Commit graph spaceship/world
Author SHA1 Message Date
Loïc Wisniewski
2bb46cba94 Charge more for each berth, and show the bill
#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
2026-09-05 22:36:21 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
265e121cb0 Build the logistics crews, and let them burn energy
#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
2026-09-05 19:09:35 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
6e13b6397c Take planets by killing what defends them
#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
2026-09-05 13:31:25 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
78836882af Sharpen upgrades, mark the convoy's destination, and give the world sound
#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
2026-09-05 12:16:17 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
a902fddba0 Show the laser's whole reach while aiming
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
2026-09-04 23:20:29 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
10d19a369b Guide the fleet to the nearest unconquered scan target
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
2026-09-04 21:46:24 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
fd792e8b63 Smooth boosted fleet travel 2026-09-04 20:01:56 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
8fbcc340ce Add planet scanner and octopus biome 2026-09-04 15:56:07 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
9864e59efc Arrange fleet abilities around fire stick 2026-09-03 23:00:52 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
c325501999 Turn dev mode into sandbox menu 2026-09-03 20:05:33 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
40f284dcdd Add tentacled boss planet encounter 2026-09-03 10:33:05 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
0f7edff15a Complete lab, quest, garrison, and energy tickets 2026-09-03 00:12:08 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
d413d1da9f Polish dialog and intro transitions 2026-09-02 20:18:44 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
3975959017 Improve aim assist target stickiness 2026-09-02 17:15:12 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
c2ebbfaa2d Resolve pending gameplay tickets 2026-09-02 13:43:56 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
ec20778215 Enlarge mobile joystick controls 2026-09-02 11:19:54 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
eb1615ab6b Restore landing fade and missing event sounds 2026-08-31 18:15:37 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
a17fe88197 Refactor gameplay menus into owned scenes 2026-08-31 02:18:08 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
0fad1dd155 #166-#173: plainer words, a point to shoot at, and a catalog that says when it is broken
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
2026-08-30 14:04:46 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
3fcc26c8bc Implement #160, #161, #162, #163, #164 and #165
#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>
2026-08-30 02:27:44 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
b721760803 #149, #153, #154: dialogs arrive, sit on top, and give the keyboard back
#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.
2026-08-29 14:39:07 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
970eafc1de #140: the objective moves behind a button next to the map's
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.
2026-08-28 15:37:13 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
ac4b96ef49 #139: the prologue's debris belt keeps off the screen too
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.
2026-08-28 15:37:11 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
ea25318201 #136, #137, #134: one build grid that cannot stack, one way to show a price
#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.
2026-08-28 15:05:20 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
710dcbf230 #130, #135: a vessel's death takes a moment, and leaves an interceptor
#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.
2026-08-28 15:05:02 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
397983b611 #129 (#131, #132, #133): a quest chain, and a World Ship out of reach
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.
2026-08-28 14:41:03 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
1e89780bd7 #128: a dialog stops the game until it is acknowledged
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.
2026-08-28 14:40:46 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
902d6922e7 #127: dialogs wait for the reader, and say who is talking
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>
2026-08-24 20:57:56 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
ddc3de595e #126: asteroids are only created off screen
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>
2026-08-24 20:57:55 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
d455361328 #125: slow the prologue down, and give the breach a real black hole
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>
2026-08-24 13:25:10 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
7d344b2a0a Add the .uid files Godot generated for the newest scripts
Godot writes one beside every script and the repo tracks them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-24 12:10:41 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
f9ed46746d #110: a dev-mode button that puts a wave on the board now
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>
2026-08-23 21:58:58 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
209169206b #108: the prologue - the convoy, the ambush, and the breach
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>
2026-08-23 20:59:12 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
0c595d775d #106/#107 (#98a/#98b): the Planning Center
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>
2026-08-23 14:21:52 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
bd0cc842ff #105 (#97g): garrison vessels patrol and defend their outpost
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>
2026-08-23 14:13:47 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
3c632276af #102/#103 (#97d/#97e): the outpost, and the garrison you compose for it
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>
2026-08-23 14:02:20 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
26f3728546 #100 (#97b): waves replace the roaming enemy spawner
The old spawner put one enemy on the map every 3-6 seconds for ever. There
was no rhythm to the danger and nothing to prepare for. Enemies now arrive
in waves: a long quiet, a warning, an attack, and quiet again once the wave
is dead.

