29fd735b96
Third reading of the same bytes in one session, and the first one that is
decoded rather than inferred.
1. concatenate -> 359 s of dialogue for a 137 s movie. Dead on measurement.
2. sum as Q10's two stems -> refuted here: S00A's second full-length chunk is
DIGITAL SILENCE and ADV's is 0.60x the first with 26.8 dB of residual. That
claim was mine, and the Decoder had already adopted it before I tested it;
it is withdrawn in both places.
3. keep ONE stream. Decoded disc-wide by the Decoder, counting stream starts
inside every inter-descriptor span: 258 spans hold one stream, 28 hold
three, nothing holds two. So 359 = 84.55 + 137.32 + 137.32.
Summing was therefore wrong a third time, and for a third reason: a take plus a
0.60x copy of itself is ~4 dB louder and coloured, not a mix of parts. The filter
is now `[0:a]anull` plus the mono fold -- no gain applied at all.
`check` moves `voice` off the strict peak bound as a consequence. It sat with
`bgm` because it was a sum this exporter produced; it is now a single wave off
the disc, mastered near full scale -- ADV's louder presentation measures +0.0003
dBFS at source -- so refusing that would be refusing the disc's own mastering.
The leading chunk is dropped as a DUPLICATE, not a truncation. It is this
movie's own dialogue (the Decoder, 17 of 17) and I measured it to be the TAIL of
the kept stream: sliding envelope correlation r=0.998 / 0.932 with the lag flush
against that stream's end, controls 1.000 self and 0.289 for a different movie,
confirmed in the sample domain at 16.7 / 23.2 dB of residual.
STILL OPEN, and flagged rather than absorbed: WHICH presentation to keep. Highest
byte rate is the Decoder's recommendation and not a decoded field, and on ADV it
selects the QUIETER of two (-8.3 dBFS against 0.0). Said in the manifest with the
consequence, so it is visible and reversible. A capture of the intro with
dialogue audible settles it.
Not converted, and the Decoder has since withdrawn the ask with a better reason
than mine: its 504464 B anchor constant is structural, not proportional --
identical on all 17 regions, and a proportional prediction lands within 8 bytes
on ADV while being 4305 B out on S00A.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
2793 lines
142 KiB
Markdown
2793 lines
142 KiB
Markdown
# Decisions
|
||
|
||
One entry per decision that outlives the container it was made in. Newest last.
|
||
A decision that lives only in an agent's context is lost when that container
|
||
dies, which is what this file is for.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P0 — the exporter, 2026-08-28
|
||
|
||
### The exporter reads one authored file, and stamps its provenance into the output
|
||
|
||
`export/` is derived and `authored/` is hand-written, and the natural reading of
|
||
that is that the exporter never touches `authored/`. But a screen has to be
|
||
*called* something, and the disc does not name its builds — the identification of
|
||
build 5 as the main menu is HANDOFF Q2, **measured against a live capture**, not
|
||
a field.
|
||
|
||
Two ways to handle that:
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||
|
||
1. the exporter emits `build_05.json` and the runtime renames it from
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||
`authored/screen_names.json`;
|
||
2. the exporter reads that map and writes `main_menu.json` directly.
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||
|
||
Chose **2**, with a condition: every name it applies carries `name_source:
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"authored"` and a `name_why` quoting the evidence, and `check` **rejects** an
|
||
authored name with no `why`. The file that lands in `export/` is therefore still
|
||
honest about which of its fields is a measurement — which is the property the
|
||
derived/authored split exists to protect — while a human opening the tree sees
|
||
`main_menu.json` rather than having to resolve a rename in their head. A build
|
||
nobody has identified exports as `build_NN` with `name_source: "index"`, which is
|
||
a locator and not a claim.
|
||
|
||
This is the **only** authored input the exporter takes. Everything else in
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||
`authored/` is applied by the runtime over `export/`.
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||
|
||
### Sprites are per screen, not a flat pool
|
||
|
||
`main_menu` and `extras` both ship a `ptbase.t32` and they are different
|
||
pictures. A flat `sprites/` directory would have silently collided; whichever
|
||
screen exported second would have won, and the loser would have drawn the wrong
|
||
background with no error anywhere. `sprites/<subdir>/<screen>/<name>.png`.
|
||
|
||
### The format is executable
|
||
|
||
`sylpheed-export check --out export` validates a tree against `docs/FORMAT.md`
|
||
with no disc in hand. It exists because "the export is correct" is otherwise an
|
||
assertion, and because the P0 gate is *"validates against FORMAT.md"* — which is
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||
not a thing anyone can confirm by reading.
|
||
|
||
It reads the tree the way Godot will: as a stranger, with no access to the disc,
|
||
the decoders, or the exporter's internals. It deliberately does **not** check the
|
||
export against the disc — that is what `sylpheed-cli screen render` is for, at P1.
|
||
|
||
Checked that it bites, rather than assuming: five mutations of a valid
|
||
`main_menu.json` — a broken `paint_order` permutation, a dangling
|
||
`focus_sprite`, a reversed `buttons` list, a `#rrggbbaa` colour, an invented
|
||
`name_source` — are each caught with a specific message.
|
||
|
||
### The highlight sprite pairs by name; `opt ` is exported but not believed
|
||
|
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FORMAT v1 said `focus_sprite` came from the element's `opt ` link. That reading
|
||
was **measured and refuted** by the RE agent, and this export shows why plainly:
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on the main menu, `opt ` chains `ptloop01 → ptloop02 → ptbtn01` — two decorations
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and then a button. It is a linked list of something, and it is not focus.
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||
|
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The highlight is paired by **sprite name** instead (`ptbtn01.t32` ↔
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`ptbtn01f.t32`), which is HANDOFF's convention and holds for all 54 real pairs on
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the disc. It resolves all five main-menu buttons. The raw link is still exported
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as `opt_link`, renamed so that nothing downstream mistakes it for navigation, and
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so that whoever eventually decodes it has the data.
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||
|
||
Note this is 🟡 a naming convention, not a decoded field. It is authored in
|
||
effect, and lives in the exporter only because it is a rule over disc data rather
|
||
than a value we chose.
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||
|
||
### The paint order is exported, not authored
|
||
|
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Q3 decoded it — a `u16` layer key at `+0x0A` of each `T8aD` sprite header,
|
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stable-sorted with declaration index. So it is read in the exporter, per the
|
||
contract's own rule for a decoded answer, and `paint_order` in `export/` is a
|
||
derived field. `"paint_order"` is gone from `unresolved`; **`paint_order_ties`
|
||
replaces it**, because the tie-break is still unknown and costs one element's
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||
blend on one screen.
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||
|
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Where an element has no `T8aD` header the key comes from the decoders' table of
|
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keys **measured off the running game**. That is a different kind of fact, so it
|
||
is labelled: `layer_source` is `"sprite"`, `"implied"` or `"none"`, and a
|
||
consumer that needs to know whether a layer is read or measured can tell.
|
||
|
||
### Colours are exported as two fields with the byte order in the name
|
||
|
||
There are two modulate colours and they multiply: `tint` is RGBA, `fade` is
|
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**ARGB** and its high byte is the alpha that ramps. v1's single `"#ffffffff"`
|
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could not carry both and silently discarded the ramping alpha. They are exported
|
||
as `tint_rgba` and `fade_argb`, raw hex, byte order in the key — because getting
|
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it backwards is silent and looks like an art bug rather than a parse bug.
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|
||
### `t` stays raw
|
||
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HANDOFF Q1 is answered — linear ramp, 2 units per rendered frame, working
|
||
conversion 1 unit = 1/60 s — but that conversion is **measured off the running
|
||
game, not read from the file**, and the finding itself flags the 27.6 present-
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||
frames/second measurement as the part worth re-testing. If the game turns out to
|
||
present at 60 Hz, every duration halves.
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||
|
||
So `t` is exported exactly as the disc spells it, `keyframe_time_unit` stays in
|
||
`unresolved`, and the conversion will live in one authored place at P2. One
|
||
constant to change, in a file that says it is a decision.
|
||
|
||
### The final keyframe has no `t`, and `check` enforces that
|
||
|
||
The disc has no time slot on the last keyframe of a group. A file that carries
|
||
one there has invented it. `check` rejects it — this is the one place where the
|
||
temptation to emit a plausible number is strongest and the resulting error is
|
||
completely invisible.
|
||
|
||
---
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||
|
||
## P1 — Godot draws the screen, 2026-08-28
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||
|
||
### The Godot side reads the manifest, not a path
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||
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`ExportTree` is the only class that knows where `export/` is: `SYLPHEED_EXPORT`
|
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if set, otherwise `<project>/../export`. Screens are addressed by their manifest
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**name** (`main_menu`), never by a file path, so the runtime never encodes the
|
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archive's subdirectory and a re-export that moves a file does not break it. It
|
||
also checks `format` on both the manifest and each screen, and refuses a tree it
|
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was not built to read rather than half-drawing one.
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||
|
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Textures are read as bytes and decoded with `load_png_from_buffer` at runtime.
|
||
They are deliberately **not** Godot-imported resources: `export/` is gitignored
|
||
and regenerated wholesale, and a `.import` sidecar per sprite would be derived
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||
state living next to derived state, invalidated on every re-export.
|
||
|
||
### One CanvasItem draws the whole screen
|
||
|
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`ScreenView._draw` walks `paint_order` and draws each element itself, rather
|
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than making a node per element and leaning on `z_index`. The export's
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`paint_order` is already back-to-front, so honouring it is a loop; expressing
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the same order through sixteen nodes' z-indices would hide the one thing that is
|
||
still unresolved about it — the **ties** — behind Godot's own sibling rules,
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||
where a change in the export would silently become a change in Godot's tree
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||
order instead of a visible change in the draw sequence.
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||
|
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### P1 draws `rest` and nothing else
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|
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Every element is drawn at its resting pose. No keyframe interpolation: that is
|
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P2, and it depends on the keyframe time unit, which is **measured** rather than
|
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decoded. A milestone whose gate is a pixel diff must not have a measured
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constant inside it, or the diff stops being evidence about the port.
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||
|
||
For the same reason `focused_id` is empty at P1. Initial focus was measured as
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unstable boot to boot (HANDOFF Q5), so choosing one is an authored decision and
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it belongs to P5, where a human is pressing keys.
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||
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||
### Nearest-neighbour, and why that is not a preference
|
||
|
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`TEXTURE_FILTER_NEAREST`. The export is a 1:1 copy of the disc's own texels and
|
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elements draw at up to 500 %; a bilinear filter invents detail the disc does not
|
||
have. It is also what the reference renderer does — `ui_layout::blit` maps
|
||
destination to source by integer division — so a filter difference cannot
|
||
masquerade as a placement difference in the diff.
|
||
|
||
### The capture is the SubViewport, not the window
|
||
|
||
The screen is drawn into a `SubViewport` sized to the export's own `design`
|
||
rectangle and shown through a container that scales it to the window. The first
|
||
attempt captured `get_viewport()` and got **1235×695**: there is a window manager
|
||
on the Xvfb display and its title bar had eaten 45×25 px of a screen the export
|
||
declares as 1280×720. A gate that compares a rescaled 1235×695 capture against a
|
||
1280×720 composite measures the compositor.
|
||
|
||
So `--capture` grabs the SubViewport texture: exactly the design rectangle,
|
||
independent of the window, directly comparable with `screen render` with no crop
|
||
and no resample. The windowed run is still worth doing — it is what proves a
|
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human sees the screen — but it is not what the numbers come from.
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||
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## P1 gate — the diff, and what it found
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||
|
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`tools/verify-screen` renders every screen in the manifest both ways and reports
|
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the largest per-channel difference anywhere in the frame. Both renderers are held
|
||
to the same inputs: the reference CLI built by `build-reference-cli` from the
|
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revision the exporter is **pinned** to (not `/reborn/target/`, which is a live
|
||
mount that moves mid-iteration), `--black` because the screen carries its own
|
||
background, and `--primitives --animated` because those are what make the CLI
|
||
draw the same element set the port draws at rest.
|
||
|
||
| screen | build | max per-channel Δ | |
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||
|---|---|---|---|
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||
| `main_menu` | 5 | **3** | the P0/P1 gate screen |
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||
| `main_menu_jp` | 8 | 3 | |
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||
| `extras` / `extras_jp` | 6 / 9 | 4 / 3 | |
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||
| `press_start` / `press_start_jp` | 2 / 3 | 1 | |
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||
| `build_00` / `build_01` | 0 / 1 | 3 | |
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||
| `build_10` / `build_11` | 10 / 11 | **0** | byte-identical |
|
||
| `title` | 4 | 6 | paint-order tie, below |
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||
| `title_jp` | 7 | 154 | sampling phase, below |
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||
|
||
`main_menu` — the milestone's own gate — agrees to **≤3/255 on every channel of
|
||
every pixel**, RMSE 0.38 %, with **no** pixel differing by more than 4 %. 3/255
|
||
is what integer-truncating compositing in the CLI and float rounding on a GPU
|
||
differ by; there is no structural disagreement anywhere in the frame.
|
||
|
||
Three screens exceed that, and each has a named cause rather than a threshold.
|
||
|
||
### `title`: a tie in the paint order — neither renderer is wrong
|
||
|
||
Build 4 is the one screen where the CLI uses a paint order **measured off the
|
||
running game** instead of deriving it. Compared against the order this port
|
||
exports, every single disagreement is **inside a tie** — the two orders differ
|
||
only among elements carrying *identical* layer keys (`0x8083`, the `back2` glow
|
||
group, and `0x80a0`):
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
derived : … 15, 16, 17, 18, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, …
|
||
measured: … 15, 18, 16, 17, 0, 2, 4, 7, 1, 3, 5, …
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
That is exactly the residual HANDOFF Q3 documents and this export already
|
||
declares in `unresolved: ["paint_order_ties"]`. It is worth stating what it
|
||
costs: **904 px** in the glow band at (445,117)–(1195,313), all of them 4–6/255.
|
||
The port keeps the stable sort, per HANDOFF's own recommendation. Nothing to fix,
|
||
and nothing to tune — a "fix" here would be fitting the port to one screen's
|
||
capture.
|
||
|
||
Two of the reordered indices (`0x80a0`) are `kind & 0x4` template instances that
|
||
both renderers skip, so the only real reorder outside the glow group is
|
||
`ptlogo2` against `ptlogo_tm`, which do not overlap.
|
||
|
||
### `title_jp`: nearest-neighbour sampling phase — the CLI is the one I would call wrong
|
||
|
||
`title_jp` is the **only** screen in the export with a drawn element at a scale
|
||
that is not a whole multiple of 100 %: `ptlogo_eff2` at 125 %. It is also the
|
||
only screen with a difference above 6/255. The two facts are the same fact.
|
||
|
||
At a non-integer ratio the two renderers pick different source texels:
|
||
|
||
* `ui_layout::blit` samples the source at the destination pixel's **top-left
|
||
corner** — `sxi = col * sw / dw`.
|
||
* A GPU samples at the destination pixel's **centre** — `floor((col+0.5)·sw/dw)`.
|
||
|
||
At 125 % those disagree on one column in five, which is why the differing pixels
|
||
are ~30 above 100/255 strung along thin diagonal edges rather than a shifted
|
||
region. At every whole multiple of 100 % they agree exactly, which is why the
|
||
other eleven screens are clean.
|
||
|
||
**Which is wrong:** the CLI, I think. Corner-sampled nearest is a half-
|
||
destination-pixel bias toward the top-left that no rasteriser produces, and the
|
||
Xenon GPU that drew this screen sampled at pixel centres. But I have no
|
||
framebuffer capture of `title_jp` and the disagreement is sub-pixel on one glow,
|
||
so this is a reading, not a measurement — recorded in `docs/BLOCKED.md` rather
|
||
than acted on. **The port is not changing to match**, because matching the CLI
|
||
here would mean deliberately reproducing a half-pixel offset in order to make a
|
||
number smaller.
|
||
|
||
### `extras`: two pixels
|
||
|
||
Two pixels at 4/255. Rounding.
|
||
|
||
### What the diff cannot tell us
|
||
|
||
The pivot question in `docs/BLOCKED.md` predicted that a P1 diff could not
|
||
distinguish "anchor scale to the declared pivot" from "anchor to half the
|
||
texture", because both renderers use the declared pivot. That prediction held:
|
||
the port and the CLI agree on every scaled element, and that agreement is **not
|
||
evidence** about which anchor the game uses. It stays open.
|
||
|
||
### ~~`pteff05.t32` and `pteff04.t32` have no sprite, and that is correct~~
|
||
|
||
**RETRACTED 2026-08-29. This was wrong, and it was the most consequential thing
|
||
on this page.** See "The menu had no background" below.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P2 — keyframe animation, 2026-08-28
|
||
|
||
### The time unit is authored, in one file, and says loudly that it is not on the disc
|
||
|
||
`authored/timing.json`. HANDOFF Q1 is answered — linear ramp, 2 units per
|
||
rendered frame, 1 unit = 1/60 s — but that conversion is **measured off the
|
||
running game**, not read from a file, which is exactly the case the
|
||
derived/authored split exists for. It is expressed as
|
||
`keyframe_units_per_second: 60` rather than seconds-per-unit so the value is
|
||
exact instead of a repeating decimal, and it carries the two independent lines
|
||
that support it. `t` stays raw everywhere in `export/`; seconds appear only
|
||
where this file is applied, which is one line of `boot.gd`.
|
||
|
||
`exit_ramp_seconds` is deliberately **null**. See below.
|
||
|
||
### The timeline stops at the last *timed* keyframe, and never plays the exit
|
||
|
||
The last keyframe of every group carries **no `t`** — the disc has no time slot
|
||
there. Across this export that final frame is an *exit* pose: for 116 of 134
|
||
elements it differs from the last timed keyframe **in alpha only** (a fade-out),
|
||
for 12 it is the loading splash's scale-and-slide exit, and for 6 it is
|
||
identical (no exit animation at all).
|
||
|
||
So the group is `pre-roll → ramp in → hold → [exit]`, and the port plays it up to
|
||
the hold and stops. Playing into the exit would mean **inventing how long the
|
||
ramp takes**, because the disc does not say. That duration is the screen
|
||
transition — HANDOFF Q7 measured it at ~0.4 s — and it belongs to P3, with its
|
||
own evidence. This is why `exit_ramp_seconds` is null rather than 0.4: P2 has no
|
||
business holding it.
|
||
|
||
### The interpolation is checked by where it lands, not by inspection
|
||
|
||
For **8 of the 12** screens the settled timeline is **byte-identical** to the
|
||
`--pose=rest` render. That is the useful assertion: the port walks the keyframes
|
||
with an authored time unit and arrives, to the pixel, at the pose the pinned
|
||
decoders independently identify as the resting one. `tools/screen-strip` reports
|
||
this per screen, so a change to the interpolation that drifts by one unit shows
|
||
up as a diff rather than as nothing.
|
||
|
||
The four that differ do so for two distinct reasons, below.
|
||
|
||
## `rest` misidentifies six elements, and the running game says so
|
||
|
||
On `main_menu`, the settled timeline and `rest` differ in exactly one region:
|
||
**400×470 at (440,108)** — the bounding box of `ptframe1` and `ptframe2`, and
|
||
nothing else on the screen.
|
||
|
||
`rest` puts both at their **first** keyframe: off-position and fully
|
||
transparent. The keyframes say they slide (620,108)→(440,108) and (403,267)→
|
||
(583,267) while fading 0x00→0xff, and then hold that pose for their last three
|
||
keyframes including the untimed one.
