Region rendered as fine uniform stucco while District and Quarter, on identical
code, read as terrain. The cause was sampling: `min_wl_m` arrives as an LOD
request and defaults to 0, so every invented octave contributed at every rung.
MIN_WL_BANDS_M was meant to be the floor but is built from the rung's CELL SIZE
(2 x DISTRICT_M), which stopped being the sample spacing at the D-255 extent
inversion — a rung fixes EXTENT now and spacing falls out of the canvas size.
The bands were off by roughly the cell count, and the served path never consulted
them anyway.
The cutoff is now derived from the resolved spacing, which is what this ticket
asked for. Two things had to be measured rather than reasoned to get it right,
and both corrected me.
FIRST: the field was the culprit, not the renderer. I attributed the stucco to
the client stipple painting noise onto a smooth field. Surfacing the terrain
layer's own mean |relief_q gradient| in the capture readout settled it in one
shot: Region 18.24 steps per cell — 144 m of relief between NEIGHBOURING cells —
against District's 0.30 and Quarter's 0.07. The server was sending noise. That
diagnostic ships here for the same reason `plane_variety` did in T-1213: a noisy
field and a renderer inventing noise look identical, and one number separates
them.
SECOND: Nyquist is the wrong threshold. The first version floored at 2 x spacing,
the aliasing limit, and Region barely moved (56.16 -> 59.73 lum spread, gradient
still 18.24) because 2 samples per cycle is unaliased but renders jagged. The
rungs that already worked say what the real bar is: District reconstructs its
finest surviving octave at 34 samples per cycle, Quarter at 135. At 8x, Region
goes to 1.08 gradient and 70.01 spread, and shows ridges and valleys.
THE TRADE, taken deliberately and recorded in the tests: an 8x floor also
truncates the coast warp's 2,048 and 1,024 m octaves at Region, the band T-1160
added for "one coastline at every rung". An earlier test here asserted that band
must survive; it now asserts the opposite. Same reasoning as the relief: a
1,024 m coastline wiggle at 379.3 m per cell is 2.7 samples per cycle, so drawing
it draws noise rather than coastline character — a rung cannot show shape finer
than its own cell. The warp is amplitude-capped sub-pixel on the working grid, so
what is lost is small. If a future pass wants the warp exempt, the fix is a
relief-only floor threaded through derive_at_metres, NOT a lower multiple, which
takes the stucco back.
Global is exempt: its floor would be ~70 km and would truncate the whole warp
band, and it needs none — the orbital derive leaves relief_q flat at 50. District
(3.79 m spacing) and Quarter (0.948 m) floor below every octave in play and
derive byte-identically, which their own test pins.
Cache-safe by construction: the floor is a pure function of (rung, extent,
body_radius), all three already in the step-canvas cache key. 0.4.12 is required
anyway — this changes derived BYTES at Region, so a 0.4.11 entry holds a field
this build would never produce.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
D-258 invariant 2 asks the map to show the minority the orbital summary
suppressed — clearings, marsh, rock, scrub inside a cell that reads "forest" from
space. composition.rs goes to real trouble to invent it, and the conservation
harness measures it: over a District patch on Ferrath the tally is {Barren: 175,
Forest: 16209}, so 1.07% of that ground is exposed rock.
The renderer was averaging it back out. One test, `veg >= Scrub`, at one density
and one strength: Forest, Scrub and both Riparian classes drew the IDENTICAL
mark, and Barren drew none at all. A wood looked like scrub, and bare rock was
invisible by construction — on the rungs whose whole purpose is to show what the
summary hid.
Each class now has its own grammar, differing on the three axes a mark has:
density (how much of the class's ground carries it), strength (how far it moves
the base colour), and lattice (the block size marks are decided on — bigger reads
as a clump, smaller as grain). Rock LIGHTENS where everything else darkens, which
is the point rather than a flourish: bare stone catching the light is the one
cover type brighter than the ground around it, so it separates from vegetation by
sign alone and can never read as "denser plants". It gets its own ScatterField
salt so an outcrop does not preferentially land where a copse already did.
