residual is smaller than I said
Testing the candidate I raised last iteration rather than carrying it.
Blending bit-0x02 sprites additively moves every measure the wrong way --
whole-frame mean diff +0.55 to +1.04, swoosh-band mean +1.83 to +3.98,
band edge-correlation 0.6971 down to 0.5578. So the bit is real and
independent but does not select an additive blend. I reverted the
experiment and kept the word as T8adImage::flags, documented and not
acted on; the render is byte-identical to before.
Second refutation: the swoosh is not displaced. Shifting the band over
plus or minus 80 by 8 pixels peaks sharply at zero, 0.7342, falling to
0.22 at 24 px. So the pivot story is dead twice over -- inert at scale
100, and no displacement to explain anyway.
And I have restated the residual, because earlier sections overstated it.
The +16 to +34 band tiles I quoted were measured WITHOUT --primitives.
With the dim drawn the band's average is nearly right at +1.83; what is
wrong is its structure, tiles running -38.6 then +33.8 and cancelling.
Six candidates eliminated now and none confirmed.
One caveat I owe the port agent about the capture I gave them: it is at
t=4.0s, roughly 174 keyframe units into a screen whose elements have
keyframes out to t=600. I judged "settled" from mean luminance, which
cannot see a thin sprite still moving. It is settled for the bulk of the
screen and not proven settled for every element -- which is a live
alternative explanation for a structural difference in exactly the band
the sweeps cross.
METHOD: cargo build passing does not mean cargo test compiles. Adding the
field built the library in 1.48s and broke two test-only struct literals;
cargo test failed with exit 101.
Continuing the swoosh. Last iteration ended with "the next step is
finding where a blend mode would be encoded, and I do not know the format
carries one". It does carry a candidate.
The kind field is not it -- the swoosh sprites are kind 0x0, the same as
ordinary ones. But the T8aD header word at +0x04 splits the title's
sprites exactly along effect versus normal: pteff01, pteff03a,
ptlogo_back2eff1..5 and both ptlogoall_eff are 0x8832, while ptlogo1,
ptlogo2, ptlogo_tm, ptbase2, ptlogo_back2 and ptcopyright are 0x8830.
One bit, 0x02.
Disc-wide it behaves like a real flag rather than an artefact: 19216
sprites, 18 distinct values, bit 0x02 set in 27.1 percent, and it toggles
against otherwise identical words -- 0x8830 against 0x8832, 0x0830
against 0x0832, 0x0810 against 0x0812, 0x0030 against 0x0032.
Marked as correlation and not decode, because nothing here shows the bit
MEANS additive. The one thing that makes it more than a guess is
ptlogo_back2eff, which carries 0x8830 despite having eff in its name --
so the split is the field's and not my pattern-matching on names. The
test is to blend bit-0x02 sprites additively and re-correlate the title
against the plate-free capture.
METHOD gets the trap that cost the first attempt: searching for a
sprite's name and taking the next T8aD returns the SAME header for every
sprite, because the names all live together in the declaration table. It
failed its own control at once -- different sprites reporting identical
dimensions -- and the fix was to match on width and height instead of on
proximity.
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.
The handoff had Q3 as "runtime-solved only". It is not: the layer key at
+0x0A of the T8aD sprite header, stable-sorted, is a file-derivable paint
order, already checked against five measured orders and already driving
the compositor for every build on the disc. That answer had simply never
reached the page the port agent reads.
The new evidence is EXTRAS -- the first screen composited from the rule
alone and scored against a framebuffer capture the rule had never seen.
0.9620 at zero shift, against a same-tooling control of 0.9657 on the
screen the rule was fitted to.
Written down with its limit rather than its headline: align_to_capture
correlates edges, and a paint-order change moves blends, not edges, by
=<45/255 on a few per cent of pixels. So the score is evidence for
placement and only CONSISTENT with the order. The sharp A/B needs a
rebuild and is named in the doc instead of being claimed.
The census filtered pak entries whose own first four bytes are T8aD. A sprite
is usually a child of a RATC bundle, and a bundle entry's magic is RATC, so a
top-level magic filter cannot see one:
top-level T8aD entries (counted) 4 525 sprites, 45 keys
T8aD inside RATC bundles (missed) 16 659 sprites, 204 keys
both 21 184 sprites, 216 keys
171 of the 216 keys exist only inside bundles. The sharpest statement of the
error: that census never saw GP_TITLE.pak at all -- the pak holding both of the
screens this page's entire evidence comes from.
Retracted: "45 values", "the keys are pak-local", "each auxiliary pak occupies
its own narrow high-byte band". On the full population 68/216 keys (31%, not
9%) cross a pak family and the per-pak ranges overlap heavily -- GP_BUNK
0x8000-0xa110, GP_TITLE 0x8000-0xc150, GP_LEADERBOARD 0x8000-0xf100. The tidy
banding was an artifact of seeing one or two keys per pak. So the key looks
like a shared vocabulary, which is the opposite of what I published.
Survives, now on the full population: the field is a u16 at +0x0A (upper half
zero 21 184/21 184), and it is an enumeration (216 values for 21 184 sprites).
Three wrong numbers on this page now, all the same shape -- a statistic computed
over a population I had not checked was the population in question. Stated once
at the end of the section rather than three times: check the sampling frame
before the statistic.