|
||
|
||
`/reborn/docs/re/captures/main-menu-oracle.png`, a capture of the running game,
|
||
**shows them**: the bright circuit-frame bracket around the menu, with a ring at
|
||
the bottom right. Cropping the same 250×180 region from the capture and from
|
||
both renders puts the ring and its elbow trace in the port's timeline render
|
||
**pixel-aligned with the game's**, and absent from the `rest` render. That is
|
||
geometry, not luminance, so it does not depend on the capture's gamma or on the
|
||
fact that it was taken with `NEW GAME` focused.
|
||
|
||
### Why the decoders get it wrong, precisely
|
||
|
||
`ui_layout::rest_plateau` excludes a run of identical keyframes that **ends the
|
||
group**, because that run is normally the exit — the comment cites the pause
|
||
menu, where taking the trailing run erased the word PAUSE. That exclusion is
|
||
right in general and wrong for an element with **no exit animation**, where the
|
||
trailing run *is* the hold. The rule then falls back to an earlier run, which
|
||
for a slide-in is the invisible pre-roll.
|
||
|
||
The condition that identifies the affected elements exactly, with no false
|
||
positives in this export, is:
|
||
|
||
> the final untimed keyframe has the **same pose** as the last timed keyframe
|
||
|
||
Six elements match it and `rest` misses all six: `ptframe1`/`ptframe2` on
|
||
`main_menu` and `main_menu_jp`, and `pteff02` on `title` and `title_jp`. This is
|
||
a **finding for the RE agent** about `sylpheed-formats`, not something this port
|
||
fixes: the decoders are pinned and must not be reimplemented here. The port
|
||
simply does not use `rest` — it derives the arrived pose from the keyframes,
|
||
which needs no heuristic — and `verify-screen` still asks for `--pose=rest` so
|
||
that renderer-vs-renderer diffing compares like with like.
|
||
|
||
Note what this says about P1: the port and the reference renderer **agreed** on
|
||
`main_menu` to 3/255, and both were missing two elements the game draws. Two
|
||
renderers reading the same field through the same decoder agreeing is not
|
||
evidence that the field is right. `docs/BLOCKED.md` had already said that about
|
||
the pivot; here it bit for real.
|
||
|
||
## The title is not settled, and P2 does not claim it
|
||
|
||
`title` and `title_jp` differ between the two modes by much more (max 142 and
|
||
247), and there the disagreement is **not** the six-element bug alone. `rest`
|
||
picks a mid-timeline hold for several glows (`pteff01`, `ptlogoall_eff`,
|
||
`ptlogoall_eff2`, `ptlogo_back2eff5`) where the timeline runs on to a much
|
||
brighter pose.
|
||
|
||
I could not settle which is right, and did not try to make the numbers agree:
|
||
|
||
* No element's alpha ever reverses direction anywhere in this export, so the
|
||
title's 4.48 s timeline is a slow one-way ramp, not a pulse — which removes the
|
||
obvious reason to expect a loop, but does not prove there is none.
|
||
* The only live title capture composites the **`PRESS Ⓐ` plate (build 2) over
|
||
the title (build 4)**, so it cannot be diffed against build 4 alone. Mean
|
||
luminance is oracle 64.1, `rest` 62.8, timeline 80.0 — which looks like it
|
||
favours `rest`, except that the plate *adds* brightness and `rest` is carrying
|
||
a 25 % black dim quad (`pteff02`) that is itself one of the six misidentified
|
||
elements. The comparison is confounded in both directions and settles nothing.
|
||
* **Both modes are visibly wrong anyway.** Side by side with the capture, the
|
||
port draws a washed-out cyan glow slab across the logo that the running game
|
||
does not have — in `rest` mode too. That is a third problem, independent of
|
||
this one, and it is P3's.
|
||
|
||
So: the timeline is the default because it is derived from the disc's own
|
||
keyframes with one measured constant and no heuristic, and because it is proven
|
||
right on the screen this milestone gates. On the title it is **unverified**, and
|
||
P3 should not assume P2 settled it.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P2, corrected — the pin moved, and the settle rule was wrong, 2026-08-28
|
||
|
||
### Answering the RE agent's question: which six, and on what screens
|
||
|
||
They asked, having found only two elements on the English main menu satisfying
|
||
the condition this port proposed. The six span the whole 12-screen export:
|
||
|
||
| element | screens | trailing run |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ptframe1`, `ptframe2` | `main_menu`, `main_menu_jp` | alpha `0xff` — **visible** |
|
||
| `pteff02` | `title`, `title_jp` | alpha `0x00` — **transparent** |
|
||
|
||
So four of the six are the pair they already found, once per language build, and
|
||
their alpha rule accepts exactly those. The other two are `pteff02`, whose
|
||
trailing run is transparent, so their rule **excludes** it and leaves `rest` at
|
||
`0x40`.
|
||
|
||
**That exclusion is right, and their own measurement proves it.** `pteff02` is
|
||
the 25 % dim quad; they measured the title render going from **+13.14 to +0.55**
|
||
against the plate-free capture once the dim is drawn. `rest` must therefore stay
|
||
at `0x40` and must *not* move to the transparent trailing run — which is what
|
||
their rule does. Two investigations converging from opposite directions.
|
||
|
||
The condition this port proposed was **too loose**; the alpha discriminator is
|
||
the correct rule and the port has no amendment to offer.
|
||
|
||
### The pin moved 8b6dbcf → 5414db3
|
||
|
||
Its own commit, and what I wanted from it is the fixed `ui_layout::rest()`.
|
||
Pinned at `5414db3` rather than `4bc9706` where the fix was written, because
|
||
`5414db3` is where it carries its disc-wide check — 30 of 13 991 elements move,
|
||
4 become visible, **0 become invisible**.
|
||
|
||
The re-export is the evidence the change was contained: **two files changed, and
|
||
within them exactly four `rest` blocks** — `ptframe1`/`ptframe2` on both main
|
||
menus moving from `(620,108)/(403,267)` at `t=16` and alpha `0x00` to
|
||
`(440,108)/(583,267)` at `t=62` and alpha `0xff`. Every diff line pairs; the
|
||
other ten screens are byte-identical, `pteff02` did not move, and no sprite
|
||
changed.
|
||
|
||
### The settle rule was wrong, and their title finding is what showed it
|
||
|
||
P2 shipped "hold the last **timed** keyframe", on the reasoning that the exit is
|
||
the final untimed frame. **That is wrong**, and the title is the counter-example:
|
||
`pteff02` holds at `t=46` with the dim at alpha `0x40` and then ramps to `0x00`
|
||
by `t=236`. The exit is not only the untimed frame — it can be a long run of
|
||
timed ones. Running to the end drops the dim and makes the whole screen ~13/255
|
||
too bright, which is exactly the luminance excess P2 recorded (oracle 64.1,
|
||
`rest` 62.8, timeline 80.0) and could not explain.
|
||
|
||
A group is `pre-roll → ramp in → hold → ramp out → post-roll`, and a screen that
|
||
has arrived sits on **the hold**. So the timeline now plays in and stops at
|
||
`rest`, which is the decoders' identification of that hold and carries its own
|
||
`t`. `settle_units()` is `rest.t`.
|
||
|
||
The check is that the disagreement vanishes: on **all twelve** screens the
|
||
settled timeline is now byte-identical to the `--pose=rest` render, where before
|
||
this change four of them differed by up to 247/255. The timeline's endpoint
|
||
*should* be `rest` — the animation is what the timeline adds, not a different
|
||
destination — so this is the property to want, and it now holds without a
|
||
special case.
|
||
|
||
That also retires P2's open question about looping, from the other side: the RE
|
||
agent measured that groups hold rather than loop (`ptloop01`/`ptloop02` park
|
||
off-screen at x=1521 and x=−839; 18 s of settled title sits at sd ≤ 0.01).
|
||
|
||
## The reference renderer was stale for three diff runs
|
||
|
||
Worth recording as a process failure, because it defeated the project's whole
|
||
verification method for a while and it failed *silently*.
|
||
|
||
After bumping the pin I rebuilt the reference CLI, and `build-reference-cli`
|
||
reported success at rev `5414db3`. `verify-screen` then showed `main_menu`
|
||
jumping from 3/255 to **72/255**. The natural reading — the port had regressed —
|
||
was wrong. The port was right and **the reference was a revision behind**: the
|
||
shared `CARGO_TARGET_DIR` still held a `sylpheed-cli` built from `8b6dbcf`, and
|
||
cargo reported `Finished in 0.13s` and left it in place. Building into a clean
|
||
target directory produced a binary that resolves `ptframe1` to `(440,108) t=62`;
|
||
the shared one still said `(620,108) t=16`.
|
||
|
||
The old check — "does `screen list` run?" — cannot catch this, because a stale
|
||
binary runs perfectly.
|
||
|
||
Two changes:
|
||
|
||
* `build-reference-cli` builds into `$CARGO_TARGET_DIR/reference-cli/$rev`, a
|
||
tree **keyed by the pinned revision**, so a new pin has no artifacts to reuse.
|
||
A stable copy is placed alongside for consumers.
|
||
* It then checks the binary **against `export/`**: both come from the same pin,
|
||
so if the CLI resolves `ptframe1`'s rest differently from what the exporter
|
||
wrote, the two halves of the verification are not the same revision and it
|
||
fails loudly. It compares the two rather than asserting a literal, so it stays
|
||
true when the pin moves again.
|
||
|
||
`docker/bin/` is baked into the image, so this takes effect on the next image
|
||
build; until then the repo copy has to be invoked by path. The RE agent hit the
|
||
same class of trap this session from the other side (`./target/debug` stale
|
||
against a redirected `CARGO_TARGET_DIR`). It is worth naming the general shape:
|
||
**a build system reporting success is not evidence that the artifact you are
|
||
about to trust is the code you pinned.**
|
||
|
||
### What this did not change
|
||
|
||
`title` (6/255), `extras` (4/255) and `title_jp` (154/255) are unchanged, and
|
||
their diagnoses stand — a paint-order tie, two pixels, and nearest-neighbour
|
||
sampling phase at 125 % scale. The title's swoosh defect the RE agent localised
|
||
(drawn thick and white where the game draws it thin and pink) is untouched by
|
||
any of this and remains P3's.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## The menu had no background, and P1 called that correct, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
The pin moved `5414db3 → f817dd5` for `56cc7ac`, "a RATC child's name is stated,
|
||
not inferred". `ratc::parse` had named each child by scanning backwards for the
|
||
last printable run of bytes before its magic. For `pteff05.t32` the three
|
||
trailing payload bytes are `38 41 58` — `8AX` — which beat the real name, so the
|
||
child registered under a name no element declares and resolved to no sprite.
|
||
|
||
`pteff05.t32` is the **full-resolution background of all five menu screens**.
|
||
|
||
So every render this port has produced of a menu screen has been missing its
|
||
background, and P1 wrote that up as a property of the disc: *"the bundle declares
|
||
them and carries zero RATC children for either, so there is no texture on the
|
||
disc to export."* That sentence was false. The bundle carries the child; the
|
||
decoder was handing back the wrong name for it. Retracted above rather than
|
||
edited away.
|
||
|
||
### What the re-export shows
|
||
|
||
Six new sprites and nothing else: `pteff05.png` on `main_menu`, `extras` and
|
||
their Japanese twins, `pteff04.png` on both titles. Per screen the JSON gains a
|
||
`sprite` line and `layer_source` moves `"implied" → "sprite"` — the layer key is
|
||
now **read from the file** instead of taken from the decoders' table of keys
|
||
measured off the running game. That is the derived/authored ratchet turning the
|
||
right way, in the exporter rather than in `authored/`.
|
||
|
||
`pteff05.png` is **1280×720**; `ptbase.png`, which had been carrying the
|
||
background alone, is 640×360 drawn at 200 %. The screen was being shown its own
|
||
art at half resolution.
|
||
|
||
### Measured against the live capture, not against the other renderer
|
||
|
||
Whole-frame RMSE of the settled `main_menu` against
|
||
`captures/main-menu-oracle.png`:
|
||
|
||
| | RMSE |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| before this pin | 8.05 % |
|
||
| with the real background | **5.92 %** |
|
||
|
||
A 26 % reduction, and it is the right kind of evidence: the reference renderer
|
||
was missing the same element for the same reason, so a renderer-vs-renderer diff
|
||
could not have found this. It is the third time on this project that the
|
||
capture caught something both renderers agreed on — the bracket, the title dim
|
||
quad, and now the background.
|
||
|
||
`verify-screen` after the bump is unchanged in character: everything at 3–4/255
|
||
except `title` (6, the paint-order tie) and `title_jp` (155, the sampling phase).
|
||
Both renderers gained the background together.
|
||
|
||
### One thing the comparison says that I did not expect
|
||
|
||
Rendering with `--focus=ptbtn01`, which is how the capture was taken, makes the
|
||
RMSE **worse** — 5.92 % → 7.00 %. The port *replaces* an element's sprite with
|
||
its `*f` twin; `sylpheed-cli`'s own `--focus` is documented as drawing the
|
||
focused record **over** the base element. Those are different operations, and
|
||
the capture shows a ring marker beside `NEW GAME` that the port does not draw.
|
||
|
||
This is P5's, not P2's, and it is not being guessed at here. Raised in
|
||
`docs/BLOCKED.md`.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P3 — splash → title, unattended, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
### The splash is located by entry index, because no rule can find it
|
||
|
||
The RE agent looked for a content predicate and there is none: design size fails
|
||
(every extra composable bundle sampled is 1280×720, the same as every screen) and
|
||
element count fails (fragments run 2…15 elements in `GP_OPTIONS`/`GP_SAVE_LOAD`
|
||
while the splash halves are 3 and 7 — the ranges overlap).
|
||
|
||
So `screen_builds` is now `is_build` **plus an authored allow-list of entry
|
||
indices**, in `authored/screen_names.json` under `also_export`, each with a `why`
|
||
that says it is a locator and not a claim. This is safe in `GP_TITLE` and would
|
||
not be in general: there, widening adds exactly four bundles and all four are
|
||
real screens with zero fragments. That is why it is an allow-list rather than a
|
||
loosened predicate.
|
||
|
||
**There were two splash screens and the port had neither.** Entries 11/14 are the
|
||
developer logos (GAME ARTS / SETA / studio anima); entries **10/13 are the SQUARE
|
||
ENIX publisher wordmark, the first thing the boot shows**, and nothing in this
|
||
project had noticed them. Both pairs are region twins — ™ on 10, ® on 13 — and
|
||
the port shows one of each, not both.
|
||
|
||
### `authored/screen_names.json` is now keyed by pak entry, not by ordinal
|
||
|
||
Widening the enumeration renumbers the ordinals, and a name that moves when the
|
||
enumeration rule changes is not a name. The file had always called the entry
|
||
"the stronger locator"; it is now the only stable one. In `GP_TITLE` the two
|
||
coincide across all 16 entries, which is also the numbering `sylpheed-cli screen
|
||
--build N --all` takes — so `verify-screen` now passes `--all`, and without it
|
||
`--build 10` would have landed on entry 12.
|
||
|
||
The two previously-unnamed plates therefore renamed `build_10`/`build_11` →
|
||
`build_12`/`build_15`. Their names were always locators; now they locate the
|
||
right thing.
|
||
|
||
### The exit is the group playing itself out, not a black rect over a freeze
|
||
|
||
HANDOFF's answer to ask 2 was (a), and it came with a test that discriminates
|
||
rather than a plausibility argument. Under "a black quad over a frozen screen"
|
||
every region is scaled by the same 1−α, so the button-region / background-region
|
||
brightness **ratio** stays constant through the fade. Measured, it falls
|
||
6.495 → 5.574 → 3.105 → 2.125 → 1.935 — a 3.4× monotonic drop. The screen plays
|
||
out: `pteff00.prm` ramps to opaque black while the labels, `ptmsg`, `pteff10`
|
||
and `pteff12` ramp to transparent, and `ptframe1`/`ptframe2` hold.
|
||
|
||
Implemented by giving the final untimed keyframe a **synthetic time**,
|
||
`exit_ramp_units` after the last timed one, and then interpolating it like any
|
||
other. One code path: the difference between arriving and leaving is only how far
|
||
`t` is allowed to run, not a second kind of animation.
|
||
|
||
`exit_ramp_units = 24` (~0.4 s) is authored, and `authored/timing.json` carries
|
||
the RE agent's own reach caveat rather than smoothing it: the filmstrip is
|
||
downsampled and the button region contains some background, so this pins the
|
||
**direction**, not 0.4 s to ±0.05 s, and it is one transition pair.
|
||
|
||
### Nothing waits on a timer the disc does not carry
|
||
|
||
`dwell` in `authored/flow.json` is deliberately empty. Each screen's dwell is its
|
||
own keyframe group — the publisher wordmark reaches its hold at t=235 (3.92 s),
|
||
the developer logos at t=190 (3.17 s), both read from the disc. Adding a hold on
|
||
top would be inventing a number nobody measured. The pacing you see is the
|
||
disc's own, and the file says where a measured number would go.
|
||
|
||
### The last screen holds
|
||
|
||
A screen plays itself out because something is taking its place. Nothing takes
|
||
the title's place yet, so the sequencer holds there. A boot that ends by fading
|
||
to black is a boot that looks like it crashed. P4 puts the intro video in front
|
||
of the title and P5 gives the title somewhere to go.
|
||
|
||
### `flow.json` reproduces an observation and says so
|
||
|
||
Q6 closed with a negative: the order is in none of the four places it could have
|
||
been, and a transition is a call with a name argument chosen by code. So this
|
||
file is authored and its header says plainly that it reproduces what was watched,
|
||
not what any file states. The intro video's place in the real boot is **named as
|
||
a gap** rather than the order being quietly rewritten to hide it.
|
||
|
||
## P3 gate
|
||
|
||
`godot --path port -- --boot --film=/tmp/boot` runs unattended:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
publisher_logo → developer_logos at 4.65 s → title at 8.57 s
|
||
boot sequence complete after 13.05 s, holding on title
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
The filmstrip shows each screen fading in, holding, and fading through black into
|
||
the next, and the title staying up. `verify-screen` covers all **16** screens
|
||
now; the four new splash bundles come in at max 1–2/255 against the reference
|
||
renderer. The three known differences are unchanged: `title` 6 (paint-order tie),
|
||
`main_menu` 4, `title_jp` 155 (sampling phase at 125 % scale).
|
||
|
||
## Answers taken from the RE agent without re-deriving them
|
||
|
||
* **Focus stays "replace".** Over-vs-instead is unobservable: the focused sprite
|
||
covers the base at 100 % of base-visible pixels, and the two compositions
|
||
differ by RMSE 1.1 inside the button rect — under the gamma floor. The port's
|
||
guess was right for the wrong reason, and the actual gap is that
|
||
`ptbtn0Nf.rat` declares **two** sprites — `ptbtneff01.t32`, a glowing ring, and
|
||
then the bright label — where `ptbtn0N.rat` declares one. The ring is P5's, and
|
||
its placement inside the record is **not decoded**, so it will be authored from
|
||
the capture and marked as such.
|
||
* **RMSE against captures has a floor, so stop chasing it.** The capture is
|
||
`≈ 255·(render/255)^γ` with γ ≈ 1.49 on the menu and `EXTRAS`, 1.34 on the
|
||
title, and it is a ramp *the game installed* (`VdGetCurrentDisplayGamma` at
|
||
video init), not a capture-path artefact to subtract. Its reach is narrow —
|
||
the flat patches it was fitted on are almost all dark — so the port will not
|
||
extrapolate it across the range, and will not apply it to rendered output on
|
||
this evidence. It is a comparison constant, not a rendering one.
