Sylpheed/docs/agents/PLAYTEST-2026-09-02.md

Play-test, 2026-09-02 — the splash did not animate. Now fixed and signed off.

✅ CLOSED THE SAME DAY — the human's verdict, which is the only gate that counts

"Looks good! Cannot notice any obvious difference from the actual game. Mark logos as done." — 2026-09-02

The logo splashes are DONE. Not "the check passes" — a person compared the port against the real game and could not tell them apart. That is the oracle, and it is the strongest result this port has produced.

⚠️ Both agents: the sole-focus block is lifted. Return to your milestones. What remains open from the play-tests is listed at the bottom of this page; none of it is this.

The root cause was one word

- t = settle_instant if settle_instant >= 0.0 else min(t, settle_units(element))
+ t = min(t, settle_instant)      # the comment above it already said "stop at"

pose_at assigned the settle instant instead of clamping to it, so every query returned the settled pose whatever the clock said.

🔴 And the same line manufactured the false green. The capture harness shoots after two frames, so it was photographing t ≈ 2 units — which looked settled only because everything looked settled. The 0.01 % agreement that closed H2 was measured through the accident. One bug produced the defect and the evidence that the defect was absent.

Verified independently before it went to the human

Filmed a real boot at 0.05 s, before against after:

	before	after
splash in motion	1.30 s / 7.95 s (16.4 %)	2.20 s / 7.95 s (27.7 %)
distinct luma states	26	43
publisher ramp	0.30 s, 6 steps	0.65 s, 13 steps, one continuous run
developer splash	two bursts split by a 0.50 s freeze	one continuous 0.90 s run

The publisher trajectory rises to a peak and settles back — the crossfade signature: glow alone, then both, then sharp only. The developer splash's interrupting freeze disappearing is the clearest single sign the clock now drives the poses.

The port then closed a gap motion-census names in its own header — "a wrong ramp that moves every frame passes here" — with a shape check pre-registered from the disc, measured off a film, on a strip no other element overlaps, in ratios so the texture divides out: middle:last declared 0.203 / measured 0.213, rise:last declared 1.20 / measured 1.20 exact. It agrees with the Decoder's independent measurement of the running game.

🔴 The lesson, which outlives the bug

Three instruments passed a frozen screen. Keep this: an instrument that sits below the thing under test cannot see it fail. A frozen sweep drives the clock by hand; a settled comparison is defined to pass on a frozen screen; an achieved-fps counter counts frames drawn, not frames different. Ask of any new check: what would this still report if the feature were entirely absent?

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The original report, kept for the record

The human, watching the port on real hardware, on a GPU, at ~140 fps:

"The port does no blur animation at all! I cannot discern if there is any animation at all. The logos just switch without the animation."

Measured, not paraphrased

Filmed from a real boot at 0.05 s (--film), then per-frame change measured with tools/motion-census:

splash moves	1.30 s of 7.95 s — 16.4 %
publisher splash	0.30 s of motion, then 3.20 s frozen
developer splash	0.35 s + 0.25 s, then 2.40 s frozen
distinct luma states in 7.95 s	26

A 45-unit build-in cannot be drawn in 26 states, and a fade does not hold one picture for 3.20 s. This is a switch with a flicker on either side.

The frame counter says 24.8 fps achieved. Both are true: the port is drawing 25 times a second and changing almost never.

🔴 Why three instruments all said it was correct

This is the part that matters more than the bug, because it is the fourth time this shape has cost a milestone.

instrument	what it proved	what it could not see
frozen sweep (--time=, 3 units a step)	the renderer CAN draw pose N	whether the poses are ever drawn in sequence, while running
settled comparison (0.01 % against the capture)	the resting pose is right	a screen frozen 84 % of the time matches a settled reference perfectly — that is what frozen means
achieved-fps counter	frames are being drawn	drawing the same pixels 25×/s scores identically to animating

Every one measured throughput or a pose. Not one measured CHANGE.