Tuned against captures, not guessed. A first pass gave Forest a 4x4 lattice at
52% density, which produced visibly axis-aligned dark SQUARES — a 4-cell block is
8 screen px at District — and read as an artefact laid over the hillshade. It
also mistook the background for a feature: Forest is 98.9% of this frame, so
marking half of it dark is not "the occasional copse", it is a second colour
layer. Pulled back to grain at a 2x2 lattice, and the occasional thing is now the
thing that catches the eye: the outcrops read as scattered pale clusters of
exposed ground, exactly the "occasional copse/tree/rocky outcropping" that was
missing.
District holds its form through the change (lum p1-p99 74.15, against 74.43
before the cover marks and 13.72 when the rung was flat).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
relief_q now reaches the renderer, and the first pass spent it on brightness:
lighten where the ground is high, darken where it is low. That moved the numbers
(District 13.72 -> 77.01 lum spread) and still looked like moss, because the eye
does not read landform from absolute brightness. It reads it from light falling
ACROSS a gradient — height-shading gives a rise and a fall the same tone, so no
ridge ever reads as a ridge.
So relief drives a proper hillshade: the local gradient of the field dotted with
a light from the upper-left. The light direction is not a free choice; lit from
the lower-right the brain inverts the read and valleys pop out as ridges.
THE SCALE IS MEASURED PER CANVAS, not fixed, and the first attempt at this failed
exactly the way this file already warned a fixed gradient constant would (see
RUGGEDNESS_BASELINE_CELLS: "the same 4-cell delta reads 21.86 at Region and 0.08
at District"). With a constant full-scale of 8:
Region 81.72 but District 77.01 -> 20.01, Quarter 42.56 -> 16.44
because at District's 3.8 m per cell neighbouring cells barely differ. The
terrain layer now measures each canvas's own mean |gradient| once per rebuild and
the hillshade normalizes against it, so one constant works at every rung.
Ladder (tooling/atlas-flatness, lum p1-p99), flat -> shipped:
Global 145.69 -> 145.69 unchanged; relief_q is flat 50 at orbital
Region 33.59 -> 54.30
District 13.72 -> 74.43
Quarter 11.01 -> 73.72
District and Quarter now read as terrain — ridgelines, valleys, and the stipple
organised into contour-like bands. Judged by eye on the captures, not by the
metric alone.
Stipple full-scale 25 -> 60. The old value was calibrated against a relief_q that
never arrived, so it was tuned to the elev_q fallback; with the real plane nearly
every land cell earned a mark and Region read as static (17,599 distinct colours,
more than twice Global's, for a quarter of the legibility). Form comes from the
hillshade now; the stipple is grain on top of it.
REGION IS NOT FIXED, and the cause is T-1240 rather than this change. It renders
as fine uniform stucco: a Region cell is 379 m of ground while the relief field's
content sits in the 128-1024 m band, so the field is at or below Nyquist and the
gradient the hillshade reads is aliasing, not slope. min_wl_m defaults to 0 on
the served path, so nothing truncates the octaves Region cannot resolve — which
is precisely what T-1240 proposes to fix. That ticket said the stale cutoff was
"currently inert"; it is now the thing capping Region, and T-1240 is updated
with the measurement.
Three tests, on direction rather than magnitude so tuning does not rewrite them:
a hill's west flank lit and east flank shadowed, a uniform field shading nothing,
and the canvas edge not drawing a rim. That last one is a bug this nearly
shipped: `_l8_value` returns 0 out of bounds and 0 on relief_q means MAXIMUM
HOLLOW, so sampling off-canvas posts a full-scale false gradient all the way
round the frame. The sample position is clamped instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`relief_q` is the one field with signal below District — elev_q's 80 m steps
quantise sub-district detail away, which is precisely why relief_q was invented.