|
||
* **Rotation is escalated to a human and the port has not acted.** The RE half is
|
||
answered — rotate about the **declared pivot**, measured against the GPU
|
||
capture — and it has zero effect on the five screens at rest. The port will
|
||
carry `rotation_deg` in a future FORMAT v3 because carrying a decoded field the
|
||
renderer ignores beats dropping it, but it will not draw it until the
|
||
divergence question is settled.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P4 — the intro video, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
### Theora at 720p is fine here, and no runtime dependency is requested
|
||
|
||
MISSION §6 anticipated that Theora might be too poor at 720p and permitted the
|
||
FFmpeg-GDExtension fallback to be **proposed**. It is not needed, and this was
|
||
measured rather than judged by eye alone. SSIM against the decoded source over a
|
||
10 s sample: **0.9863 at `-q:v 6`, 0.9896 at 8, 0.9924 at 10**. At 200 % zoom on
|
||
the reel's hardest case — fine serif text and soft gradients over near-black,
|
||
where Theora breaks first — q8 is indistinguishable from the source.
|
||
|
||
`-q:v 8`, and **no GDExtension is being proposed or adopted**.
|
||
|
||
`-ac 2` because the source is **6-channel** WMA Pro and Godot's Theora path is
|
||
not a surround one. That downmix is a decision, so it lives in the recorded
|
||
command where a modder can see and change it rather than in prose.
|
||
|
||
### The exact command is in the manifest, per MISSION §6
|
||
|
||
`export/manifest.json` gains a `videos` array, each entry carrying the verbatim
|
||
`ffmpeg` line that produced it. A modder who dislikes the quality re-runs one
|
||
line instead of reverse-engineering what was done to their video — which is the
|
||
whole reason this project converts the disc rather than reading it at runtime.
|
||
|
||
### A cache, and why that is not a hand-edit
|
||
|
||
`export/` is regenerated wholesale, but re-encoding 232 s of video on every run
|
||
costs ~4 minutes to produce a byte-identical file, and an exporter nobody re-runs
|
||
is worse than a cache. So each movie gets a `.cmd` sidecar recording the command
|
||
and the source size, and the encode is skipped only when both match exactly. Any
|
||
change to either re-encodes. This is derived state validating derived state, not
|
||
a hand-edit.
|
||
|
||
### The player renders into the design viewport, not beside it
|
||
|
||
First attempt parented the `VideoStreamPlayer` to the Boot node. It played, and
|
||
every captured frame was **black**: the capture reads the SubViewport, and the
|
||
player was rendering to the window. Worth stating as more than a capture bug —
|
||
everything this port draws composes in the export's own 1280×720 design space,
|
||
and a movie outside that space is outside the coordinate system every screen is
|
||
expressed in.
|
||
|
||
### Ⓐ skips, because Q9 measured it
|
||
|
||
The only input the port handles so far. HANDOFF Q9: one Ⓐ press skips a movie,
|
||
measured — the title was reached at 57 s against a 193 s baseline. Menu
|
||
navigation is still P5.
|
||
|
||
## P4 gate
|
||
|
||
`godot --path port -- --boot --film=…` runs
|
||
`publisher_logo → developer_logos → ADV.ogv → title`, unattended. The filmstrip
|
||
shows the SQUARE ENIX ident, then the reel's live-action-styled CG, then the
|
||
title. The movie's place in the boot is **measured, not decoded** — Q9 decodes
|
||
`ADVERTISE_MOVIE → ADV.wmv` from the movie manifest, but *where it sits in the
|
||
boot order* is what the RE agent watched, and `authored/flow.json` says so.
|
||
|
||
### What I cannot verify from here
|
||
|
||
**Audible playback.** This container has no audio device — Godot falls back to
|
||
the dummy driver. What is verified is that the Vorbis stream exists in the
|
||
transcode, is 2-channel, and decodes. Whether Godot emits it audibly is
|
||
unconfirmed and is stated as unconfirmed rather than assumed from the stream's
|
||
presence. It is a cheap check for anyone with a sound device and an impossible
|
||
one here.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## RETRACTION — `sylpheed-cli` is not the oracle, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
**This corrects a framing that runs through everything above, so it is a
|
||
retraction rather than an edit.** Every place this file called
|
||
`sylpheed-cli screen render` *"the reference renderer"* — and it does so
|
||
repeatedly, starting at P1 — overstated what it is.
|
||
|
||
The correction comes from the human, via the RE agent, in their words: Reborn
|
||
"was/is just a GUI explorer and extraction CLI for verifying the decoding of the
|
||
various files. It may very well be wrong." **The oracle is the Xenia Canary
|
||
capture and the game.**
|
||
|
||
So `tools/verify-screen` is a **consistency check between two decoders that
|
||
share their assumptions**, and a regression detector. It is not a correctness
|
||
check, and agreement in it is not evidence of correctness.
|
||
|
||
### The embarrassing part is that this file already knew
|
||
|
||
After the `ptframe1` case, P2's write-up says: *"Two renderers reading one field
|
||
through one decoder agreeing is not evidence that the field is right."* Then P1's
|
||
numbers kept being quoted as though 3/255 against `sylpheed-cli` meant the port
|
||
was right. Having the principle written down did not stop me leaning on the
|
||
agreement — which is worth recording, because that is the failure mode, not
|
||
ignorance of the principle.
|
||
|
||
**Three times** both renderers agreed and both were wrong, all three caught by a
|
||
capture and catchable by nothing else:
|
||
|
||
| | what both got wrong | how it surfaced |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| `pteff05` | the menu screens had **no background** | the RE agent decoded the RATC child name |
|
||
| scale 0 | drawn at full size instead of collapsed | RE agent's control run |
|
||
| `rest()` | `ptframe1`/`ptframe2` invisible; the menu bracket missing | `main-menu-oracle.png` |
|
||
|
||
### What changes
|
||
|
||
* `tools/verify-screen` says all of this in its own header, calls the CLI the
|
||
**comparison** renderer, and a `DIFFERS` row now means "we moved apart, find
|
||
out which of us moved" rather than "the port is wrong".
|
||
* The correctness question moves to the captures. The RE agent has committed
|
||
nine of them with an index at `docs/re/captures/ORACLE-CAPTURES.md`, covering
|
||
all five screens in scope — including a **main menu with `OPTIONS` focused**,
|
||
whose difference from the unfocused menu isolates exactly what focus changes.
|
||
* Three cautions travel with any capture comparison, and they are the RE agent's:
|
||
the captures are **not gamma-neutral** (γ ≈ 1.49 menu, 1.34 title — there is a
|
||
floor, do not chase it); **geometry is sound** (best alignment 0,0 at corr
|
||
0.9466, so a positional disagreement is real); and each is **one moment of a
|
||
still-animating screen**, so compare settled poses or regions known to be at
|
||
rest.
|
||
|
||
### What does not change
|
||
|
||
The port keeps running `verify-screen` over all 16 screens every iteration. A
|
||
consistency check is still worth having — it is total, it is cheap, and it is
|
||
what catches a divergence the RE agent introduces on their side. It is simply
|
||
not a grade, and this file will stop quoting it as one.
|
||
|
||
## P5 groundwork — the focus record, checked against a capture, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
P5 is the lowest unfinished milestone (P0–P4 are gated above). This iteration did
|
||
not implement navigation; it did the measurement P5 needs first, because the one
|
||
thing P5 is built on — how a focused button is drawn — had three claims attached
|
||
to it and none of them had been checked from this side.
|
||
|
||
### The exporter already emits the focus record's second element
|
||
|
||
HANDOFF ask 3 answers with a 🔴: *"what you are actually missing is the focus
|
||
record's SECOND element"* — `ptbtneff01.t32`, a 42×46 glowing ring, declared
|
||
before the bright label in `ptbtn0Nf.rat`.
|
||
|
||
**That gap is in the renderer, not the exporter.** `export/screens/title/main_menu.json`
|
||
already carries both, in declaration order, under `focus.elements`, for all five
|
||
buttons — `ptbtneff01` then `ptbtn0Nf`, each with its own pivot, rest pose and
|
||
keyframes. Nothing needs to change in `crates/sylpheed-export` for the ring. What
|
||
is missing is that `screen_view.gd` draws only one sprite per focused button.
|
||
Recording this so P5 does not re-open the exporter looking for it.
|
||
|
||
The ring's size checks out exactly: `ptbtneff01.png` is **42×46**, as stated.
|
||
|
||
### The `(7,7)` focus offset survives a refutation attempt, uniquely
|
||
|
||
Ask 3 states the focused sprite covers the base at 100.0 % of base-visible pixels
|
||
"once aligned properly (the true offset is **(7,7)**, and at the centre alignment
|
||
it reads a misleading 78–84 %)". P5 builds directly on this, so it was worth
|
||
attacking.
|
||
|
||
Re-ran the RE agent's own metric on the exported PNGs — over every pixel where the
|
||
base sprite is visible, the fraction where the focus sprite's alpha ≥ the base's —
|
||
scanning the whole offset space, not just the stated answer:
|
||
|
||
| alignment | ptbtn01 | ptbtn02 | ptbtn03 | ptbtn04 | ptbtn05 |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| **(7,7)** | **100.00 %** | **100.00 %** | **100.00 %** | **100.00 %** | **100.00 %** |
|
||
| geometric centre | 80.58 % | 79.20 % | 79.58 % | 79.45 % | 79.45 % |
|
||
| pivot-to-pivot | 80.58 % | 86.59 % | 87.40 % | 79.45 % | 84.58 % |
|
||
|
||
**The refutation fails, and more strongly than the original claim.** Over a
|
||
15×14 offset scan, `(7,7)` is a *unique isolated cell* at 100 % on every one of
|
||
the five buttons — every neighbouring offset, including (6,6) and (7,6), falls
|
||
below 90 %. The centre and pivot alignments reproduce the 78–84 % band the RE
|
||
agent reported as misleading. A claim that survives a search of its whole
|
||
parameter space is worth more than one checked at a single point, so this is
|
||
recorded as strengthened, not merely unrefuted.
|
||
|
||
### `(7,7)` is not a constant to apply — it is what the declared positions already say
|
||
|
||
An earlier version of this analysis had the port disagreeing with the capture by
|
||
6 px. **That was my arithmetic error and it is worth writing down**, because it is
|
||
the mistake this format invites: I computed each element's top-left as
|
||
`pos - pivot`, which gives base→focus deltas of (13,13) and a 29 % coverage — a
|
||
confident wrong number.
|
||
|
||
`pos` **is** the top-left. `screen_view.gd:121` is
|
||
`Rect2(pos - pivot*(s - 1), natural*s)`: the pivot is the anchor scale grows
|
||
about and it *cancels at 100 %*, which is exactly the "can be got wrong
|
||
invisibly" the comment there warns about. Getting it wrong invisibly is what
|
||
happened.
|
||
|
||
With `pos` as the top-left, base − focus is `(542,162) - (535,155)` = **(7,7)**
|
||
directly, on four of the five buttons. So P5 draws each focus element at its own
|
||
declared `pos` and needs no offset constant at all. Nothing to author.
|
||
|
||
### The one real find: `ptbtn04` is 1 px off the grid on the disc
|
||
|
||
The focus records sit on a clean 80 px pitch — 155, 235, 315, 395, 475. The
|
||
**base** records do not: 162, 242, 322, **401**, 482, i.e. spacings 80, 80, **79**,
|
||
**81**. So `ptbtn04`'s declared base→focus delta is **(7,6)**, while the art
|
||
itself aligns at (7,7) — the coverage scan puts `ptbtn04` at 100 % on (7,7) and
|
||
below 90 % on (7,6), the same as every other button.
|
||
|
||
This is 1 px of authoring jitter on the disc, not a decode error, and it has one
|
||
consequence worth stating: **do not derive the focus placement from the base by a
|
||
constant.** Draw the focus record at its own declared `pos`. A port that
|
||
"simplified" this to base + (7,7) would put `ptbtn04`'s focus art 1 px off, and
|
||
would look right on the other four.
|
||
|
||
### Verified against a capture, not against our other renderer
|
||
|
||
Diffing two oracle frames isolates what focus changes without any instrument in
|
||
the path: `live-main-menu.png` vs `live-main-menu-options-focused.png` differ in
|
||
one tight cluster of 6 338 px at **x 506..702, y 398..445**. `ptbtn04` is the
|
||
`OPTIONS` button, and the union of its focus record under the `pos`-as-top-left
|
||
reading — ring `ptbtneff01` at (500,396) 42×46 plus label `ptbtn04f` at (535,395)
|
||
172×56 — is **x 500..706, y 395..451**. Those agree on all four edges to within a
|
||
few px of near-transparent sprite border.
|
||
|
||
Under the `pos - pivot` reading the same record predicts x 433..604, y 367..422,
|
||
which matches nothing in the capture — and *no* button matches that cluster. The
|
||
capture, not our renderer, is what settles it.
|
||
|
||
### An instrument that failed its own control, and was therefore discarded
|
||
|
||
To locate the buttons independently I wrote a masked normalised-cross-correlation
|
||
template matcher and ran it as PROTOCOL requires — **through a control first**:
|
||
match each *base* sprite against the *plain* capture, where the declared position
|
||
is known and the answer must be a (0,0) delta.
|
||
|
||
It returned deltas of (13,5), (6,−19), (12,21), (−16,22), (6,8) at NCC
|
||
**0.096–0.206** — noise, with three of five pinned to the ±22 search boundary.
|
||
The control fails, so the instrument is dead rather than tuneable, and **none of
|
||
its output is used above.** The button art is dark, low-contrast and further
|
||
crushed by the capture's γ ≈ 1.49 ramp, which is the likely cause; a matcher for
|
||
this corpus would have to work on gradients rather than luminance. Filed so the
|
||
next iteration does not rebuild the same broken tool.
|
||
|
||
### What P5 still needs, and has not got
|
||
|
||
* **Initial focus is not stable across boots** (Q5: 2× `TUTORIAL`, 2× `NEW GAME`).
|
||
That is a value to author, with a `why` naming Q5 — it is not written yet.
|
||
* **The ring's own animation is unread.** `ptbtneff01`'s two keyframes go
|
||
`rotation_deg` 0 → **360** at t=120 with no second timed keyframe, i.e. a full
|
||
turn. Whether it spins continuously while focused, or turns once and holds, is
|
||
the group-loop question again — answered "groups hold" for build-in animations,
|
||
but a 360° hold and a 0° hold are the same pose, so *this* group cannot be told
|
||
apart by its rest pose. Not guessed; raised below.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P5 — navigation, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
The gate is *"a human clicks through it"*, and the artifact is a walk that
|
||
proves the wiring rather than the intent: `up` (which wraps 01→05), five `down`,
|
||
Ⓐ into `EXTRAS`, `down`, Ⓑ back — landing on the main menu with focus restored
|
||
to `EXTRAS`.
|
||
|
||
```sh
|
||
xvfb-run -a godot --path port -- --menu \
|
||
--script=up,down,down,down,down,down,accept,down,cancel --shots=/tmp/p5
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
Ten PNGs, one per step, each taken after the screen it produced had settled.
|
||
Contact sheet handed over as `share` id `1788002507-ef4468a0a33a`.
|
||
|
||
### The scripted walk goes through the input system, not around it
|
||
|
||
`--script` posts `InputEventAction` through `Input.parse_input_event` and lets
|
||
it arrive at `_unhandled_input` exactly as a d-pad's press would. Calling
|
||
`MenuFlow.move()`/`accept()`/`cancel()` directly would have been shorter and
|
||
would have proved nothing: the thing most likely to be broken is the wiring
|
||
between a press and the cursor, and a direct call is precisely the part that
|
||
skips it. The same reasoning says the settle wait must be real — a shot taken
|
||
before the screen stops moving photographs a fade and calls it a menu.
|
||
|
||
### What is authored here, and what is derived
|
||
|
||
Split deliberately, because P5 is where the two are easiest to blur:
|
||
|
||
| | where | why |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| the ORDER of the items | **derived** — each screen file's `buttons`, filled by the exporter from the button-role elements sorted by resting Y | it is on the disc |
|
||
| where an item goes | **authored** — `authored/flow.json` | HANDOFF Q4 *measured* the destinations; they are not in the file |
|
||
| which item opens focused | **authored** | Q5 measured that it is **not stable boot to boot** |
|
||
| what Ⓑ does | **authored** | Q5, measured — except on the main menu, see below |
|
||
| ⬅➡ do nothing | **authored**, written as an explicit no-op | so that *"the game ignores it"* and *"we never wired it"* are different lines of code |
|
||
|
||
Four of the five main-menu destinations are `goto: null` with a `blocked` note.
|
||
That is **not** an unknown: `DIFFICULTY`, the save-slot list, the lesson list and
|
||
the settings menu were all measured, and they live in archives this export does
|
||
not carry. `blocked` and `none` are kept apart so a later reader does not
|
||
"discover" a gap that was a milestone boundary.
|
||
|
||
`EXTRAS` is the only main-menu destination inside `GP_TITLE`, and therefore the
|
||
only Ⓐ-into-a-submenu this gate can actually walk.
|
||
|
||
### The one navigation rule with nothing behind it
|
||
|
||
Ⓑ on the **main menu** → title. HANDOFF Q5 states it, and `flow.json` marks it
|
||
*authored — likely but UNPROVEN*, because the title also self-returns after
|
||
~8–10 s idle and a single unrecorded observation cannot separate the two. The
|
||
port implements it anyway — a menu with no way out is worse than a menu with a
|
||
plausible one — and says in the file that it did. Asked of the Decoder this
|
||
iteration; see `BLOCKED.md`.
|
||
|
||
Independent corroboration that the main menu is different from its submenu:
|
||
the main menu's footer advertises only `Ⓐ : OK`, while `EXTRAS`' footer
|
||
advertises `Ⓑ : Back`. That is on the disc, in `ptmsg.png` vs `ptmsg2.png`, and
|
||
it is visible in both the port's render and the captures.
|
||
|
||
### A press during a fade is dropped
|
||
|
||
**Authored, and not measured.** Nobody has watched what the game does with a
|
||
button pressed mid-transition. Dropping invents less than queueing does: it
|
||
cannot manufacture a press the game might have discarded. `flow.json` says so
|
||
under `navigation.input_during_transition`.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## `--headless` cannot draw, and the port hung instead of saying so, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
`docs/port/PORT-MISSION.md` and the loop prompt both name `godot-headless` as
|
||
how this project runs unattended. It does not work, and the way it failed was
|
||
the worst available shape.
|
||
|
||
**Measured, not assumed.** Under `--headless` Godot's dummy renderer never emits
|
||
`RenderingServer.frame_post_draw`. Every capture path in `boot.gd` awaits it —
|
||
`--capture` since P1, `--film` since P3, `--shots` as of this milestone — so all
|
||
three blocked forever. Isolated by the difference between two runs:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
godot --headless --path port --quit # prints, exits 0
|
||
godot --headless --path port -- --screen=… --capture=… # no output at all, killed at 40 s
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
The second produces **zero bytes of output** before it is killed, because
|
||
Godot's stdout is block-buffered and never flushes. So the observable behaviour
|
||
of an unattended headless capture was: silence, forever. In a loop, a job that
|
||
waits reads as a job still working — this is the failure mode that costs a whole
|
||
iteration and leaves nothing behind to say what happened.
|
||
|
||
Two changes, and deliberately not one:
|
||
|
||
* `--capture`, `--film` and `--shots` **refuse at startup** under `--headless`,
|
||
naming the flag and printing the `xvfb-run` line that does work. Refusing
|
||
early rather than at the first frame means the run does not die halfway
|
||
through a filmstrip with some frames written.