The clock lives in GameState, because Main.tscn is destroyed on every trip
to a planet surface and a wave must not be cancelled, nor restarted from
zero, by a landing. The spawning does not: GameState cannot see the world,
so EnemySpawner reads the phase and puts the enemies in it. That also
settles what happens when a wave turns while the player is on a surface -
the wave is waiting in space when they come back.

EnemySpawner keeps its name deliberately. It is still the thing that puts
enemies in the world, and 88 test files already say
`get_node("EnemySpawner").set_process(false)` to ask for a quiet map.

Strength is a function of the FLEET, per the ticket, with the wave number as
a slower second term so a player who never grows still meets escalation. The
budget is spent most-expensive-first, so a large wave is heavier rather than
merely longer, and min_strength keeps the first waves to chasers whatever
the arithmetic says.

"No timer should be visible" is enforced rather than merely observed:
GameState offers wave_warning_pulse(), a 0..1 throb, and no
remaining-seconds accessor at all, so the alert cannot drift into being a
countdown. The test pins both - that no such accessor exists, and that the
alert's own text contains no digits.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-23 13:37:42 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
5f1b5a9b29 #95: stop printing the bank twice in the research menu
The research table's LOCAL column was not merely equal to BANKED, it was the
same store: research lives on the mothership, the mothership is also the
bank, and building_inventory() redirects any bank-capable building to
bank_inventory itself. ResourceBar now drops LOCAL wherever it resolves to
the bank and lets the remaining two columns share the width. Anywhere else -
a crafter, a lab, the transfer panel - the column is untouched.

The "Research" heading went with it. It named a panel you can only reach by
pressing the research button, and it cost the tree canvas 128px, which the
table and the tree have now taken back.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-23 11:35:14 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
4883197ef3 #93: drive the research menu with a mouse, and close the hole under it
Two separate faults, both reported on the same ticket.

The menu was inert under a mouse. Input reaches the tree as raw events
through BuildController._unhandled_input, because a Control that consumes
them through the GUI system swallows the drag, and the tree only ever read
touch events. That was invisible while the project set
emulate_touch_from_mouse and every click arrived as a synthetic touch; with
that setting gone, nothing selects and nothing scrolls, and there is no
other way to research anything on a desktop. The press and the pan are now
the behaviour, with touch and mouse as two ways in to them. Motion pans only
while the button is held - a hovering pointer must not drag the tree out
from under the reader - and the wheel scrolls, which is the first thing a
desktop player reaches for.

The panel also still had the buy button's hole in it. That button went away
in #83 and nothing moved down into the space, leaving ~180px of dead panel
below the readout while the tree above it stayed cramped. The readout moves
down 154px and the canvas takes the height: 1190px to 1344px.

The test drives clicks through BuildController rather than into the view,
since the missing piece was the routing - calling the view directly would
have passed against the bug as reported.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-22 23:29:34 +02:00
Loïc Wisniewski
2f161621c3 #84: move 215 root files into a folder hierarchy
Everything lived in one flat directory, so a diff gave no clue what area it
touched and finding the file you wanted meant knowing its exact name. Twelve
folders now, grouped by what a thing IS rather than what type it is - a
vessel's definition, its component scenes and its upgrade resources sit
together, because that is the set you read when you change one of them.

  buildings  core  controllers  enemies  logistics  planets
  resources  shaders  surface  ui  vessels  vfx  world

332 files moved and every res:// reference rewritten - 306 files touched,
including the autoload and main-scene paths in project.godot. Nothing renamed:
this is purely where files sit, so the diff is a pile of pure moves and no
behaviour is buried in it. ui_theme.tres, icon.svg and web_shell.html stay at
the root, where Godot and the export preset expect them.

Verified three ways, because a suite alone would not have caught all of it:
the full 117 pass, the web export builds clean, and the game renders.

The export is why that matters. The FIRST export after the move failed with
"Attempt to open script 'res://GameState.gd'" - the old path - while
project.godot on disk plainly said res://core/GameState.gd. That is this
project's documented Android FUSE mtime trap: Godot served a cached copy of a
file whose content had changed. A `touch` fixed it. Nothing in the test suite
would have found that, because the suite runs from a copy on a native
filesystem - the one place the bug cannot happen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-21 19:44:14 +02:00