The server has encoded it since 5eb394b36 and the terrain layer has asked for it
by name ever since. step_canvas_protocol.gd's decode dictionary never listed the
key, so `canvas.get("relief_q")` was always null and the plane arrived nowhere.
The server half of that change landed; the protocol half did not.
That is the whole reason Region and below rendered as a flat wash. Measured plane
variety at District before the fix:
{morphology: 1, elev_q: 11, relief_q: 0, moisture_q: 25, vegetation: 3}
A 0 there means ABSENT, not constant — a distinction the capture could not make
until this commit adds it, and the reason two earlier sessions read the flatness
as a missing generator rather than a missing key.
Also spends the field properly. It drove a stipple PROBABILITY only, so a ridge
and a plain differed in dot density, which at one pixel per cell reads as noise;
and `_ruggedness()` took absf(relief_q - 50), discarding the sign the server
deliberately preserved ("a hollow and a rise are different ground... the reverse
is not recoverable"). Relief now shades continuously and signed — rises lighten,
hollows darken — UNDER the stipple rather than instead of it. Ruggedness
(unsigned) and elevation (signed) are different questions and both are worth
asking.
Ladder, before -> after (tooling/atlas-flatness, lum p1-p99):
Global 145.69 -> 145.69 unchanged, correct: relief_q is flat 50 at
orbital rungs by construction
Region 33.59 -> 71.01 2.1x
District 13.72 -> 77.01 5.6x
Quarter 11.01 -> 42.56 3.9x
Structure retention Global->Quarter: 7.6% -> 29%.
NOT finished, and the ticket says so: Region now reads as heavy speckle, because
ruggedness is real data instead of an elev_q-gradient fallback and far more cells
earn a mark than the T-1194 tuning assumed; District reads as soft blobby relief,
form without directionality. Both are grammar/tuning follow-ups on a channel that
finally carries signal.
0.4.9 is a REQUIRED bump. The disk cache stores the DECODED canvas, so every
earlier entry physically lacks the field and would keep rendering flat against a
build that reads it — the first bump in this series where a warm cache is wrong
about CONTENT, not merely stale. tooling/canvas_sources.py gains
step_canvas_protocol.gd for the same reason: it decides which planes exist, the
cache stores its output, and the T-1242 gate would not have flagged this fix
while the registry stopped at ui/.../step_canvas/.
Regression cover: every protocol test passed throughout the weeks the plane was
missing, because each asserted a field it already knew about and none asserted
the SET. There is now a test walking all eight dense planes of EncodedStepCanvas,
verified by disabling the fix and watching it fail by name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A test-only edit to composition.rs tripped the canvas-generation gate, which is path-based and cannot tell an assertion fix from a generator change. Bumped rather than excepted: the ruling is that a false positive costs one round of cache misses and a false negative costs a week. Second no-op bump in two days, noted in project.yaml so the rate is visible if it becomes noise.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
project.yaml's version is the Atlas disk cache's only invalidation signal, and
nothing enforced that changing canvas GENERATION also moved it. It broke five
times -- 0.4.2 lake_margin_q, 0.4.3 coast_warp_px, 0.4.4 the extent inversion,
0.4.5 the Global sentinel, 0.4.6 one-course-per-river -- each bumped only after
someone noticed a wrong map. The failure is invisible to its author: it needs a
warm cache to reproduce, so a cold checkout looks fine. T-1239 is the last one,
and it took eight days.
tooling/canvas_sources.py is the path registry; tooling/check-canvas-version
rejects a push that touches those paths without moving project.yaml's version
line. Wired into the pre-push hook, `make check-canvas-version`, and, for the
parsing units, `make test-tooling`.
Verified against real history rather than a synthetic branch: run over
4e503c356 -- the commit that actually caused T-1239 -- the gate rejects and names
the three files. Run over the commits that DID bump (bdea71953, 39f0fd8c5, and
T-1239's own fix), it passes.
