The hunt for the un-decompiled pick writer ends with the reason no scan could
find it: it does not exist. In 1995 the pick was a DPL SCENE INTERSECTION run
by the video board. The evidence converges from five directions:
- The WinTesla renderer still carries the result slots: dplHitInstance /
dplHitDCS / dplHitGeoGroup / dplHitGeometry + vehicleReticle, NULL-inited
in the ctor and never fed by the port.
- The stubbed 1995-era renderable constructors each took dpl_isect_mode_obj
("type of intersections to do on this object") plus an intersection MASK
-- every scene object was configured for ray queries.
- Auric, quoted in the KB long before this dig: "the pod's division card
cast from the view."
- VGL Lynx's night-6 LOD warning ("the hit test may run against a different
LOD") reads as firsthand knowledge: the ray tested the DRAWN geometry.
- Exhaustive byte- and pseudocode-level scans: nothing in the binary writes
rayIntersection/targetEntity/targetDamageZone. Game code only reads them,
constructs them (the Mech ctor @0x4a1674 -- identified this dig, along
with vtable +0x18/+0x1c = Mech::Read/WriteUpdateRecord, nine replication
groups, reticle not among them), gates them (FUN_004afd10, the look-state
machine: per-view crosshair positions, the pi rear case, the per-weapon
rear-fire mask walk), and ships them to the board for drawing
(FUN_00460a7c packages rayIntersection + elementMask into dpl).
What this means for #73: aimed fire in 1995 had PER-PART precision -- scene
ray, struck triangle on the active LOD, the DCS is the segment, the segment's
dzone is the credited zone. The cylinder lottery was only ever the UNAIMED
path. The port's whole-mech box pick funnels aimed fire through the unaimed
lottery, which is exactly what three testers documented on night 6: aim at
the arm, get the spray.
Fix design recorded in the KB: a per-SEGMENT ray test on the shooter side
(inverse(segmentWorld) * ray vs each segment BGF's local extent box, nearest
wins, its dzone dispatched as the aimed zone), falling back to box+lottery
when no segment resolves.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
