The three orders the derived rule was built from all live in GP_TITLE.pak, so
they cannot confirm it - the rule was fitted to them. These two are from
GP_SAVE_LOAD.pak, read off the running game now that the Canary threading fix
makes the main menu dependable.
The 9-element slot-list header composites EXACTLY as the sort predicts, on all 6
instances of it, and nothing about this screen was fed into the rule:
measured 7 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
derived 7 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
including TWO tied groups (0xb102 x2 and 0xb210 x5) that both come out in
declaration order, and the unkeyed pfeff00.prm fade quad last.
The 13-element save/load frame differs in exactly the two open questions and no
new ones: two unkeyed pfbase.tbm backgrounds paint FIRST where the sort puts the
keyless last - the splash's palogo_eff0.prm behaviour in a different file type,
so implied_layer_key now covers it - and the 0xb100 group of four paints
10,11,8,12 where declaration order is 8,10,11,12.
That second point is a SECOND screen with a mis-ordered tie, which is what the
question needed, and it immediately kills a candidate: 10 and 11 are kind=0x2002
while 8 and 12 are 0x0000, so "descending kind then declaration index"
reproduces 10,11,8,12 exactly - and then fails both title groups, where every
element of 0x8083 is kind 0 and where 0x80a0 would predict 2,3,4,5,0,1,7 against
a measured 0,2,4,7,1,3,5. Seven candidates refuted now.
16 disc tests green.
Two places checked for the key a .prm element sorts by, both empty:
* the declaration entry's four unread words are constant across every element
of all three measured screens (+28=0, +36=0xffffffff, +56=0, and +44 is a
button ordinal 1-5, 0xffffffff elsewhere);
* the bundle carries NO data for a primitive at all - the menu build declares
pteff00.prm, pteff02.prm and pteff05.t32 and has zero RATC children for any
of them, its 34 children being 21 T8aD sprites and 13 .rat records.
So the layer comes from the game code. But it is consistent, which is what makes
a per-name table a measurement rather than a fudge. Bracketing each unkeyed
element between the keys of its measured neighbours: pteff02.prm falls in
(0x8010, 0x8040) on BOTH screens it appears on, pteff00.prm is past the maximum
on both, and palogo_eff0.prm is below the minimum on the splash.
implied_layer_key records exactly those and nothing else; an unlisted primitive
keeps u32::MAX and still sorts last. With it, derived_paint_order produces the
same layer-key sequence as the order read off the running game on all three
measured screens - primitives included - and matches element-for-element on four
of the five bundle instances. The fifth is the title, differing only inside its
tied groups, which is a separate open question.
This does not make include_primitives safe by default: the 36 builds that come
out one colour are wiped by pzeff00.prm and pceff00.prm, never measured, hence
not in the table.
14 disc tests green.
Read off the running game with screen_children.py and identified by pivot
signature as GP_TITLE.pak ratc-index 8, the NEW GAME / LOAD GAME / TUTORIAL /
OPTIONS / EXTRAS screen:
paint order: 1 3 4 2 5 8 9 6 7 15 10 11 12 13 14 0
It is the first measured screen carrying TWO primitives, and they land in
different places, which is the point. pteff02.prm (the 25% dim) paints 4th,
beneath the whole UI; pteff00.prm (the transition fade, resting transparent)
paints last. Both match their positions on the title screen exactly. So a
primitive's place is per-element and stable by role - backdrop first, dim at
slot 4, fade last - and there are now three permutations to test a derivation
against rather than two.
Wired into measured_paint_order, keyed by element names so both language builds
get it. The English build composited with --primitives edge-correlates at 0.9591
at shift (0,0) against a framebuffer capture taken in the same session - a third
screen confirming paint order, resting pose, fade alpha and primitives at once,
against a capture this project had not seen before.
13 disc tests green.
fill_quad composites an untextured primitive as a solid rectangle of the
keyframes fade colour, pivot x 2 in size, placed and scaled exactly as a sprite
is. Behind ComposeOptions::include_primitives and screen render --primitives.
