The pod bay has a ritual: the mission is committed, every pod preps up to
- but not past - the launch, and then the operator presses the button.
The prep hold is not dead time. The MFDs and the map buttons are alive
before the mission starts, so pilots use the window to set their maps and
presets, and the wait itself is part of the game's social fabric. Cyd
asked for the ritual back, and the engine turned out to have kept most of
it: the console already feeds the eggs, watches every pod climb through
loading to WaitingForLaunch, and held the run until the room was staged -
it just fired RunMission itself the instant that was true.
Now it arms instead of firing. The host's menu button reads COMMIT while
hosting (a plain single-player launch is still a launch, and commits with
no remote pods still start themselves - a lone pilot has nobody to wait
for). Committing marshals everyone exactly as before, and a small commit
board comes up over the 3D view: one row per pod, the host first, each
saying what its machine is doing - connecting, waiting for egg, loading,
READY - bright when ready, dim while not, so who the room is waiting on
reads at a glance. When every system is ready the board's LAUNCH button
lights, the operator presses it, the run goes out over the same wire and
local delivery as always, and the board gets out of the way - the host
has a race to fly. If a pod falls back out of readiness before the press,
the button disarms rather than launching a room no longer whole.
The board lives entirely on the game thread, created and clicked inside
ConsoleTick, so the game's own message pump delivers its input - the same
pump that keeps the MFDs alive through the hold is what makes the button
work, which is fitting. WS_EX_NOACTIVATE keeps the game window focused
throughout: PadRIO controls answer only while it is, and launching the
race must not cost the operator their controls. The board repaints only
when a state actually changes, and every teardown path destroys it -
InstallCommon, the run transition, and the mission-ended-otherwise exit -
so no board survives into a race or out of one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
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