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question expected One iteration, as the mission gates it, and no Ready Room work started. The two criteria it named both pass. It is NOT 3D: the corpus already holds a capture of the running screen and it is a flat six-item menu in the same visual language as the title. And unrecoverable paths do not mean unrenderable screens -- content enumeration finds 60 builds in the 1106 entries. What kills it is something the question did not ask. GP_READY_ROOM.pak does not appear to hold the Ready Room's own menu at all. Two signals agree: the four largest builds composite to briefing panels -- a planet readout, unit markers, direction arrows -- and, much harder, the 902 bundles declare 317 distinct element names of which NONE matches any of the six labels on the screen (takeoff, brief, hangar, pilot, option, mission, ready all return nothing). The pak is the briefing / tactical-map content behind the BRIEFINGS item. If this is ever picked up, the first job is finding where the menu lives -- GP_BUNK.pak is the obvious place -- not naming this pak's keys. The probe also reaches back into something already delivered: kind == 0x3002 finds ZERO buttons across all 902 bundles here, while GP_TITLE has 16. 0x3002 is one member of a 0x3000 family with sub-bits, and this pak uses 0x3000/0x3004/0x300c/0x3008. Nothing in the milestone changes -- every screen in scope is GP_TITLE -- but the handoff now says not to ship that equality as a general button test.
133 lines
7.8 KiB
Markdown
133 lines
7.8 KiB
Markdown
# Primary objective — answer everything the menu port needs
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**Status:** active, set 2026-08-28. This replaces "work the RE backlog" as the
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agent's primary objective. It does not change what the agent *does* — it is still
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reverse engineering — it changes what earns attention: an item is worth doing
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when the menu port is blocked on it.
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## Who builds what
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**You do not build the port.** A separate agent will build it, from what you
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produce. Your deliverable is decoded, verified, written-down answers plus the
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reference data that proves them.
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| | container agent (you) | port agent |
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|---|---|---|
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| decodes the disc | ✅ | ❌ — consumes your answers |
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| measures the running game | ✅ | ❌ — no emulator |
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| writes `docs/re/` and `docs/port/HANDOFF.md` | ✅ | reads them |
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| Godot project, asset pipeline, transcoding | ❌ | ✅ |
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If you find yourself designing an export schema or writing GDScript, you have
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crossed the line. Stop and go back to the question you were answering.
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`crates/sylpheed-viewer` is also **not yours to change** for this objective. The
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Explorer is the human's tool for exploring and verifying the RE work, it keeps its
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static-data-only rule, and the port does not depend on it.
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## The target
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Someone else has to build this, from your answers alone:
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```
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developer logo splash → intro video → title / PRESS Ⓐ → main menu → submenus
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```
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No gameplay, no 3D, no HUD, no missions. If an answer is not needed to put those
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five screens on a display and let a person move through them with a d-pad and Ⓐ,
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it is not in this objective.
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## What is already answered
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Do not re-derive these. They are in `docs/re/` and the
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[disc atlas](../re/disc-atlas.html):
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* **The screen archive.** `GP_TITLE.pak` holds the whole title-side tree — build 4
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the title with animating wordmarks, build 5 the five-button main menu, builds
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6/8/9 submenus, and the developer splash as the `palogo` bundle in the same pak.
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* **Buttons are identifiable as data.** Element kind `0x3002` is a button, `0x0`
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decoration, `0x10` a primitive; buttons sort top-to-bottom by resting Y; each
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pairs with an `f`-suffixed highlighted variant.
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* **The screen vocabulary.** The GamePart id table, 29 entries at `.rdata
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0x820A1630`, confirmed by the executable's own factory-registration strings.
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* **The resting pose rule** — the hold, not the longest dwell — and that a
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keyframe is the *start of a ramp*.
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* **Screen composition**, pixel-accurate for the tutorial pause menu and the title
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main menu, via `sylpheed-cli screen render`.
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* **The logo splash is not a video.** `logo1`–`logo4` are manifest-bound with no
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`.wmv` on the disc; the splash is the RATC screen, which already renders.
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## The open questions — these are the objective
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Ordered by what blocks the port earliest. Each is done when its **gate** exists:
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a written `docs/re/` result with the evidence, and reference data committed
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alongside it.