That is why the port could write "the companion quads are drawn, verified by a frozen sweep" and be simultaneously right and useless: the sweep drives the clock by hand. It is the same defect as InputEventAction bypassing the input map — the instrument sat below the thing that was broken, so the thing that was broken could not appear in it.

tools/motion-census exists to close this class. It measures change and nothing else, and its --selftest proves it separates a fade (97.4 % moving) from a switch (2.6 %) from a frozen film (0.0 %) — because a detector that cannot tell those apart would report the same green line on all three.

What both agents do now

Nothing else. Not the clock rate, not the plate, not blend, not audio. This first.

Port

1. Reproduce it with --film + motion-census before changing anything, and quote the numbers. If your run does not reproduce 16.4 %, say so — the disagreement is then the finding.
2. Find why the clock does not advance the poses. Candidates, unranked and none established: the keyframe interpolation returns the same pose for a range of t; rest()/plateau logic snapping to an endpoint; the group clock not integrating; interpolation between keyframes not happening at all (nearest-keyframe rather than lerp); the screen advancing by keyframe index instead of by time.
3. Every fix is gated by a film, never by a still. A change that improves a settled frame and leaves the film at 16 % has not fixed this.
4. motion-census goes into check-all, so a future regression fails a check instead of waiting for a human.

Decoder — map the whole graphics pipeline, end to end

The human's instruction, in their words: "get the whole graphics pipeline, from the xex/pe + the disc files to the final screen displayed, and take Xenia Canary processing into account too."

So: one continuous account, each stage with evidence and each labelled by the instrument that produced it —

disc bytes  →  RATC/T8aD decode  →  what the GAME CODE does per frame
            →  the draw calls it submits  →  Canary's own processing
            →  the presented frame

Specifically, and none of it inferable from a file alone:

• The game's per-frame update. Which code advances a UI group's clock, in what units, and what it does between keyframes — does it interpolate, or hold to the next key? That single question decides whether the port should lerp at all. It is in the image; find the function.
• What the game submits per frame during the splash — the draw list frame by frame, not one settled frame. If the alpha changes, it changes somewhere observable: a vertex colour, a PS constant, a blend factor, a texture swap. Name which, with the per-frame series.
• What Canary does to it. Present cadence, any resolve/scaling/gamma between the guest's draw and the pixels a capture records. A capture is evidence about Canary's output, and the difference between that and the guest's intent has bitten this corpus before (the kernel_display_gamma_type entry).

⚠️ Deliver a per-frame SERIES, not a settled value. Follow TEMPORAL-VERIFICATION.md: film it, align by content, report ordering/counts/durations. The port needs to know what the alpha trajectory is, and a single frame cannot carry one.

And this is a refutation the port should record against itself

BLOCKED.md H2 currently reads ✅ ANSWERED, on the strength of the frozen sweep. The mechanism half stands — the blur is a baked companion texture, that is decoded and correct. The behaviour half does not: the port draws those quads and does not animate them, so "the companions are drawn" was true and did not mean what the row used it to mean.

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What is STILL OPEN after the sign-off

The logos are done. These are not, and none of them blocks a milestone gate:

		owner
H1	Does a held direction repeat in the menus, and at what rate? One step per deflection stays authored. The 61 % arm threshold is decoded and adopted; the 0.11 hysteresis gap is still authored.	Decoder
H3	The PRESS Ⓐ plate. All four named causes are dead and the port measures fractionally early, so what the human saw is unattributed — deliberately not closed green. ⚠️ Worth re-asking now: the animation fix changed what the whole boot looks like, so the original observation may simply no longer reproduce.	both
pipeline	The end-to-end graphics account — disc → decode → the game's per-frame update → submitted draws → Canary's processing → the presented frame. Cut short by the sole-focus order and still the right work: it is what would let the port know whether its ramp duration matches the game rather than only its own declared keyframes.	Decoder

P5's gate is "a human clicks through it" and has NOT been claimed here. The human has signed off the logos, and separately confirmed that Ⓐ, the stick and the submenus work. Nobody has said the milestone is met, and an agent must not say it on their behalf.