Walked the respawn handshake end to end and measured the assumptions. Two
eliminations and one find:
ELIMINATED: the engine hunt re-posts to itself every 2s forever while the mech
is dead (PLAYER.cpp:325-327; its only state-based exit never fires, see below),
and the DropZone re-grants the SAME slot to a repeat request from the same
requester+deathCount even while busy (DROPZONE.cpp:182-194). So neither a
transient "no slot" nor a single lost reply can strand a respawn -- the request
keeps being re-sent and re-granted. A permanent strand needs a permanent cause.
THE FIND: BTPlayer::DropZoneReplyMessageHandler ends
if (!playerVehicle) ... else if (deathCount == message->deathCount) ... else { return; }
and that last branch was a BARE RETURN WITH NO LOG. The drop zone grants a
spot, replies, the numbers disagree, the reply is dropped, deathPending stays
latched, the mech is never Reset -> permanent ghost, zero evidence. That is
why 6 of 8 field cycles stranded silently. Now always-on, printing the
DIRECTION of the mismatch: msgDeath < ours = genuinely stale (dropping is
right); msgDeath > ours = our counter is behind and we just threw away a LIVE
respawn -> points straight at #45 (the death tally does not replicate).
Deliberately NOT auto-recovered: guessing would be a stand-in, and the wrong
guess resets a mech that is still alive.
LANDMINE DOCUMENTED IN CODE: Set_Alarm_Level is an empty stub (btstubs.cpp:87),
so the death path's Set_Alarm_Level(this+0x2c,1) and the reply's (+0x2c,2) are
no-ops. Their values decode against Player's enum as DropZoneAcquiredState(1)
and VehicleTranslocatedState(2), which makes "these should obviously be
SetSimulationState() calls" both attractive and CATASTROPHIC: the engine hunt is
gated on GetSimulationState() != DropZoneAcquiredState, so setting 1 on death
would stop AssignDropZone ever being dispatched and ghost EVERY pilot. Measured
our simulationState at 0x24 (not 0x2c) and the write leaves it 0; in the binary
+0x2c is the Simulation-base alarm (the field the mech side calls graphicAlarm,
@0x4ac126 "owner alarm+0x2C -> level 9"), which our layout models only on Mech.
Verified solo: a healthy death+respawn logs the grant and the RESET and emits
ZERO discard/gate-off lines (no false positives).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
