Frame-rate testimony from the morning follow-up, now on record beside the bytes:
* Oracle, asked if the pod frame rate was rock solid: "I think I could do as
well with a flipbook"; heavy fights "would turn to a slide show".
* Lynx (original era): "RP had a target frame rate of 30FPS. It wasn't hard
coded or locked. BT never had a locked frame rate in 1st release
testing... coming from 3.0, where 20FPS was a miracle."
* The engine pacer's own design agrees: fixed budget + background fill + NO
overrun catch-up (APPMGR.cpp, T0) = "target 28 but allowed to slip", with
the 18.2065 BIOS fallback anticipating degraded timing.
Also settles epilectrik's open confirmation ("frame rate is advancing at least
some of the subsystems -- i have to fully confirm that"): ALL of them --
UpdateManager::Execute runs every interesting master every frame,
Entity::PerformAndWatch runs every executable subsystem per entity tick, no
throttle at any layer. The crisp rule: CADENCE is frame-linked for
everything; only terms missing a dt multiply are rate-SENSITIVE.
Corollary worth keeping: a choking 486 generated LESS heat/s exactly during
the biggest fights -- the slideshow was mercy. Veteran memory of seek-4
endurance encodes the LOADED rate, which is why bracketing by their consensus
is the correct instrument rather than a concession.
Follow-up filed in the KB: sweep the reconstruction for OTHER dt-less per-tick
accumulators (known: particle trail density, rendering.md; the 15-sample
heatFilter window is rate-dependent smoothing, benign). Each found one should
normalize against the same 28-nominal/bracketed-effective pair.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