The registry is globbed, not hand-listed. step_canvas.rs imports ten sibling
modules and those import more, so a traced closure would be stale within a month,
and stale here is silent. It over-includes on purpose: a false positive costs one
bump and one round of cache misses, a false negative costs another week of a
wrong map -- the ticket's own ruling.
Two deliberate calls worth naming. The registry includes ITSELF, which closes the
narrowing hole: remove a path and change that same path in one push, and the gate
still fires because the registry file is in the set. And there is no override
flag -- it would be reached for exactly when someone is certain their change is
harmless, which is the reasoning behind all five regressions.
Version bumped 0.4.6 -> 0.4.7 with NO canvas-generation change: self-inclusion
means adding the registry trips its own rule. Spent rather than special-cased,
because the first exception is how a rule like this dies.
The units cover the property no branch run can show -- that editing project.yaml's
comment block, which quotes old version NUMBERS directly above the field, is not
a bump -- plus a registry-coverage test naming the files each of the five known
regressions touched, so a future narrowing past them fails loudly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ferrath's Global map drew no rivers at native resolution: 375 courses arrived
and 0 were drawn. The report suspected the D-261 length cull or the water
truncation. Both were innocent, and so was the renderer.
The client served the canvas from its own disk cache (T-1183). Every payload
for GJ820Bc predated T-1237 (4e503c356), which replaced one-course-per-D8-hop
with one-course-per-river -- so the map was drawing 375 hop fragments whose
longest run was 106 km, all of them under D-261's read-as-a-line floor. Same
build, same scenario, same 3440x1440, cache the only difference:
stale courses=375 runs=180 longest=6.0px (~106 km) drawn=0
cold courses=73 runs=23 longest=93.2px (~1,644 km) drawn=18
It looked resolution-dependent because it wasn't a resolution at all: 960x540
resolves to an 814x407 canvas, a key never cached, so it missed and re-derived
correctly. 3440x1440 resolves to 1080x540, which had an entry from 2026-08-06.
During the stale capture the server logged no course production whatsoever --
the canvas never came from it.
The cache's only invalidation signal is project.yaml's version, and 4e503c356
changed how canvases are generated without touching it, so hop-shaped entries
stayed valid. All 13 stale entries are stamped 0.4.5. 0.4.6 forces them to miss;
that, not clearing a local directory, is what repairs a player's Atlas.
The harness let this hide for eight days, in two ways now fixed. It ran against
the developer's persistent user:// cache, so a capture could render a canvas
built by a build that no longer existed -- and any golden shot in that window
silently inherited it; user:// is now isolated per run. And it sent server
stderr to /dev/null via an already-unlinked mktemp file, so no tracing from a
capture was ever reachable; the log now lives at .cache/visual-server.log.
The capture readout gained runs= and longest= between courses= and drawn=,
because "375 arrived, 0 drawn" is not one fact but three stages, and telling
them apart is what turned a guess between two suspects into a measurement.
Follow-ups filed: T-1241 (current_schema_version() returns its ?.?.? fallback in
an exported build, so a shipped game never invalidates on version at all) and
T-1242 (nothing enforces the generation-change/version-bump pairing -- this is
the fourth bump forced after the fact).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jeroen's Global map has been two coloured blocks all along. Not missing
hydrology, not a missing layer: serve_step_canvas_request zeroed Global's wire
extent, so every request arrived downstream as (0,0), clamped to (1,1), and
resolved to a 2x1 canvas.
That sentinel was correct when Global's size came from the body's region grid
and the client's extent field was meaningless. The D-255 extent inversion made
Global viewport-sized and this line silently outlived it. The commit titled
"size the Global rung to the viewport" was therefore correct and completely
unreachable — its tests passed by calling resolve_canvas_extent directly
rather than through the serve path, i.e. they tested the function that changed
instead of the path the data takes.
Two more places carried the same dead premise, both meaning the first canvas
ever built answered every later request and a resize could never take effect:
- GlobalTierCache keyed on body id alone. Now treats a size mismatch as a
miss, so the re-derive replaces it. Deliberately still ONE entry per body
rather than one per size: keying by size would make a tier that never
evicts accumulate an entry per viewport a player has ever used.
