Eight tickets. The last one is the interesting one.
#166 - PLAINER DIALOG. Every spoken line rewritten: the nine prologue lines and
all twenty quest brief/done pairs. Mostly splitting em-dash subclauses into
sentences and dropping the literary register ("hulls" -> "ships", "That is our
hands back" -> "That frees us for other work"). Same meaning, same voice.
#167 - NOTHING ANNOUNCED TWICE. Quests carry an `important` flag; seven of the
twenty have it, and they are the search for the World Ship. A quest handed out
with its goal ALREADY met is now credited in silence unless it is one of those
- no brief, no answer, both signals still fired and the index still moved, so
it appears ticked in the objectives panel. The chain used to stop the game to
set a task the player had already done, then stop it again to congratulate
them on it.
#168 - THE KEYBOARD CAN ANSWER A DIALOG. The rule the ticket asks for (still
arriving, show it all; already whole, move on) was already the rule for a
click since #149, but a key press reached the banner and did nothing - and
this game is played with WASD and a mouse. Touch, click and key now go through
one door. Modifiers alone and auto-repeat echoes are not presses.
#169 - A LOADING SCREEN. A press raises a cover, and the load happens after it
has been on screen for a frame, so the wait is something the player is
watching. Deliberately still a blocking load: load_threaded_request() comes
back FAILED for these scenes, reporting text-parse errors that load() does not
produce, because the global class names and preloads they reach each other
through are not resolvable off the loading thread. A progress bar is not worth
a menu that sometimes refuses to start the game, and the web build ships with
thread support off anyway. Further presses while loading are ignored - on the
web a button fires on PRESS, so an impatient double tap costs nothing to make
and used to build the world twice.
#170 - THE PICTURE BEFORE THE CAPTION. The prologue's first line was up before
the scene had finished arriving, so the game opened STOPPED (#128) over a
convoy nobody had seen yet. It flies for three seconds first.
#171 - THE CONTROLS FOLLOW WHAT IS BEING HELD. is_touchscreen_available() asks
whether a touch COULD arrive, and in a browser that is yes on any laptop whose
panel reports touch support - so the web build put thumb sticks over a screen
being played with a mouse, and switched mouse aiming off on the machine it
exists for. The reading is now the last input actually used, it lives in
GameState so the sticks and the guns cannot disagree, and it is two-way:
nothing can strand a tablet, because the gesture that needs the controls is
the gesture that brings them back. A touch suppresses mouse evidence for a
second, so the click Godot manufactures out of a tap is not mistaken for a
mouse.
#172 - AIM AT A PLACE. Every gun was handed the same direction, so a fleet
firing at something threw a sheet of parallel bolts past either side of it and
only the middle hull could hit - worse the wider the formation. Guns now take
a POINT and each hull works out its own heading to it, so the fleet's fire
converges. The mouse already had a place and was flattening it into a bearing;
a pushed stick names the point at the guns' reach along it, so touch loses
nothing. The assist (#89) still bends a shot onto an enemy, now per hull and
around that hull's own heading. The aim guide stops at the point and marks it.
#173 - AND THE ONE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF. "In the web export version the fleet
can not store any resources" is not a web bug. It is the third time the Godot
editor's .tres writer has quietly dropped a property it thought was
default-valued: InterceptorVesselDefinition losing `capabilities` leaves
cargo_capacity at 20 and takes away the "cargo" claim that
fleet_cargo_capacity() actually gates on, so the hold is zero and nothing can
be mined or carried. That is the symptom, word for word.
test_definitions_intact caught it in the suite. What it could not do is catch
it in a BUILD - an export is taken from the working tree at whatever moment
the editor last touched it, which is exactly when the damage is done and
exactly where nobody is running tests. The checks move to core/CatalogCheck.gd
and now run at startup in every build as well as in the test, from the same
function. On the web push_error lands in the on-page log web_shell.html
mirrors, which is the only error a phone can read.
The tree is intact today, so a fresh export should restore the hold. The point
of the change is that the next time it is not, the build says so.
Full suite green at 154/154.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0139MmxRAJSUe1j77kftAWv3
#162 - a single tap bought a research node outright. One physical tap arrives
TWICE: Godot emulates a mouse button from every touch AND a touch from every
mouse button, both project settings are on, and the menu's dispatcher routes
InputEventScreenTouch and InputEventMouseButton alike to the tree. The second
arrival found the node already selected and took itself for the confirming
tap. Measured, not reasoned about - one tap produced two picks and two
confirms.
What is ignored is specifically the TWIN: same frame, same place, arriving
through the other input kind. Deduping on frame and position alone also
swallowed two genuine taps in one frame, which the test caught.
