The standing tracker #132 put on the HUD sat in the right-hand column, on
top of the dev wave button - and there is no free strip of that edge to move
it to, because everything down it is already something. So the objective
stops living on the HUD: a quest button beside the map's, and a panel when
you press it.
The panel shows the current objective, its progress, and the road behind it.
Deliberately NOT what comes next - the chain is meant to open the game up a
step at a time (#133), and a list of everything still to come is that
discovery given away on the first press.
It owns its own button, the way WorldMap owns the map button rather than
being wired through BuildController, and it hides that button during the
prologue for the same reason and in the same two places (at _ready as well
as in _process, since #128 means a dialog stops the tree before the first
_process frame ever comes).
Both scenes carry it. On a planet surface there is no map button to sit
beside, so it goes under the planet's name.
The test now checks the button is beside the map's and clear of the wave
button by rectangle rather than by eye, which is the bug the ticket reported.
Both halves of the ticket, in the shape vessels have used since gas bombers
and laser ships: a definition carries an ore figure and, when it wants more
than ore, a dictionary that IS the price. `building_costs()` and
`skill_costs()` answer it the way `product_costs()` already did, so there is
one question with one answer whatever is being bought, and every payment
path now goes through `spend_resources` rather than `spend`.
Seven of ten structures and thirteen of seventeen doctrines now want gas,
energy or dark matter alongside their rocks, and the totals climb with tree
depth - structures 16/31/58/62/96 by depth, doctrines 15/30/73/96/143/258/530.
The constraint that shaped the table is REACHABILITY, and it is the reason
some prices stayed ore-only. Energy exists only where a gas burner stands,
and a gas burner needs Power Systems - so nothing at or before that depth
may be priced in energy, or it is a wall with no way through. Dark matter is
rarer still and appears once, on the deepest node in the game. The extractor
stays rocks-only despite its depth allowing gas, because the quest chain
reaches it before it has sent the player for any.
test_progressive_costs checks those as properties rather than transcribing
the numbers, so rebalancing a price costs nothing while breaking the shape
fails: nothing unreachable at its own depth, prices rising with depth, the
ore field agreeing with the dictionary (repairs quote the field alone, since
a repair drone carries ore and nothing else), and the quest chain never
asking for a structure it has not funded.
Two things cleaned up on the way:
- The per-building cost constants in GameState are gone. Nothing but tests
used them, and they were a second copy of a number the definitions already
hold - exactly what would drift once a price gained a resource.
- research_for_building() returns a display NAME, and the id-keyed half of
the tree wants an id. That mix-up is silent - skill_depth() of a name finds
no node and answers 0, so a deep structure reads as an ungated one, which
is how the first draft of the test let an unreachable price through.
research_node_for_building() is the id, and the name is expressed from it.
PriceTag no longer rebuilds its labels when re-told the same price; it
refreshes the held figures instead. The craft menu re-states prices every
frame and the build menu now does too, so that was a dozen Labels being torn
down and rebuilt sixty times a second.
Sixteen quests that walk a new game through the things it contains: ore,
the mothership, exploration, a yard and a second hull, planetfall and
conquest, extractors, gas, freight, power, the lab, a new vessel type, an
outpost, and a survey.
The chain turns on the second quest. The fleet builds the mothership to
call the World Ship and hears nothing - and the array is not at fault. The
breach put them further out than that signal will carry, so every quest
after it is a search that has to be flown rather than transmitted.
Three pieces:
Quests.gd the chain, as data and nothing else. Two rules it obeys:
nothing may ask for something unreachable - research points
come only from conquering a planet, so every doctrine that
costs them sits after the conquest quest - and a quest names
one goal, with the research it implies said in the brief
rather than split into an errand of its own.
GameState how far along the chain the player is, and the answer to each
goal kind. Progress latches for free: the chain is walked one
quest at a time, so collecting five ore and spending it cannot
un-complete the quest that asked for five - by then nothing is
asking. It lives here so a quest finished on a planet surface
is still finished after take-off.
the HUD QuestTracker, the standing objective, in the wave alert's
idiom; QuestDirector, which reads the lines out.
Lines are QUEUED by GameState and drained by the director rather than
emitted at a banner, because quests advance in the autoload, which runs on
a planet surface too - where a line emitted straight at a banner would be
lost. Both scenes now carry a banner, a tracker and a director, so a quest
finished underground is announced underground.