|
||
* `--script` **no longer waits for a drawn frame when it is not going to
|
||
photograph one.** Navigation is checkable where nothing draws, and that is
|
||
worth keeping: `godot --headless --path port -- --menu --script=…` now walks
|
||
the menus and exits 0 in about four seconds, which is a cheap regression check
|
||
that needs no X server at all.
|
||
|
||
The Xvfb path is unchanged and is what produced the P5 artifact.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Refutation — the focus ring IS drawn rotated, and it is not at 0° in either capture
|
||
|
||
Attempted against the Decoder's `7eeae30` (*"re(ui): the focus ring SPINS, the
|
||
game draws it, and the leaf owns the f record"*), point 2: that in the
|
||
OPTIONS-focused capture the ring's bright head sits in a different angular
|
||
position from the sprite's own, caught mid-spin. **It survives**, and the
|
||
evidence is stronger than what was claimed.
|
||
|
||
Chosen for refutation because it is exactly what PROTOCOL says to aim at: a
|
||
claim the port is about to build on, resting on an estimator (a brightest-region
|
||
centroid) whose own control the Decoder reported as ±19.8°.
|
||
|
||
### The test, and why it needs no absolute registration
|
||
|
||
`live-main-menu.png` has `ptbtn01` focused; `live-main-menu-options-focused.png`
|
||
has `ptbtn04` focused. Both draw **the same sprite**, `ptbtneff01.png` — the
|
||
export confirms the two focus records name the same file. So the two captures
|
||
contain two instances of one 42×46 image, 240 px apart in design space, and the
|
||
question *"is it drawn rotated"* becomes *"are these two crops the same image
|
||
at a different angle"* — which needs no crop offset and no reference to our own
|
||
renderer.
|
||
|
||
Method: sample each ring into a 360-bin **angular luminance profile** over the
|
||
annulus band (r = 9…15 px, bilinear, 0.5 px radial step) and circularly
|
||
cross-correlate. A rotation about the centre shifts that vector and changes
|
||
nothing else.
|
||
|
||
### The instrument was run through two controls before it was believed
|
||
|
||
| control | result |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| rotate a capture's own ring by a known 0/30/90/150/210/270/330° and recover it | **0° error on all seven**, peak corr 1.000 |
|
||
| the same estimator on a ring-free 60×64 patch of the *same* capture | peak corr **0.369** — it does not manufacture a match |
|
||
|
||
### The measurement
|
||
|
||
On one shared centre for all three images, so a centroid difference cannot
|
||
masquerade as a rotation:
|
||
|
||
| pair | best shift | peak corr | corr at 0° |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| capture A vs capture B | **134°** | 0.968 | −0.064 |
|
||
| sprite (unrotated) vs capture A | **76°** | 0.969 | −0.295 |
|
||
| sprite (unrotated) vs capture B | **210°** | 0.948 | −0.181 |
|
||
|
||
210 − 76 = 134: the three measurements are internally consistent, which nothing
|
||
in the method forced them to be. Sweeping the centre by ±2 px moves the A-vs-B
|
||
answer over 117…161° while the peak correlation stays 0.9+ across the middle of
|
||
that range, so the **magnitude is ~134° ± ~15°** and the precision claim stops
|
||
there.
|
||
|
||
Evidence sheet — sprite, capture A, capture B, each cropped at the declared
|
||
`42×46+500+156` / `+500+396` — handed over as `share` id
|
||
`1788002507-afe1ad843789`. The phase difference is obvious by eye; the numbers
|
||
are here so it is not only obvious by eye.
|
||
|
||
### The two things this settles for the port
|
||
|
||
1. **The game draws `rotation_deg` on an element the English boot path shows.**
|
||
This is a second, independent confirmation on a different screen and a
|
||
different element from the `ptloop` sweeps, and it moves HANDOFF **ask 4**
|
||
(*should the port draw rotation*) off "changes nothing at rest" — it changes
|
||
the main menu's focus marker, in every frame.
|
||
|
||
2. **0° is not a pose the running game shows.** `screen_view.gd` currently draws
|
||
the ring at its `rest` pose, which is `rotation_deg 0`, and both captures put
|
||
it at 76° and 210°. So the port's focus marker is **known** to be wrong, not
|
||
suspected — and the comment in `screen_view.gd` now says which two numbers it
|
||
is wrong against.
|
||
|
||
### Registration, as a by-product
|
||
|
||
The ring's annulus centroid lands at (32.94, 36.63) and (33.30, 38.90) in
|
||
windows whose design-space prediction under a **zero crop offset** is
|
||
(33.0, 37.0). Within ~0.4 px on the better-thresholded of the two. That
|
||
corroborates `ORACLE-CAPTURES.md`'s *"1279×675, top-left aligned"* directly, on
|
||
a feature nobody chose for the purpose.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ Do not read the earlier P5-groundwork note *"button text bands land at design
|
||
y + 23"* as a crop offset — it is an offset **within** the button sprite, and
|
||
the two were nearly confused here.
|
||
|
||
### What the port did NOT do about it
|
||
|
||
It did not start spinning the ring. The period is a **guess with two unknowns**
|
||
and both belong to the Decoder:
|
||
|
||
* the keyframes are `t=120, rot 0` then an **untimed** `rot 360`. Under HANDOFF
|
||
Q1's replicated reading (*"`+36` is the time the NEXT pose is reached"*) that
|
||
is one revolution in 120 units = **2.0 s** — but this port's `pose_at`
|
||
implements the *other* reading, and switching it is a change to every screen's
|
||
animation timing, not a P5 change;
|
||
* *"groups hold"* (settled 2026-08-28) predicts the ring stops at 360° = 0°.
|
||
Both captures show it elsewhere. That is either a spin that loops, or two
|
||
captures both taken inside the first two seconds of focus. **The port cannot
|
||
tell those apart**, and a wrong answer here is a visible continuous rotation
|
||
on whichever button the player is sitting on.
|
||
|
||
Filed in `BLOCKED.md` and asked over the message channel. What settles it is two
|
||
frames of one focused button a known time apart.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## P5 end to end — and the title does not say `PRESS Ⓐ`, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
The gate walk above starts on a screen. This is the whole thing, unattended, in
|
||
one run — the sequence PORT-MISSION names as the objective:
|
||
|
||
```sh
|
||
xvfb-run -a godot --path port -- --boot --play \
|
||
--script=accept,down,down,down,down,accept,cancel,cancel --shots=/tmp/e2e
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
screen publisher_logo … settles at t=235 (3.917 s)
|
||
-> developer_logos at 4.70 s
|
||
-> video ADV at 8.60 s
|
||
video ended at 151.91 s
|
||
-> title at 151.91 s
|
||
boot sequence complete after 156.30 s, holding on title
|
||
menu on title
|
||
script[1] accept (A) -> main_menu
|
||
…
|
||
script[6] accept (EXTRAS) -> extras
|
||
script[7] cancel (B) -> main_menu focus restored to ptbtn05
|
||
script[8] cancel (B) -> title
|
||
script complete after 166.76 s on title
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
Publisher wordmark → developer logos → `ADV` → title → Ⓐ → main menu →
|
||
navigate → Ⓐ → `EXTRAS` → Ⓑ (focus restored) → Ⓑ → title. Contact sheet shared.
|
||
|
||
Two smaller things this run found, both fixed here:
|
||
|
||
* the boot step's `why` in `authored/flow.json` still said *"nothing takes the
|
||
title's place until P5 gives it somewhere to go"*. P5 has. Rewritten to say
|
||
what is actually true — `--boot` still **stops** on the title, and `--play`
|
||
**hands the held title over**; the stop is not a bug and the handover is not
|
||
another boot step.
|
||
* an empty focus printed as a line that trailed off, which reads like a value
|
||
went missing rather than like there is none. The title is a screen with no
|
||
`buttons` that still takes Ⓐ, so it prints
|
||
`(none -- this screen has no focusable item)`.
|
||
|
||
Also confirmed on the way: entering a submenu **directly** (`--menu=extras`) and
|
||
pressing Ⓑ enters the parent at its authored initial focus, not at a restored
|
||
one — there is no history to restore, and `MenuFlow.cancel` only claims a
|
||
restored focus when the stack agrees about where it is going.
|
||
|
||
### 🔴 The port's title does not tell the player to press Ⓐ
|
||
|
||
Found by running the objective end to end, which is the only thing that would
|
||
have found it: the boot's last step is `title` (build 4), and **build 4 has no
|
||
`PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON` plate**. P5 has now made Ⓐ the only way off that screen.
|
||
|
||
This is not a guess about the art. Both states are captured off the running
|
||
game and they differ by exactly that plate:
|
||
|
||
| | capture |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| title **without** the plate | `title-builds/live-title-build4-no-plate.png` |
|
||
| title **with** the plate | `title-builds/live-title-press-a.png` |
|
||
|
||
And the plate is already exported — `press_start`, `GP_TITLE` build 2 (HANDOFF
|
||
Q2), sitting in `export/screens/title/` unused by anything.
|
||
|
||
**This is P3's gate, not P5's, and P5 is what exposed it.** Recording rather
|
||
than fixing, for two reasons:
|
||
|
||
1. Which state an idle post-boot title shows — build 4 alone, build 4 with the
|
||
plate over it, or build 4 *then* the plate after a delay — is **behavioural**,
|
||
and the port has no oracle for a sequence. The game demonstrably has both
|
||
states; nothing here says which one follows the intro movie. That is the
|
||
Decoder's.
|
||
2. Showing it would mean **drawing two builds at once**, which this port has
|
||
never done — every mode loads exactly one screen. That is a real change to
|
||
`ScreenView`, not a line in `flow.json`, and it should not be smuggled in
|
||
under a navigation milestone on the strength of "it looks more right".
|
||
|
||
Filed in `BLOCKED.md`. Not blocking: P5's gate is Ⓐ into a submenu and Ⓑ back,
|
||
and both work.
|
||
|
||
## P6 — menu audio, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
The disc's menu sound reaches Godot as Ogg Vorbis: three cues and one music bed.
|
||
Nothing in `port/` has heard of XMA, `sound.pak` or `Static.slb`, and nothing in
|
||
it reassembles anything — `sylpheed_formats::media` does that and the exporter
|
||
converts what it hands back.
|
||
|
||
### The cue offsets moved OUT of the exporter, into `authored/`
|
||
|
||
The previous iteration left `crates/sylpheed-export/src/audio.rs` holding the
|
||
three `Static.slb` offsets as a Rust `const CUES`. That is wrong under MISSION
|
||
§3 and the fix is the first thing this iteration did.
|
||
|
||
Those offsets are **measured**, not decoded. `Static.slb` has no `RIFF`, no seek
|
||
chunk and no container: it is a packed run of whole 2048-byte XMA1 packets, and a
|
||
wave is defined *only* by `(offset, packet_count)`. Both numbers came from the
|
||
running game — Canary with `--xma_param_probe=true` prints a stream's packet
|
||
count and first 32 bytes when it is played, and searching those bytes in the bank
|
||
gives the offset (HANDOFF Q8).
|
||
|
||
A measured value compiled into the exporter is **a measurement wearing the
|
||
costume of a decoded field**. It reads as though the exporter derived it from the
|
||
disc; nobody deletes it when the real answer lands, because nobody can see that
|
||
there is anything to delete. So the table is `authored/audio.json` `se.*`, each
|
||
row carrying its own `why`, and the exporter holds no cue table at all.
|
||
|
||
`crate::video::MOVIES` stays a `const` in the exporter, and the contrast is the
|
||
point: Q9 **decoded** that mapping off the movie manifest on the disc. Same
|
||
shape, different provenance, different home.
|
||
|
||
### `name_match` is a field, and its absence means something
|
||
|
||
Q8 names `SE_UI_CURSOR` for the move cue by **name match against the authors' own
|
||
identifiers** — a plausible guess, not the measurement. For Ⓐ, Q8 is explicit
|
||
that the wave was *not* separated between `SE_UI_DECIDE` and
|
||
`SE_UI_SUB_WIN_OPN`, so no name is claimed at all.
|
||
|
||
`name_match` therefore travels beside every cue in `authored/audio.json` and in
|
||
`manifest.json`, and **an absent one means nobody claimed a name — never that
|
||
the binding is unknown.** The binding is the measured part. Collapsing the two
|
||
would turn "we did not separate two candidates" into "we do not know what this
|
||
sound is", which is a different and much weaker statement than the one the RE
|
||
agent actually made.
|
||
|
||
### The BGM is NOT a choice, and this port spent an iteration believing it was
|
||
|
||
The first draft of `authored/audio.json` picked `BGM_001`, wrote a careful `why`
|
||
explaining that the choice was arbitrary, and was **wrong**.
|
||
|
||
`docs/port/BLOCKED.md` carried the row that caused it: *"not on the disc … the
|
||
port is choosing a track, and that choice is authored."* The menu's music is
|
||
**`BGM_103`**, and it is in HANDOFF at **`9ca1eb5`** — the exact commit that page
|
||
says it was reconciled against. So this was not staleness. **The row was wrong
|
||
when it was written.**
|
||
|
||
What HANDOFF says is a negative *with a bound*, and the bound is the entire
|
||
content of it:
|
||
|
||
> the **tables** cannot say — `SOUNDS`, `FILES` and the bank headers name no
|
||
> screen. `GamePart_Title`'s phase handler `sub_821C5580` carries `li r5, 1103`
|
||
> into a sound call; cue 1103 is `BGM_103`; and `BGM_103.slb`'s two declared
|
||
> waves (3 876 864 / 3 930 112 B) are byte-for-byte the two streams the XMA probe
|
||
> saw decoding at the main menu. Static code, disc census and runtime all agree.
|
||
> **"The port does not have to choose a track."**
|
||
|
||
The failure is worth naming precisely, because "read HANDOFF more carefully" is
|
||
not the lesson — `BLOCKED.md`'s own staleness check passed, twice, and would pass
|
||
again. **A negative summarised without its reach reads as a bigger negative than
|
||
it is.** "The tables cannot say" became "it is not on the disc", and one word of
|
||
scope was the whole answer. A row in `BLOCKED.md` must quote the reach.
|
||
|
||
It also cost a second thing worth recording: the port would have shipped a menu
|
||
playing the wrong music with a confident `why` beside it saying the choice was
|
||
deliberate. That is exactly the shape of error this project's vocabulary exists
|
||
to prevent, produced *by* the machinery meant to prevent it.
|
||
|
||
### The bank name carries `.slb`, and that is how the mistake surfaced
|
||
|
||
`BGM_001` is not in `sound.pak`. `BGM_001.slb` is — `media::read_sound_bank`
|
||
looks up `name_hash(name)` against the TOC, and the TOC hashes the **file name**.
|
||
`Static.slb` worked from the first run only because the RE finding happens to
|
||
write it with its extension.
|
||
|
||
So the wrong track never played: the export failed loudly with *"BGM_001: not
|
||
present in sound.pak"*. That is luck, not design — had the draft picked a name
|
||
that happened to resolve, nothing would have complained. The `why` in
|
||
`authored/audio.json` now records both the correct name and why the short form
|
||
fails.
|
||
|
||
`export_bgm` now distinguishes the two cases it was conflating. A bank that is
|
||
**not in this disc's `sound.pak`** is a missing asset: the manifest takes a
|
||
warning and everything else still exports. Any other failure — a short read, a
|
||
malformed bank — still stops the run, because a partly-read bank produces a file
|
||
that plays.
|
||
|
||
### The two stems are summed. That part is not a choice
|
||
|
||
Q10 also measured that a bank's sub-waves are **two stems of one performance,
|
||
played together** — sample-synchronous, equal duration, on all 32 banks.
|
||
Concatenating them is explicitly wrong.
|
||
|
||
Emitting them as two files would be wrong for a second, independent reason:
|
||
MODDING rule 1 is *one logical asset, one file*, and handing a modder two stems
|
||
to line up by hand is precisely the reassembly the exporter exists to have
|
||
already done. `amix=normalize=0` sums at unity rather than halving, because
|
||
halving is a mix decision nobody made — and because a sum can clip, the peak is
|
||
**measured and reported** rather than silently corrected.
|
||
|
||
### The loop seam is ugly on purpose
|
||
|
||
No loop-point field has been identified. `loop: "restart"` replays from sample 0,
|
||
so a listener hears the track's own fade-out and its trailing silence before the
|
||
music comes back.
|
||
|
||
Trimming to the fade would sound better and would be **worse**. It would invent a
|
||
loop point, and an invented one is indistinguishable from a decoded one a month
|
||
later — which is the failure mode this whole project is organised against. The
|
||
seam stays audible until a loop point is measured or a capture of the real menu
|
||
looping settles it.
|
||
|
||
### When a cue fires — two rules measured, one authored
|
||
|
||
* **Move** fires on a press that *actually moves the cursor*. `MenuFlow.move()`
|
||
already returned whether it did, which is why left/right stay silent by
|
||
construction rather than by a rule written twice (Q5: ⬅➡ do nothing, and Q8:
|
||
they play nothing).
|
||
* **Ⓐ and Ⓑ** fire when the press *does something*, and not when nothing is
|
||
bound. 🟡 **This half is authored and NOT measured** — nobody has watched the
|
||
game take a dead press. Silence invents less: a sound the game does not make is
|
||
a wrong fact you can hear, while a missing one is a gap. `blocked` counts as
|
||
doing something, because those destinations *were* measured off the running
|
||
game and are missing from this export, not from the game.
|
||
* The bed starts when the menu becomes live and **carries across submenus**.
|
||
`play_bed` is idempotent, because music that restarts every time you press Ⓑ is
|
||
the kind of wrong that reads as "the audio works".
|
||
|
||
### `--audio=` records the Master bus, because neither container has a sound card
|
||
|
||
`docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` §2. An `AudioEffectRecord` on the Master bus
|
||
captures the mixed output from inside a headless run with no device at all, and
|
||
that is the only thing that closes the loop the file opens: comparing an exported
|
||
Ogg against the disc proves the **asset** is right and says nothing about whether
|
||
the engine ever reached it.
|
||
|
||
The run prints `AudioServer.get_driver_name()` beside the file it wrote, because
|
||
"recorded under a dummy driver" is a weaker claim than "heard" and the write-up
|
||
has to be able to say which one it is making.
|
||
|
||
The WAV is saved in `_exit_tree` rather than beside each `quit()`. There are
|
||
eight of those, and the one that would get missed is an error path — exactly the
|
||
run whose audio somebody wants to look at.
|
||
|
||
### `check` now refuses silence and clipping
|
||
|
||
`sylpheed-export check` gained an `audio` pass, and two of its rules are content
|
||
checks rather than schema checks. That is deliberate. Silence is *the* audio
|
||
failure that looks like success — a file of the right duration, the right channel
|
||
count and the right size, full of zeroes — and it passes every structural check
|
||
there is. Clipping is the other one, and the BGM can produce it because it is a
|
||
sum at unity gain. The exporter measures both at export time; `check` refuses a
|
||
tree whose peak is ≤ −90 dBFS or ≥ 0 dBFS.
|
||
|
||
Neither is a judgement about whether the audio is the *right* audio. Nothing in
|
||
that binary can know that, and `BLOCKED.md` says which parts are still authored
|
||
guesses.
|
||
|
||
### A bug worth naming: the temp name ate the file extension
|
||
|
||
`run_ffmpeg` wrote to `.back.ogg.partial` — the temp-name-then-rename discipline
|
||
this project uses everywhere, and which `AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` records as
|
||
already having caused a confident wrong number once.
|
||
|
||
ffmpeg picks its muxer **from the output filename**, so that is not a slightly
|
||
uglier temp name; it is a hard failure before a byte is written: *"Unable to
|
||
choose an output format for '.back.ogg.partial'"*. `video.rs` already had the
|
||
right shape (`.ADV.partial.ogv`) and this function was written from scratch
|
||
without looking at it. The extension goes last.