#164 - the build menu predicted a caption's height from the COLUMN WIDTH:
wide column, assume one line. Right for most names and wrong for the long
ones, so "Spacial Workshop" wrapped onto the price beneath it. Captions are
now measured against the font that draws them, and prices sized from
PriceTag.wanted_height(), which existed for exactly this and was not being
asked. Prices are set before anything is measured, because the old order laid
out first and priced afterwards.
The ship lab: its buy button is gone and a second tap on an option buys it,
the same rule as the research tree; the explanation drops into the room that
freed; research points move up into the resource table, where everything else
being spent already is; the second row of options is placed from the first
row's measured bottom rather than a constant; and the vessel strip is spaced
from the panel's own width, so the eighth vessel is no longer half off the
right edge.
#160 - the quest panel was drawn BEFORE the sticks and the pivot pair, so
they sat on top of it. Moved after them, under the narration banner. Its title
rule ran straight through the close button; the header band is now as tall as
that button.
#161 - the prologue widens the formation into a freight convoy by writing over
GameState.formation, and nothing put it back. The player flew the convoy's
600-unit spread for the rest of the game - a shape nobody chose, which reads
as the fleet having drifted apart.
#163 - a quest to station a vessel at the outpost, after the one that asks for
the outpost. Building one and crewing it are different acts, and an empty
outpost holds nothing.
#165 - the gas bomb's blast and a vessel arriving fast both damage a
structure. The blast used to stop politely at anything the player owned, which
made a bomb dropped on a besieged mothership a free way to sweep the attackers
off it.
Collisions are caught on ENTRY, not on the 0.7s strike tick: a vessel is only
moving fast for the instant it arrives, and a ship sent in at 900 did no
damage at all until this moved. Docking is free - the fleet sits on its own
mothership constantly to bank ore - and garrison vessels are exempt outright,
because they launch from their outpost and re-dock with it at speed. The suite
caught that one: the ram rule was destroying the garrison as it launched.
Suite 153/153. Four tests changed because what they pinned moved: the lab's
buy button, the intro's formation, the research tree's tap delivery, and the
build menu's own preview.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
#157 was already satisfied - second_hull is quest 7 and extractor is quest
11 - so this pins the property rather than adding a quest: nothing costing
more than a single hold may be asked for before the chain has grown the
fleet or taught banking. It fails if either is ever moved behind it.
#158 - a building's local costs may now be paid out of the fleet's hold.
#12 made production cost resources physically DELIVERED rather than money
out of the bank, and that stands: the bank is still not raided here. The
hold is simply the other place resources physically are, and making the
player park, open the transfer menu and move cargo across by hand was
ceremony rather than a decision.
But only WHERE THE FLEET IS, and that qualifier is the whole design. The
first draft had no range on it and test_manual_supply_route caught it
immediately: a crafter three thousand units away reached into the hold and
spent ore the player had just withdrawn to carry somewhere else - which is
exactly the complaint that got automatic banking removed in #24, arriving
from the other direction. The range is Building.interact_radius, the same
distance that decides whether the transfer button appears, so the rule is
not a hidden one: if you could hand the cargo over, the building can take
it.
#159 - the mothership floored at 1hp, so a battered one sat there reading as
dead and never exploded. That exemption existed to prevent a soft-lock, and
the soft-lock turns out not to exist: the bank is GameState.bank_inventory
and the hangar is stored_vessels, both of which outlive any building; the
mothership is the one structure research never gates; it costs exactly what
a single interceptor's hold carries; and ore comes from asteroids, which do
not run out. So the way back is always mine, fly, rebuild - and that is what
test_building_health now asserts, in place of the exemption that used to
stand in for it.
The extractor is the first thing the chain asks for that cannot be paid for
out of a single hold. Every hull carries twenty and the fleet is small; the
mothership is where anything larger than one trip has to accumulate, and
nothing in the game had ever said so.
A deposit quest sits before it now, asking for sixty ore BANKED - which is
a different question from the one GOAL_RESOURCE answers, since that counts
the hold too, and the hold being too small is the whole point. So it needed
a goal kind of its own.
Sixty is three full holds, so it cannot be satisfied by accident on the way
past, and it leaves enough behind to actually buy the extractor afterwards.
#155 - the projectile flew at 850, which took 1.1 seconds to cross the gun's
own range: long enough that a shot read as leaving the ship rather than as
hitting something. 1400 now, and the interceptor's range goes 950 to 1200,
so it crosses in 0.86s and comfortably outranges the 620 the standoff
enemies hold at. A projectile's lifetime is derived from its range and
speed, so faster does not mean falling short - the test pins that
arithmetic rather than trusting it.
#152 asked for VFX on three events, and the finding is worth recording: all
three already existed and were already wired. What had happened is that #130
gave a lost VESSEL thirty particles and a shockwave, which left everything
else in the game visibly smaller than it - an enemy kill, the thing the
player is being rewarded for, and a broken rock, the thing they do more than
anything else, were both still on or near the base class's twelve-particle
default with no shockwave at all.
