JSON at user://savegame.json rather than a binary resource: a save that can
be opened in a text editor is diagnosable from a bug report, and
ResourceSaver would tie the file's shape to GDScript class layout, which is
the thing that keeps changing.
The run is not plain data, which is the actual work here. A tagged codec
carries Vector2, Vector2i, PackedStringArray and the Inventory objects
nested inside `buildings`. explored_chunks is keyed by Vector2i and JSON has
no such key, so every key carries its own type prefix ("v2i:3,-4") - without
that a planet id could come back as a chunk coordinate.
WHAT is saved is an explicit list of 30 fields, not a dump of GameState's
58 vars. A dump would carry transient junk - which pointer last touched the
screen, whether a dialog holds the camera - and would break silently on
every rename. The cost is that new progression must be added to the list;
the benefit is that forgetting is a missing feature, not a corrupt save.
Versioning, as the ticket asked. MIGRATIONS walks a save up one version at a
time; MIN_SUPPORTED_VERSION is how a break too messy to migrate gets
DECLARED rather than bodged. A save that cannot be walked forward is refused
with a player-readable reason, because a save that loads subtly WRONG is
worse than one that refuses and says so. Adding a field needs no bump: it
arrives missing from old saves and keeps its new-game value (case F).
The menu offers Continue only when there is something to offer. A save this
build CANNOT open is still shown, disabled, with the reason underneath -
silently hiding someone's run reads as lost rather than incompatible.
Autosave every 30s, plus on close and on Android's app-pause, since the
phone kills backgrounded apps with no warning. Skipped during the prologue.
That autosave writes to the same user:// path every test that loads
Main.tscn shares, so it could make Continue appear and shift the menu stack
under test_main_menu depending on what ran first. That test clears the save
before building the menu.
Verified by breaking it: neutering the key decoder fails with "chunk keys
came back as [v2i:-11,0, v2i:3,-4]".
Still absent, deliberately: no save-on-demand button, and no route back to
the menu from in-game, so a resume currently needs a relaunch.
175/175.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
Reported from the game: sounds sometimes start a bit late. The samples were
the suspect, so they were measured first - and they are clean. True digital
silence at the head of each file:
seven of nine start on sample 1
sfx_gas_blast 0.2ms
sfx_black_hole 1.5ms, then a deliberate swell
The black hole's slow attack is the sound it was written to be - make_sfx.py
says it "swells across most of its length instead of decaying from the first
sample" - so there is nothing to trim without breaking it.
The delay was in the playback path, and "sometimes" was the clue:
play() called load() every time. A cache hit after the first, but the
FIRST play of each sound was a synchronous read and decode on the frame
the sound was asked for. Ten sounds, ten occasional late starts.
_pool() built its twelve AudioStreamPlayer nodes lazily, on the first
play() call - one bigger stall, every session.
The catalog is preloaded now, so play() never touches the disk, and
Sfx.warm() builds the voices next to Music.ensure() at startup.
Case F pins the thing that was originally suspected, since make_sfx.py
regenerates these and a lazy envelope would hide the delay somewhere nobody
would look. It reads the source .wav's RIFF chunks rather than the imported
stream: these import as QOA (compress/mode=2), so AudioStreamWAV.data is not
PCM. The first version of that check was vacuous for exactly that reason and
passed at a 0.5ms threshold; it now reports "9 samples checked, worst attack
sfx_black_hole.wav at 1.5ms" and fails when tightened.
Not touched: project.godot has no [audio] section, so output_latency is at
its default. On Android that buffer is usually the dominant latency, but
lowering it risks crackle on real hardware - worth doing with someone
listening, not blind.
172/172.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
The "no research data" explainer is the only dialog in the game that opens
ON TOP of another one - the skill tree or the ship lab, from the button that
was just refused. IconButton._blocked_by_modal() refuses input to any button
sitting behind an open panel, and it had no notion of stacking order: it saw
the lab still visible, saw it was not an ancestor of the popup's close
button, and killed the touch. Every button in the explainer was dead,
including the only way out of it. Reported from the game.
The check now compares draw order. A panel that this button's own panel is
drawn on top of is behind it, not over it, and is ignored; a panel drawn
above it still blocks, so the lab's own buttons stay dead while the popup
covers them. Buttons belonging to no panel - the HUD - are unchanged and
still blocked by anything open.
The existing test missed this because it dismissed the popup by calling
close_menu() directly, which is not what a player can do. Case D presses the
button, and asserts the reverse too. Verified in both directions: with the
fix reverted it fails with "the explainer close button is blocked by the lab
behind it - the dialog is inescapable".
