lands on the known tie-break group
Chasing the residual I left open last iteration, and it turns out I had
attributed the port agent's slab to the wrong thing.
First the refutation. My hypothesis was that our dim is applied over the
whole frame rather than beneath the UI where its layer key puts it. If
that were true the logo would render too dark. It reads +2.36 against a
background of -0.74, so the compositor honours the paint order and the
hypothesis is dead.
What the residual actually is: with the dim in place the error is not
uniform but concentrated in one band, running -38.6 in one tile and +33.8
three tiles to its right. Cropping that band from capture and render
shows it immediately -- the game draws the logo's Z swoosh thin with a
pink edge, and we draw it thick and solid white. That, not the missing
dim, is the washed-out slab over the title logo the port agent reported.
The dim explains a uniform +13; this explains the slab.
The elements are ptlogo_back2, its glow, and the five ptlogo_back2eff1..5
segments -- which are also the group carrying this corpus's known
unsolved paint-order tie-break at key 0x8083, on the same screen. I have
recorded that as a lead and explicitly not as a diagnosis, because a
blend-order swap is a poor explanation for white instead of pink and I
would expect a second cause.
MISSING dim quad
Both halves of what the port agent could not settle, answered against the
plate-free capture rather than against another renderer.
Rendering build 4 and edge-correlating to the capture of the real screen
gives 0.9163 at zero shift, 0.92/0.78/0.93 per band. The geometry of rest
is the title's arrived pose, so the timeline is not needed there.
The slab is the more useful half, and it is inverted from how it looked.
rest alone renders uniformly +13.14 too bright, R +12.35, G +13.58,
B +13.48. Drawing the .prm primitives collapses that to +0.55. The
element is pteff02.prm, the 25 percent dim at rest t=46 with fade 0x40,
and --primitives is OFF BY DEFAULT. So the washed-out cyan slab is not
something being drawn that should not be; it is a dim that should be
drawn and is not, and because the title art is blue-dominant the
shortfall reads as a cyan wash. Any consumer of screen render that omits
--primitives on this screen gets it.
Two residuals recorded rather than tidied. With the dim drawn the mean is
essentially exact but per-pixel agreement gets slightly WORSE --
edge-correlation 0.9163 down to 0.9066 and pixels off by more than 20
rising from 108051 to 162636 -- so the dim's average contribution is
right while its application is not exactly the game's. And separately the
per-tile map shows a +25 to +38 hot spot on the upper-right Z swoosh,
which a capture from the first iteration of this work already showed pink
in the game and white in ours. Same region, still undiagnosed.
than loop
The port agent ranked a plate-free capture of build 4 above any further
static RE, so that came first.
B from the main menu returns to the title and the plate fades in a beat
later, which opens a clean window. Recorded at 20 fps from the press: the
art appears at 1.10 s, builds in to 3.70 s, sits settled and unobstructed
until 5.00 s, and the plate arrives at 5.10 s -- the band jumps from 282
to 3755 bright pixels. Committed the frame at 4.0 s as the reference for
the cyan glow slab they report drawing and the game not having.
Their other sub-question -- whether a keyframe group loops or holds --
falls out of the decoded sweeps plus a measurement I already had, and the
two agree. ptloop01's final keyframe parks pteff03.t32 at x=1521 and
ptloop02's parks pteff03a.t32 at x=-839, both off-screen on a 1280-wide
design; and over 18 s of settled title the centre tiles sit at sd <= 0.01
when a looping group would recross the screen every 7.5 s. So groups HOLD
at the last keyframe. The loop*.rat name is misleading.
Also recorded, in the corpus rather than only in their report: the
rest_plateau bug, with their exact identifying condition -- the final
untimed keyframe has the same pose as the last timed one -- the six
elements it misses on main_menu, and the bracket it drops. That closes an
open question ui-paint-order-key.md has carried for a while about
ptframe1 and ptframe2 resting at alpha 0 while the capture shows the
frame plainly. Same two elements, same cause. Not fixed yet; the change
is in ui_layout's rest().
And a METHOD line I would not have written myself: two renderers agreeing
is not evidence the field is right. Their composite and screen render
matched to 3/255 on main_menu and both omitted two elements the game
draws, because both read one field through one decoder.
assumed
Continuing the pulse's cycle length, which I had called a structural
limit of the format. It is, and now I can show it rather than assert it.
Dumping past what I thought was the final keyframe found an EIGHTH block:
fade 0x00ffffff at the same position, so the glow returns to fully
transparent and the pulse is a closed cycle rather than a one-shot ramp.
That is worth having on its own -- the port knows the animation ends
where it starts.
And the eighth block's time slot contains the four bytes "end ", the
record's ASCII terminator. So the corpus's rule that a group's last block
has no time of its own holds here in a second form: not the next group's
element index, but the chunk terminator. The value does not exist. That
goes into ui-rat-layout.md, because it generalises beyond this record.
The measured 2.3 s would need a final step of about 33 units. I have
written that number down explicitly labelled as fitted to the measurement
rather than read from the file, so nobody later re-derives it as a
decode.