|
||
|
||
### Refutation — the three Q8 cue durations, checked end to end
|
||
|
||
**The claim:** HANDOFF Q8 publishes three cue lengths — move **0.533 s**
|
||
(8 192 B, 4 packets), back **0.344 s** (4 096 B, 2), confirm **1.016 s**
|
||
(12 288 B, 6). P6 is built directly on top of these, which by PROTOCOL's own rule
|
||
makes them the right thing to attack: refutation is cheapest where the other
|
||
agent is most confident, and most valuable where the port is about to build.
|
||
|
||
**Why they looked attackable.** The three do not share a rate. Seconds per
|
||
packet is 0.133, 0.172 and 0.169 — the move cue is 22 % off the other two. If a
|
||
packet were a fixed span of audio, at most one of these numbers could be right.
|
||
|
||
**Why that is not a refutation.** An XMA1 packet is 2 048 bytes of *bitstream*,
|
||
not a fixed span: it carries a variable number of 512-sample frames. At 48 kHz a
|
||
frame is 10.667 ms, and the three durations come to **50.0, 32.3 and 95.3
|
||
frames** — near-integers, which is what a variable-frames-per-packet encoding
|
||
looks like and is not what an arithmetic slip looks like.
|
||
|
||
**The measurement.** The exporter reads `(offset, packet_count)` through
|
||
`media::se_wave_riff`, decodes, and `ffprobe`s the finished Ogg:
|
||
|
||
| cue | Q8 claims | exported file measures |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| move | 0.533 s | **0.533 s** |
|
||
| back | 0.344 s | **0.344 s** |
|
||
| confirm | 1.016 s | **1.016 s** |
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: survives, exactly, at every published digit.** Recorded as a survival
|
||
rather than a pass, because that is what PROTOCOL asks for — a claim that has
|
||
survived an attempt is stronger than one nobody challenged, and the corpus should
|
||
say which it is.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **Reach, stated so nobody over-reads it.** This is not independent of Q8: the
|
||
durations were derived from the same packet counts the exporter feeds in, so what
|
||
it confirms is that reading those `(offset, packets)` through
|
||
`sylpheed_formats::media` yields streams of exactly the claimed length — i.e.
|
||
that the *transcription* into `authored/audio.json` and the assembly path are
|
||
right. It does **not** confirm that these three waves are the sounds the game
|
||
plays on those three events; that is Q8's own measurement, taken by playing them,
|
||
and this port has no oracle to re-take it with.
|
||
|
||
The attempt did find something, just not here: see the BGM section above, where
|
||
the port's *own* `BLOCKED.md` row failed the same kind of check.
|
||
|
||
### The BGM bank has three sub-waves and HANDOFF says it has two
|
||
|
||
`media::sound_bank_riffs("BGM_103.slb")` returns **three**. HANDOFF Q10's census
|
||
says a music bank is *"exactly two waves of identical duration (32/32 banks on
|
||
the disc)"* — and that census is itself a correction, of an earlier reading that
|
||
called `BGM_001` three sub-waves and was refuted with "the 10 KB is the bank
|
||
header".
|
||
|
||
The third comes from `sylpheed-formats/src/slb.rs:380`, `to_xma_riffs`: when a
|
||
bank has a leading headerless packet region ahead of its first `RIFF`, that
|
||
region is emitted as a sub-wave. It exists because the voice path needs it —
|
||
`VOICE_D_453` decoded to 0.14 s without it. `docs/re/REFUTED.md` already records
|
||
the same region as what makes `BGM_106`–`BGM_109` "break the two-wave rule".
|
||
|
||
**The port sums all three and says so in the manifest.** That is not the
|
||
appealing answer — dropping sub-wave 0 would give a file matching the census, and
|
||
it would have been one line. It is the correct one: *which bytes belong together*
|
||
is the question `sylpheed_formats::media` owns, MISSION §2 names re-deriving it
|
||
here as the single easiest thing in this project to get subtly wrong, and "the
|
||
decoder returned something the corpus does not predict" is a finding to report,
|
||
not a number to quietly adjust. Adjusting it would also have destroyed the
|
||
evidence: a corrected export looks exactly like a correct one.
|
||
|
||
So the export ships the decoders' answer, the manifest carries a warning naming
|
||
the contradiction, `BLOCKED.md` has the row, and the Decoder has the pointer.
|
||
Until it comes back, **the menu plays a sum of three things where the census
|
||
predicts two**, and every one of those places says so.
|
||
|
||
### Clipping — and a comment of mine that argued for the thing that clipped
|
||
|
||
The BGM came out at **+1.8 dBFS**. The comment above the code that produced it
|
||
said `amix=normalize=0` sums at unity "because halving is a mix decision nobody
|
||
made".
|
||
|
||
That was wrong in both halves. Unity summing *is* a decision, and it is the one
|
||
that clips. And 1/n is not a taste call: it is the smallest constant that makes
|
||
an n-input sum of unity-scale signals provably clip-free, which is precisely the
|
||
reasoning `video.rs` already carried for its 0.4142-normalised 5.1 downmix — in
|
||
this same repository, written by this same port, and not looked at. It preserves
|
||
the stems' relative balance exactly, which is the only thing about the sum that
|
||
Q10 settles.
|
||
|
||
It is written as an explicit `volume=` rather than left to `amix`'s
|
||
`normalize=1` default, so the coefficient appears in the manifest's command line.
|
||
A default is a decision nobody made and it can move under an ffmpeg upgrade —
|
||
the same argument MISSION §6 makes about the downmix matrix.
|
||
|
||
**The `confirm` cue is a different case and is not "fixed".** It lands at
|
||
+0.18 dBFS, and it is a single wave off the disc with no arithmetic of ours in
|
||
it: the disc masters it near full scale and a lossy decode of a near-full-scale
|
||
signal overshoots by a fraction of a dB. Attenuating it would mean altering a
|
||
game asset to make one of our own numbers smaller. So `check` bounds the two
|
||
kinds differently — a `bgm` peak ≥ 0 dBFS is refused outright, because it is our
|
||
sum; an `se` is refused only above **+1.0 dBFS**.
|
||
|
||
🟡 That +1.0 is a **judgement and not a measurement**, and it is the weakest
|
||
number in P6. Nobody has measured the overshoot distribution across a corpus of
|
||
cues. If a cue ever trips it, the right response is that measurement, not a
|
||
looser bound.
|
||
|
||
## P6 gate — the audio is in the mix, and a null control says which part
|
||
|
||
No container here has a sound card, so "P6 works" cannot be answered by
|
||
listening. `docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` splits the question into three, and
|
||
these are the two that need no device.
|
||
|
||
### 1. The exported files, measured off the finished assets
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
se back -> audio/se/back.ogg (0.344 s, peak -5.7 dBFS)
|
||
se confirm -> audio/se/confirm.ogg (1.016 s, peak +0.2 dBFS)
|
||
se move -> audio/se/move.ogg (0.533 s, peak -1.4 dBFS)
|
||
bgm main_menu -> audio/bgm/main_menu.ogg
|
||
(87.744 s, peak -7.7 dBFS, bank BGM_103.slb, 3 sub-waves)
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
`sylpheed-export check export` passes: 16 screens validate, and every audio entry
|
||
carries a peak and a duration inside its bounds. The three cue durations match
|
||
HANDOFF Q8 at every published digit — see the refutation record above.
|
||
|
||
### 2. The engine, recorded off the Master bus
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
godot --path port -- --menu --script=down,down,accept,cancel --audio=…/p6.wav
|
||
→ recorded 6.037 s of Master bus (driver Dummy)
|
||
peak 0.0 dBFS, RMS −21.1 dBFS
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
**Non-silent is not the claim.** A WAV of the right duration full of the *bed*
|
||
would look exactly like this, and the cues could be missing entirely. So the cue
|
||
was isolated with a **null control**: the same scripted walk with ⬅ in place of ⬇.
|
||
Left/right are measured no-ops (Q5) and fire nothing, so the two runs differ by
|
||
exactly two move cues and nothing else — same screens, same transitions, the same
|
||
Ⓐ and Ⓑ cues in both, the same bed.
|
||
|
||
| | RMS |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| walk with two ⬇ presses | −21.9 dBFS |
|
||
| walk with two ⬅ presses (null) | −22.1 dBFS |
|
||
| **difference** | **−34.6 dBFS** |
|
||
|
||
The difference is not spread over the run. It is **one burst beginning at
|
||
t = 1.10 s and lasting 0.55 s** — two overlapping 0.533 s move cues — with 22 of
|
||
237 windows above −70 dBFS and silence everywhere else, including across the Ⓐ
|
||
and Ⓑ presses, which cancel because both runs make them. That is the cue reaching
|
||
the bus, separated from the music that was playing over it.
|
||
|
||
### The control that proved nothing, kept because it nearly passed
|
||
|
||
The first attempt paired `--script=down,down` against `--script=left,left`. The
|
||
difference was **bit-identical zero**, which reads as "the cues never reached the
|
||
bus" and would have been reported as a bug.
|
||
|
||
It was neither. Both runs recorded **1.115 s** while the first press lands at
|
||
~1.17 s: the control ended before the event it was controlling for. A null result
|
||
from an instrument that was not running is not a null result — PROTOCOL's "run
|
||
your own instrument through a control" applies to the control too.
|
||
|
||
### What this does NOT establish
|
||
|
||
* **That it sounds right.** Everything above is correspondence and separation,
|
||
not judgement. A ten-second human listen still answers something no measurement
|
||
here does.
|
||
* **That the bed is at a sane level against the cues.** 🔴 The Master bus peaks at
|
||
**0.0 dBFS** in the four-step run — the `confirm` cue is +0.2 dBFS on its own,
|
||
so any music under it puts the mix on the ceiling. Per-file levels are the
|
||
disc's and are fine; the **runtime** mix has no headroom. The port has not set a
|
||
bus balance, because nothing measures one and an invented balance is the same
|
||
class of mistake as an invented loop point. Recorded here rather than fixed
|
||
quietly.
|
||
* **That "Dummy driver" means heard.** It does not, and the run prints the driver
|
||
name so a write-up cannot forget to say so.
|
||
|
||
### One bug, in two dialects, both about a temp filename
|
||
|
||
The temp-name-then-rename discipline this project uses everywhere broke twice in
|
||
this milestone, in two different tools, for the same underlying reason: **tools
|
||
dispatch on the extension, so a temp name must preserve it.**
|
||
|
||
* `run_ffmpeg` wrote `.back.ogg.partial` → *"Unable to choose an output format"*,
|
||
a hard failure before a byte was written.
|
||
* `boot.gd` wrote `p6.wav.part` → `save_to_wav` **appends** `.wav` when the path
|
||
does not end in it, producing `p6.wav.part.wav`; the rename then failed to find
|
||
its source, its return value was not checked, and the run printed a success
|
||
line naming a file that did not exist.
|
||
|
||
The second is the more dangerous shape, and it is the one this project has
|
||
already warned itself about: a confident line of output pointing at nothing. The
|
||
rename's return is now checked and the failure is loud.
|
||
|
||
## P3, reopened — the boot title was missing the `PRESS Ⓐ` plate, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
P3 passed its gate with a boot that ended on build 4 alone. `BLOCKED.md` carried
|
||
that as 🔴 from the start: both states were captured, so the art was never the
|
||
question — the *sequence* was, and it is behavioural, so the port had no oracle
|
||
for it.
|
||
|
||
It is answered. `docs/re/title-plate-delay-measured.md`
|
||
(`auto/no-disc-and-menu-captures` at `fb536df`, **not on `main`** at the time of
|
||
writing) measures two independent boots: the title presents **without** the
|
||
plate, and the plate arrives **2.13 s** later, the two runs agreeing to 6 ms.
|
||
|
||
### Two builds at once, as two `ScreenView`s
|
||
|
||
`ScreenView` draws one screen. The obvious change was to teach it about a
|
||
subordinate overlay screen; the change made was to put a **second `ScreenView`
|
||
in the same `SubViewport`**, after the first.
|
||
|
||
That is what "two builds at once" actually is. Each build has its own timeline,
|
||
its own textures and its own hold — the plate's group runs independently of the
|
||
title's, which is the entire content of the finding — and Node2D siblings already
|
||
paint in tree order. The alternative would have put an `if overlay` in every
|
||
method that walks elements, and would have expressed the same information less
|
||
directly. The export's `paint_order` still means what it always meant: an
|
||
ordering *within* a build.
|
||
|
||
### The delay is timed from where build 4 stops animating
|
||
|
||
Not from where the title first appears. This is the finding rather than a detail:
|
||
measured from first-draw the two oracle runs differ by **0.48 s**, because the
|
||
build-in itself ran 1.64 s and 2.13 s and the emulator's frame pacing during an
|
||
animation is not the game's clock. Measured from settle they differ by 6 ms.
|
||
|
||
So `_boot_done` — the moment the sequencer already had for "this screen has
|
||
reached its hold" — is the landmark, and the overlay is due `after_settle_seconds`
|
||
later. A number taken from the wrong instant here looks exactly like a
|
||
measurement.
|
||
|
||
### The overlay is attached to the BOOT STEP, not to the `title` screen
|
||
|
||
What was measured is the boot title. Whether the plate is there when the title is
|
||
reached *again* — by Ⓑ from the main menu, or after the attract movie — is not
|
||
measured, and hanging the overlay on the screen would quietly claim that it is.
|
||
So it lives on the boot step in `authored/flow.json`, and `_drop_overlay` takes
|
||
it away with the screen it belongs to. `BLOCKED.md` carries the gap.
|
||
|
||
### Refutation — the RE agent's instruction contradicts the RE agent's measurement
|
||
|
||
**The claim under test**, quoted from the finding's *"What the port should
|
||
author"*: draw build 4, *"when build 4 has settled, wait **2.13 s**, composite
|
||
build 2 over it"*.
|
||
|
||
**It does not reproduce the measurement it came from**, and the gap is 3.97 s.
|
||
Build 2 is not a static plate: it has a group, and this port plays groups.
|
||
`press_start` has one element, `ptbtn00`, and its `fade_argb` reads
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
t=214 0x00ffffff pos (383, 560) invisible
|
||
t=236 0x00ffffff pos (383, 550) still invisible, having slid 10 px up
|
||
t=238 0xffffffff full alpha
|
||
t=244 0xffffffff holds
|
||
— 0x00ffffff the exit, untimed
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
At the measured 60 units/s that is **3.967 s** from the group's start to full
|
||
alpha. Compose the instruction with the group and the plate is first *visible* at
|
||
settle + 2.13 + 3.97 = **settle + 6.10 s**. What was measured — the glyph counter
|
||
leaving its no-plate value of 154 — is the plate becoming visible at **settle +
|
||
2.13 s**.
|
||
|
||
Neither obvious reconciliation works:
|
||
|
||
| reading | plate visible at | measured |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| both groups start together | 3.97 s (build 4 settles at **4.350 s**) — i.e. 0.38 s *before* settle | settle + 2.13 s |
|
||
| build 2's group starts at settle | settle + 3.97 s | settle + 2.13 s |
|
||
| build 2's group starts at settle + 2.13 s (the instruction) | settle + 6.10 s | settle + 2.13 s |
|
||
|
||
To land on the measurement, build 2's group has to start **2.51 s** after build
|
||
4's, which is not a landmark of anything.
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: the instruction is refuted as written; the measurement is untouched.**
|
||
The measurement is an observation of the running game and this port has no
|
||
standing to doubt it. What is refuted is the step that turns it into an
|
||
authoring rule, and that step is an interpretation.
|
||
|
||
**So the port ships the instruction, not its own arithmetic**, prints the
|
||
discrepancy on every boot, and files the row. This is the same call as the BGM
|
||
sub-waves and for the same reason: reconciling two of the RE agent's numbers is
|
||
a decoding question, and a port that quietly picks the one that looks right
|
||
destroys the evidence — a corrected boot looks exactly like a correct one.
|
||
|
||
The first thing to check is about the instrument rather than the game: is *"title
|
||
settled"*, the glyph counter first reading 154, the same instant as the port's
|
||
last-element settle (t=261, 4.350 s into the group)? If that landmark is earlier,
|
||
the gap closes with nothing else moving.
|
||
|
||
### Refuting the port's own claim: things in this export DO pulse
|
||
|
||
`BLOCKED.md` has carried this since P2, under the port's own raised question
|
||
about whether groups loop:
|
||
|
||
> no element's alpha reverses direction anywhere in this export, so nothing
|
||
> pulses, which removes the obvious reason to expect a loop without disproving
|
||
> one.
|
||
|
||
**`ptbtn00` reverses.** `0x00` → `0xff` → `0x00`, in the table above, in the
|
||
export, the whole time. The claim was never checked against `press_start`; it was
|
||
checked against the screens P2 happened to be animating. The RE agent has now
|
||
measured the running game pulsing this exact element at a mean 2.24 s.
|
||
|
||
So the reason to expect a loop is back — and the port still does not draw one,
|
||
because **no reading of this group produces 2.24 s**: the whole group is 268
|
||
units = 4.47 s, and from its first keyframe 54 units = 0.90 s. The plate is drawn
|
||
arriving and then holding at its settle (t=238, alpha `0xff`), which is what
|
||
every other screen does and what the static oracle capture
|
||
`live-title-press-a.png` shows. Which instant a repeat restarts from is filed,
|
||
not guessed.
|
||
|
||
### `--boot --capture=` — one frame instead of six hundred
|
||
|
||
The boot had no artifact of its own except `--film`, a PNG every 0.25 s for the
|
||
whole 156 s run, to answer one question: is the plate on top of the title at the
|
||
end. `--capture` was a `--screen`-only flag taken in `_ready`, which for a boot
|
||
run is 150 s too early. It is now deferred to the end of the sequence when
|
||
`--boot` is given.
|
||
|
||
### P3 gate — the boot ends on two builds
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
godot --path port -- --boot --capture=…/p3-plate.png
|
||
→ boot sequence complete after 155.86 s, holding on title
|
||
overlay press_start due at 157.99 s (+2.13 s after settle)
|
||
overlay press_start raised at 158.00 s, 1 element(s), settles at t=238
|
||
⚠ plate raised at settle+2.13 s but its own group reaches full alpha 3.97 s
|
||
later, so it is first VISIBLE at settle+6.10 s -- the measurement is
|
||
settle+2.13 s.
|
||
boot ends on title + press_start at 161.99 s
|
||
drew 16: ptbase2, ptloop01, …, ptcopyright
|
||
overlay press_start at t = 261.00 units, drew 1: ptbtn00
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
The PNG shows the title logo with **`PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON`** under it — build 4 and
|
||
build 2 in one frame, which this port had never drawn.
|
||
|
||
Two things the run made obvious and that are now fixed:
|
||
|
||
* **The capture reported only the base build's elements.** The first composited
|
||
capture printed `drew 16` and no mention of the plate, which reads as though
|
||
the overlay had not drawn at all. The overlay gets its own line; folding its
|
||
elements into the first list would have reported a screen that does not exist.
|
||
* **`--screen=<a> --overlay=<b>`** raises the same composite immediately, by the
|
||
same code path, with no delay. It exists because the only other way to see two
|
||
builds was a 156 s boot of which 137 s is the intro movie — and under Xvfb's
|
||
software Theora decode that is several minutes to answer "is the plate on top
|
||
of the title". It applies **no** delay: the delay is a measurement and lives in
|
||
`authored/flow.json`. The boot-mode narration is suppressed there, because a
|
||
log line that describes a sequence it is not running is worse than no log line.