On the title screen, whose paint order is ground truth, it is measurably right:
mean luminance 76.30 -> 63.72 against the captures 64.58, i.e. from +18% to
-1.3%, and mean absolute difference 16.07 -> 13.08. The background was ~40% too
bright; pteff02.prm, a 25% black dim, was what was missing. The wordmark is not
dimmed by it because the measured order paints that quad at slot 4, beneath the
logo. Edge correlation moves 0.9538 -> 0.9480, which is not informative here: a
uniform dim scales gradients uniformly so a normalised edge score barely sees it.
OFF BY DEFAULT, and that is the finding. A primitive has no T8aD header, so no
layer key, and derived_paint_order sorts the keyless to the end. GP_DIALOGs
pzeff00.prm is a single keyframe of opaque black at full screen; painted last it
wipes the build. Of the 125 builds that draw a visible primitive, 36 come out
>99% one colour with the derived order.
No constant default works, because the two screens read off the running game
disagree: the splash paints its primitive FIRST (the black backdrop) while the
title paints one at slot 4 and another LAST (the fade-out). Declaration order
fails the title too. A disc test measures the damage rather than asserting the
feature works, so the number moves when the ordering is solved.
Also records a false alarm worth keeping: a first pass reported 36 GP_DIALOG
builds at "100% black", which was a crude near-black pixel threshold and not a
black screen - those dialogs are dimmed 50% and perfectly legible. The genuinely
wiped builds are a different set.
blit modulated by tint only, which is 0xffffffff on essentially every keyframe,
so the fade word was decoded, stored and then discarded. Applying it as an ARGB
modulate takes the title composite's edge correlation against the framebuffer
capture of the running game from 0.4597 to 0.9538, both at zero shift. The white
wordmark with its blue outline, the trademark, the copyright and the orange
exploding planet all appear -- the planet because a full-screen blue effect that
rests at alpha 0 had been painting over it at full opacity.
ARGB is measured: across a fade-in the high byte walks 0x00 -> 0x80 -> 0xc0 ->
0xe0 -> 0xff while the low three stay ffffff, and the low 24 bits are 0xffffff on
5276 of the disc's 5453 resting keyframes.
A modulate can only remove pixels, so the risk is a blank screen. Measured: no-op
on 4060 of 5200 sprite elements, partial on 453, hides 687 -- transient HUD
indicators that should not be lit at rest -- and NO build is left with nothing
visible. A disc test asserts that, and that the no-op share stays high, which
also guards the resting rule against drifting onto ramp frames.
Both changes are in one commit because the second is invisible without the first.
Applying fade erased the word PAUSE, which the running-game capture plainly
shows: pgptitle.rat has three runs of two identical keyframes -- pre-roll, hold,
exit -- and the 'later run wins' tie-break grabbed the exit. A group carries the
screen's entry animation AND its exit, so a run ending on the last keyframe is
now excluded unless it is the only one. The title correlation is unchanged.
Element::rest() picked the keyframe with the largest gap to the next keyframe's
time. That reads a keyframe as a value held until the next one; it is the start
of a ramp toward it. A long gap after keyframe k means the screen spends that
time arriving at k+1, so the settled pose is at the far end of the gap.
The title wordmark zooms in over five frames and holds at (184,193) at 100% from
t=251 to t=264. The old rule picked the frame before the long gap: (179,186) at
101%, still mid-zoom.
Measured against the framebuffer capture of the running title screen, which is a
1:1 crop so frame coordinates map directly (confirmed: the copyright line lands
on row 669 in the capture and in both composites). Edge-correlated over the
wordmark box:
plateau (landed) best 0.4597 at shift (0,0)
longest dwell (old) best 0.1511 at shift (+3,+8), 0.1268 at (0,0)
The old composite scores 3x lower and only peaks after being moved, by about the
(-5,-7) that picking kf4 instead of kf5 predicts.
