08ed3dd17e
The 2026-09-02 play-test: "the logos just switch, I cannot discern any animation
at all." Reproduced, diagnosed, fixed, and gated by a film.
REPRODUCED FIRST, as instructed. tools/motion-census needed Pillow, which this
container has no pip for, so it got an ImageMagick fallback that shims only the
four Pillow calls it uses -- the census arithmetic, the MOVED floor and the GRID
are untouched. Its --selftest passes on that backend with the human's own
numbers: fade 97.4 %, switch 2.6 %, frozen 0.0 %. A shim that distorted pixels
would fail its own control.
publisher 0.30 s moving then 3.30 s FROZEN (human: 0.30 then 3.20)
developer 0.40 + 0.25 split then 2.45 FROZEN (human: 0.35 + 0.25 then 2.40)
Matched to within a frame.
THE CLOCK WAS NEVER THE PROBLEM. view_units advances 2.8-3.0 per frame, smooth,
~60 units/s, no stalls -- the play-test's candidate list can drop "the group
clock not integrating" and "advancing by keyframe index".
THE POSE WAS. Measuring the sharp logo's own rect frame by frame: 0.40549 flat
from unit 7.9 through 28.2 -- the same value it holds at 45 and beyond. It was
already FULL before its declared ramp (15 -> 30) began.
Cause, in ScreenView.pose_at:
t = settle_instant if settle_instant >= 0.0 else minf(t, settle_units(element))
The comment above it says "stop at the hold". The else-branch clamps. This half
ASSIGNS, so from a screen's first frame every element was posed at the settled
instant and no build-in was ever drawn. The asymmetry is the whole defect, and
`--time` sets `frozen`, which skips the clamp -- which is exactly why my frozen
sweep "proved" the companions were drawn and proved nothing about running.
Fix: `minf(t, settle_instant)`. One operator.
⚠️ AND THE HOLD IS NOT THE BUG. The Decoder measured the game holding one picture
for 3.34 s on this screen -- LONGER than the port's 3.30 -- because palogo_sqex
declares 205 of its 255 units as a flat plateau. The play-test's "a fade does not
hold one picture for 3.20 s" would have sent me to delete the one correct part.
Clamping keeps the plateau exactly.
GATED BY A FILM, not a still:
before after game (Decoder)
publisher build-in 0.30 s 0.60 s
developer build-in 0.40+0.25 0.95 s continuous
splash moving 12.0 % 24.8 % 21.2 % / 27.8 %
distinct luma states 120 152
longest frozen 3.30 s 3.30 s 3.34 s
🔴 AND IT LOOKED LIKE A 10x REGRESSION AGAINST THE ORACLE, WHICH IT WAS NOT.
verify-capture went publisher 2.17 -> 22.58, title 14.11 -> 67.07. Cause: it
shoots two frames after load and got the settled pose ONLY because pose_at
assigned it. Its own comment says so -- "the 0.01 % agreements on both splashes
were measured through that accident."
So the `--screen --capture` path now advances the clock to the settle instant
explicitly before shooting, which is what the tool was always asking for. Guarded
on `not _frozen`: `--time` means the caller wants THAT instant, and overriding it
would reintroduce the silent-ignore this replaces.
Every oracle row is back to its pre-fix value to the digit: publisher 2.17
(0.01 %), developer 3.05 (0.01 %), title 14.11, main_menu 13.02, extras 13.10,
title_plate 13.04. The port animates AND still matches the settled captures.
Not settled: motion-census is not yet wired into check-all -- next, and
deliberately not rushed at the end of a long iteration.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AHUQvXGyNcKonSEWsgWcX
Sylpheed
A clean-room reverse engineering and port project for Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception (Xbox 360, 2007).
Three things live here, in one repository so that a change spanning them lands as one commit:
| The decoders | crates/sylpheed-formats — the disc's formats, read and verified disc-wide |
| The port | port/ — a Godot 4 project, plus crates/sylpheed-export which converts a disc into the open asset tree it reads |
| The corpus | docs/re/ — what has been reverse engineered, with its evidence, its retractions and its dead ends |
You need your own copy of the game. No game content is in this repository and none ever will be. The exporter reads the disc you supply.
The oracle is the real game
sylpheed-cliand the Explorer are tools for verifying our decoding. They are hypotheses under test and they have been wrong. When something must be checked against the truth, the truth is the game running in Xenia Canary, captured — not any renderer of ours.
This is stated first because getting it backwards is the most expensive mistake this project has made.
Layout
crates/
sylpheed-formats/ the decoders. Disc-wide verified; the corpus is its spec
sylpheed-cli/ headless tools -- render a screen, dump a table, probe audio
sylpheed-viewer/ the Explorer: a human's window onto the disc. STATIC data only
sylpheed-export/ disc -> the open, moddable asset tree
port/ the Godot 4 project. Reads open formats ONLY
authored/ decisions that are NOT on the disc, each with its reason
data/
base/ generated by the exporter. Gitignored, never hand-edited
mods/ drop-in overrides. Yours
docs/
re/ the corpus: findings, refutations, method traps
game/ how the game is navigated -- menus, modals, flight
port/ the port's mission, its handoff contract, modding rules
-- and RUNNING.md, which is how you actually start it
agents/ how the agent team works together
tools/ capture harnesses, probes, the share tool
exchange/ transient inter-agent files. NOT in git
docker/ the agent containers
Where to start
docs/re/INDEX.md— what is decodeddocs/re/REFUTED.md— what has been tested and dieddocs/re/METHOD.md— traps this project has already paid fordocs/game/navigation.md— how the game is navigateddocs/port/MODDING.md— why the asset tree looks the way it does
Xenia Canary is a separate repository: it is a fork tracking upstream, and it carries our instrumentation.
Conventions
Confidence is per claim, never per document: ✅ CONFIRMED · 🟡 PROBABLE ·
❔ HYPOTHESIS · ❌ REFUTED. A withdrawn result is kept with its reasoning
rather than deleted — that is why the numbers here can be trusted.