A river is sub-pixel at almost every Atlas scale (a 100 m channel against
Global's ~17.6 km per screen pixel), so drawing it to scale draws nothing.
The line becomes a symbol whose job is legibility: a fixed 5 px screen-space
stroke, contiguous through the river's own cell centres, never drawn over
water, and culled when too small to read.
The cull threshold derives from the stroke rather than being stipulated. A
mark reads as a line at roughly 3x its own width, so the minimum is 15 px of
on-screen length — and the kilometre thresholds then fall out of each rung's
scale: 264 km at Global, 2.8 km at Region, 28 m at District. A level-of-detail
ladder with no hand-tuned constants, which self-corrects if the width changes.
Measured on the visible extent, not total river length: a course crossing the
window always spans it and passes, so only a course wholly inside the view and
small is culled. Correct at both ends of the ladder, and no new wire field.
Records a tension that had to be resolved rather than split. Jeroen proposed a
flat 100 km cutoff, then noted that 5x5 px still reads as a dot and asked for
15-20. Those are incompatible: the km threshold depends only on the pixel
length, so 100 km implies ~6 px, which is dot-shaped at a 5 px stroke.
Admitting 100 km rivers AND keeping them line-shaped needs a ~2 px stroke.
Thick lines mean fewer rivers; thin lines mean more. Ruled for the bold stroke.
Client-side, and provably so: the cull is measured in screen pixels, and the
display ratio is a client-side viewport-dependent parameter that never reaches
a wire request or cache key, so the server cannot know how many pixels a
course occupies. Water-clipping needs nothing new either — the per-cell
classification is already in the adopted canvas.
Built on the 2026-07-27 measurement in D-258's amendment: 375 courses present,
458 of 518,400 pixels different. The rivers were not failing to render, they
were correctly beneath notice; the defect was drawing specks instead of
drawing properly or not at all.
T-1237 implements. T-1238 restores size-varying width as polish, deliberately
deferred — noting width and cull are coupled, since a thinner stroke lowers
its own visibility threshold.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything else from the pair session was either shipped or ticketed with its
rationale in git. These two were design decisions Jeroen made, living only in
a scratchpad under /tmp, one cleanup away from gone.
D-259 — ENCLOSED SETTLEMENTS. Open-air requires atmosphere == standard;
everything else is enclosed, as point locations on the Atlas with interiors
deferred to a separate generator and handled like embedded stations. Branch on
an explicit `enclosed` property rather than the atmosphere string, so enclosed
settlements on breathable worlds (hostile-biome posts, undersea, arcologies)
need no second code path. NULL defaults to enclosed, which fails safe.
The load-bearing claim is that D-220's density model is PHYSICALLY
INAPPLICABLE to a pressure vessel, not mistuned: it measures people per km2 of
footprint driven by utility cost per metre of street, so run airless it yields
1,500 ppl/km2 of open-air streets in vacuum. The handoff mechanism was already
planned — D-166's door boundary contract, where a dome's airlock IS that door.
Atmosphere keeps its full range for the surface-expedition layer; the binary
collapse applies to settlement layout only, and the record says so to stop the
collapse being read as atmosphere not mattering.
D-260 — GENERATOR SCOPE. Sol is encoded as Authored { deepest_rung: Global }
rather than excluded by convention. The DLC gate is a DEPTH, not a boolean, so
a Sol expansion changes one value instead of unpicking an exclusion. No new
wire status: "viewable at Global, no deeper" IS the existing rung-liveness
path. Sol art is an authored data canvas, not a finished image, so it rides
the existing wire and is drawn by the same map-art function as all 269
procedural bodies.
The hazard that made encoding necessary is recorded: systems.db still carries
terrain_reference rows for Sol bodies pointing at heightmaps deliberately never
baked, so a real Earth DEM dropped at that exact path would silently start
generating a procedural homeworld. The importer comment said Sol was excluded;
nothing enforced it.