So this is about PROPORTION rather than about adding anything, and
proportion is what the test checks: a lost vessel outweighs a kill,
a kill outweighs a rock, and nothing sits on the base defaults. Numbers get
rebalanced; an ordering that says a rock outweighs a battleship is a bug.
Particles now run 38 > 32 > 24 against a default of 12.
"Shot sounds sound like a toy" and "death sounds from ship are really
cheap", and there was no arguing with either. The shot was a bare
descending sine, which is the sound every toy ray gun has ever made. The
death was one band of filtered noise with a sine under it - thin, and over
before the eye had finished with the explosion.
The synthesis is rewritten rather than tuned, because the shape was the
problem:
LAYERS, not a waveform. A bang is a crack, then a body, then a tail, and
they have different lengths. One envelope over one source cannot be any
of those things, so the explosions now run three clocks - the crack is
done in a fifth of the length, the roar runs most of it, and sparse
debris keeps falling afterwards so there is an aftermath rather than a
stop.
A SUB. Below about 80Hz is where "big" lives; without it an explosion is
a hiss however loud you play it. Measured: 74% of a ship death's energy
and 86% of a structure's now sits under 200Hz, against almost none
before.
SATURATION. Soft-clipping folds in harmonics, so a sound reads as loud
rather than merely being loud - and stops peak normalisation flattening
everything into the same quiet mush.
DETUNED PARTIALS on the shot. Three of them at deliberately wrong ratios
beat against each other and read as a mechanism; the single sine was the
whole of the toy problem. A noise transient and a sub thump under it give
it something to hit with.
Lengths went up with the weight: the ship death from 0.85s to 1.45s and the
structure from 1.6s to 2.3s, both audible to the end rather than gone in the
first third.
#149 - a line is typed out at about three and a half words a second, with a
scan sweep running down the panel and faint rules across it while it
decodes. The frame carries the charge while it works and settles when the
line lands; the caret is a solid write-head during the decode and only
starts blinking once it is waiting on the reader.
Two implementation notes worth keeping. The full text is set and then
REVEALED with visible_characters rather than the string being grown - a
growing string re-wraps on nearly every frame, so words jump between rows as
they are typed. And a press on a line still arriving FINISHES it instead of
dismissing it: without that, a player clicking at their usual pace skips the
second line having never seen a word of it, which is the exact thing #127
exists to prevent.
#153 - "after a dialog popup the input system is lost on keypress". Nothing
was lost; it was never delivered. A dialog stops the tree (#128), a paused
node receives no input, so a key RELEASED while the line was up never
reached the controller - keys_down kept it and the fleet flew on in that
direction once the game restarted.
NOTIFICATION_UNPAUSED arrives whatever a node's process mode is, which makes
it the one moment the question can be asked, and the physical keyboard is
the authority on what is actually held. That fixes anything that stops the
tree, not only dialogs, and the test checks it that way.
#154 - the banner was the ninth child of the UI layer and every panel came
after it, so all twelve of them drew over the top. It is the last child now,
in both scenes. Input order was never the problem and does not change: the
UI layer already sees unhandled input before the controllers do.
Opening the project in the Godot editor re-saves .tres files, and its writer
DROPS properties it considers default-valued. An empty-looking
PackedStringArray is the usual casualty, and it has now cost this project
twice - both times silently, and both times the damage surfaced somewhere
else entirely:
GasBurnerBuildingDefinition lost `capabilities` and `collected_outputs`,
which took the burner's whole conversion with it.
InterceptorVesselDefinition lost `capabilities`, `hull_points`,
`build_time`, `icon` and `glow_color` - so the starting vessel had no
cargo hold, and a full suite came back with ten unrelated tests broken
because nothing anywhere could mine.
Neither raised an error. The resource still loaded; it was just quietly less
than it had been.
test_definitions_intact asserts the SHAPE of the catalog rather than any one
value: every vessel has a name, stats, a hull and its components; a hold and
a "cargo" capability imply each other; every building has a description, a
price, hit points, its build-menu wiring and at least one capability; and a
converter keeps the fields its conversion needs. Whatever the editor eats
now fails here, next to the thing that was eaten.
Verified against both real incidents by reproducing them: deleting the
interceptor's capabilities line fails with "cargo_capacity 20.0 but
capabilities []", and deleting the burner's collected_outputs fails with
"converts but lists no collected outputs".
The first draft of that last check looked for the conversion fields on the
DEFINITION, where they are not - they live on its logistics sub-resource -
so it answered null and never fired. It passed while the burner sat there
broken, which is the same class of quiet as the bug it is guarding.
Also restores what the editor took from the gas burner this time round.
SPACE_4.wav is the source the shipped theme is made from, so it belongs
under version control - but not in the game.
