While a line is on the banner the whole tree is paused, which freezes the
fleet, the enemies and GameState's own production and wave clocks, and stops
input reaching any node but the banner. So a press while a dialog is up
acknowledges it and does nothing else - it cannot also steer the fleet or
open a menu on the way through.
The pause is owned by NarrationBanner rather than by its callers: the thing
that must not get out of step is "a line is showing" and "the game is
stopped", and the banner is the only code that knows the first. It releases
on the last line, on clear(), and on leaving the tree - a scene swapped out
mid-line must not leave the game stopped with nothing left to start it.
Two consequences worth naming. A beat's deadline in the prologue is now game
time, so it can no longer run out from under an unread line; it remains the
way past a beat the player will not finish. And "the prologue leaves you
movement and nothing else" was applied by _process on the first frame, which
no longer comes - the prologue opens ON a dialog - so BuildController and
WorldMap apply it at _ready too.
A line now stays until it is DISMISSED - there is no timer under it at all.
A prologue whose lines expire on their own reads at the game's pace rather
than at the reader's, and that was most of what made the opening feel
rushed even after #125 slowed the beats down.
The beats that are about the guide talking already hold while the banner is
speaking, so dismissing a line is what advances the prologue. A player who
never clicks is still never stuck: each beat's own deadline is the way out,
and the test pins that the deadline sits past the floor.
A dismissed line eats the press, so clicking to continue does not also steer
the fleet on the way through.
The speaker's name sits in a notch cut out of the top border at the left,
the way a label is riveted to a panel - the frame is one polygon, so the
fill and the stroke cannot disagree about where that notch is. Everything up
to the breach is the convoy's controller; after it there is nobody left to
talk to, so the closing lines are the ship's own log, which is the point
being made.
The tick strip along the bottom is gone. It read as an underline attached to
the last line rather than as part of the frame. What replaces it is a
blinking caret at the bottom right - the one thing that says a click is what
moves this on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five things, all of them "this happens too fast or looks too thin".
PACING. Every beat had a completion test that could be satisfied while the
guide was still mid-sentence, which is why everything landed seconds after
the thing before it. Beats now have a FLOOR as well as a deadline - a
minimum length - and a beat whose point is the guide talking will not end
while a line is still on screen. One rule in one place rather than tuning
each condition. The run is 3400px instead of 1500, which at cruise was about
four seconds, and a held line is 6.5s instead of 4.5.
THE CONVOY. Escorts at the four corners of a box, holds packed in the middle
of it, roughly three times the spread of the fleet's own wedge - this is
freight under guard, not a fighting formation. CONVOY and CONVOY_FORMATION
pair index-for-index, which is all it takes for spawn_ships to seat the guns
on the outside, and the test pins that every hold sits further in than the
furthest-out escort.
THE DIALOG. Cut corners, brackets holding the short edges open, a tick strip
along the bottom and a caret in the corner - geometry rather than art, so it
scales with the banner and costs nothing.
THE BREACH. It was a few lines turning around a point. It is now two halves
driven by one number: DimensionalBreach, a growing black hole out in the
world built on BlackHoleVisual's idiom - empty core, counter-rotating arc
segments hotter toward the centre - with infalling streamers it does not
have, because a planet's disc is steady and this one has to say "now"; and
breach.gdshader over the top, bending the ACTUAL SCENE around it. Ships,
rocks and the starfield all get dragged in, which is most of what makes a
hole in space read as a hole rather than as a decal drawn on one.
Inside the horizon the shader samples nothing at all - the same decision
BlackHoleVisual makes, for the same reason: a black hole with something
visible in the middle stops being one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Landed as one piece across #122, #123 and #124: the frame is useless without
a script, and the script has nowhere to run without the frame.
The director drives the REAL scene rather than being a scene of its own. It
wants the real fleet, the real enemies and the real asteroid field, and it
makes "then the game starts" cost nothing - the director stops steering,
clears the flag, and what is left running is the ordinary game.
The script is a list of beats, each with a deadline as well as its own
completion test, so a beat whose condition is never met - a player who
refuses to fly at the ambush - runs out rather than wedging the prologue.
skip() ends the whole thing at any point and lands in exactly the state
playing it through does, so the game has one way to start rather than two
that have to be kept in step. The test pins that equivalence.
"No action button available, only movements" is enforced where the buttons
are decided, not by the director reaching in: the ability controllers set
their own visibility every frame and would have put them straight back, and
the map button belongs to the map. The joystick, the pivot and the fader
stay.
The convoy is ten hulls where a new game's fleet is one, so it needs an
explicit fleet-size override - a plain number rather than a fake doctrine,
because nothing about the player's own progression should be bent to fit a
cutscene. It is carriers rather than transporters: transporters belong to
hubs and are not fleet-eligible, so a convoy of them would be silently
filtered down to its escorts.
The ambush is chasers and only chasers. "Easy enough" is the requirement,
and a sniper against a convoy the player cannot yet fight properly is
neither easy nor a good first impression.
The breach takes the wheel through one check in GameController, covering the
stick, the keyboard and the released-again path together - three separate
gates would be three chances for one of them to keep steering. The shake is
written to camera.offset, never to its position, because GameController owns
where the camera is and would smooth a shake away.
The vessel that survives is chosen as the interceptor rather than whichever
happened to be first in the list, and the prologue ends on exactly a new
game's opening position.
Also: PlanetAtmosphereController no longer spawns the opening fleet while
the prologue is arming, and the tests that are about what the GAME starts
from now say so by turning the prologue off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