One thing I had half-assumed and can now rule out: the word at +0x004 is
not a keyframe count. It reads 60 here with 8 keyframes and 30 in the
loop records with 3. Unknown, and marked so.
Closing the residual I left explicitly unidentified last iteration, and
correcting my own claim twice over in the process.
The cheap test first: is the oscillation global? No -- the bottom-right
corner is flat at sd 0.003 and uncorrelated with the whole frame. So a
per-tile amplitude map over an 8x6 grid, which localises it hard: sd 7.65
in the band x 318..954, y 560..672 at lag 2.3 s, against 0.06 on the
wordmark. That band is the PRESS (A) BUTTON plate's rest position.
Decoding ptbtn00f.rat, the plate's highlight variant, gives the pulse
itself: alpha 0x00 -> 0x06 -> 0x4a -> 0x50, held, then back down through
0x4a to 0x06 across t=6..105. A glow that fades in and out, which is
exactly what a press-start prompt does.
So "the title screen loops at 2.2 s" was wrong in both halves. The title
ART is near-static apart from the two decoded sweeps at 7.5 s and 9.5 s;
what pulses is the PLATE, and the plate is build 2, not build 4. REFUTED
carries it under my own name.
Still amber, and said so rather than rounded off: the cycle LENGTH is not
readable. The keyframe group's last block has no time -- that slot
belongs to the next group -- so the declared span is at least 105 units,
1.75 s, against a measured 2.3 s. Consistent with a final block
extending the tail. Not confirmed.
Two of my own claims from last iteration die here, and the decode is the
thing that kills them.
Searching for the SHAPE instead of an assumed count found it immediately:
fade words matching 0x??ffffff at alternating strides of 24 and 16, which
is a 40-byte block carrying fade at +0 and tint at +24 -- exactly the
build layout, starting at +0x68. So "a leaf record's keyframes are not in
the build's 40-byte layout" is withdrawn. They are. My scan failed
because I demanded 29 strictly-increasing times, having read the word at
+0x004 as a keyframe count; the records hold THREE.
Decoded, both are horizontal light sweeps. ptloop01 runs pteff03.t32
from x=-639 to x=1521 over t=150..600, which is 450 units or 7.5 s;
ptloop02 runs pteff03a.t32 the other way over 570 units or 9.5 s.
Which refutes the second thing. Last iteration I attributed the measured
2.2 s oscillation to these elements because build 4 declares them --
association, not evidence. A 7.5 s cycle would give about three peaks in
a 22 s capture and I counted eight. So the loops are not what I measured,
the 2.2 s stands as a measurement, and its source is now explicitly
unidentified rather than wrongly assigned.
METHOD gets the general form, because it is what cost the previous
iteration: do not hard-code an expected element count into a structure
scan. Scan for the shape and let the count fall out.
Continuing the one gap from last iteration -- turning the title's
measured 2.2 s loop into a decoded cycle. It did not turn.
The record itself is found and partly confirmed. ptloop01.rat is an
opt-linked leaf RATC at 0xbb5966 in build 4, placing pteff03.t32, with
0x1e -- thirty -- in the high half of the word at +0x004, which is the
~30 keyframes ui-rat-layout.md predicts for a loop record. Its pivot
fields read 200 and 90, matching exactly what screen info prints for
ptloop01, so this is the right blob and the header offsets hold.
The times are not there. A build's keyframes are 40-byte blocks with the
time at +36; scanning every 4-byte-aligned start across a 0xC0 window for
29 strictly increasing values at that stride finds nothing, in either
loop record. So a leaf record's keyframe layout is NOT the build
placement layout, which is now a line in REFUTED because it is the
obvious first assumption and it is wrong.
The 2.2 s stays measured and the port hardcodes it. What the next attempt
inherits is the record's address, a confirmed pivot, and one layout ruled
out -- which is the useful part of a negative.
did not work
I set out to do for the title what worked for the splash: measure the
build-in and check it against the declared keyframes. That part failed,
and I am recording the failure rather than the number.
It failed for two reasons, both mine. The title was reached by skipping
the movie with A, which cuts to black and brings the title up on a path
that may not be the normal one. And the visible rise, about 2.7 s, is a
luminance curve -- which screen-transitions.md already establishes is not
the fade quad's ramp. So 2.7 s neither confirms nor contradicts build 4's
declared 16 -> 261, four point oh eight seconds. They are not measuring
the same thing, and I have said so instead of reporting a discrepancy.
What the recording did establish is worth having anyway: the title never
settles. Over 22 s the mean luminance oscillates continuously, peaks at
5.6, 7.8, 10.0, 12.7, 15.2, 17.1, 19.2 and 21.3 s, mean interval 2.24 s.
Marked as about 2.2 s plus or minus 0.4 rather than a precise period,
because peak-picking a low-amplitude signal is coarse.