The census filters pak entries whose own first four bytes are T8aD. The
sprites this page measures paint order on are children of a RATC bundle --
ui_layout.rs reaches them via ratc::parse, and a bundle entry's magic is RATC,
so a child T8aD never matches a top-level magic filter.
So the 45 keys may describe a population that only partly overlaps, or does not
overlap at all with, the one the page's two measured screens come from. I do
not yet know which; the comparison is running. Marking the section rather than
leaving the counts to be read as covering the screens' sprites.
Same failure shape as the 37/45 language-duplication note lower down the page:
a number computed over a population I had not checked was the population in
question. Recording it as such.
The page rested on twelve values from two screens. This walks all 4525 sprites
on the disc.
* The field is a u16 at +0x0A. The upper half of the 32-bit word the page
reads is zero in 4525/4525. Nothing above changes -- 0x00008100 sorts the
same as 0x8100 -- but a future value with the high half set would mean
something had been misread rather than that the layer got deeper.
* It is an enumeration: 45 values for 4525 sprites, one of which (0x8100)
covers 1188 of them.
* The reading worth trying -- a global layer vocabulary shared across the UI
-- is refuted. Only 4 of 45 keys cross a pak family and 33 of 45 live only
in GP_MAIN_GAME_2D; every other pak owns a narrow high-byte band (0x90-0x94
for the in-game overlays, 0xa4 mission log, 0xb1-0xb2 save/load). A screen
that owns one or two keys is not ordering itself with them.
That supports "group id in the high bits, order in the low bits", which is what
the page already suspected, but it does NOT test it: paint order has been
measured on two screens and both are inside GP_MAIN_GAME_2D, so there is no
ground truth to check the split against. Left amber.
The first number I got was 37/45 shared, which would have supported precisely
the wrong conclusion. It came from counting paks instead of pak families: the
six GP_MAIN_GAME_*2D paks are the same screens in six languages and their key
sets are byte-for-byte identical. Recorded on the page, because the shape
recurs -- a corpus with near-duplicate members manufactures agreement.
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.
With the layer key and the primitives' implied keys in place, the tie-break -
how the game orders elements sharing a key - is all that is left between the
derived order and ground truth. Three measured screens now constrain it.
On the menu and the splash every tied group comes out in declaration order,
which is what the stable sort already gives. The title is the only screen that
discriminates, and nothing predicts it: 0x8083 x5 paints eff1, eff2, eff5, eff3,
eff4, and 0x80a0 x7 paints logo1 x3, tm, logo2 x3.
Refuted: declaration order; RATC child order; first keyframe time (52, 56, 62,
58, 60 - the measured order is not sorted by them); resting keyframe time;
resting X or Y (938, 938, 64, 788, 447); and T8aD header words +00, +04, +0c and
+10, which are either identical within a group or unsorted.
Child order is worth its own line: a strict improvement over declaration order
(7 misplaced positions on the title instead of 9, and it recovers the logo
grouping) and exactly right on the other two screens. NOT adopted, because on the
only screen that can tell them apart it is still wrong.
Adds a test that measures what the residual costs instead of assuming it. Of the
3 disagreeing pairs of drawn elements across all three screens, all 3 have
overlapping bounding boxes and 2 share opaque pixels: ptlogo_back2eff5 against
eff3 (22568 px) and eff4 (32395 px). The third pair, ptlogo2 vs ptlogo_tm,
overlaps by two columns and shares NO opaque pixel - the wordmark is transparent
there. A bounding-box test called that a defect; reading the alpha says it is
not, which is why the test reads pixels. The set is pinned, so a change that
makes it worse fails.
15 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.
The layer-key order was adopted from two measured screens and then applied to
every build on the disc, so it owed a regression check against the screens the
corpus had already validated against the running game.
Rendered the tutorial PAUSE menu and the title main menu both ways and diffed:
3.8 % and 1.1 % of pixels differ, max delta 45/255 and 34/255, and the two
renders are indistinguishable in layout — the change is confined to blends where
translucent sprites overlap. No regression, but which order is more faithful on
those two screens is unsettled and recorded as such.
Adds a corpus-wide test asserting every composite's draw list is strictly
increasing in (layer key, declaration index), streaming one pak at a time so it
does not OOM alongside the other whole-disc tests. It reports the rule's reach:
341 of 965 builds are reordered, and it fails if that share collapses.
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.
The word at +0x08 of a T8aD header — which this project's decoder never read,
taking width/height/tiles from +0x14 onward — is non-decreasing in the order the
game paints a screen, on BOTH screens whose order has been measured: 20 of the
title's 24 elements (the other four have no T8aD sprite) and 6 of the splash's 7.
No inversion anywhere.
On the splash it explains the whole permutation: the three _eff glows carry
0xa100 and their base logos 0xa110, so the glows paint first even though the
declaration table interleaves them.
This is the first FILE-DERIVABLE account of the paint order. Everything checked
before failed — declaration order and its reverse, the placement region, the RATC
child order, keyframe start and rest times, resting Y, the runtime record's
fields, and every other build's table.
Recorded as unsettled: the ties (two groups share a key and are painted in an
order that is not declaration order), what the bits actually mean (the values
look like flag words, and the two screens use different ranges), and the fact
that two screens is two screens — a third permutation either promotes this to a
rule or breaks it.
