Three respawn-visual bugs the user saw, each grounded in the engine/decomp:
1. Warp = flat blue BLOB, not the demo's swirly blue/light-blue/white shimmer.
Ground truth (content/VIDEO/MAT/DAY/BTFX.VMF): tsphere_mtl = a SCROLLING bintA
texture (tsphere_scr_tex, SPECIAL SCROLL) + EMISSIVE {0.7,0.5,1} + RAMP "sky"
(dark-blue->white). The swirl IS the scrolling texture; the colour is the
emissive/ramp. Our draw did COLOROP=SELECTARG1/ARG1=TFACTOR, which REPLACES
every texel with one flat colour -> the blob. Fix: MODULATE the (bound,
scrolling) texture by a TFACTOR set to the authentic EMISSIVE hue (0xB380FF)
so the swirl survives and reads blue-white. DrawMesh's cached SetTexture
(L4D3D.cpp:1215) leaves our MODULATE ops standing since textured meshes drew
first. Additive glow, all state saved/restored.
2. First-person view BLACK on the dying/respawning mech until V. SetViewInside's
body-hide + '_cop' canopy suppression + viewSkeleton update were gated !wrecked,
and RebuildMechRenderables (respawn un-wreck) restored the full OUTSIDE torso
with no '_cop' rule -> the cockpit eyepoint ended up wrapped in opaque geometry.
Fix: factor the per-segment mesh selection into ApplyViewSkeleton(viewpoint,
inside) shared by SetViewInside AND RebuildMechRenderables, so respawn re-asserts
the inside skeleton + '_cop' hide; record viewSkeleton even while wrecked. Only
the mech the local camera views FROM gets the inside treatment (a replicant is
always outside).
3. OBSERVER never saw the peer respawn -- the peer's wreck sat forever. The wreck
appears incidentally via rising damage-zone replication -> MechDeathHandler::Tick
-> BTRemakeMechModel (one-way). The un-wreck+warp ran master-only in Mech::Reset.
Fix (reuses the existing damage channel, no stream-framing change): Mech::Reset
also ForceUpdate(DamageZoneUpdateModelFlag) so healed zones cross; Tick handles
the FALLING edge -- on a ReplicantInstance whose zone heals from destroyed, call
BTRebuildMechModel + BTStartWarpEffect once (wasWrecked latch). This is the port
analog of the binary's type-0 graphic-state -> ResetPose un-wreck hook
(Mech::ReadUpdateRecord case 0); the full Mech::WriteUpdateRecord death record
(type 6) is deferred (would touch the netcode framing).
Smoke-verified headless (2-node): victim respawns intact + warp; observer logs
"replicant un-wrecked + warp" at the peer's spawn point; no crash.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
