User report: the shadow broke MID-SESSION -- suddenly solid opaque black and
buried on any slope. The session log pinned the trigger: pressing V. The
view toggle (SetViewInside) RELOADS every segment mesh through the object
loader and swaps them into the render tree -- including blh_tshd.bgf -- and
the reload path never called SetIsShadow(1) (only the original tree-build
call site tagged it). Untagged, the entire shadow pipeline disengages: no
translucent TFACTOR state block (solid black), no depth bias (buried), wrong
pass. The damage-swap reloads had the same hole.
Fix: tag *tshd* filenames in LoadObjectBGF itself, next to the existing
all-shadow-material detector (which misses the mech proxy -- plain black
material, not shadow_mtl). Every load path -- build, damage swap, view
toggle -- now yields a tagged object; the drawOps alphaTest routing reads
the flag downstream. User-verified live: the shadow survives repeated V
toggles, translucent and slope-correct.
This also likely explains the RECURRING "shadow vanishes on inclines"
reports: any V toggle silently broke it; every relaunch "fixed" it. KB
(locomotion.md): loader-level tag recorded as co-dependent part 5 of the
shadow arrangement; the vanish-diagnostic note now lists all three causes
(reload untag / gait desync / genuine burial) with check-first guidance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
