settled-reach/docs/briefings/araminta.md

title, description, type, status, agent, updated

title	description	type	status	agent	updated
Araminta - Project Briefing	Visual art director for the Phase-4 asset pipeline and Atlas map-art rendering — owns palette.md/conventions.md as the live style authority, co-maintains the D-235 ObjectTag rendered-look layer with Miri, co-designed the D-255 stepped Atlas	briefing	active	Araminta	2026-07-25

Araminta - Project Briefing

Last updated: 2026-07-25

Current Project State

Check active work: pql ticket list --status in_progress Check your tickets: pql ticket list --assigned araminta

Status

ACTIVE. Araminta is visual art direction for the Phase-4 asset pipeline (D-244: 3D objects in-world, no per-object sprite layer — the sprite-era pipeline is gone) and for Atlas map-art rendering (the client's "map-art function" role in D-255's stepped render architecture). Her two style documents — docs/assets/visual/palette.md (T-1052) and docs/assets/visual/conventions.md (T-1050) — merged 2026-07-25 and are now the live style authorities. This briefing points at them; it does not restate their content, to avoid a second copy drifting out of sync the way the old stub palette.md drifted from D-148/D-019 for months.

The two live style documents (read these, not this briefing, for content)

• docs/assets/visual/palette.md — camera (D-148 gameplay vs D-019 offline-render-only, §1), toon-vs-PBR rendering treatment (D-257, §2), the D-235 ObjectTag rendered-look register — hue/grain/weathering per material tag (§3), what survives from the pre-cascade docs (§4), and the formal supersession statement for visual-grammar-v01.md / workshop-outcomes.md (§5). This is the single live style bible for Phase 4+ rendered look — new style guidance lands here, not in a new parallel document.
• docs/assets/visual/conventions.md — model naming, mask sidecars, D-235-keyed texture naming, multi-tile footprint metadata. Mechanics, not taste; this is where "how do I name/organize the file" questions go.

Both documents are Araminta-authored and Araminta-owned going forward — she extends them, not this briefing.

Standing rulings — hers to extend

These are rulings Araminta has already made under delegated art-seat authority (T-1052/T-1050 activation). Treat them as settled defaults for any new asset-class work, extend rather than relitigate:

• Category-first model naming (conventions.md §1) — <category>_<descriptor>.glb (e.g. table_baroque.glb), matching the shipped character-clothing convention. The 3dpipeline spike's descriptor-first naming was pre-convention scratch work, not precedent.
• D-257 toon/PBR ruling with the glazing carve-out — environment props and furniture share the character toon shader family (toon.gdshader/toon_masked.gdshader) by default; glass_curtain_wall and industrial_glazing (the ratified D-235 glazing tokens) plus deliberately reflective/polished metal get a narrow minimal-PBR carve-out (roughness 0.05–0.2, non-zero specular/metallic) so transparency reads correctly — load-bearing because the game's core mechanic is occlusion-based perception (D-033). Reviewed by Tyre at PR #211.

Decisions relevant to your role

Read decisions/architecture.md (primary) and decisions/perception.md (secondary — the still-live camera/color/neutrality bedrock). Key decisions:

• D-033: Entity color = relationship to player (unknown teal, friendly green, POI amber, hostile red) — active, amended by D-154 (2026-03-17, confirmed): the relationship-color palette displays only within the insert/perception-mode overlay; normal gameplay renders all character outlines as a uniform dark gray/black (#1a1a1a) that carries zero semantic information (an inverted-hull silhouette, D-150). Read both records together — D-033 defines the palette and its meaning, D-154 restricts where it's shown. Still the single most important color system in the game; applies at any render fidelity, but only inside the insert channel. Also the rationale root for D-257's glazing carve-out (a player must be able to judge sightlines correctly).
• D-045: Environmental neutrality — strict zero shift. Governs how the D-235 material register may and may not respond to game state (condition bands shift with prosperity_score, never with narrative state).
• D-148: 30° low-angle Camera3D, 45° map rotation — the gameplay camera, supersedes D-019 for gameplay (D-019 survives only as the offline flat-2D-artwork render rig's angle — palette.md §1 corrects a long-standing conflation of the two).
• D-149: 3D characters rendered live in scene, not pre-rendered sprites — backing precedent for the shared toon-shader argument in D-257.
• D-235: Building exterior visual grammar — the ratified ObjectTag vocabulary (wall/roof/facade/street axes, wiki/economics/object_tag_vocabulary.toml). This is the logical layer (what material is this wall); Araminta renders the look on top of it (palette.md §3). Co-maintained with Miri per D-235's own Implementation note.
• D-244: 3D objects in-world; 2D limited to textures + flat artwork. Retires the sprite catalog framing this briefing used to carry.
• D-255: Body Map Viewer — the stepped Atlas render architecture (Global opener + Region/District/Quarter/Block/Chunk fixed rungs). Araminta is a named co-designer (named-feature encoding, payload schema, lakes) — see below.
• D-257: Environment props share the character toon shading treatment; minimal-PBR carve-out for glazing — her own ruling, see Standing rulings above.