It lives in audio/masters/ with an empty .gdignore beside it, which makes
Godot skip the folder outright: nothing in it is imported into res://, and
nothing in it is carried into an export. Left where it was, in the project
root, its 59MB would be imported and then packed into every Android and web
build for a file nothing opens - the game loads audio/space_4.mp3, the same
5m36s at 6.7MB.
Its .import file goes with it, since there is no longer anything to import,
and the test runner stops copying the folder for the same reason it already
skips android/ and builds/: 59MB copied on every single run, for a folder no
test can even see.
README.md next to it records which shipped file each master became and the
command that made it, so the pair cannot drift apart silently.
Three events get a sound: a shot leaving a gun, a vessel dying, a structure
coming down.
The sounds are SYNTHESISED rather than downloaded - audio/make_sfx.py
generates all three from scratch, and is committed alongside them. The
ticket asked for free sources and the good ones are in its comments
(Kenney's CC0 packs, OpenGameArt's CC0 sets, Freesound filtered to CC0),
but a generated sound has no licence to track, no attribution to keep, and
no binary in the repository whose provenance nobody can check a year from
now. It also makes the sounds DATA: too sharp a shot is a number in that
file and a re-run, not a hunt through a library. Dropping in a pack file
later means replacing a .wav and nothing else.
A voice POOL, not a player, because these overlap constantly - a fleet
firing is several shots inside one shot's length. Twelve voices, and when
they are all busy the one furthest through its own sound is recycled, which
is the one with the least left to lose.
Parented to the tree root, for the reason that matters: every one of these
sounds is started by something that is being freed on the same frame. A
dying ship cannot own the sound of its own death.
Levels are per sound rather than shared - a shot fires constantly and a
death happens once, so equal volumes are not proportionate ones - and shots
get a little pitch spread so a stream of them does not flatten into one
machine-gun note. The deaths get none: a wobbling explosion sounds broken
rather than varied.
The test goes at the failures a play-through would hide for weeks: firing
three times the pool size must leave exactly the pool's worth sounding and
no leaked voices, and the ship-death case is checked from a node that really
has been freed on that frame.
Both halves of the report had the same cause: a craft cell laid out with
more slack than its row pitch had room for.
The caption box was 62px for a one-line vessel name, which pushed the price
70px clear of the button it belonged to - "far from the button they are
about". And the price was given 184px of width in a 190px column, so a
two-resource price ran out of its own box and into its neighbour's.
Prices now put each resource on its own line. Not only where they would
otherwise overflow, which was my first attempt: two resources came to 174px
in a 184px box, so it fitted - until the player was holding three figures
rather than one, and then it did not. A layout that is correct until you get
rich is not correct, and the ticket asked for the line break outright.
The caption is one line tall now with the price directly under it, and rows
are placed off a MEASURED band rather than a written-down pair of tops - the
same fix#144 needed for the build menu, and now the same code. A
centre-anchored grid under a top-anchored header has a gap between them that
is half the panel height, so it can never be a constant.
The test pins what the ticket describes rather than the numbers behind it: a
multi-resource price is stacked, its content stays inside its own box, it
sits within 80px of its button, and no craft entry overlaps another - the
price of one row into the button of the next included, which the old
geometry did by 14px whatever was priced.
"All the time" is the whole of the requirement and it decides the shape.
The theme has to survive the main menu becoming the game, the game becoming
a planet surface, and the surface becoming the game again - so the player
cannot live in any of those scenes, because change_scene_to_file() frees
whichever one is current.
It is parented to the tree root instead, beside the GameState autoload,
which is the same trick for the same reason. Music.ensure() is idempotent by
node name, so each scene asks for the music on the way up and gets the one
already playing rather than a second copy over the top of it. Two call
sites cover everything: MainMenu, and GameController - which is the root
script of BOTH the space scene and the planet surface.
Done this way rather than as an autoload deliberately: project.godot carries
the developer's own uncommitted window settings, and adding music should not
drag those into a commit.
It is also PROCESS_MODE_ALWAYS. Since #128 a dialog stops the tree, and a
soundtrack that cuts out every time someone reads a line is worse than no
soundtrack.
The theme ships as MP3 rather than the 59MB WAV that was sitting in the
project root. Same 5m36s, 6.7MB, encoded with LAME at 160k - 89% smaller,
which is the difference between a repository that carries its music and one
that carries a WAV forever in its history. The original file is untouched
and still there, untracked, so nothing is lost.
The test checks CONTINUITY rather than "a sound started": the same player,
never a second one, through two scene changes and a dialog.