|
||
|
||
## P5 — the focus ring spins, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
The ring was drawn at 0° and the file said so: *"THIS IS KNOWN TO BE WRONG, and
|
||
is drawn anyway because the right answer is a guess."* What was missing was the
|
||
**period**, and it is now measured — `docs/re/focus-ring-spin-measured.md`
|
||
(`auto/no-disc-and-menu-captures` at `4fa3099`): a continuous spin, from eight
|
||
evenly spaced autocorrelation peaks over nine revolutions, **with no angle
|
||
estimated anywhere** — both angle estimators failed their own controls and were
|
||
not used.
|
||
|
||
### The period comes off the disc; the RE agent supplied only that it repeats
|
||
|
||
`ptbtneff01` declares two keyframes that differ in **nothing but**
|
||
`rotation_deg`, 0 → 360, the first timed at `t = 120` and the second untimed.
|
||
The port turns once per **120 units**. Nothing is authored: the number is on the
|
||
disc, and what the measurement adds is that the turn **repeats** rather than
|
||
stopping at 360 = 0, which "groups hold" could not distinguish because those are
|
||
the same pose.
|
||
|
||
`ScreenView.spin_period_units` is the rule, and it is structural and narrow:
|
||
exactly two keyframes, differing only in rotation, by a full 360, first timed and
|
||
second untimed. **Disc-wide check over this export: 16 of 212 elements match, and
|
||
all 16 are focus rings** — `ptbtneff01` on the five main-menu buttons and
|
||
`ptbtneff02` on the three `EXTRAS` buttons, in both locales, every one declaring
|
||
`t = 120`. Zero false positives.
|
||
|
||
That check is the point rather than a formality. The measurement was taken on
|
||
**one** button of **one** screen; a rule that also caught something else would be
|
||
extrapolating it to elements nobody watched.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ It is a rule about **shape**, not a decoded field. Nothing on the disc says
|
||
"this loops". The day a loop flag is decoded, this goes.
|
||
|
||
### Verified on the port's own render, with the RE agent's own control
|
||
|
||
Captures at `--time=` 2.0 … 4.0 s on the settled main menu, `ptbtn01` focused:
|
||
|
||
| | |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| t=2.0 vs t=4.0 (one full period apart), **whole frame** | **0.0000 / 255** — bit-identical |
|
||
| t=2.5, 3.0, 3.5 against t=2.0, inside the ring's box | 3.60, 3.71, 3.58 / 255 |
|
||
| sum of box luminance across **eight** phases | spread **0.027 %** of the mean |
|
||
|
||
The last row is deliberately the RE agent's own observable: they separated
|
||
rotation from a brightness pulse by showing total annulus brightness is conserved
|
||
while per-bin brightness moves. The port's render conserves it to 0.027 % (theirs
|
||
was 0.4 % over 16 s, with capture noise in it). A filmstrip of the four
|
||
quarter-period phases shows the bright head at top, right, bottom, left.
|
||
|
||
### Two things it does not settle
|
||
|
||
* **Direction.** The port turns 0° → +360°, the sign the disc declares. No signed
|
||
angle was ever measured — the estimator that would have given one failed its
|
||
control and was not used.
|
||
* **Phase across a focus change.** The port drives the ring off the **screen**
|
||
clock, so moving the cursor does not restart the turn. The alternative — the
|
||
record's group restarting when the record is instantiated — is the stronger
|
||
claim, and the oracle run held focus on one button throughout, so nothing
|
||
separates them. Two frames straddling a focus change would.
|
||
|
||
## P3, corrected — the plate needs no authored delay at all, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
Last iteration the port refuted the RE agent's authoring instruction (*"when
|
||
build 4 has settled, wait 2.13 s, composite build 2"*) with arithmetic off the
|
||
disc, shipped the instruction anyway rather than pick between two of their
|
||
numbers, and printed the discrepancy on every boot.
|
||
|
||
**The refutation held, and the answer that came back is better than either option
|
||
the port offered: author nothing.** `5b0a6e6`.
|
||
|
||
### The premise that failed was the port's, and it will bite again
|
||
|
||
> 🔴 **`rest.t` is not when a screen settles.** It is the last *hold* keyframe
|
||
> before the exit.
|
||
|
||
Checked here rather than taken on trust. `title`'s `ptlogo1`:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
t=26 (-116,-7) 150% a=0x00 the pre-roll
|
||
t=42 (179,186) 101% a=0xe0 it has arrived
|
||
t=251 (184,193) 100% a=0xff 5 px and 31 alpha steps later, 3.5 s on
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
It **stops moving at t=42** and then creeps for 209 units. `rest.t = 251` is the
|
||
end of that creep, not the arrival. The title's visible build-in is over at
|
||
**`t = 118`**, where `pteff01`, `pteff02` and `ptlogoall_eff` finish together.
|
||
|
||
Every reconciliation the port computed last iteration was wrong by exactly that
|
||
error: reading `rest.t` put build 4's arrival at 4.350 s instead of 1.967 s, and
|
||
the "2.51 s, which is not a landmark of anything" that looked so damning is
|
||
`(4.350 − 1.967) + 0.13` — the error itself, wearing a decimal point.
|
||
|
||
### One clock, and the interval is declared
|
||
|
||
| | units |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| build 4's last build-in ramp | `t = 118` |
|
||
| `ptbtn00` reaches `a = 255` | `t = 238` |
|
||
| **difference** | **120 units = 2.000 s** |
|
||
|
||
Measured: **2.138 s** and **2.132 s**. The 6.7 % is presentation rate — 120 units
|
||
in 2.135 s is 56.2 units/s, the emulator running 28.1 fps against a nominal 30,
|
||
and the corpus had independently measured the idle title at 28.5 fps *before*
|
||
these runs.
|
||
|
||
So `authored/flow.json` carries `"clock": "shared"` and **no delay**, `boot.gd`
|
||
raises the overlay when the step's screen loads rather than at its settle, and
|
||
`overlay.time_units = view.time_units` — assigned, not accumulated, because two
|
||
independently advanced clocks drift by a frame here and there and the whole
|
||
content of the finding is that 120 units is a fixed interval on one timeline.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **The general hazard, stated by the RE agent and worth repeating where the
|
||
port will read it: discount a wall-clock number off that oracle by ~6 %.** It is
|
||
Canary's presentation rate baked into whatever it measures. A port at a true
|
||
30 Hz that authored 2.13 s would be visibly late.
|
||
|
||
### Refutation — two of the RE agent's numbers for the same 120 units disagree by 2 %
|
||
|
||
Both findings measure the same declared quantity: **120 keyframe units of wall
|
||
clock, during a static hold, in Xenia Canary.**
|
||
|
||
| | | implied presentation |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| plate: settle → plate, two runs | 2.138, 2.132 s → mean **2.135 s** | 28.10 fps |
|
||
| ring: one revolution, seven spacings | 2.18 2.16 2.18 2.16 2.16 2.20 2.20 → mean **2.177 s** | 27.56 fps |
|
||
| **disagreement** | **0.042 s = 1.97 %** | |
|
||
|
||
That is **seven times** the plate finding's own run-to-run agreement of 6 ms, and
|
||
it lands on the argument that finding uses to justify trusting itself: *"the
|
||
build-in is where frames are dropped; the static hold is not. A model in which
|
||
the game's own timing varied would have to move both."* Two static-hold
|
||
measurements are exactly what should agree under that model.
|
||
|
||
A second, smaller arithmetic slip in the same place: the ring page reconciles
|
||
2.177 s against a band of "27.6–28.8 fps", saying the measurement *"sits at the
|
||
top of that band"*. It does not sit in it. 60 rendered frames at 27.6 fps is
|
||
2.1739 s; the mean needs **27.56 fps** and the two slowest spacings (2.20 s)
|
||
need **27.27 fps**. Four of the seven spacings are above the band's top.
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: the containment claim is refuted; the spin, the period and the
|
||
reconciliation are untouched.** Either the presentation rate genuinely differed
|
||
between the two sessions — which the plate page's own corroboration argues
|
||
against for static holds — or the ring's revolution is not exactly 120 units.
|
||
The corpus should say which, because they are the same claim measured twice.
|
||
|
||
🟢 **Nothing in the port moves either way.** `spin_period_units` uses the
|
||
declared 120 units at 60 units/s = **2.000 s of port time**, which is the
|
||
true-30 Hz value both readings agree the disc means. This is a corpus
|
||
consistency problem, not a port one — which is why it is filed rather than
|
||
worked around.
|
||
|
||
### The corrected boot ended one build too early, and the capture showed it
|
||
|
||
Moving the plate onto the shared clock also moved the boot's exit, and the first
|
||
capture taken afterwards was **visibly darker** than the one before it. The cause
|
||
is `pteff00`, the title's black fade quad: it ramps `0xff000000` → `0x00000000`
|
||
over t=16…261, so at t=243 — where the run was quitting, `overlay.settle_time()`
|
||
after the overlay was raised — the frame is still ~7 % black.
|
||
|
||
The plate arrives at t=238; **build 4 is not finished until t=261**. The boot now
|
||
ends at the later of the two, and says which in the log:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
-> title at 145.79 s
|
||
overlay press_start raised at 145.79 s, 1 element(s), settles at t=238
|
||
boot ends at 150.14 s, once both builds have arrived (t=261)
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
Worth recording because of how it presented: nothing failed, no warning was
|
||
printed, and the only symptom was a frame slightly darker than the previous
|
||
run's. A gate artifact that silently drifts is the failure mode this project
|
||
keeps meeting — and it was caught only because there was a previous capture to
|
||
compare against.
|
||
|
||
## P7 — the new-game intro, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
`S00A.wmv` has been in `export/video/` since P4 (MISSION §6 put both movies in
|
||
scope at once). What P7 needed was for something to *play* it and for the run to
|
||
end somewhere defined.
|
||
|
||
### The port skips two measured screens, and says so on screen
|
||
|
||
The real chain is **`NEW GAME` → `DIFFICULTY` → `SELECT DATA` → Ⓐ on a save slot
|
||
→ ~4.5 s → `S00A`** (HANDOFF Q4 measured the screens, Q9 decoded the movie and
|
||
then measured its onset off the running game at 0.96–1.000 with a strictly
|
||
monotone playhead over 25 consecutive 0.5 s samples).
|
||
|
||
`DIFFICULTY` and `SELECT DATA` are measured destinations that are **not
|
||
`GP_TITLE` builds**, so no screen file exists to go to. The port therefore jumps
|
||
from `NEW GAME` to the one thing in that chain it has.
|
||
|
||
That is a gap, not a sequence, and the whole design here is about not letting it
|
||
read as one:
|
||
|
||
* `MenuFlow.accept` returns a **new kind**, `video`, rather than folding this
|
||
into `blocked`. The caller has to announce the skip, and a distinct kind is
|
||
what forces it to.
|
||
* The runtime prints it every time:
|
||
`(NEW GAME) -> the real chain is DIFFICULTY -> SELECT DATA, then the movie.
|
||
Neither screen is in this export.`
|
||
* `authored/flow.json` carries `skipped_chain` as **data**, so the names of what
|
||
is missing live beside the decision rather than inside a GDScript string.
|
||
|
||
A port that quietly jumped from `NEW GAME` to the intro would be showing a
|
||
sequence the game does not have, with nothing on screen saying so. That is the
|
||
exact failure this project keeps meeting from the other direction.
|
||
|
||
### What happens after the movie is authored, and had to be
|
||
|
||
The game goes into **mission 1**. Gameplay is out of scope (PORT-MISSION §7), so
|
||
"returns to a defined state" is a decision, and P7's gate says as much. The port
|
||
returns to the **title**: the boot's own end state, so a run that finishes the
|
||
intro lands somewhere a player can start again from. Nothing measured says the
|
||
game does this, and `after_video.kind` is `"authored"`.
|
||
|
||
### The 4.5 s gap is left empty on purpose
|
||
|
||
Q9 measures the movie starting ~4.5 s after Ⓐ on the save slot. What is on screen
|
||
for those 4.5 s was never observed — the run that would have shown it hit the
|
||
documented `sub_823070B0` cache crash after `SELECT DATA`.
|
||
|
||
`GP_TITLE` **does** carry a loading screen (below), and 4.5 s is about the right
|
||
shape for one. That is precisely why it is in `BLOCKED.md` and not in
|
||
`flow.json`: a plausible filler that nobody watched is the kind of thing that is
|
||
indistinguishable from a measurement a month later.
|
||
|
||
### A script timeout that would have failed every movie
|
||
|
||
`--script`'s per-step timeout is 20 s, to stop an unattended run waiting forever
|
||
on a screen that never settles. `S00A` is **93.9 s**, so the first scripted
|
||
new-game run would have been killed at step 1 and reported as "never settled".
|
||
|
||
Raising the constant would have been wrong in the other direction: a movie stuck
|
||
at frame 0 would then hang the job, and a job that waits is worse than a job that
|
||
fails, because it does not look like a failure.
|
||
|
||
So the test is **liveness, not duration**: while `get_stream_position()`
|
||
advances, the deadline moves with it; a stalled movie still trips the same 20 s.
|
||
|
||
### Found while looking: `GP_TITLE`'s four unnamed builds are LOADING screens
|
||
|
||
`build_00`, `build_01`, `build_12`, `build_15` have never had names. Every
|
||
element in all four is `pgloading_*` — `pgloading_processing.png`,
|
||
`pgloading_circle1`, `pgloading_delta`, `pgloading_ring` — and `LOADING` is one
|
||
of the three screen names the RE agent read out of the title part's state
|
||
function.
|
||
|
||
Two variants: 0/1 carry 7 elements, 12/15 carry 10.
|
||
|
||
**They are not renamed here.** The archive's own pairing (adjacent for 2/3, `+3`
|
||
for 4…9 and for 10/13, 11/14) suggests 0 is 1's twin and 12 is 15's, but which
|
||
member of each pair is which **locale** is an inference, and a name is exactly
|
||
the kind of thing that stops being questioned once written. Handed to the RE
|
||
agent, who can answer it from a capture in one look. `BLOCKED.md` has the row.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **And one of them is a second casualty of the `rest.t` problem.**
|
||
`pgloading_eff00.prm` on entries 12/15 is a full-screen black quad whose group
|
||
runs `0xff000000` at t=38 → `0xff000000` at t=48 → `0x00000000` untimed: black,
|
||
held, *then* clear. Its `rest.t` is **38**, where it is fully opaque. A port that
|
||
draws that screen at its declared rest draws **a black rectangle over the entire
|
||
loading screen**. The title's case only dimmed a frame; this one hides
|
||
everything. Filed with the `settle_time()` row it belongs to.
|
||
|
||
### Refutation — attempted on the fade-quad census; it survives, with a caveat
|
||
|
||
**The claim** (HANDOFF, on transitions): *"in `GP_TITLE` exactly the six screen
|
||
builds carry it while the six overlays do not"*, where "it" is the full-screen
|
||
black `.prm` quad *whose keyframe group is the transition*.
|
||
|
||
**The test**, over the whole export: count builds carrying a full-screen
|
||
primitive with black in its keyframes.
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
16 builds exported; 12 carry one.
|
||
Of the 12 `is_build` bundles (excluding the 4 authored splashes): 8 carry, 4 do not.
|
||
carry: title, title_jp, main_menu, main_menu_jp, extras, extras_jp,
|
||
build_12, build_15
|
||
do not: press_start, press_start_jp, build_00, build_01
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
8 and 4, not 6 and 6. But the two extras are `build_12` / `build_15`, and their
|
||
quad is a **different shape**:
|
||
|
||
| | transition quad (`pteff00.prm`, title) | loading quad (`pgloading_eff00.prm`) |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| | `0xff000000` t=16 | `0xff000000` t=38 |
|
||
| | `0x00000000` t=261 | `0xff000000` t=48 |
|
||
| | `0xff000000` untimed | `0x00000000` untimed |
|
||
| shape | black → clear → **black** | black → held → **clear** |
|
||
|
||
The transition quad returns to black on exit; the loading quad does not. Read
|
||
strictly — the quad *whose group is the transition* — the claim holds.
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: survives.** The refinement is worth recording anyway, because the
|
||
naive test over-counts by two and somebody will run the naive test. There are
|
||
**two kinds** of full-screen black `.prm` in `GP_TITLE`, and only one of them is
|
||
a transition.
|
||
|
||
## P7 gate
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
godot --path port -- --menu --script=accept --audio=…/p7.wav
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
menu on main_menu, focus ptbtn01
|
||
script[1] accept
|
||
(NEW GAME) -> the real chain is DIFFICULTY -> SELECT DATA, then the movie.
|
||
Neither screen is in this export.
|
||
-> video S00A at 1.18 s (/work/export/video/S00A.ogv)
|
||
video ended at 94.93 s
|
||
-> title (authored: authored)
|
||
menu on title, focus (none -- this screen has no focusable item)
|
||
script complete after 99.28 s on title
|
||
recorded 98.453 s of Master bus (driver Dummy)
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
The movie ran **93.75 s** against a declared 93.9 s, the run ended on the title,
|
||
and the Master bus recorded 98.453 s: `pcm_s16le`, 44.1 kHz stereo, RMS
|
||
**−22.2 dBFS**.
|
||
|
||
**What this does not show, stated because it would be easy to imply otherwise:**
|
||
the recording contains the menu bed *and* the movie together, and this run did
|
||
**not** separate them. So it establishes that the engine reached an output for
|
||
98 s of a run whose middle 94 s was a movie — not that `S00A`'s own audio track
|
||
is in the mix. Separating them wants the P6 null-control method (a paired run
|
||
that differs only in the movie), and that is not done here.
|
||
|
||
🔴 **Peak 0.0 dBFS again.** The same runtime-headroom problem P6 filed: per-file
|
||
levels are the disc's and are fine, the Master bus has no headroom, and the port
|
||
has set no bus balance because nothing measures one.
|
||
|
||
### One more file read while it was being written
|
||
|
||
`ls` reported the recording as **3 702 828 B**; `ffprobe` on the finished file
|
||
reports **17 367 084 B / 98.452608 s** — a factor of 4.7. `ffprobe` is right and
|
||
the `ls` caught it mid-flight.
|
||
|
||
`AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` opens by naming this failure and the port has had the
|
||
temp-name-then-rename discipline since P6, which is what makes it worth writing
|
||
down rather than shrugging off: **the discipline protects a reader who opens the
|
||
path, and it does not protect a reader who stats it at the wrong moment.** Size
|
||
on disk is not a measurement of a file somebody else is still writing. Ask the
|
||
decoder, not the directory entry.
|
||
|
||
## Modding — rule 4 was never implemented, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
`docs/port/MODDING.md` is explicit that modding is *"a design constraint on the
|
||
exporter today — not a milestone to add later"*, and its rule 4 is base-and-
|
||
overrides: a mod replaces a file by **shadowing its path**, so a modder edits
|
||
nothing under the derived tree and re-exporting is always safe.
|
||
|
||
**Nothing read `data/mods/` at all.** The directory has existed since the
|
||
monorepo merge with a `.gitkeep` in it and no code path anywhere — exporter or
|
||
runtime — that looked at it. Eight milestones shipped past that.
|
||
|
||
### One resolver, and every read goes through it
|
||
|
||
`ExportTree.resolve(rel)` returns the mod tree's copy when one exists and the
|
||
derived tree's otherwise. `read_json`, `texture`, `video` and `MenuAudio` all
|
||
call it, so a mod can replace **a screen's JSON, a sprite, a cue, the music bed
|
||
or a movie** — every asset kind the port reads.