172/172.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
Nothing under ui/ or vfx/ was marked @tool, so every hand-drawn control
rendered as an empty rect in the editor. BuildMenu.tscn positions its
buttons with hand-tuned pixel offsets (offset_left = -204) around a glyph
identified only as `icon = 8` - laying out invisible boxes by number.
@tool on the three scene-placed components that are safe to run in the
editor, covering 23 of the 34 placements: IconButton (20 scenes),
TouchJoystick (2), NeonPanel (1).
Two of them mutate persisted properties on _ready, which under @tool
would write computed values back into the .tscn every time the scene was
opened, so both are guarded with Engine.is_editor_hint():
NeonPanel._fit_to_screen() rewrites all four offsets
TouchJoystick._relayout() overwrites max_radius, which is @export
IconButton's _gui_input is guarded too, so clicking a button on the
editor canvas does not emit `pressed`.
The autoload-heavy drawers (ResourceBar, PriceTag, QuestPanel,
ResourceTransferList, SkillTreeView, FormationEditor - 6 to 16
GameState./Quests. references each) are left alone; they need their call
sites guarded first.
Verified: 172/172 headless, and a --headless --editor pass loads the
project with no script errors. That pass only proves the scripts parse
under @tool - it never opens a scene, so it does not exercise the
in-editor _draw.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
Reviewed against the rule issues #6 and #10 set for the buildings: geometry
is rasterised once and thereafter only moved, scaled or faded, because every
NeonDraw call expands into four antialiased polylines.
The planet visuals never got that refactor. The black hole rebuilt ten
glowing paths of twenty-five points every frame - forty polylines - to spin
five rings; each ring is a NeonPiece that rotates now. The research lab spent
nine draw calls a frame, eight of them fixed geometry, to turn one dish and
blink six lights; the dish is a child that rotates and the lights a child
whose modulate breathes. The gas giant's bands genuinely deform, so they
still draw, but its constant rim moved out to a child. NeonPiece gained
add_path, which it needed for open arcs.
And I had broken the rule myself. ScannerGuidance re-queued a redraw of its
arrow every frame for a colour that changes only with the destination - and
it runs with PROCESS_MODE_ALWAYS, so it was re-tessellating through every
dialog that stops the rest of the game. Guarded, and pinned by a test that
counts CanvasItem's own draw signal: 36 rasterisations in 0.6s before, one
after.
Two smaller things from the same pass: the station menu drew its condition
bar by hand where the ship lab already uses a ProgressBar node, so it uses
one now and its _draw is gone; and station/upkeep refreshes were wired into
_refresh_garrison(), which nothing but a test calls, so both menus showed
whatever was true when they opened.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
_export_probe.gd is the check that found the empty planets: run inside a
built pack with --main-pack, it reports how many planet setups the registry
actually finds and what garrisons they carry. The suite runs from source and
structurally cannot see an export-only fault, so this is the thing to run
before a deploy.
The .uid files go with it because the repo tracks one beside every other
script; the ones added this session were left behind.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
The scanner quest moves ahead of the gas burner and gains the hunt it exists
for: a research lab world, which pays several times what an ordinary planet
does and is the only reliable source of research data. Finding one is what
the scanner is FOR, so the conquest record now remembers which kind of world
was taken and a quest can ask for that kind.
Bombers get a pair of quests after the transporters. That pulled the ship lab
up with them - a vessel is unlocked AT the lab, so asking for a bomber before
one exists would have been unfinishable, the same trap second_hull fell into.
And both research screens now explain a shortfall instead of hiding it. The
skill tree refused a doctrine in silence; the ship lab said "already queued
or complete", which is not why it refused and sends the player to look at the
wrong thing. Both open an explainer naming what was wanted, what is held, and
where data actually comes from.
#192's rule - a tool is taught immediately before the quest that needs it -
now points at the scanner's FIRST use rather than its only one, with the
world survey still required to follow it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
A ship crafter shows what can actually be ordered there: a hull whose
research is done, and - for the support craft - one with somewhere to be
assigned. A transporter with no hub and a drone with no workshop have
nowhere to go and would sit in the hangar as spent resources, so the
structure that uses one is part of its availability. Hidden rather than
greyed, as the build menu already treats an unresearched structure, and
gated in queue_order() too so the model refuses what the menu declines to
show.
The craft buttons bound their handlers to a definition captured at startup.
With a list that changes length that is a live bug - a slot would order
whatever hull was there when the menu was built - so they bind to the slot
and resolve through the current offer.