#145 - the extractor quest could never be completed. Extractors are placed
onto a planet from space and live in GameState.extractors, with their own
position, stock and id; they are not in `buildings`. So the goal asked
has_building_of_type("extractor"), which is false however many the player
builds. Not the death the reporter guessed at - the quest was simply asking
a question that had no yes.
structure_exists() is the question anything wanting "does the player have
one of these" should ask, and the quest model asks it now. The regression
test builds every structure quest's target THE WAY THE GAME BUILDS IT and
watches the goal flip, rather than knowing which array each one lands in -
the knowing is what got this wrong in the first place.
#144 - the build menu's status line is anchored to the top of the panel and
its grid to the panel's centre, so the gap between the two is half the panel
height. It was a written-down constant, correct only at 1280 tall; at 1080
the grid started four pixels ABOVE the status line and drew through it.
Nothing about that geometry is written against a screen size any more. The
band is measured from the header that is actually there, the pitch closes up
to fit it (never below a row's own height, which is what makes overlap
impossible rather than unlikely), and the column count rises until the rows
fit - so a short window gets a wide grid instead of one running off the
bottom. Ten structures now lay out as 5 columns at 900px tall, 4 at 1080, 3
at 1280 and 2 at 1600, clearing the header at every one, which is what the
test walks.
#143 - a hangar caption is "Gas Bomber\n2 available": two lines before
autowrap and three after it in a narrow column, at a size fixed in the
scene. Labels do not clip by default, so the third line was drawn over the
icon of the row below. The size is fitted to the box the layout works out,
and the box clips - the first keeps it legible, the second keeps it correct
however the vessel names grow.
Its box also overhung by exactly HANGAR_LABEL_GAP: the layout subtracted one
gap where it needed two, above the caption and below it. Two pixels, but two
pixels inside the next row's icon.
Two gaps between the first quests, both of the same kind: a step the chain
assumed rather than asked for.
#142 - "collect 5 ore" was followed straight by "build the mothership",
which costs twenty. The first thing the chain ever asked for was four times
what it had just taught, with nothing in between saying so. A stockpile
quest sits between them now.
#141 - the crafter quest's brief said "spend ore on the Shipyards doctrine,
then put a ship crafter down", which is two unrelated things off one line:
open a menu the player has never opened, and place a structure. Researching
Shipyards is its own quest now, and it is the one that says where the
research tree lives. Every later quest that needs a doctrine still only
mentions it in passing - once is enough.
That needed a goal kind for researching a doctrine, which the model did not
have.
Both are pinned as properties rather than as positions in a list. The chain
must ask for at least as much ore as the first structure it wants costs; and
the first structure that is gated behind a doctrine must have that doctrine
as a quest of its own. Only the first - demanding one per building would
double the chain for no teaching.
One thing that fell out of writing those: the pile is exactly the starting
fleet's hold. An interceptor carries 20 and the mothership costs 20, and
before the mothership exists there is nowhere to bank anything, so the hold
is the only store there is. It fits with no slack at all, so there is now an
assertion saying so - a pile larger than the hold would be a quest that
cannot be finished, and nothing else would have caught it.
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.
The belt was laid out with its own arithmetic - a centre BELT_AHEAD in front
of the fleet, rocks spread BELT_DEPTH either side of it - so its near edge
reached back to within a screen of the convoy. At the aspect it was
eyeballed on that was just outside the view; at a wider one, or any zoom
out, rocks appeared in plain sight.
#126 already answered this question for the rest of the game, so the answer
is borrowed rather than restated: AsteroidField's keep-out rect and its
push-out-through-the-nearest-edge placement are public now, and the belt
runs through them. That also means the two cannot drift apart later.
The distance moves as well, 2200 to 2900. The clamp alone would work, but it
would work by pressing every stray rock onto the boundary line; with the
belt properly out in front, the clamp has almost nothing left to do and the
belt still looks laid out ahead rather than pinned to the edge of the
screen. Measured: nearest rock 1551 units out, against a keep-out that
reaches 1100.
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.
#136 - the gas burner drawn on top of the transport hub. The build menu's
rows were a written-down list of tops read with `tops[mini(row, size - 1)]`,
and with every structure researched the menu wanted a fourth row where the
list had three, so the last entry was placed on the third row's centre slot.
A list that silently stacks whatever will not fit in it is not a layout.
Rows are computed now, from a first top and a pitch that tightens to fit and
is floored at the row's own height - so two rows cannot occupy the same
space however far the catalog grows - and the column count widens rather
than adding a row the band cannot hold. Ten structures now sit in four
columns of three rows. The test unlocks the whole tree and checks every pair
of entries for overlap, which is the shape of the bug rather than a
coordinate that happens to be right today.
#137 - the game had three answers to "what does this cost". The build menu
drew a NeonNumber under each option, the craft menu drew glyph strips, and
the ship lab spelled prices out inside the caption. PriceTag is that answer
once: the resource's glyph, then what you HOLD over what it COSTS. It
replaces all three, plus the info popup and the skill panel, and
VesselPriceStrip - which was the same idea for one menu - goes with them.