- The client's make_key collapsed Global's extent to a sentinel. Centre
stays collapsed — Global's canvas really is whole-body and origin-anchored
— but extent is now part of the key.
project.yaml 0.4.5 forces the 2x1 canvases already on disk to miss.
Verified through the capture harness, not by reasoning: server probe shows
req=(960,540) radius=6238.4 resolved=960x480, and Ferrath's Global now renders
continents, oceans, inland lakes and polar ice where it previously rendered
one solid rectangle.
Server suite green (45 binaries), client 1830 total / 1804 passed / 26 skipped.
Pair session with Jeroen, 2026-07-27.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Global took its cell counts from `global_cell_counts()` — one gridunit per
region — and discarded the requested extent entirely. On GJ380c that produced
a 191x95 canvas built from a heightmap stored at 512x256: roughly seven times
the available cells thrown away before anything was drawn. The count also
shrank as REGION_M grew, so tuning the scale ladder silently degraded the
opener, which is why the top of the ladder got worse rather than better as
the ladder itself was refined.
Global now fits the largest 2:1 canvas inside the requested extent. It cannot
take its ASPECT from the viewport — the canvas is equirectangular whole-body,
360 degrees of longitude by 180 of latitude, and must stay 2:1 or the cells
stop being square and the map shears — so the existing letterbox absorbs the
remainder. A hostile extent is still clamped; sizing to the request is not
trusting the request.
Global also joins the deep display ratio, making the band uniform. At 5 px
per gridunit a 1920 px window asked for 384 cells across a body whose
heightmap holds 512x256 — discarding stored detail to save work already done.
At 2 px it asks for 960, which is heightmap-native: nothing thrown away,
nothing invented, and the same screen area filled either way.
A body with no radius is not a sphere (asteroid belt, oort cloud) and has no
equirectangular surface to fit. Those degrade to the region grid — a visibly
degenerate 1x1 canvas — rather than a plausible-looking lie at whatever size
the viewport happened to ask for.
project.yaml 0.4.3 -> 0.4.4 invalidates the persisted step-canvas disk cache.
District/Quarter/Block/Chunk kept identical 960x540 cell counts through the
extent inversion, so their cache keys are byte-identical while a District
canvas now covers 3.6 km of ground instead of 1,966 km — a warm cache would
silently serve pre-inversion canvases.
Global still rides the orbital derive, so it carries no courses yet; that is
the next step and is deliberately separate, being a cost question over the
whole body rather than a sizing one.
Pair session with Jeroen, 2026-07-26.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Global/Region rungs sampled the heightmap ocean mask raw while every
finer rung samples it at the coast-warped position — a structurally
different coastline at the orbital-to-district seam. Audited on all 267
real body heightmaps at region spacing, coastal band only: 5.01%
land/ocean classification disagreement (2,911 of 58,073 cells), mean
displacement ~6.0 km, max ~18.9 km. Fork taken: APPLY the warp —
derive_orbital_at_metres now runs invent_primitives' steps 1-3 (driver
climate -> coast character -> coast_warp_px) before sampling, still
skipping detail-scatter (its octave ceiling, 32.8 km, is below region
spacing; the WARP's octaves reach 262 km, which is why skipping it was
wrong). Cost measured: ~784 ns/cell added (~15 ms on an Earth-class
Global canvas; low hundreds of ms parallel at the 8.3M-cell ceiling).
The ignored audit test preserves the pre-fix baseline for the record.
