a zero on focus change
-- clears it with no event afterwards to set it back. The port then believes
the stick is centred while the player is holding it, which is precisely the
symptom reported.
Now polls `Input.get_joy_axis()` against the game's own 0.61, which is what
the comment always meant. The latch stays as a fallback for INJECTED events,
so the script harness and verify-input keep testing something.
🔴 Every instrument here missed this because every instrument SUPPLIES the
input it measures: verify-input ticks repeat_due() directly, --script sends
InputEventAction which bypasses the input map, and the new --script=hold:
injects its own axis event. All three agreed with each other and none read a
device. Same shape as the 2026-09-01 report that opened gamepad.gd, one
level deeper, with the lesson already written at the top of that file.
So this adds the two things that would have caught it:
--script=hold:down:2.0 hold one real axis deflection and log every move
--input-probe print what the devices report, on change
⚠️ The fix itself is NOT verified. It matches the symptom exactly and was
found by reading, but only a human holding a stick can confirm it, and the
probe exists so the answer is measured either way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
REPEAT_DELAY = 0.402, REPEAT_INTERVAL = 0.134, from
docs/re/f1-repeat-measured-via-driver-patch.md -- 12 and 4 frames at the
run's achieved 29.87 fps guest rate, converted to seconds because this port
does not run at the guest's rate and it is the cadence that was measured.
The mechanism has been here since 2026-09-02 and inert on purpose. The
instruction it was waiting on is now vindicated in the most awkward way: the
draft it refused to ship had 0.40 / 0.20, so the guessed delay was nearly
right and the guessed interval was off by 50 %. The half that was wrong
would have been protected by the half that was right.
The delay and the interval are NOT equally well evidenced, and the code says
so at the constants. No physical controller exists in the Decoder's
container, so the measurement fed Canary's file driver the SDL driver's own
400/100 ms constants: the 402 ms that came back is the constant that went
in, and confirms the instrument. The 133 ms interval against a fed-in 100 ms
is the new fact -- the game paces repeats to its own frame consumption. One
run; the two-run minimum is not met and the finding says so itself.
Also: the prediction that this would turn verify-input's "a held stick is
ONE step, not six" red was wrong. It stayed green, because steps() never
advances a clock and so had never called repeat_due() at all -- the rate was
about to ship into a harness with no coverage of the feature, with a green
line that would have been read as coverage.
So verify-input gains a `repeat` subject: nothing before the delay, the
first repeat on the delay, the steady interval, cadence independent of frame
rate (the code claims this in a comment, so it is now asserted), and a
direction change restarting the delay. Each asserts THESE numbers, not the
shape -- a shape-only check would have passed on 0.40 / 0.20. The control
removes the premise, a held direction, and every controllable row inverts.
The first-repeat row measures from the arming tick, not from t=0: that tick
is the frame the press is handled, which is the origin the finding measures
its 12 frames from. Measured from zero it read 0.433 vs 0.402 and the
tolerance would have had to be widened to hide a units mismatch.
Closes#2
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