The D-255 stepped Atlas — active co-designed work

Araminta co-designed D-255 (body-map-viewer workshop, 2026-07-23/24) alongside Tyre (record author), Dudley (server derivation/wire/cache), Stig (client component/measurement), and Troblum (adversarial review). Her contribution was the named-feature encoding, payload schema, and lakes work — the tagged-envelope carrier's field shape for dense classification data (PNG-per-field) and sparse feature lists (courses, cliffs — MessagePack- native), and the lake morphology-sourcing fix. This is ongoing implementation work, not a closed design: watch docs/workshops/body-map-viewer/ for the measurement appendix and follow-on tickets as the tagged-envelope migration and the two lake tickets land.

Her T-1196 body-map-viewer verification pass (GJ1002b Quarter-vs-District Alpine relief capture, PASS) produced one direct visual-grammar finding — see T-1198 below.

The character wardrobe pipeline — the proven reference model

docs/architecture/character-asset-organization.md (Tyre, D-159–D-164 body types, D-162 pre-baked clothing) is the working, shipped, end-to-end pipeline: mask sidecars, manifest.json schema, category-keyed naming. conventions.md explicitly imitates it rather than inventing a parallel scheme — the RGBA multi-region tint convention (conventions.md §2) is a direct reuse of character-asset-organization.md §11 (T-1089), not a props-specific reinvention. When in doubt about how a new asset class should be organized, this is the model to check against first.

Open questions assigned to you

• Q-119: Is the generic-parent placeholder set (generic_wall / generic_roof / generic_facade / generic_street + the door/floor/ furniture equivalents) the first asset-production milestone? Open, sequencing-only (not a blocker) — yours to weigh in on per the D-235 co-maintenance with Miri. T-1049's briefs each note the generic parents as milestone-0 if this resolves yes.

Current priorities

1. T-1049 (in progress, this batch) — refine T-961 into per-asset-class stories, each gated on a one-page brief (scope / visual reference / naming / generation path / acceptance, citing palette.md §3 + conventions.md). Station walls, rural walls, doors, floors, furniture/props get real briefs; street furniture/signage-screens/rural structures (lamp posts, TVs, billboards, barns) get a formal Q-067-style deferral note, not briefs — they're Phase-6-adjacent set-dressing, not blocking the walkable-exterior deliverable.
2. D-257 glazing shader implementation — unassigned. The ruling is recorded (palette.md §2.1–2.2, D-257); nobody has yet built the minimal-PBR material variant for glass_curtain_wall/industrial_glazing. This is implementation work waiting for an owner, not a design gap.
3. T-1198 (backlog) — elevation-white vs ice-white grammar split. Her own T-1196 observation: on a temperate standard-atmosphere island world at Quarter zoom, the elevation ramp's peak-white reads nearly identical to the legend's glaciation-tint white — a non-glaciated alpine ridge can be misread as icy. Not a bug (lightness=elevation is always-on; ice tint is a separate D-217/D-239 overlay) but needs a deliberate hue/value split so the Atlas never visually lies about glaciation. Home: palette.md §3 + the Atlas legend treatment — hers to design.
4. Q-119 — weigh in when sequencing allows; not urgent, but don't let it go fully cold since T-1049's briefs are already conditioning on its answer.

Development workflow

Image/3D generation costs money — always get Team Leader permission before running /image-gen or /glb-gen for real (non-spike) production assets.

Key documents

• docs/assets/visual/palette.md — the live rendered-look style bible (T-1052)
• docs/assets/visual/conventions.md — the live naming/mask/manifest mechanics doc (T-1050)
• docs/assets/briefs/ + docs/assets/_templates/asset-brief.md — the per-class production briefs and their template (T-1049): how every asset class is gated before generation
• docs/assets/briefs/deferred.md — the formal deferral register (T-1051 classes + cars/Q-067) with revisit triggers
• docs/architecture/character-asset-organization.md — the proven pipeline reference model
• decisions/architecture.md — D-148, D-149, D-150, D-217, D-228, D-232, D-235, D-244, D-255, D-257
• decisions/perception.md — D-019 (superseded for gameplay), D-033, D-045
• decisions/scope.md — D-154 (D-033's insert-only display amendment)
• docs/workshops/body-map-viewer/ — D-255 design record, measurement appendix, her co-design contribution