The hub and workshop crew menus now NAME what is left in each vessel:
"TRANSPORTER 2 9 / 20 RUNS", worst first, with one wide bar for the vessel
closest to spent. The per-vessel bars they replaced drew about seven pixels
tall on a phone and carried no figure, so the number the player is deciding
on could not be read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#221: the planning centre listed only fleet-eligible hulls, so the two
vessels that most need replacing were the two it could not plan - #216 made
transporters and repair drones wear out, which is what a standing order is
for. It offers everything a crafter can build now.
That needed the census to see them: it counted the fleet, the hangar,
garrisons and transit, but not vessels standing at a hub or a workshop. An
order for a transporter would never have seen the ones already built, and
the crafters would have gone on making more forever.
#222: the ship lab's detail block restated the selected upgrade's research
point cost, which its own card shows a few pixels higher. Removed, with the
parameter and the call-site lookup that fed it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#220: every berth past the first paid one costs 1.12x the one before it, on
top of the flat per-vessel charge. A linear bill makes the tenth hull no more
of a decision than the second; compounding weighs each addition against the
whole fleet behind it. Shallow on purpose - the thirteenth berth costs about
three and a half times the second, the twentieth about seven and a half.
Fleet Offices gain a menu naming the whole bill per minute, a line per paying
berth with its multiplier, and the arithmetic in words. It renders
fleet_upkeep_breakdown(), which is the calculation the charging loop itself
runs: a readout that summed independently could quote a bill the game does
not take, which is the thing worth preventing here. The test pins that what
the menu quotes for a berth is what that office is charged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#216: transport hubs and spacial workshops no longer conjure their crews.
Transporters and repair drones are ordered at a ship crafter, assigned per
building through a new Station menu, flown out from the mothership hangar,
and spent by the work they do - 20 runs, 12 repairs, counted where the run
ENDS so nothing retires with cargo in the air or a building half repaired.
A spent vessel is gone, so the structure is short again and the player has
to build another. The menu shows what each one has left, worst first.
Craftability needed its own flag: "the crafter can make it" and "it can take
a berth in the fleet" stopped being the same question.
#217: transporters crawl at 120 rather than 150, and a Burn Drive lets them
carry energy and spend it to travel far faster. Fetching it is a leg of its
own, to the nearest store that has any - so a refuelling transporter cannot
be dispatched mid-errand - and the leg flown to COLLECT fuel is not charged
for it. Unresearched, nothing detours and nothing changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#219: fleet capacity is a built, supplied thing rather than a researched
one. The eight fleet-size doctrines are gone; capacity is one berth free
plus one per Fleet Office standing. An office charges every 25s for the
vessel in its berth, priced off that vessel's own build cost so an expensive
hull is expensive to keep, and drawn from its own store the way a gas burner
draws gas. An office that cannot pay goes dark, its vessel is scuttled, and
the player is told through the same queue quest lines use - which reaches
them on a planet surface too.
An empty berth is idle rather than starved: an office is only failing while
there is something in it to fail, and holding it disabled would leave a
berth that could never be crewed and so could never be paid for again.
Ships have no hit points and a shield absorbs a hit wholesale, so the lost
vessel is scuttled rather than damaged - otherwise a shielded hull would
survive its own eviction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#211 conquest is the fight now: a planet registers the garrison its setup
authors, each defender's own death counts against it, and the last one takes
the world. The capture points - stand in a ring, wait out a timer, once per
ring - are gone, along with the editor palette that placed them.
#212 conquest opens a dialog on the surface naming the research points
recovered; the award travels with the signal, after it is banked.
#209 the prologue's charted sectors go with the breach, so the map the
survivors keep is of where they now are - and "chart 30 sectors" is no
longer complete before they have flown anywhere.
#218 enemy variety is gated on the FLEET, not on wave strength: a starting
fleet meets chasers only at any wave number, and each vessel past three
opens one more kind.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#204 the Beam Collimator widens the beam instead of adding range to one that
already crosses the screen; beam width becomes a per-shot vessel stat.
#205 the Energy Propulser gains three upgrades - dash recharge, dash reach,
and boosted-cruise drain - which turns three constants into vessel stats.
#206 three further doctrines carry the fleet from ten to twenty.
#207 the prologue's World Ship gets a marker, through the scanner's own
guidance arrow rather than a second one.
#208#210#213#214 four new synthesised sounds: the breach opening, cargo
reaching the hold, a rock breaking, and a gas bomb blooming.
#215 building health bars are larger, plated and framed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
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>
#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.
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.
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.
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