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| | Question | Gate |
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|---|---|---|
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| **Q1** | **What is a keyframe time?** Values run 16…269. 60 Hz frames would make the title intro ~4.5 s — plausible and untested. Also: is the ramp linear, or eased? | A measured answer against the running game, not an inference. Everything animated downstream depends on this number |
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| **Q2** | **Which build is which screen state?** Confirm build↔state for splash, title/PRESS Ⓐ, main menu and each submenu | A table, each row confirmed against a capture of the real screen |
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| **Q3** | **Paint order for these six screens.** Solved at runtime, unsolved from the file — the declaration table is provably not it | Either a rule derived from the bundle, or six measured orders and a clear statement that no file-side rule was found |
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| **Q4** | **What does each button do?** Labels are baked into the sprites; no decoded field says which GamePart a button opens | Button → GamePart id, from code or from driving the game. Say which |
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| **Q5** | **Navigation semantics.** Initial focus, wrap-around at the ends, whether left/right does anything, what B does on each screen | Observed behaviour, per screen |
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| **Q6** | **The boot sequence, and what drives it.** Order is observable; the *data or code* that sequences it is not decoded. Include the attract loop and what returns to the title | The sequence, plus whatever the game reads to decide it |
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| **Q7** | **Transitions.** What happens visually between screens — the `pteff00.prm` quads, a fade, a cut — and its timing | Described and timed against a capture |
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| **Q8** | **Menu audio.** Which BGM per screen; which cue on move / confirm / back / error. The cue table is complete; the event binding is not | Cue names bound to events, with how you established each |
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| **Q9** | **Video binding.** Which movie is the boot intro vs the new-game intro; whether playback is skippable and what ends it | Named movies plus the playback rules |
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| **Q10** | **What are a music bank's sub-waves?** `BGM_001.slb` is three sub-waves — 10 KB, 4.47 MB, 4.67 MB — and we currently **concatenate them blindly** into one 347 s track. Two near-equal halves could be intro + loop, or two variations, or two halves of one piece. A menu that loops its music needs to know which | The role of each sub-wave, established for at least the menu BGM. "Concatenate" is a decision, not a default — right now it is a default nobody chose |
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| **S1** | ~~**Ready Room probe.**~~ **DONE 2026-08-28 — [no-go](../re/ready-room-probe.md).** It is 2D and enumerates fine, but the pak is briefing/tactical-map content, not the Ready Room menu | ✅ go/no-go written |
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## Known unknowns — say so, do not fill them in
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Some of these may turn out to be undecodable. That is a valid, useful answer, and
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it is better than a guess, because the port agent will otherwise have to author
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the mapping by hand and needs to know it is authoring rather than transcribing.
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For each question, the answer is one of:
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* **decoded** — here is the field, here is the disc-wide check;
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* **measured** — not on the disc in any form we found, but here is what the
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running game does, and here is the capture;
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* **undecodable, with reach** — we looked here, here and here, and this is why it
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is not there.
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Never a fourth thing. In particular: if Q4 ends as "read the labels off the sprite
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images by eye", say exactly that — it is then an authored mapping on the port
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side, not a disc fact, and mislabelling it would put a guess into the port wearing
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the badge of a measurement.
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## The Ready Room probe (S1) — one iteration, then stop
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`GP_READY_ROOM.pak` is the largest UI archive on the disc, 1 106 entries, and only
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**6 of its names resolve**. It is also ISL-scripted. That is either a week or a
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quarter, and one cheap test tells you which.
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Our screen catalog enumerates bundles by **content**, not by name — `is_build` /
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`is_composable` read the bytes — so unrecoverable *paths* do not necessarily mean
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unrenderable *screens*.
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```bash
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sylpheed-cli screen list "$SYLPHEED_DISC/dat/GP_READY_ROOM.pak"
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sylpheed-cli screen render --build <n> "$SYLPHEED_DISC/dat/GP_READY_ROOM.pak" /tmp/rr.png
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```
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Report how many builds it finds, whether any composite looks like a Ready Room,
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and **whether the room is 2D at all** or 3D with a UI overlay — if it is 3D the
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answer is no-go by definition, not "try harder".
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**Then stop and write the go/no-go.** Do not start Ready Room work on your own
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authority.
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## Handing it over
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[`HANDOFF.md`](HANDOFF.md) is the single page the port agent reads. Keep it
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current as you answer questions: it is a summary with links into `docs/re/`, not a
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second copy of the findings. An answer that is not reachable from HANDOFF.md has
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not been delivered.
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## Out of scope
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3D, gameplay, HUD, missions, save/load, localisation beyond English, the Godot
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project itself, any asset pipeline, and any archive outside `GP_TITLE`,
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`tables.pak`, `sound.pak` and `dat/movie/` — except for the S1 probe.
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