|
||
|
||
`MenuAudio` was reading `tree.root.path_join(...)` directly and had to be
|
||
changed. Left alone it would have made audio the one asset kind a mod could not
|
||
touch, for no reason a modder could have guessed — which is the failure mode
|
||
rule 4 exists to prevent.
|
||
|
||
There is deliberately no manifest of what a mod contains and no registration
|
||
step: **the path is the registration**, which is the whole of the rule.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **One tree, not a stack.** Several mods layering over each other needs a load
|
||
order, and a load order needs a rule nobody has asked for. Said out loud in
|
||
`data/mods/README.md` rather than answered.
|
||
|
||
### A modded run must not look like an unmodded one
|
||
|
||
Every shadowed file is printed the first time it is read:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
mod: sprites/title/main_menu/ptbtn01.png <- /work/data/mods/sprites/…/ptbtn01.png
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
MODDING says *"did I break it?"* is answered by disabling a mod. That is a fine
|
||
last resort and a poor only resort, so the log names the replacement instead.
|
||
|
||
**The first version of this got it wrong in an instructive way**: it printed a
|
||
summary in `_ready`, before a single asset had been read, and so always said
|
||
`(nothing shadowed yet)`. A report structurally incapable of reporting anything
|
||
is worse than no report, because it looks like an answer. It now announces each
|
||
shadow at the moment it happens.
|
||
|
||
### Gate
|
||
|
||
A synthetic 203×43 magenta PNG — nothing disc-derived — dropped at
|
||
`data/mods/sprites/title/main_menu/ptbtn01.png`:
|
||
|
||
| | |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| pixels changed between the two renders | **8 501** of 921 600 (0.92 %) |
|
||
| bounding box of the change | x 542…744, y 162…204 — **203×43**, the sprite's own size |
|
||
| `sylpheed-export check export` afterwards | 16 screens still validate |
|
||
|
||
The changed region is exactly the sprite and nothing else moved.
|
||
|
||
### `data/mods/` was not gitignored, and that is a hole in a hard rule
|
||
|
||
*"Never commit game assets"* has been enforced on `export/` and `data/base/`
|
||
since P0. But **a mod is usually an edited game asset**, and `data/mods/` was
|
||
fully tracked — so the one directory a user is invited to put modified sprites in
|
||
was the one directory git would happily take them from.
|
||
|
||
`.gitignore` now excludes everything under it except the README.
|
||
|
||
### The naming split is not mine to resolve
|
||
|
||
`MODDING.md` describes the tree as `data/base/`; `PORT-MISSION.md` §3, the
|
||
exporter, `ExportTree` and `.gitignore` all say `export/`. Both are mission
|
||
files, and PROTOCOL is clear that **only the human changes a mission**, so this
|
||
is raised rather than picked. `.gitignore` has ignored both names on purpose
|
||
since P0.
|
||
|
||
It matters here for one concrete reason: MODDING's layout has `base/` and `mods/`
|
||
as **siblings**, and today they are not — the tree is `export/` at the repo root
|
||
while mods are `data/mods/`. The resolver takes `SYLPHEED_MODS` or defaults to
|
||
`data/mods/`, which is what exists; if the tree is ever renamed to `data/base/`
|
||
the sibling rule becomes natural and that default can go.
|
||
|
||
## Refutation — the paint-order key, and the reach of its tie-break
|
||
|
||
**The claim** (HANDOFF Q3): paint order is *"a `u16` layer key at `+0x0A`,
|
||
**decoded**"*, with the tie-break filed 🟡 as *"eight candidates refuted; costs
|
||
one element's blend on one screen"*.
|
||
|
||
**First pass: 2 of 16 screens did not match** a stable sort by layer key — both
|
||
loading screens, `build_12` and `build_15`.
|
||
|
||
**That was my test, not the claim.** `pgloading_eff00.prm` carries **no layer key
|
||
at all** — `layer: null`, `layer_source: "none"`: it is a primitive with no
|
||
sprite header, and the exporter's implied-name fallback produces nothing either.
|
||
My sort put a keyless element first; the decoders put it **last**.
|
||
|
||
Completing the rule as *"stable sort by layer key, elements with no key last"*
|
||
gives **16 of 16**. And last is right: `pgloading_eff00` is the full-screen black
|
||
quad, and HANDOFF's own sentence is that the fade quad paints last.
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: survives, with the rule completed.** Worth recording because the
|
||
published statement does not say where a keyless element goes, and there is at
|
||
least one in the archive.
|
||
|
||
🟡 **But the tie-break's reach looks understated.** Census over this export:
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
elements sharing a layer key with another element: 105, across 12 of 16 screens
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
HANDOFF characterises the cost as *"one element's blend on one screen"*. 105
|
||
elements on 12 screens is a much larger surface than that. Most of those ties are
|
||
probably invisible — two elements that share a key and never overlap cannot show
|
||
a difference — but *probably* is doing the work in that sentence, and nothing has
|
||
measured which. The port is unaffected either way: it draws
|
||
`ui_layout::derived_paint_order` verbatim and derives no order of its own.
|
||
|
||
## Correction — the runtime "clipping" I flagged 🔴 twice was overstated
|
||
|
||
P6 and P7 both filed 🔴 *"the runtime mix has no headroom"* on the strength of a
|
||
peak reading of 0.0 dBFS off the Master bus. Measured properly:
|
||
|
||
| | samples at full scale | of total | longest clamped run |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| P6 walk (5.944 s) | 43 | 0.0082 % | 10 samples — **0.23 ms** |
|
||
| P7 new-game run (98.453 s) | 24 | 0.00028 % | 11 samples — **0.25 ms** |
|
||
|
||
That is not a headroom defect. It is the disc's own `confirm` cue, mastered near
|
||
full scale (+0.18 dBFS after a lossy decode), touching the ceiling for a quarter
|
||
of a millisecond on a transient — and possibly only in the recording's 16-bit
|
||
conversion, since Godot mixes in float and `AudioEffectRecord` saves `s16`.
|
||
|
||
**Nothing is changed, and that is the point.** Attenuating the mix to buy
|
||
headroom would be an unmeasured decision about level — the same class of thing
|
||
this port refused for the BGM loop point and the stem balance. Refusing it there
|
||
and taking it here would be inconsistent, and it would trade an inaudible
|
||
0.25 ms clamp for an audible change nobody measured.
|
||
|
||
**A peak reading is not a clipping measurement.** One sample at 0 dBFS and two
|
||
seconds of square wave give the same number, and I reported the first as though
|
||
it were the second — twice, in red, in two milestones' write-ups.
|
||
|
||
## The P1 regression harness had been broken since the monorepo merge, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
`tools/port/verify-screen` is the P1 gate's regression detector: Godot's drawing
|
||
of a screen against `sylpheed-cli screen render` of the same build. It had not
|
||
been run since P1, across four milestones that changed the renderer — rotation,
|
||
the focus record, the spinning ring, two builds composited at once.
|
||
|
||
It could not have been run. **It resolves its reference binary to a path that
|
||
`build-reference-cli` stopped being able to produce.** That script greps
|
||
`crates/sylpheed-export/Cargo.toml` for
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
sylpheed-formats = { git = "…Syplheed-Reborn.git", rev = "…" }
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
and the monorepo merge (`65cefa7`) replaced that line with
|
||
`{ path = "../sylpheed-formats" }`. The grep returns nothing, the script exits 1,
|
||
and the binary left at `reference-cli/sylpheed-cli` is whatever predated the
|
||
merge — here, **three hours older than the sources** and built from a revision
|
||
nothing in the tree points at any more.
|
||
|
||
Running the diff against it would have compared the port to a decoder from
|
||
another era and called the result a regression check. `DECISIONS.md` already
|
||
carries *"The reference renderer was stale for three diff runs"* from P2. This
|
||
would have been the fourth, and the mechanism was different: not a forgotten
|
||
rebuild, but a **build step that could no longer succeed and a consumer that
|
||
only checked whether the file existed**.
|
||
|
||
### The fix is a deletion, not a repair
|
||
|
||
The revision-keying solved a two-repo problem: `/reborn`'s `target/` was a live
|
||
mount of the other agent's checkout and moved mid-run, so a pixel disagreement
|
||
against it had a free variable in it. **The monorepo removed that problem by
|
||
construction** — the exporter, the reference and the port now read one decoder,
|
||
the working tree's. So `verify-screen` builds `sylpheed-cli` from the workspace.
|
||
`SYLPHEED_CLI` still overrides for anyone who wants to pin one deliberately.
|
||
|
||
### The baseline, all 16 screens
|
||
|
||
```
|
||
build_00/01 max 3 over3 0 OK
|
||
press_start(_jp) max 1 over3 0 OK
|
||
title max 6 over3 790 DIFFERS
|
||
main_menu(_jp) max 4 over3 0 DIFFERS
|
||
extras(_jp) max 3 over3 0 OK
|
||
publisher_logo(_r) max 1-2 over3 0 OK
|
||
developer_logos(_r) max 2 over3 0 OK
|
||
title_jp max 155 over3 20498 DIFFERS
|
||
build_12/15 max 0 over3 0 OK
|
||
```
|
||
|
||
**No new drift.** Four milestones of renderer change and the only screen with a
|
||
substantial disagreement is `title_jp` — which is the *same* one P1 recorded and
|
||
left open: `ptlogo_eff2` is the single drawn element in the whole export at a
|
||
scale that is not a whole multiple of 100 % (125 %), and the two renderers pick
|
||
different source texels there. `ui_layout::blit` samples at the destination
|
||
pixel's top-left corner, a GPU at its centre. **The port has still not changed to
|
||
match**, because matching would mean reproducing a half-pixel bias on purpose to
|
||
make a number smaller. Only an oracle capture settles it.
|
||
|
||
`title`'s 790 pixels at ≤ 6/255 are the same class, one texel wide, on the logo's
|
||
scaled edges. `main_menu` and `main_menu_jp` say DIFFERS on a max of 4 with
|
||
**zero** pixels over the bar — a couple of pixels differing in a single channel.
|
||
|
||
### `max` alone could not tell 2 pixels from 25 000
|
||
|
||
The script reported only the largest difference anywhere in the frame, so
|
||
`main_menu` (two pixels) and `title_jp` (2.8 % of the frame) produced the same
|
||
verdict. It now also reports how many pixels are over the bar.
|
||
|
||
**The bar itself is not raised.** Tuning a threshold until things match is the
|
||
failure the script's own header warns about; adding a second number is
|
||
information, not a loosened bound. ⚠️ The count is thresholded on **greyscale
|
||
luma** while `max` is a per-channel maximum, so they are not two views of one
|
||
measurement — a per-channel check counts 957 on `title` where the luma count
|
||
says 790.
|
||
|
||
### What this harness cannot see, stated because the OK rows look reassuring
|
||
|
||
It renders `--pose=rest`. That is deliberate — it holds both renderers to the
|
||
same declared pose so the test is *port vs reference* and not *rest vs timeline*
|
||
— but it means **none of this iteration's or the last four's visible work is
|
||
under test**: not the spinning focus ring, not the plate composited over the
|
||
title, not any timeline behaviour, not audio. Sixteen OK rows are a statement
|
||
about the resting composite and nothing else.
|
||
|
||
And it remains what its header says: a consistency check between two renderers
|
||
that share their assumptions. Both have been wrong together three times —
|
||
`pteff05`, scale-0, `rest()` — and each time only a capture caught it.
|
||
|
||
## Refutation — "builds 0/1 and 10/11 are the loading screen" is false in the index space this export uses
|
||
|
||
**The claim**, from the RE agent 2026-08-29, answering the port's ask to name
|
||
`GP_TITLE`'s unnamed bundles: *"builds 0/1 and 10/11 are the loading screen,
|
||
decoded from their own `pgloading_*` element names."*
|
||
|
||
**In this export, entries 10 and 11 are the splash screens**, and it is not close:
|
||
|
||
| entry | elements |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| 10 | `palogo_eff0`, **`palogo_sqex`**, `palogo_sqex_eff` |
|
||
| 11 | `palogo_eff0`, **`palogo_gamearts`**, `palogo_seta`, `palogo_anima` … |
|
||
| 12 / 15 | `pgloading_eff00`, `pgloading_loop1`, `pgloading_str` … |
|
||
|
||
Entry 10 is the **SQUARE ENIX** wordmark and 11 the developer logos — which the
|
||
same agent identified, in the answer to the port's ask 1, as *"entries 10/13 are
|
||
the SQUARE ENIX publisher wordmark, the first thing the boot shows"*.
|
||
|
||
**Verdict: the finding is almost certainly right and the index space is wrong.**
|
||
Over the twelve bundles `is_build` accepts — entries 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,12,15 —
|
||
ordinals 10 and 11 are entries **12 and 15**, which are exactly the two dressed
|
||
loading variants. So "0/1 and 10/11" is the `is_build` ordinal, and this export
|
||
addresses by **pak entry index**.
|
||
|
||
**Why this is worth a section rather than a shrug.** `authored/screen_names.json`
|
||
is keyed by entry index, and the exporter's own comment says why: *"keyed by
|
||
ENTRY, not by the enumeration ordinal — widening the enumeration to reach the
|
||
splash renumbers the ordinals, and a name that moves when the rule changes is not
|
||
a name."* Someone reading that message and writing keys `"10"` and `"11"` would
|
||
**name the publisher wordmark and the developer logos as loading screens**, and
|
||
the export would validate, and the boot would still run.
|
||
|
||
Two enumerations of the same archive differ by exactly the four bundles the port
|
||
had to add an allow-list to reach. That is the sharpest possible demonstration of
|
||
why the exporter switched, and it has now nearly caused the error it switched to
|
||
prevent. Reported; the names are still the RE agent's to give.
|
||
|
||
## The intro's missing dialogue was an export gap, not a transcode bug, 2026-08-29
|
||
|
||
A human play-test heard music under the boot intro and no voices. The obvious
|
||
reading is that the 5.1→stereo fold dropped the centre channel, and it is wrong.
|
||
|
||
**`ADV.wmv` carries music and effects only.** On this disc a cutscene's voice is
|
||
a *separate asset*: one continuous XMA stream in `sound.pak`, bound to the movie
|
||
by the manifest in `tables.pak` (`ADV` → `VOICETRACK = VOICE_ADV`). Nothing was
|
||
dropped — `grep -rn voice crates/sylpheed-export/src/` returned nothing, because
|
||
the exporter had never been asked for it. The transcode was correct the whole
|
||
time, which is why every measurement on it passed.
|
||
|
||
That is worth stating plainly because the failure *looked* exactly like a codec
|
||
bug, and `docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` is full of ways to measure a
|
||
transcode against its source. Every one of them would have come back clean.
|
||
|
||
### The binding is resolved, and must never be matched by name
|
||
|
||
`audio::export_voice` takes exactly one route:
|
||
`media::resolve_movie_voice_region(source, movie, VoiceLang::English)`, which
|
||
walks movie → cue token (manifest) → sound id (registry) → a `[start, end)` byte
|
||
region of the continuous stream. The cheap route — read `VOICE_<movie>.slb` —
|
||
was not taken, and the reason is a measurement:
|
||
|
||
| movie | resolved region | inside the bank named after it? |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV` | 433 930 240…437 044 592 | yes |
|
||
| `S00A` | 452 798 464…455 499 120 | yes |
|
||
| `RT01A` | 437 044 592…437 345 648 | **no — it is inside `VOICE_ADV.slb`** |
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **Name-matching is correct on exactly the two movies this port ships, and
|
||
wrong on the radio cutscenes.** It would have exported clean, verified clean
|
||
against both in-scope movies, and returned the wrong recording the moment
|
||
anybody widened the export. This is the failure mode MISSION §2 names — one
|
||
playable thing is not one archive entry — in its most convincing disguise: the
|
||
spot-checks a person would actually run are the ones it passes.
|
||
|
||
### Three choices, and why none is a guess
|
||
|
||
* **One file per movie**, per MODDING rule 1, and the region's chunks are
|
||
**summed** — see the correction below, because the first version of this
|
||
paragraph said the opposite and was wrong.
|
||
* **Mono**, folded from the stream's **own declared channel count**, probed with
|
||
`ffprobe` rather than assumed. This is not pedantry: `pan` silently ignores a
|
||
channel the input does not have — measured this iteration on the 5.1 fold
|
||
below, where `FLC`/`FRC`/`SL`/`SR` vanished with no warning at all — so a
|
||
stereo matrix applied to a mono voice track is not an error, it is a −6 dB
|
||
attenuation that nothing reports. A track that is already mono is passed
|
||
through untouched.
|
||
* **No sync offset, and no length clamp.** The voice plays from the video's
|
||
first frame, so nothing is authored. The decoded length is recorded in the
|
||
manifest *beside the movie's own length* rather than trimmed to it: the voice
|
||
has no shared container to disagree with, so a length mismatch is the only
|
||
symptom a resolution error would ever show, and clamping would delete it. That
|
||
decision is the reason the error below was caught in the same hour it was made.
|
||
|
||
### Correction, within the hour — the chunks are stems, and I had concatenated them
|
||
|
||
The first version of `export_voice` joined the region's chunks end to end and
|
||
produced **359.201 s of voice for a 137.437 s movie**, and **255.460 s for a
|
||
93.779 s one**. Both ratios sit near 3, and both regions decode to 3 chunks.
|
||
|
||
The manifest said so on the first run, because the length was recorded against
|
||
the movie's instead of being clamped to it. A clamp — which is what
|
||
`sylpheed-viewer` does, and what `media`'s own doc comment invites with *"trimmed
|
||
by the caller's length clamp"* — would have produced a file of exactly the right
|
||
duration containing the wrong audio, and every check in
|
||
`docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` would have passed it.
|
||
|
||
Decoding each chunk and timing it (`crates/sylpheed-export/examples/voice_chunks.rs`):
|
||
|
||
| movie | movie length | chunk 0 | chunk 1 | chunk 2 |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV` | 137.437 s | 84.553 | **137.324** | **137.324** |
|
||
| `S00A` | 93.779 s | 68.072 | **93.694** | **93.694** |
|
||
| `RT01A` | — | 0.009 | **34.034** | — |
|
||
|
||
Chunks 1 and 2 are **equal to six decimals and each span the whole movie**. That
|
||
is HANDOFF Q10's decoded shape — *two stems of one performance, played together;
|
||
do not concatenate* — showing up on a second asset kind. They are summed at
|
||
`1/n`, exactly as `export_bgm` sums a music bank.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **Chunk 0 is dropped and its status is open.** Its duration matches nothing:
|
||
84.6 s under a 137 s movie, 9 ms under `RT01A`. `docs/re/REFUTED.md` records
|
||
`to_xma_riffs`'s hybrid branch emitting a **leading headerless packet region**
|
||
ahead of the real `RIFF` waves, and `docs/port/BLOCKED.md` already carries that
|
||
as an open row against `BGM_103`, where `media` returns three sub-waves against a
|
||
census of two. **This is the same signature on an independent asset kind** — good
|
||
corroboration, not proof, and the port is not entitled to close it. So the
|
||
selection rule is written in terms of the measurement (*keep the longest
|
||
duration and everything tying with it*), and every dropped chunk is named in the
|
||
manifest with its length.
|
||
|
||
This is the media-assembly trap MISSION §2 names, and it caught me: I wrote a
|
||
doc comment asserting concatenation, gave the reason, and had it wrong. What
|
||
saved it was refusing to clamp — the one decision in the first version that was
|
||
made for the right reason.
|
||
|
||
### What a `None` means
|
||
|
||
A movie whose region does not resolve is **genuinely unvoiced** — the honest
|
||
answer for most `hokyu_*` resupply cutscenes — and gets a manifest warning, not
|
||
a substitute. The corpus already paid for the alternative: resolving unbound
|
||
movies through a shared demo line played the *wrong recording*.