The mechanism was already decoded and I did not re-derive it: build 4
declares ptloop01.rat and ptloop02.rat, and loop*.rat is a looping sprite
animation rather than a composition. What is new is the period, and that
it runs forever. For the port that matters -- drawing the resting pose
and stopping will look wrong.
Not confirmed, and flagged: that 2.2 s is the loop's OWN declared cycle.
screen info prints the element's placement keyframes but not the frame
count inside the .rat, and I did not open it.
Closing the caveat I left last iteration -- the splash timing was +/-0.5s
because I sampled at 2 fps, and at that rate I could not see ramps at
all, only plateaus.
Re-recorded at 10 fps: the splash FADES, both in and out, rather than
cutting. And the bundles declare it. palogo_sqex.t32 carries keyframes
[15 30 235 239 251 255] and palogo_gamearts.t32 [15 30 190 194 206 210],
each with an _eff glow child on [15 30 45]. Under Q1's 1 unit = 1/60 s
that is a 0.25 s ramp in, a 3.42 s or 2.67 s hold, and a 0.33 s fade out
-- against measured holds of about 3.5 s and 2.4 s and fade-outs of about
0.3 s. The constant 0.35 s offset between declared and measured start is
just that my recording's t=0 is when the WINDOW appears, not when the
guest starts drawing.
So the first screen's animation moves from measured to decoded: the port
reads it off the disc instead of trusting my stopwatch.
It also explains something the capture showed and I had no account for.
The brightness overshoots on the way in -- peaks at 0.8 s, settles by
1.1 s -- which reads as a bloom. It is the _eff glow child, whose
keyframes run 15 -> 30 -> 45, ramping in after the logo and back down
while the logo holds. Mechanical, not a rendering artifact.
Closing the amber I raised last iteration: the splash renders had no
framebuffer capture to diff against. Recording the boot from the moment
the window appears, at 2 fps, catches it before the movie.
Both halves match their own render at zero shift, each with the OTHER
half as a negative control: publisher frame 0.9146 against entry 10 and
0.027 against entry 11; developer frame 0.9792 against entry 11 and
-0.033 against entry 10. The EN/JP twins score 0.876 and 0.966, so the
test tells a screen from a different screen but cannot tell a pair apart,
and I have said so rather than implying it discriminates.
The recording also times the front of the boot, which Q6 and Q7 only had
from the title onward: SQUARE ENIX from about 0.5 to 4.0 s, black,
developer logos from about 5.0 to 7.5 s, black, then ADV.wmv from about
9.5 s.
One trap avoided and written into METHOD. The frames around 9.5 to 12.5 s
show SQUARE ENIX again in cyan, and read from the capture alone that is a
third logo screen. It is not -- it is the intro movie's own opening,
which the milestone-2 notes describe as white SQUARE ENIX plus cyan glow
plus red diamonds. A logo appearing twice may be two different things.
Two pages of this corpus disagreed. MISSION says the splash "is the RATC
screen, which already renders"; ui-paint-order-key.md says it "cannot be
rendered by screen render at all". Running the tool both ways settles it.
screen list --all shows all 16 GP_TITLE entries instead of 12, and the
four the default listing drops are the splash, each half shipped twice:
entries 10 and 13 are the white SQUARE ENIX publisher logo, entries 11
and 14 the GAME ARTS / SETA / studio anima developer logos. Entry 11's
seven elements are the three logos, their three _eff glows and the
palogo_eff0.prm backdrop -- exactly the composition ui-paint-order-key.md
had measured for the splash without being able to draw it.
So the "cannot be rendered" line is wrong and is corrected in place. What
is true is narrower and worth keeping: the splash is invisible to the
DEFAULT listing because is_build wants a .rat child, so anyone who does
not pass --all concludes it is missing. That goes in METHOD -- a default
filter can hide a whole screen and the corpus will record it as absent.
The payoff is for the port rather than for the RE: the first of the five
screens now has a reference composite, which it did not have. Marked
amber on one point -- there is no framebuffer capture of the splash in
this repo, so the match to the running game is by description against the
milestone-1 notes, not by pixels.
Q2. The archive is eight screens shipped twice, English and Japanese --
not the "build 4 title, 5 main menu, 6/8/9 submenus" the handoff claimed.
Build 8 is the JAPANESE main menu; 6 and 9 are the EN and JP EXTRAS, and
EXTRAS is the only submenu GP_TITLE holds. The PRESS (A) BUTTON plate is
its own build (2/3), composited over the title art and faded in a beat
later, not a state of build 4.
Confirmed by booting to the main menu and walking it: title, PRESS (A),
main menu and EXTRAS each match their render element for element. Builds
0/1 and 10/11 -- a DELTASABER / SYLPHEED A.I. plate -- were looked for in
the whole boot filmstrip, every title-side screen and the attract loop,
and appear in none of them; the reach of that negative is written down
rather than filled in with a guess.
Two rig traps went into METHOD: the menus drop d-pad presses shorter than
~0.3 s, and a grab 2.5 s after a transition can catch a screen mid-fade
-- which nearly wrote "the returned title has no plate" into the corpus.