Golden re-pinned — region rows only, district/quarter byte-identical.
project.yaml 0.4.2 -> 0.4.3: orbital canvas bytes changed, client disk
caches must miss. Awaiting Araminta's review-seat sign-off per ticket.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The PR #206 eyeball caught what every numeric gate passed: the depth
signal was visually flat on both test lakes (GJ1c lmq=0 across the whole
basin; GJ338Bd 0-13 of 100). Two compounding causes: a fixed absolute
ceiling (one body's p90 cell depth) compressing skewed depth
distributions into single digits, and heightmap-pitch depth variation
being sub-texel-tiny within most basins. lake_margin_q is now
depth / the basin's own maximum settled depth: HydrologyResult grows
basin_max_depth_scaled (computed in solve() from existing basin_cells
membership, broadcast per basin), threaded through
HydrologySample.basin_max_depth, normalized in lake_from_hydrology_at
with a degenerate-basin epsilon guard (a genuinely uniform pond shades
flat — honest, not forced). Lake EXISTENCE (filled > original) is
untouched — only tone changes. Measured at district spacing:
GJ1c min=0 p50=33 max=84; GJ338Bd min=8 p50=38 max=70 — full-range
shore-to-deep ramps on both. No perceptual curve added: the linear
per-basin ramp is already well-quartiled. project.yaml 0.4.1 -> 0.4.2
(0.4.1-tagged canvases carrying flat-lmq semantics reached real disk
caches during eyeball runs and must miss). Acceptance gates green;
zero golden churn (lake_margin_q not captured by either golden shape).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lake edges rendered as hard step-edges while ocean coasts got multi-tone
transition bands: every coastal-transition morphology gate keys on
ocean_fraction_q, definitionally 0 inside a lake basin (hypothesis (b)
of the ticket; (a) disproven first — a shoreline-crossing sweep at
2048/512/128m plus a 10m fine sweep all land on the same continuous
crossing, so positional refinement was never broken). New
DistrictProfile.lake_margin_q (0-100 settled-hydrology depth band, from
the same bilinear filled/elevation pair the lake test already samples;
ceiling calibrated just above the observed p90 depth on GJ338Bd's 5,043
flooded cells), threaded through both derive paths onto
EncodedStepCanvas (serde-default for shape tolerance) and down the
client: protocol decode, terrain-layer plane, colorize shades Lake cells
by depth band instead of elev_q (bedrock-under-water, the wrong signal).
project.yaml 0.4.0 -> 0.4.1: the new wire field must invalidate the
client disk cache via its version tag (T-1183's D-192 mechanism).
Acceptance gates green with the new field (lossless round-trip,
cache-hit==cache-miss, every rung).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- make test-tooling: planet-gen determinism guard + import_economics
--dry-run, wired into pre-push on TOOLING_CHANGED; ruff widened to
E4/E7/E9/F/W (90 safe auto-fixes applied; E402/E702/F841 ignored with
documented counts)
- one-generator reality fixed in DEVOPS.md, asset-pipeline rule, CLAUDE.md
(import_economics sole generator since #951/D-223); dead check-protocol
target deleted; DEVOPS hook/config sections rewritten from the actual
hook sources; team-patterns gate description updated (client+tooling)
- project.yaml: 0.2.0 → 0.4.0 per the 0.{phase}.{n} scheme, description
refreshed from the v0.1 Sova narration to cascade reality
- stale comment sweep: voxel.rs stub claims (all 8 families implemented),
cascade.rs TODO recited to T-1044, main.rs D-192 handshake claim,
relationships.rs/chunk_streaming.rs version targets → phase language
- gitignore: client/settings.db* e2e-run artifacts
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sprint 28: Character Visuals — character creation screen with live 3D
preview, face-based body segmentation, solidified hair and clothing,
skin/eye/eyebrow tinting, manifest-driven content, pre-push lint hooks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
System S-057 assigned to real star GJ 35 (Van Maanen's Star, DG white
dwarf at 13.9 ly). Renamed across all content, server code, docs,
decisions, wiki lore, and config files. 224 files updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Technical project descriptor with game architecture, simulation
parameters, and content model. Version field (0.1.9) is now the
canonical version — Cargo.toml synced, CLAUDE.md and start-sprint
skill updated to reference it during release workflow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