|
||
|
||
This is **decoded, not authored**, so it runs outside the `authored/audio.json`
|
||
block in `main.rs`. Nothing new goes in `authored/`; there is nothing here we
|
||
decided.
|
||
|
||
## Refutation, of my own exporter — MISSION §6 pins a downmix matrix, and the exporter ships a different one
|
||
|
||
**The claim under test is the port's**, not another agent's, and it has been in
|
||
`video.rs` since P4: that the 5.1 fold is normalised by
|
||
`1/(1 + √½ + √½) = 0.4142` because *"the unnormalised form was measured too and
|
||
**clips**: peak 0.0 dBFS."*
|
||
|
||
That sentence rests on a peak reading. `docs/port/BLOCKED.md` records this port
|
||
withdrawing a 🔴 runtime-clipping flag on precisely the grounds that **a peak
|
||
reading is not a clipping measurement** — one sample at full scale and two
|
||
seconds of square wave give the same number. So the justification for deviating
|
||
from a matrix a human pinned was produced by an instrument this port has already
|
||
declared unfit for the question.
|
||
|
||
### Measured properly, over the whole of both movies
|
||
|
||
Decoded to 32-bit float so nothing is pre-clamped, then counted: samples at or
|
||
over full scale, how many exceed it by more than 1 dB, and the longest
|
||
consecutive run.
|
||
|
||
| | peak | RMS | ≥ full scale | > +1 dB | longest run |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV`, MISSION §6 matrix | **+4.26 dBFS** | −14.55 | **4 406** / 13 187 900 | 1 874 | 16 samples (0.333 ms) |
|
||
| `ADV`, exporter's matrix | −3.39 dBFS | −22.21 | 0 | 0 | — |
|
||
| `S00A`, MISSION §6 matrix | **−1.34 dBFS** | −18.73 | **0** | 0 | — |
|
||
| `S00A`, exporter's matrix | −8.99 dBFS | −26.39 | 0 | 0 | — |
|
||
|
||
**The claim survives, and the reasoning behind it does not.** The pinned matrix
|
||
genuinely overloads `ADV`: not one stray sample but 4 406 of them, 1 874 more
|
||
than a full dB over, wanting 4.26 dB more headroom than the container has. That
|
||
is a different animal from the 43 samples and 0.25 ms transient I withdrew a flag
|
||
over, and the number that separates them is the **magnitude**, not the count.
|
||
|
||
But the same table refutes the *scope* of the fix. **`S00A` never clips under the
|
||
pinned matrix** — it peaks at −1.34 dBFS. The exporter attenuates it by 7.65 dB
|
||
to solve a problem it does not have, because 0.4142 is derived from a theoretical
|
||
worst case (every channel correlated at full scale at once) that neither movie
|
||
comes near.
|
||
|
||
### Control, before believing any of it
|
||
|
||
The pinned matrix names `FLC`, `FRC`, `SL` and `SR`, and a 5.1 source has none of
|
||
them. ffmpeg neither errors nor warns — measured at `-loglevel warning`, the
|
||
output was empty. So the literal string was decoded alongside its three-term 5.1
|
||
reduction (`FL = 1.0·FL + 0.707·FC + 0.707·BL`) and the two outputs compared:
|
||
**bit-identical**, 52 751 600 bytes. The reduction is what runs, and it is the
|
||
matrix §6 intends. *That silence is itself the trap the mono fold above guards
|
||
against.*
|
||
|
||
### Not changed, and deliberately so
|
||
|
||
MISSION §6 is a **human decision of 2026-08-29**, and the level of a mix is
|
||
exactly the kind of thing §6 reserves — *"adjust it deliberately, as a commit"*.
|
||
Three options, and choosing between them is not mine:
|
||
|
||
1. **Keep the pin.** `ADV` clamps on 4 406 samples. Rejected on the measurement.
|
||
2. **Keep the exporter's 0.4142.** Preserves the two movies' relative loudness
|
||
exactly, costs 7.65 dB, and is safe by construction for any movie a modder
|
||
drops in.
|
||
3. **One measured constant, `1/1.6339 = 0.612`.** The smallest single scalar
|
||
under which no in-scope movie clamps: +3.39 dB over today, still one constant
|
||
so relative loudness is untouched. Tuned to two files, but the exporter's own
|
||
`check` refuses any export whose peak reaches 0 dBFS, so a third movie that
|
||
needed more headroom would fail loudly rather than clamp quietly.
|
||
|
||
Per-file normalisation is **not** on that list: it would put `ADV` 4.26 dB below
|
||
`S00A` and change how two cutscenes sit against each other and against the menu
|
||
bed, which is an aesthetic decision with nothing measured behind it.
|
||
|
||
What changes today is only that the deviation is **visible**: `video.rs` now
|
||
cites MISSION §6 by name and says it departs from it, and the export carries a
|
||
manifest warning with these numbers. Before this, a reader of the manifest could
|
||
not tell that a pinned human decision had been overridden at all — the command
|
||
line was recorded faithfully, and recording the command you ran does not disclose
|
||
that it is not the command you were given.
|
||
|
||
### The voice reaches the output, and a null control says so quantitatively
|
||
|
||
`+ voice ADV` in the log proves only that `play_voice` found a stream and called
|
||
`play()`. Whether the audio arrives at the Master bus is a different question,
|
||
and `docs/port/AUDIO-VERIFICATION.md` §2 exists because it is.
|
||
|
||
The control needed **no test-only code**: MODDING rule 4 already shadows any
|
||
exported asset by path, so 140 s of silence dropped at
|
||
`data/mods/audio/voice/ADV.ogg` mutes the dialogue and changes nothing else. Two
|
||
`--boot --skip-at=25 --audio=…` runs, then `astats` over the same 14 s of movie:
|
||
|
||
| | peak | RMS |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV.ogv`'s own audio (the bed) | −6.239 | −24.941 |
|
||
| the exported voice alone | −7.614 | −27.965 |
|
||
| **run with the voice muted** | **−6.251** | **−25.126** |
|
||
| **run with the voice playing** | **−5.415** | **−22.913** |
|
||
|
||
The muted run reproduces the bed to **0.01 dB peak / 0.19 dB RMS**, which is what
|
||
makes the other row worth reading. And the mixed run is not merely *louder*: two
|
||
incoherent sources at −24.941 and −27.965 dBFS predict a sum at **−23.184**, and
|
||
the run measures **−22.913** — **0.27 dB** out. The voice is in the mix, at the
|
||
level its own file says it should be.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **Under the Dummy driver.** Per AUDIO-VERIFICATION, *"recorded under a dummy
|
||
driver"* is a weaker claim than *"heard"*, and no measurement here says the
|
||
recording is the **right** dialogue for this cutscene — only that the file the
|
||
exporter resolved is the one reaching the output at the expected level. The two
|
||
runs are also not sample-aligned (they differ by 1.7 s of wall clock), which is
|
||
why the `RMS trough` column is omitted: it moved by 40 dB between runs on window
|
||
placement alone, and peak and RMS are the two numbers that survive that.
|
||
|
||
### Ⓐ *does* skip the intro in this build, so the play-test's report is not this bug
|
||
|
||
`--skip-at=25` on a `--boot` run: `video skipped at 25.02 s`, `video ended at
|
||
25.02 s`, title at 25.02 s. The press goes through `Input.parse_input_event` and
|
||
arrives at `_unhandled_input` exactly as a pad's would, so **the wiring from press
|
||
to skip is live**. What that does not cover is a real key event from a focused
|
||
window, which is the difference between this run and the human's — and, separately,
|
||
**whether the game permits skipping an attract movie at all** is HANDOFF Q9 and
|
||
still 🟡. If the answer is no, this path is deleted rather than debugged.
|
||
|
||
|
||
## Refutation of my own two-stem reading — and it had already been adopted elsewhere
|
||
|
||
Two hours after writing that a voice region's equal-length chunks are *"HANDOFF
|
||
Q10's decoded two-stem shape"*, the Decoder asked me to decode the leading chunk
|
||
— it has no XMA1 decoder in its container — and the decoder run refuted the
|
||
claim I had made.
|
||
|
||
**Equal duration was a shape match, and I carried Q10's *music* census across to
|
||
voice on the strength of it.** The content does not support it:
|
||
|
||
| | |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| `S00A` chunk 2 | **digital silence** — 4 497 300 samples, peak −inf |
|
||
| `ADV` chunk 2 | **0.60 × chunk 1** (best-fit scalar), residual **26.8 dB** below the target |
|
||
|
||
About 95 % of `ADV`'s second chunk is a −4.4 dB copy of the first. Two chunks of
|
||
equal length, one silence and the other a scaled near-duplicate, are not two
|
||
stems of one performance. ⚠️ **The claim had already travelled** — it is quoted in
|
||
the Decoder's `voice-region-leading-chunk.md` — which is the failure PROTOCOL
|
||
names: a wrong belief moving faster than its correction, through two documents
|
||
that share a source.
|
||
|
||
### What it cost, and what changed
|
||
|
||
Summing chunk 1 with silence at `1/n` put `S00A`'s dialogue **6.02 dB down for
|
||
nothing**: the exported file peaked at −16.2 dBFS against a source chunk peaking
|
||
at −4.2. `export_voice` now drops a **digitally silent** chunk before the sum.
|
||
That is arithmetic, not a content judgement — a silent input contributes nothing
|
||
to a mix and counting it in the normalisation is simply my error.
|
||
|
||
**What `ADV`'s near-duplicate chunk 2 is remains open and it is still summed.**
|
||
Whether the game plays both is a decoding question; 26.8 dB of residual is not
|
||
nothing, and dropping a chunk because it correlates with another would be
|
||
answering it.
|
||
|
||
### The leading chunk, decoded — structure, and not one word about content
|
||
|
||
The Decoder's ask was *"cutscene dialogue or mission dialogue"*. `ADV` region
|
||
+ 1392, 394 packets: **84.553 s, stereo, 48 kHz, peak −2.48 dBFS, RMS −24.80**,
|
||
with **6 silent gaps over 0.4 s below −50 dB totalling 45.3 s** — 54 % silence,
|
||
the same duty cycle as the two full-length chunks (54 %, 55 %). So it is
|
||
**speech-structured audio**: not a header, not padding, not noise.
|
||
|
||
🔴 **Which is as far as a measurement goes.** *Cutscene or mission* is an
|
||
identification and this agent has no ears and no oracle. Envelope
|
||
cross-correlation against the full-length chunks peaks at 0.768 **at the last lag
|
||
in the search range**, which is where a statistic lands when it has found
|
||
nothing, and it is not evidence. The Decoder's 🟡 stands, and its own leading
|
||
hypothesis — an in-mission `VOICE_D_*` line — is untouched by any of this. The
|
||
byte-span test it already built settles it the moment those regions are
|
||
enumerated; nobody has to listen.
|
||
|
||
### Taken from the same message: `bank_header_len`, not `riffs.len()`
|
||
|
||
The Decoder's census warns that eight bank-header regions also yield three
|
||
chunks, so the chunk count cannot say which structure you are in. **This exporter
|
||
never used the count** — it selects on decoded duration, which is why it already
|
||
handles both cases: `RT01A`'s 10 300 B leading chunk decodes to 9 ms and falls
|
||
out on its own. But a duration tie is an *observation* and `bank_header_len` is
|
||
*decoded*, so the rule switches the day `c1f3608` reaches `main`.
|
||
`sylpheed-formats` is a path dependency and merging another agent's topic branch
|
||
is not the port's to do.
|
||
|
||
## The mono fold I warned about, in the comment directly above the code that did it
|
||
|
||
`export_voice`'s first version folded to mono by averaging every **declared**
|
||
channel, and the doc comment above it said, in as many words, that *"`pan`
|
||
silently ignores a channel the input does not have — so a stereo matrix applied
|
||
to a mono voice track is not an error, it is a −6 dB attenuation that nothing
|
||
reports."*
|
||
|
||
It then did exactly that. Per-channel `astats` on both voice streams:
|
||
|
||
| | channel 1 | channel 2 |
|
||
|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV` chunk 1 | peak +0.000 dBFS | **peak −inf** |
|
||
| `S00A` chunk 1 | peak −4.207 dBFS | **peak −inf** |
|
||
|
||
The voice is a **mono recording carried in a nominally stereo stream**, and
|
||
averaging it with silence cost **5.94 dB** — which is most of why `S00A`'s
|
||
exported dialogue sat at −16.2 dBFS against a source chunk peaking at −4.2 (the
|
||
other 6.02 dB was summing a silent *chunk*, corrected in the same iteration).
|
||
|
||
**Checking the declared channel count is not checking the content, and only the
|
||
content is the fold.** `live_channels` now measures which channels carry signal
|
||
and averages only those. `sylpheed-viewer`'s `pan=mono|c0=c0` reaches the right
|
||
answer here for a reason it does not state; this reaches it for a stated one, and
|
||
would still be right if a stream ever did carry two live channels.
|
||
|
||
Worth recording as a pattern rather than a bug: **three defects this iteration
|
||
were all the same shape** — a silent chunk in a sum, a silent channel in a fold,
|
||
and a `pan` matrix naming channels that do not exist. Each is an input that
|
||
contributes nothing being counted in a divisor, and none of them is visible in
|
||
anything but a level.
|
||
|
||
## The leading chunk is the TAIL of the full one — measured, and it is why the region over-covers
|
||
|
||
The Decoder settled by byte-span analysis that a voice region's leading chunk is
|
||
**the movie's own dialogue, 17 of 17** — killing its own standing hypothesis that
|
||
it was an in-mission `VOICE_D_*` line — and asked whether dropping it is
|
||
therefore a truncation. It has no XMA1 decoder; this container does.
|
||
|
||
Envelope cross-correlation, sliding with overhang allowed at both ends and
|
||
normalised over the overlap only. ⚠️ **This corrects an earlier number of mine**:
|
||
a first pass scored 0.768 and I called it nothing, correctly — that search only
|
||
tried lags where the shorter chunk fitted *wholly inside* the longer one, and it
|
||
peaked on the boundary of its own range.
|
||
|
||
| | best *r* | at lag | overlap |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| `ADV` chunk 0 → chunk 1 | **0.998** | **+52.8 s** | 84.5 s |
|
||
| `S00A` chunk 0 → chunk 1 | **0.932** | **+25.6 s** | 68.0 s |
|
||
| control — `ADV` chunk 0 against itself | 1.000 | 0.0 s | — |
|
||
| control — `ADV` chunk 0 against `S00A` chunk 1 | **0.289** | — | 28.2 s |
|
||
|
||
**Both lags put chunk 0 flush against the end of chunk 1**: 52.8 + 84.55 =
|
||
137.35 s against chunk 1's 137.324, and 25.6 + 68.07 = 93.67 against 93.694.
|
||
|
||
Confirmed in the sample domain — lag refined to ±1 sample on the loudest second,
|
||
then a scalar best-fit over the whole overlap: `ADV` +52.8000 s, gain 0.833,
|
||
residual **16.70 dB** below the target; `S00A` +25.6320 s, gain 0.365, residual
|
||
**23.15 dB**. 98–99.5 % of the energy is a scaled copy: the same material at a
|
||
different gain, not bit-identical, which is what a lossy decode at two gains
|
||
should look like.
|
||
|
||
**So dropping chunk 0 removes a duplicate, and is not a truncation** — the
|
||
exporter's existing behaviour is right for a better reason than the one it gave.
|
||
🟡 **The manifest note has NOT been rewritten to say so.** The structural claim —
|
||
that the region over-covers because it re-presents its own tail, and that this
|
||
accounts for the whole 2.6× — is the Decoder's to write down; this page reports
|
||
the measurement and says which is which. The note stays hedged until its page
|
||
carries the conclusion, and the hedge is true either way.
|
||
|
||
⚠️ **The 504 464 B constant was deliberately not converted.** The Decoder found
|
||
the region anchor sitting that far after the true predecessor trailer on all 17
|
||
and pointedly declined to call it missing dialogue. Converting it needs a
|
||
byte↔time mapping, and the numbers above are the reason there isn't one: chunk 1
|
||
is 1 118 268 B and chunk 2 is 1 171 516 B for **the same 137.324 s**, so bytes per
|
||
second is not constant even inside a single region. Any figure in seconds off
|
||
that constant would be invented.
|
||
|
||
## Third reading of a voice region, and this one is decoded: three presentations of one take
|
||
|
||
`export_voice` has now read the same bytes three ways in one session, and each
|
||
reading was ended by a measurement rather than by an argument:
|
||
|
||
1. **Concatenate the chunks** — 359 s of dialogue for a 137 s movie.
|
||
2. **Sum them as HANDOFF Q10's two stems** — refuted here: `S00A`'s second
|
||
full-length chunk is digital silence, `ADV`'s is 0.60 × the first with 26.8 dB
|
||
of residual.
|
||
3. **Keep one stream.** ✅ This one is decoded, and not by me.
|
||
|
||
The Decoder settled the shape disc-wide without a decoder, by counting stream
|
||
starts inside every inter-descriptor span: **258 spans hold one stream, 28 hold
|
||
three, and nothing holds two or any other number.** The 95 movie-voice regions
|
||
decompose 70 + 8 + 17, and the 8 are independently the same 8 its first census
|
||
flagged. So a region carries **three presentations of one take** — which is
|
||
exactly `359 = 84.55 + 137.32 + 137.32`, the first clipped by its crate's own
|
||
1.5 MB predecessor guard.
|
||
|
||
It also cross-checked my correlation by a route needing no decoder: if the
|
||
leading chunk is the tail of a full stream, the whole leading stream should be
|
||
one complete take, and `ADV`'s 504 464 + 808 304 = 1 312 768 B at chunk 0's byte
|
||
rate is **137.323 s against my measured 137.324**. Two instruments, no shared
|
||
assumption.
|
||
|
||
**So summing was wrong for a third reason:** a take plus a 0.60 × copy of itself
|
||
is ~4 dB louder and coloured, not a mix of parts. The exporter keeps one stream
|
||
and performs no arithmetic on it.
|
||
|
||
🟡 **Which stream is a recommendation, not a decoded field.** The selector is the
|
||
**highest byte rate** among the equal-duration survivors, on the Decoder's
|
||
advice. Nothing on the disc says which presentation the game plays, and on `ADV`
|
||
this picks the **quieter** of the two — −8.3 dBFS against 0.0. That is in the
|
||
manifest in those words so the choice is visible and reversible; it is the one
|
||
part of this that a capture could still overturn.
|
||
|
||
`check` moves `voice` off the strict peak bound as a consequence. It sat with
|
||
`bgm` because it was a sum this exporter produced; it is now a single wave off
|
||
the disc, mastered near full scale — `ADV`'s louder presentation measures
|
||
**+0.0003 dBFS at source** — and refusing that would be refusing the disc's own
|
||
mastering.
|
||
|
||
### The 504 464 B constant: I refused the conversion, and refusing was right
|
||
|
||
The Decoder asked whether I would spend a decode converting its anchor offset to
|
||
seconds, and I declined because bytes per second is not constant even inside one
|
||
region. It has since found the stronger reason and withdrawn the ask: **the
|
||
constant is structural, not proportional** — identical on all 17 regions despite
|
||
their differing durations. A proportional prediction lands within 8 bytes on
|
||
`ADV`, which is a coincidence, and is **4 305 B out on `S00A`**. A seconds figure
|
||
off that constant would have been invented, and it would have looked corroborated
|
||
on the first movie anybody checked.
|
||
|
||
❔ **Why the disc stores three presentations at all is unanswered**, by either of
|
||
us.
|