KB: gotcha #27 -- drawing against compositor invariants (the #118 MFD corruption class)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Joe DiPrima
2026-08-03 21:06:55 -05:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent 78722542fd
commit 0535a7ab74
+34
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@@ -795,3 +795,37 @@ grep its helper types for `return 0` bodies FIRST; (b) a bring-up shim must
either Fail() loudly or log its own emptiness, never silently iterate nothing;
(c) before shimming an engine-side structure, check whether the engine already
has it -- the offsets in the decomp comment ARE the lookup key.
## 27. Drawing where the design says DON'T: under-surface buttons, shared planes, and inherited D3D state (#118, 2026-08-03)
Three MFD-corruption incidents in one evening, all mine, all the same class:
adding a DRAW to a compositor whose layout invariants I had not read.
1. **The eject-wipe gauge** (BitMapInverseWipeScalar) drew into a weapon's ENG
graphics port -- but the Eng1-3 planes SHARE composite dest cells with the
weapon pages (`ckSlotOf` in L4VB16), so its mis-geometry scribbled striped
garbage OVER the weapon MFDs whenever an eject cycle redrew it (= at
overheat-jam onset, which the operator correctly correlated with "when the
coolant warning starts").
2. **The "flash overlay"** re-drew flashing buttons' full faces ON TOP of the
surfaces. But the side buttons are BIG rects deliberately tucked UNDER the
displays -- the protruding edge IS the lamp (the pod's backlit keys sat
beside the CRT; there is no in-display face). A full-face redraw is wrong
BY DESIGN: it covers gauge imagery with button faces.
3. **The same overlay, drawn after `DrawDevSurface`, inherited its bound
texture** -- an un-reset `CkFill` renders a TEXTURED quad sampling the
gauge atlas: green diagonal-striped rectangles. (With the state reset the
bug became honest: solid flashing faces covering the MFD -- which is how
the operator's "the panel buttons took over the MFD" report finally
identified the author.)
Rules: (a) before ADDING a draw to an existing render pass, read the pass's
layering comments -- "UNDER the surfaces", "masks the part inside", "shares
its sibling's dest cell" are INVARIANTS, not descriptions; (b) any D3D draw
inserted after another subsystem's draws must re-assert its own texture/color
state (CkColorState-equivalent) -- the previous draw's bindings are live;
(c) when a visual corruption tracks an EVENT ("starts with the coolant
warning"), list what STARTS DRAWING at that event -- alarm-driven redraws,
state-change repaints -- before suspecting the event's logic; (d) the
operator's screenshot is worth ten theories: the red-faces capture identified
in one frame what three log-side hypotheses missed.