Also files the last three parked items, which were likewise /tmp-only:
T-1233 tiled/interlaced map loading (workshop-sized D-255 revision, blocked in
spirit on the rung-0.5 cost numbers), T-1234 enumerate the flow tweaks the
fetch panel exposed but which were never written down, T-1235 zoom
discoverability — the person who specified wheel-only zoom could not find it.
T-1231 closed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eyeballed on Lendel: the Atlas opened on a Global map that was literally two
cells — one green, one blue — stretched across the window, reporting
19,598.512 km/gridunit, which is exactly half the body's circumference.
Two bugs, both of which the D-255 extent inversion turned from harmless into
fatal.
enter() fires its first request BEFORE this Control is laid out, and a
not-yet-laid-out size is not always exactly Vector2.ZERO — a few stray pixels
sailed past the `== Vector2.ZERO` guard, so the viewer asked for a 2x2
gridunit canvas and the server's 2:1 fit floored it to 2x1. That never
mattered while Global discarded the requested extent and took its cell counts
from the body's region grid; the moment the request became the canvas size, a
transient layout artefact became the map. Any viewport below a plausible
panel size is now treated as not-laid-out.
And Global was excluded from the refetch settle entirely, so a canvas born at
the wrong size could never heal however the window was resized. That
exclusion was correct when no viewport could change Global's extent. Global
now takes the SIZE refit like every other rung, but still never the pan
re-float — its canvas is whole-body and origin-anchored, and the server
ignores `center` for it.
Both have regression tests. The second asserts on _world_center rather than
_view_offset, because _recompute_canvas_transform() legitimately re-centres
the offset on any canvas adoption and would have made the test pass for the
wrong reason.
Worth noting for the class: no test written today could have caught this.
Every one supplies an explicit viewport. The bug lived entirely in the gap
between "scene loads" and "layout completes" — a seam a live launch
exercises and a unit test does not.
Also stages governance/README.md's pql-maintained record index (D-258).
Pair session with Jeroen, 2026-07-26.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the T-1174 ruling: derive(seed, absolute world metres) via the
derive_at_metres family is the only derive core; the batch 64x32
pseudo-grid is re-scoped as a survey raster with a real SurveyCellPos
newtype (role name, not a D-243 rung); derive_district_profile becomes
a thin wrapper at survey-cell-centre positions with binding basin and
riparian preservation; point-feature terrain judgments move to exact
world positions; D-255 step canvases are fenced to the window family.
LayerRegionOutput rebuild deferred to T-1181 (tripwire verified: sole
reader is the region_grid overlay); voxel carrier deferred to Phase 5.
Consults: Tyre APPROVE-WITH-CHANGES, Dudley FEASIBLE-WITH-CHANGES —
both incorporated. Discharges the T-1174 blocker on D-255's T-1181
step-canvas envelope.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
D-252 (new record, amends D-054/D-249, resolves Q-084's walk-vs-aim split):
Facing is view-only; movement no longer writes it. Client side: the rig's
moving-body yaw now always derives from leg velocity (the wire octant is the
VIEW and must never rotate the body — the follow-only commit flag
generalizes and disappears); the layered head/torso look-at runs during any
movement, WASD included; the ~100ms post-step re-assert mitigation is
removed as dead (server-side facing_from_delta removal lands separately).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
D-246 (architecture): intra-class micro-habitat mosaic — a voxel_mosaic()
sub-chunk noise band modulates the D-228 axes into spatially-coherent,
relief-conditioned micro-habitats; palette keyed on surface-class ×
climate-biome × biosphere-register; five new D-228 axis values front-loaded
for determinism; within-patch believability metric in scope. Governs T-1084.
D-247 (content): habitable Reach worlds were alive before humans — the
settlement timeline forbids terraforming from dead rock. An authored per-world
chirality bit gates whether native life is edible (Compatible) or
inedible-but-inert (Mirror); "safe" and "edible" are decoupled; colonization
is ecological war that grows an Earth-crop footprint outward from settlements.
Grounds D-246's native-vs-introduced register.
D-228 amended: +Vegetation{Meadow,Deadfall,Lichen}, +TerrainMaterial{Hardpan,Scree}.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lock the cascade's nature-half deliverable to "reads alive anywhere", not
"implemented" — the holy-grail objective surfaced by probing the generation
cascade.