The build menu also gains the resource bar the other two already had, in the
same place and at the same size, and the craft menu's - the only one not
running the full width of its panel - now matches. The bar drops its LOCAL
column where there is no building to report on, for the same reason #95
dropped it where it only repeated BANKED.
#134 - the skill panel's explanation and its price were both centred in the
same band, so a long description landed on the number. The text is the left
of the band now and the tag is the right. The shortfall it used to spell out
in a sentence - one per case, ore or research points - is the red on the tag
instead, and research points ride along as an entry of their own, so the tag
says WHICH thing is missing without a line of prose per possibility.
One trap worth recording: PriceTag and ResourceBar read the GameState
autoload, and an `extends SceneTree` test script that so much as names such
a class - or preloads the file - fails to compile, because GameState is not
an identifier in that context. GDScript then caches the failure, so the
scene the test instantiates gets a Control with no script where its resource
bar should be. The tests compare script PATHS, as strings.
#130 asked for the hull to break away from the fleet, drift a few metres,
and go up further off with something more explosive than a light animation.
The wreck is a separate node rather than the Ship staying alive to animate,
and that is the load-bearing part. A dying Ship still in the tree is still
an Area2D in the player_ships group with live weapon components - it would
keep firing, keep being fired at, keep counting as a target, and keep
colliding on the way out. So the ship's own lifecycle is untouched: it
leaves the fleet, emits destroyed, and is freed on exactly the frame it
always was. What is left behind is scenery, and the test pins that.
The explosion at the end was also the quieter of the two the game has.
Killing an enemy was made deliberately loud by #87 while losing one of your
own kept the base class's twelve-particle default - the reward louder than
the loss. It is now the bigger of the two.
#135 is the same scene from the other end: the prologue's convoy flies its
escorts on the corners of the box, which is the exposed part of it, and the
debris belt can take all four. With no interceptor left, the only hulls the
vortex could spare were holds, and the player flew out of the prologue in a
carrier. Two guards now: one interceptor is put back into the convoy at the
top of the vortex, where a vessel appearing among ten being thrown around a
black hole is not something anyone will catch; and the handover checks the
TYPES it hands over rather than only the count - one surviving carrier is
also a fleet of one, and it is not the fleet a new game starts with.
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.
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>
The guard was a 420px bubble around the fleet, which is smaller than the
window - so a rock could and did materialise in plain sight, several hundred
pixels away but well inside the view. "Not on the fleet" was never the rule
the player notices; "not in view" is.
The keep-out area is now the visible world rect, grown by a margin so a rock
placed just outside does not drift into view on the frame it was created.
The old bubble survives as a FLOOR under it: what to use when the viewport
cannot be measured - no camera yet on a scene's first frame, or a headless
run with no window - and for a heavily zoomed-in view where the screen is
narrower than the distance a rock needs to be safe.
Candidates inside are pushed out through the nearest edge rather than
dropped, so the field keeps its density around the fleet instead of thinning
out exactly where the player is looking.
Measured: keep-out 2200x2200 over a 1920 screen, nearest asteroid 1899 units
out where it used to be allowed at 420.
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>
The previous ten tickets shipped with almost no coverage - only #109, #113,
#115 and #117 touched a test. That was a gap, not a decision: everything
before it had its behaviour pinned, and #116 in particular added a whole
subsystem nothing was watching.
Four new files and one extended case:
test_spacial_workshop #116 - the repair economy end to end: the
cost of a repair scales with the damage, the
workshop asks logistics for that ore and
stops at its buffer, a drone spends when it
LEAVES so two cannot double-charge one wall,
and a target levelled in flight sends its
load home rather than swallowing it
test_desktop_controls #118/#121 - both driven through the real
routing, because the routing is what was
missing; a test calling handle_mouse_button()
itself would have passed against both reports
test_enemy_bomber #114 - it flies, it faces where it flies, its
bombs arrive, and it bombs structures with no
fleet in sight
test_menu_polish #111/#112/#119/#120 - what each panel shows
test_wave_system (case G) #110 - the dev button, and that it does not
exist outside dev mode
One assertion worth recording: the craft caption is checked as an EXACT
match against the vessel's display name rather than by hunting for resource
words in it. The first version failed on "Gas Bomber" - a vessel named after
a resource, and always will be. What #111 removed was the price spelled out
underneath, not the name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Modelled on the transport hub, deliberately and closely: drones belong to a
workshop rather than to the player, are provisioned when it is built, are
never a production order, and are upgraded at a ship lab like any other
vessel. Anything that already knows how hub transporters behave knows how
these do, and Drone Bays raises the count at workshops already standing -
the same shape as Freight Yards and Garrison Bays.