It also fixes six title elements the old rule rested at alpha 0x00 where the
capture plainly shows them, and pteff00.prm - the full-screen fade quad painted
last - which rested at opaque black. That was the blocker on .prm compositing.
Adds tools/re-capture/align_to_capture.py, which is how this was scored, and
turns the .prm test that deliberately asserted the old defect into a guard on
the fix.
Not settled and now the next item: compose ignores the keyframe fade alpha
entirely (blit modulates by tint only), which is why choosing the wrong keyframe
was invisible until now.
The developer-logo splash declares its sprites directly and has no .rat layout
child, so is_build rejected it and no screen command could render it — despite
it being one of only two screens whose paint order has been read off the running
game, and the one where the layer key explains the whole permutation.
Adds ui_layout::is_composable (a declaration table plus at least one element
resolving to a T8aD the bundle carries) and an opt-in --all on screen
list/info/render. Measured on the disc: 2859 RATC bundles, 965 pass is_build,
2751 pass is_composable, and 0 pass is_build without passing it — a strict
superset. It is opt-in because the 1786 extra bundles are mostly two-element
fragments (a button and its glow), and because widening the default would
renumber --build for every pak, invalidating the build indices the corpus's
notes cite by number.
The splash now renders 6/7 elements, painting its glows first in the order
measured off the game; a disc test pins that order.
`compose` skips focused-state records by default, so whatever that flag matches
vanishes from every composite. It matched a trailing `f` in the name and nothing
else, which is not the convention — it is a letter.
Measured across the disc: 2458 elements match the suffix and only 54 of them
have the base element they would be the focused version of; all 54 are
`pgmenu_btnNNf.t32`. The other 2404, spread over 864 bundles, are `_eff` glow
layers whose names end in the same letter — `pb_name_eff.t32` alone accounts for
1122 of them, and `palogo_gamearts_eff.t32` is one the draw capture shows the
game painting, before its logo, with its own layer key.
Requiring the pair recovers 587 glows in the composable builds. GP_OPTIONS is
the plainest case: without `pbmwindow_eff.t32` the panel had no window at all,
just two floating brackets (captures/ui-layout/options-with{out,}-its-glow-layer.png).
Two other candidate rules were tried and refuted first. The `opt` link is not a
focus link: 221 elements are opt-targets, only 2 of them suffix-match, and the
targets include `pjnet_bg.rat` and `pv_loading_loop1.rat`. And the suffix alone,
as shown above, is unrelated to anything.
compose now sorts elements by the word at +0x08 of their sprite's T8aD header
instead of painting in declaration order, for every build except the two whose
measured order is hard-coded. That word is non-decreasing in the order the game
actually paints both measured screens, so every screen nobody has captured now
gets its layering from the file rather than from the declaration table, which is
provably not the paint order.
Verified with artifacts and both ways, not by a green build: the disc test
asserts the measured orders never invert the key and that the composite's key
sequence is sorted, and reading the word from +0x0c instead makes it fail; the
title composites identically; and GP_MISSION_SELECT — uncaptured — now composites
cleanly, committed as a capture.
Two things recorded rather than smoothed over: ties keep declaration order
because the game breaks them some other way that is not known, and the
developer-logo splash has no .rat child, so is_build rejects it and the
compositor never sees that bundle at all — its measured order is inert in
practice and screen render cannot draw it.
Checking the blast radius of the previous commit's `kind = 0x4` skip found 174
elements on the disc that are 0x4 with no non-0x4 element of the same sprite —
GP_READY_ROOM pak entry 75 is 56 elements and every one is 0x4, a list of real
icons a blanket skip would erase. So the rule is narrowed: skip an instance only
when its template is present, which is the case the title capture covers. The
title render is byte-identical before and after, so the narrowing changes nothing
the evidence covers.
And the claim that this "caught a regression" is WITHDRAWN, because measuring it
refuted it: none of those 174 elements is in a bundle `is_build` accepts, so none
of them ever reaches the compositor. The blanket skip would have been harmless in
practice. The narrow rule is a precaution, not a fix, and the comment says so.