The chain is armed by reset_new_game(), the same gate the prologue uses -
the only door into a real game - so instantiating a scene is not by itself
a reason to start briefing somebody.
Waves are on a fifty-second clock, which makes anything that happens during
one - the alert, the pathing, buildings taking damage, an outpost garrison
earning its keep - slow to look at even once.
It skips the warning as well as the peace: the point of the button is to see
the wave, and waiting out a nine-second alert every time would make it
useless as a tool. Gated on dev mode, the same gate the main menu already
uses for the map editor, so it does not exist in a shipped build.
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>
#105 shipped with interceptors as the only garrisonable vessel, and the
reason was a design fault rather than a decision: firing the laser and the
gas bomb lived in the player's fleet controllers, so a stationed laser would
have held its position and never shot.
The shot is now a thing in the world rather than something a controller
draws. LaserBeamEffect and GasBombEffect are self-contained, self-animating
and self-freeing, added to the tree root - the same shape EnemyBigLaserBeam
and ArtilleryShell already had on the enemy side - and they outlive the
vessel that fired them.
Above them sits one seam, on VesselCooldownFillComponent: ability_range(),
ability_ammo_resource(), ability_ammo_cost() and fire_ability(). A beam and a
bomb are now the same shape of thing to whoever pulls the trigger, so the
garrison AI never names an ability - the test asserts that literally, by
reading the AI's own source. A third armed vessel needs to implement the
seam and nothing else.
Ammunition is the CALLER's business, deliberately: the fleet spends from its
hold, a garrison from its outpost's store, and neither concern belongs in
the component. A garrison with an empty magazine holds fire rather than
falling back on the fleet's hold.
Outpost storage: 50 gas per stationed bomber and 50 energy per stationed
laser, off the VESSEL definitions, so an outpost never learns which vessel
needs what. It is a capacity, not a stock - hub transporters fill it exactly
as they fill a gas burner's buffer, because building_logistics_deficit now
takes the larger of the definition's static buffer and the garrison's
magazine. Every other resource is capped at zero: an outpost is not a depot,
and ore parked at one has nothing to do there and no transporter coming for
it.
Also restores two properties the Godot editor dropped from
GasBurnerBuildingDefinition.tres when it re-saved the file:
collected_outputs and capabilities. Without the first, nothing ever collects
the burner's energy - test_gas_burner caught it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Landed together: a board of standing orders nothing acts on is a notepad,
and a planner with nowhere to read the plan from has nothing to do.
The targets are GLOBAL, not per building. There is one plan for the whole
game, and a second planning centre is another place to read and edit it
rather than a competing one - per-building targets would let two centres
hold contradictory orders and tell the crafters to satisfy both.
The census is the harder half. Every vessel is counted exactly once wherever
it happens to be: flying in the fleet, parked in the hangar, stationed at an
outpost, or in the air between any two of those. Miss the in-flight ones and
the planner queues a replacement for a vessel that is merely en route. The
fleet is the one place GameState cannot see, so Fleet pushes its composition
on every change, alongside the cargo capacity and distorder count that
already went that way.
Three rules keep the planner from fighting the player. It tops up and never
rewrites, so an order placed by hand stays exactly where it is. Everything
counts, including what is already queued, or it re-queues the same shortfall
every tick and buries the player in hulls. And nothing happens without a
planning centre - though the plan is remembered when one is destroyed, so
rebuilding picks up where it left off.
Vessels on order are counted separately from the census on purpose: they do
not exist yet, so the readout can say "4 of 6, 2 building" rather than
claiming six. The per-row note says where the vessels actually are, because
a plan can look unmet while everything it asked for is sitting at an
outpost.
The build menu goes to three columns past eight entries. #54 already
tightened its rows to 223px to fit a fourth, explicitly to avoid a
scrollable menu, and a ninth structure needs a fifth row that will not fit
at any spacing a button, a label and a cost can share. Three columns take
nine into three rows - fewer than it uses today, not more.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Vessels come from the HANGAR and never from the fleet. The fleet is what the
player is flying, and taking a vessel out of it to crew a building would be
the game undoing the player's own arrangement. "Whenever available" means
"when one is sitting at the mothership", and an outpost asking for a hull
nobody has built simply waits.
They travel, down the same vessel_deliveries path a finished crafter order
already uses to reach the mothership, rather than teleporting.