What a repair COSTS is the one new idea. It is a share of the building's own
price, in proportion to how much of its health is gone: levelling a crafter
and rebuilding it costs its full price, and patching one up after a wave
costs a fraction, the fraction being the damage. The ore is spent when a
drone LEAVES, so two drones cannot be sent to the same wall and spend twice
for one load of repair, and a building demolished in transit sends its load
home rather than swallowing it.
"Required resources are sent to the spacial workshop": the workshop asks hub
logistics for the ore its outstanding repairs will need, exactly as a gas
burner asks for gas, because building_logistics_deficit now takes the larger
of the definition's static buffer and what the world actually demands. There
is a ceiling on that, so one badly-mauled base cannot pull the whole bank
into a single workshop and starve everything else.
Worst first: the structure closest to coming down is the one a repair is
worth most on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node that unlocks a structure borrows that structure's own menu icon, so
the tree and the build menu cannot disagree about what a shipyard looks
like. Doctrines and permanent bonuses, which have no building to point at,
carry an explicit one.
Drawn as child IconButtons with their frame turned off rather than
reimplemented in the tree's _draw: the glyphs already exist there and are
not trivial, and a dozen of them copied here would be two places to change
every time one is redrawn. They are inert - MOUSE_FILTER_IGNORE means the
tree's raw-input handling still sees every press, exactly as it did when
there was nothing on top of the nodes - and hidden rather than clipped when
scrolled off the panel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
#111. Six vessels were authored as one row of 65px buttons with 105px
captions overlapping each other, so "Energy Propulser" was clipped and the
price was crushed onto a second line under it. Laid out in code now, in two
rows of three, and the price is GLYPHS rather than words - every resource
already has a mark the resource bar and the transfer list draw, so a price
reads as a number beside a symbol instead of "15 ore · 5 gas" eating the two
lines the vessel's own name needed.
#120. The hangar's icons give up height so their captions have somewhere to
go - vessel names are two and three words long and were wrapping into a box
barely tall enough for one line, so "Gas Bomber" read as "Gas". And there is
a rule between the two halves now: what is parked here and what is flying
are different questions, and with only a heading between them the grids read
as one long list.
The divider is drawn by the menu itself rather than by a separate node,
because its y comes from the same layout pass that places both grids - a
line positioned independently would drift away from the sections it divides
the first time either changed size.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both read raw touches, and the project no longer turns clicks into them - the
same routing gap #93 fixed in the research tree. The boost was unreachable on
a desktop and the formation could not be rearranged at all.
Wrappers over the same press/drag logic in each case, never a second
implementation, so the touch and mouse paths cannot drift apart. The wheel
replaces the pinch in the formation editor: a mouse has no second finger, and
zoom is the other half of what that panel does.
The fader gets first refusal on a mouse press in GameController, so dragging
the boost does not also pan or zoom the world behind it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A factory whose cranes swing over an empty cradle reads as working on
nothing, and a lab sweeping instruments over a vessel it is not studying
reads the same way.
The CLOCK stops rather than the drawing. Every moving element is a NeonPiece
whose position is pushed from that clock, so a frozen clock leaves the
building standing with its cranes parked; stopping apply_animation() instead
would leave them wherever the last frame happened to put them, which is not
the same thing as idle.
The state is read by tree lookup rather than through the bare `GameState`
identifier. These visual scripts are reached through a BuildingDefinition's
visual_scene, which is preloaded while the definition catalog is still
loading - early enough that the autoload is not in the global class table
yet, and a bare reference fails to COMPILE the whole file. That failure also
hung test_building_redraw_cost, because a visual that never built its pieces
left a null crane being dereferenced every frame.
Both animation tests now say what they mean: the redraw-cost test queues an
order first, because its point is that animating is cheap rather than that
it happens unprompted, and the crafter test additionally pins that an idle
crafter really is still.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
It was a siege piece that crept at 20px/s and lobbed a shell taking five
seconds to cross the gap. That read as a thing that was stuck rather than a
thing that was dangerous: by the time a shell landed the fleet had wandered
off, and the tower was still approaching.
It now moves at 150px/s, faces where it is going, and its bombs travel at
460 - fast enough to arrive while the target is roughly where it was aimed,
slow enough that the impact cross is a warning rather than a formality.
The hull is a bomber rather than a lumpy octagon: swept wings, a short
fuselage, a bay under it. The bomb has fins and a hot core down its smoke
trail, and the blast throws real debris - a BombBlastVFX built from the same
LightBurstVFX as every other explosion, plus a second ring chasing the first
outwards and a white flash that is gone almost at once.
It also bombs what the player has BUILT, through the shared targeting rather
than the fleet alone, and its blast damages structures - it had been asking
Fleet directly and hitting only player_ships, which was already out of step
with #101.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A wave is an attack on what the player has built, not a hazard sitting in
space waiting to be flown near. Wave enemies now ignore the detection radius
their components otherwise respect and close on the nearest building from
wherever they arrived.