The test that was going to assert the regression could not find such a build —
correctly, since none is composable. It is replaced by one that pins the fact
which makes the narrow rule safe: no composable build on the disc has a 0x4
element without its template, checked across 500+ builds. If that stops being
true it fails, instead of a screen quietly going empty.
The compositor painted in declaration order, which the draw capture proved wrong
— the title's background is declared ninth and paints first. The order the game
uses is its runtime child list, and no decoded field reproduces it, so rather
than leave the screen composited wrongly this lands the orders that HAVE been
read off the running game and falls back to declaration order everywhere else.
Two builds are covered: GP_TITLE's title build and the GAME ARTS / SETA / studio
anima splash. Keyed by element names, which identify a build across paks and
language variants.
Rendering it exposed a second defect, and the same capture settles it: the
kind = 0x4 elements are motion-trail ghosts, not resting content. The bundle
declares three instances of each wordmark; the capture shows exactly ONE quad at
each wordmark's position. Drawing them at their resting keyframe put three
oversized PROJECT SYLPHEED copies across the composite. They are now skipped.
Verified with an artifact, not a green build: the composite is committed
(captures/title-composited-measured-order.png) and now reads as the title screen
— background, planet, ship, wordmark, TM, copyright, correctly layered.
The test is disc-gated and was checked BOTH ways: it passes as landed, and
disabling the order table makes it fail. It reads one pak rather than every
build on the disc — the first version used the all-builds helper and got the
test process OOM-killed running alongside the other three.
The title screen needs an order that puts element 13 (`ptbase2.t32`, the
full-screen background) behind elements 0-5 (the wordmarks) — the capture shows
the wordmarks on top, so the declaration table is not it. Two other orderings
the bundle carries were the cheap candidates, and both are now dead:
* the **placement region** stores a keyframe group per element with an explicit
element index, so it could be a second ordering. It is not — it equals the
declaration order on every build on the disc. `UiBuild::placement_order`
exposes it and `placement_region_order_is_never_a_second_ordering` pins it, so
the refutation stays checkable instead of remembered.
* the **RATC child order** is the declaration order with the `.prm` elements
absent — strictly less information, and no place to put the background other
than where the table already puts it.
`screen info --geometry` prints both, plus each element's decoded sprite size
beside `pivot*2` and every keyframe's scale/position/time — the numbers a
placement hypothesis has to be tested against, and how the pivot/scale rule in
the previous commit was found.
`title_background_is_full_screen` pins that rule against the disc rather than a
synthetic sprite. `scaled_elements_are_a_small_and_mostly_undiscriminating_minority`
reports the scope honestly: 865 of 5 130 resting placements are scaled at all,
and only 213 of those could tell "about the pivot" from "about the sprite
centre" — which the capture did *not* settle, because `ptbase2`'s pivot is its
centre. It also counts how far `pivot*2` is from the decoded size disc-wide
(2 521 agree, 1 884 are off by more than 16 px), which demotes the "pivot is
exactly half the texture" result to a property of the tutorial bundle.
The compositor read a keyframe as `top-left = (X,Y)`, `size = decoded · scale`
and ignored the declared pivot. That is right at 100 %, which is every element
the format was ever checked against — the pause menu, the ARSENAL chip ruler —
and wrong for every element that is scaled.
Measured against a framebuffer capture of Canary on the title screen.
`GP_TITLE.pak` build 7 element 13 is `ptbase2.t32`: 640x360, pivot (320,180),
one keyframe at (320,180) with scale 200 %. From the corner that is a 1280x720
rect at 320..1600 x 180..900 — a quarter-screen slab with the top-left quadrant
bare. Anchored at the pivot it is (0,0)..(1280,720), and the capture shows the
background art reaching all four edges. Normalised cross-correlation of the
composite against the capture, searched over +-40 px, peaks at (0,0): 0.90 on
the planet limb, 0.72 on the lower-left ship.