- D-245 (architecture): the nature layers are accepted only when the
believability litmus passes at randomly-sampled locations across all
habitable bodies/seeds — multi-scale + never-repeating (macro identity,
meso non-stationarity, micro mosaic), coherence + non-stationarity +
intra-class variety + relief + climate-appropriateness, automated screen
under a human sign-off, budgeted -> strict. Q-123: threshold calibration.
- T-1079 (epic, north-star, DoD=D-245) + findings T-1080 (uniform climate
fields), T-1081 (near-zero relief), T-1082 (no water-body generator),
T-1084 (intra-class micro-habitat mosaic), and T-1083 (the repeatable
believability test protocol / D-245 enforcer).
- aliveness_probe bin: the exploratory probe that found these (runs the
deterministic cascade for a body+seed, reports per-district nature +
verdict). Seed for T-1083.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
D-244 ratifies what the character architecture (D-159..D-164, runtime
CharacterVisualDescriptor compositing) and the Trellis env pipeline already implied
but no decision had recorded: the in-world view renders 3D objects directly; the only
flattened 2D content is textures + flat 2D artwork (paintings/flags/billboards/signage).
There is no per-object sprite layer.
Roots out the drift: the early-spike 3D->2D sprite pipeline (#541) and the sprite-centric
docs/assets/visual catalog were never cleaned out when the project went 3D, so the
2026-06-12 fable-ous audit read them as live and re-injected the dead sprite model into
T-1049/T-1050. Fix:
- docs/assets/visual/README.md + docs/assets/README.md re-scoped to 3D models + textures
+ flat artwork (dropped the sprites/tilesets-as-entities framing).
- /sprite-gen + renderer/README repurposed as the 2D-artwork generator (paintings/flags/
billboards/signage), not the in-world object format; legacy 4-direction object-sprite
mode flagged as retired.
- T-961/T-1049/T-1050 already held in backlog pending this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Resolves Q-110 (region/chunk physical-scale anchoring), which had three
contradictory metres-per-scale assumptions in the cascade and no record
fixing metres-per-heightmap-pixel.
D-243 establishes a nested absolute-metre containment ladder with a single
elastic seam at planetary scale:
voxel 1m -> chunk 64m -> block 128m -> quarter 512m -> district 2km
-> region ~205km (100x100 districts) -> (elastic) -> planet
A body holds round(2*pi*R/204.8km) regions (the only per-body-floating
quantity); everything below is fixed integer math, so ChunkPos->RegionPos
is body-independent. The region is the largest hard block: the climate/
weather/season lockdown scale (the Q-105 cheap-dynamism source) and the
sane planetary grid. Sub-heightmap detail is invented deterministically
(interpolation + domain warp + detail-scatter, never stored, D-227); climate
is edge-fuzzed so the grid never shows ('climate does not change on a line').
Vocabulary locked and recorded in CLAUDE.md: 'region' = the 205km metric
cell only; the old 1km RegionProfile is dropped onto the 2km district; D-201
tier-4 'Region' renamed Province (the watershed/political overlay), amended
here. Refines D-239 §2 (district temperature now modulates a region baseline).
Implementation tickets: T-1077 (re-scale the code to the ladder + elastic-seam
resampling; blocks T-1046) and T-1078 (region climate stack + edge fuzz).
T-1046 is un-gated on Q-110 and now blocked only by T-1077.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reviewing the T-1038 road-graph hub model surfaced that corp HQs are
cross-referenced into atlas_city_names as reserved rows — one per corp —
producing duplicate co-named "cities" (e.g. 10 'Groombridge' rows on
GJ380c) that the spatial layers place as separate settlements.
D-242 resolves the data model: corp HQs are not cities. The HQ relationship
lives with the corp; placement is a baked, specialization-keyed preference
(CityTenant vs Standalone, since corp_type is degenerate); population and
settlement_class are install-baked with only position seed-derived. This
supersedes the D-223 corp-HQ-cross-ref and deferred-pop/class notes.