What is already in the air counts against the shortfall. Without that the
dispatcher sends the whole hangar to fill one berth, because the crew does
not grow until the first arrival lands.
Two directions, not one: lowering the order flies the surplus home rather
than stranding it, and a vessel whose outpost is levelled under it lands in
the hangar instead of being destroyed - the same rule a transporter
mid-delivery already follows with its cargo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Landed together because an outpost you cannot crew is decoration, and a
garrison menu with no building to hang it off is nothing at all.
#102, the building. Researched at "Forward Bases", two prerequisites deep
and cheaper than any mid-game structure - the ticket asks for early, and the
answer to waves attacking your buildings should arrive at about the time the
waves can hurt them. It is drawn as a watch mast on a tripod with two open
berths, deliberately the least machinery of any structure here: it makes
nothing and refines nothing, it holds a position. 120hp, more than a
crafter, because being shot at is its job.
#103, the garrison. Two separate things live on its record, and conflating
them was the first thing to get wrong: the ORDER, what the player asked for,
and the CREW, who is actually there. This menu edits the order only; #104
fills the crew. Keeping the order as a wish is what lets an outpost ask for
a hull nobody has built yet and wait for it, rather than the request
evaporating - and it is why the panel shows "here / ordered" instead of one
number.
"Only ships that attack can be assigned" is expressed as capabilities rather
than a list of types, so a new armed vessel is eligible the day it is added
and an unarmed one never is by accident. Today that means the interceptor
and the laser vessel; a shield, a hauler and an engine block cannot hold a
position however much one might want them to.
Two berths by default, and Garrison Bays raises it at outposts ALREADY
standing - the same shape as freight_yards for hubs, because a bonus that
only reached new buildings would mean demolishing and rebuilding to collect
it.
The panel builds its own rows from the catalog rather than from nodes placed
in the scene, so adding an armed vessel later needs no scene surgery.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The old spawner put one enemy on the map every 3-6 seconds for ever. There
was no rhythm to the danger and nothing to prepare for. Enemies now arrive
in waves: a long quiet, a warning, an attack, and quiet again once the wave
is dead.
The clock lives in GameState, because Main.tscn is destroyed on every trip
to a planet surface and a wave must not be cancelled, nor restarted from
zero, by a landing. The spawning does not: GameState cannot see the world,
so EnemySpawner reads the phase and puts the enemies in it. That also
settles what happens when a wave turns while the player is on a surface -
the wave is waiting in space when they come back.
EnemySpawner keeps its name deliberately. It is still the thing that puts
enemies in the world, and 88 test files already say
`get_node("EnemySpawner").set_process(false)` to ask for a quiet map.
Strength is a function of the FLEET, per the ticket, with the wave number as
a slower second term so a player who never grows still meets escalation. The
budget is spent most-expensive-first, so a large wave is heavier rather than
merely longer, and min_strength keeps the first waves to chasers whatever
the arithmetic says.
"No timer should be visible" is enforced rather than merely observed:
GameState offers wave_warning_pulse(), a 0..1 throb, and no
remaining-seconds accessor at all, so the alert cannot drift into being a
countdown. The test pins both - that no such accessor exists, and that the
alert's own text contains no digits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything lived in one flat directory, so a diff gave no clue what area it
touched and finding the file you wanted meant knowing its exact name. Twelve
folders now, grouped by what a thing IS rather than what type it is - a
vessel's definition, its component scenes and its upgrade resources sit
together, because that is the set you read when you change one of them.
buildings core controllers enemies logistics planets
resources shaders surface ui vessels vfx world
332 files moved and every res:// reference rewritten - 306 files touched,
including the autoload and main-scene paths in project.godot. Nothing renamed:
this is purely where files sit, so the diff is a pile of pure moves and no
behaviour is buried in it. ui_theme.tres, icon.svg and web_shell.html stay at
the root, where Godot and the export preset expect them.
Verified three ways, because a suite alone would not have caught all of it:
the full 117 pass, the web export builds clean, and the game renders.
The export is why that matters. The FIRST export after the move failed with
"Attempt to open script 'res://GameState.gd'" - the old path - while
project.godot on disk plainly said res://core/GameState.gd. That is this
project's documented Android FUSE mtime trap: Godot served a cached copy of a
file whose content had changed. A `touch` fixed it. Nothing in the test suite
would have found that, because the suite runs from a copy on a native
filesystem - the one place the bug cannot happen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