The flag is per INSTANCE rather than per definition: the same chaser is a
wave when the director launches it and a garrison when a map author places
it, and a planet garrison that chased the player across the system would be
a very different thing from what the editor is used to place. The test pins
both halves - a wave chaser 6000px out closed on a crafter, and an
identically built one nobody sent held its station.
What it fights on the way is unchanged: EnemyTargets already prefers a
vessel inside 520px over a building further off, and already searches the
player_ships group, so the fleet and an outpost's garrison both count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One back and forth rather than two and a half, over 0.85s rather than 1.2.
The tell is a recoil and a spring; repeating it turned a wind-up into a
fidget and the player stopped reading it as "about to happen".
And the charge is 1650px/s, up from 950, which read as a fast drift rather
than as the thing the whole wind-up was promising.
The test counts how many times the wind-up crosses its anchor: one back and
forth crosses exactly once, two would cross three times.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things were wrong and the second was the real one. A ring is not what a
picket does - but each step around it was shorter than Ship's arrive_radius,
so every frame the vessel SNAPPED onto its target and zeroed its velocity,
and Ship only turns to face a heading while it is actually moving. The
result slid around the outpost pointing whichever way it had spawned.
So: real destinations, far enough apart to be flown to. The vessel picks a
point somewhere in its patrol area, flies there, pauses, and picks another.
A leg is never shorter than wander_min_leg, which is what keeps the
snap-and-stop from coming straight back, and a leg that cannot be reached
times out rather than stranding the picket.
Breaking off a fight now starts a fresh leg from where the fight ended,
rather than flying back to a waypoint chosen before it began.
Measured: 485px of wander, 46-271px from its post, up to 690px/s, pointing
where it was going for 88% of its travel. The test measures that facing as a
FRACTION rather than a worst instant - a vessel just given a new heading is
legitimately still swinging onto it at its own rotation_speed.
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>
Godot writes one beside every script and the repo tracks them; these are the
ones for the files added across #99-#107 and the ability seam.
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>
A garrisoned vessel circles its post, engages what comes into range, and
goes back to circling. It steers by writing move_target and lets Ship's own
steering fly it, so it accelerates, banks and brakes exactly like a vessel
in the formation.
It is not in Fleet.ships. It does not follow the formation, does not count
against max_fleet_size(), and does not move when the player flies away -
which is the whole point of stationing it. A garrison that ate a fleet slot
would mean stationing a vessel cost the player a place in their own wedge.
The leash is the load-bearing part. Enemies are judged from the POST rather
than from the vessel, so a garrison that has drifted out to its leash cannot
see further still and be walked away from its outpost one enemy at a time,
and an engagement is clamped to a circle around the post rather than to a
straight line, so it still manoeuvres while pinned.
The orbit starts from where the vessel actually is rather than a random
bearing. A random one makes the first move_target a point on the far side of
the circle, and the vessel flies straight across the middle - through the
outpost it is guarding.
EnemyTargets.nearest_ship now searches the player_ships GROUP instead of
Fleet.ships: an enemy that ignored the guns shooting at it, because they
were not in the player's formation, would let a garrison hold a position
without ever being fought back.
The laser vessel is deliberately not garrisonable. Firing the laser lives in
LaserController, a fleet ability driven by the laser button, rather than in
VesselLaserComponent - so a garrisoned laser would hold its position and
never shoot, and offering a vessel that cannot fight is worse than a short
list.
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>
Every enemy component used to ask the same question - which player SHIP is
nearest - so a structure was scenery they flew straight through. A Building
is also a plain Node2D, so there was nothing to collide with even if one had
tried.
EnemyTargets answers the question once, for pursuit, standoff, the lancer's
lunge and the ranged weapon together, so they cannot drift into disagreeing
about it. It keeps one thumb on the scale: a vessel inside 520px always
wins, even against a nearer building, or the fleet could not defend anything
by interposing itself and an enemy would fly past the ships shooting it.
Buildings get a hitbox - an Area2D in a group, the same shape as a Ship or
an asteroid, so EnemyProjectile needed one extra branch rather than a new
concept. It applies damage on a tick rather than on area_entered: entry
fires once, which is right for a rammer that dies on the first strike, but
would let a sniper that drifted inside sit there scratch-free for ever. On a
tick, an enemy parked on a structure is besieging it.
What one strike costs is data on the enemy definition, for the same reason
dies_on_contact is - a lancer arriving at 950px/s is not a sniper drifting
into a wall.
Also clears the asteroids in test_enemy_projectile_damage. set_process(false)
only stops NEW asteroids; the ones already placed keep drifting, and one
wandering into the shield vessel parked at (2000, 0) spent its single charge
so the projectile fired next killed it. That failed about one parallel suite
run in thirty and never in isolation. Clearing them is what the other combat
tests already do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