Companion tickets under T-750: T-1074 (corp-HQ model / remove the cross-ref /
specialization map / standalone HQ settlements), T-1075 (bake per-settlement
population + settlement_class), T-1076 (road-graph hub refinement — scaled-cap
hubs, co-location collapse, hybrid minor attach, deferred RailHeadFacing pass;
blocked on T-1074 + T-1075). T-1038 annotated with shipped-vs-deferred.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
416 binary files (~1.7 GB: .glb/.gltf/.bin/.png) removed from the index,
kept on disk; spikes/ keeps verdict/review markdown + spike code tracked
(61 files). .gitignore extended to cover model/texture/render binaries
under spikes/ going forward. Reproducible from purchased packs in
docs/assets/downloads/ + tracked scripts; zero markdown-embedded images
in spikes/, so no docs break. History rewrite deliberately NOT done —
recorded as out of scope in D-241. Closes fable-ous.md finding S-14.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Record D-240: a body's orbital position and stellar assignment are placeholder
registry data with no authored physical intent, so no derivation may use them as
physical inputs. Climate derives from authored planet_class (temperature envelope)
+ atmosphere + hydrosphere + seed. Supersedes the sun-driven Stefan-Boltzmann
portion of D-239 §2, which produced +356 C 'temperate' worlds (NULL spectral_class
-> G-Sun default on an M-dwarf catalog).
File T-1033 under T-974: rewrite derive_temperature_c to the class-envelope model,
drop the orbit/star inputs, regen the T-1031 golden. Audit confirmed the blast
radius is one function (derive_temperature_c).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adopts the T-NNN convention (T-N == old #N == pql ticket id) across the active
operational layer: governance/ decision records, .claude/{rules,agents,skills},
CLAUDE.md, DECISIONS.md. 283 references rewritten.
Guarded against false positives (17 correctly skipped, each logged):
- PR references kept (PR #136/#138/... — PRs are a separate #-namespace)
- non-ticket numbers kept (#4122; the "#1 process failure" idiom; "task #3")
- only #N where N is an actual ticket id is rewritten; the 1-4 digit word-bounded
match also excludes 6-digit hex colours in the visual decision records
Git history is NOT rewritten (a commit's #N already equals T-N numerically), and
historical archives (docs/sprints, docs/discussions, docs/workshops) keep their
point-in-time #N. The /pr-process ticket-ID extraction logic moves to T-NNN in the
Phase 4 consumer cutover.
Verified: pql decisions validate ok; sync 357 records / 1057 refs / broken 0 (the
prose edits don't affect decision parsing or the tickets.decision_ref linkage).
Transform committed at tooling/pql-migrate/retag_ticket_refs.py.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 1 of the pql migration. Moves the flat decisions/*.md layout into
governance/{decisions,questions,rejected}/<domain>.md — the tree pql's
`decisions sync` parses natively (record type from subdir, domain from
filename stem). Proven against pql 1.6.2: sync reports 357 records
(237 D / 108 Q / 12 R), 1057 refs, broken: 0; validate ok.
- 6 D-domain files -> governance/decisions/ (git renames)
- 5 questions-<domain>.md -> governance/questions/<domain>.md (prefix dropped)
- rejected.md split by domain -> governance/rejected/{architecture(R-001..010),
economics(R-011),perception(R-012)}.md
- decisions/README.md + questions.md index folded into governance/README.md;
pql's `decisions sync` now auto-maintains the record index appended below
the hand-written domain guidance (no more manual ID-list table upkeep).
- .pql/config.yaml: canonical vault config (tracked, not ignored).
Link rewrites are token-preserving: only the relative `foo.md` path portion
changes (e.g. `rejected.md#r-011` -> `../rejected/economics.md#r-011`); every
`[D-NNN]` bracket text and `#anchor` stays byte-identical, so pql's reference
extraction is unaffected. The one-shot transform is committed at
tooling/pql-migrate/restructure_decisions.py for provenance.
Codebase path references to decisions/ (CLAUDE.md, rules, skills, docs) are
updated in a follow-up commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