`ptcopyright.t32` calibrates the other half: unscaled, 694x20 at (293,655), and
the capture's glyph run is x 295..986 / y 700..718 once the 45 px of window
chrome is taken off. So the keyframe really is the top-left at 1:1.
Disc-wide this moves 865 of 5 130 resting placements. The pause menu's own
`pgpeff01` glow stops hanging off the menu frame to the bottom-right and
centres on it.
`ComposeOptions::backdrop` comes with it: the default dim slate stands in for
the PRMD dim-quad behind an in-mission screen, but comparing against a
framebuffer needs the black the game actually composites over, so
`screen render --black` can ask for it.
Two independent lines landed a `.rat` reading and neither was the whole
picture, so this merges them into one module and fixes what the merge exposed.
ui_layout — the screen is the BUNDLE, not the set of .rat records
------------------------------------------------------------------
`feat/ui-layout-preview` parsed `.rat` records; the autopilot stack documented
the RATC header and probed it in `examples/screen_layout.rs` but never landed a
library module. The `.rat`-only reading structurally cannot see an element that
has no record -- the `eff*` frame corners, the `deli*` dividers, `msg` -- which
is exactly what the committed real-vs-rebuilt capture shows missing. Rebuilt
around the header:
* element declaration table at 0x20 (60-byte entries: name, parent index at
+32, kind flags, pivot) = the back-to-front draw list;
* the placement region after it = per-element keyframe groups.
Verified against the disc, each against a fact the docs state independently:
`pgpeff02a` -> parent 3 = `pgpeff02`; `pgp_ttrl_btn10` rests at (546,288); the
pause buttons sit at 268/337/407/478, the documented 70 px pitch; the Arsenal
carries X = -516. The tutorial PAUSE menu now composites 11/11 elements and
matches the real screen more closely than the earlier rebuild did.
Three defects found while validating, none of which any test would have caught:
* the keyframe block is 40 bytes with X/Y/time at +28/+32/+36 and an
alpha-ramping ARGB at +0 -- the fade, previously unread;
* a group's data stops 4 bytes short of its last block's time slot, so that
word is the NEXT group's element index. Reading it produced times like
1869640736 and silently corrupted the max-dwell pick. Last-frame time is
now `None`;
* the `.rat` sprite-name field is not 16 bytes. Capping it there truncated
`pgp_ttrl_title.t32` to `pgp_ttrl_title.t`, which resolved against nothing
and dropped 4 of 11 tutorial elements from the composite.
Max-dwell also needed a tie-break: on equal gaps take the LATER frame, or
`pgpmsg` reports the y=645 fly-through instead of the y=605 it settles at.
savegame -- a Rust port of tools/re-capture/savegame.py
------------------------------------------------------
GDHA container, zlib payload, chunk stream (GDAA / phase / GHAD 122 B / 16x20 B
SHAB / trailer). Every GHAD word carries its own confidence rather than the
block being presented as solved: 6 named, 2 recorded as REFUTED (+36, +56 were
tested as difficulty and as stage and are neither), 7 still unknown.
Tested against the three real saves committed under docs/re/captures -- no disc
and no emulator needed. The load-bearing assertion is the byte-identical
round-trip; the develop differential is asserted as a property (spending 4000 P
moves +24 and not its twin +28, steps the clear ratio, and moves exactly two
blob entries), and the header summary is checked to agree with the payload it
mirrors -- the trap that makes the Details panel a bad oracle.
CLI: `screen list|info|render` and `save info`, so both are checkable headlessly
in the same spirit as `mesh render`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Parse each RATC bundle's .rat layout records (sprite name @0x20, placement
block [scale,tint,X,Y]) and composite the .t32 sprites back into the screen
image. Validated: GP_PAUSE_MENU rebuilds pixel-accurately (btn X=226,
Y=268/337/407/478 — the documented 70px pitch); focus records land 42px
left/8px up. Compositor confirmed by rendering the pause menu from disc alone.
Format doc: docs/re/structures/ui-rat-layout.md (agent RE).
