Three guards, all of them paid for by an actual wasted afternoon.
THE BUILD GUARD. kNetRevision is hand-maintained and only bumped when
someone judges that a change alters the simulation, so two different builds
normally carry the same revision and will race each other happily - which
is how a 4.12.184 machine and a 4.12.187 machine sat in the same room all
day. The exact build now travels as lobby data and member data, and it is
checked in two places:
- on JOIN, before the room is ever entered, with a dialog naming both
builds. The owner's launch check would have caught it eventually, but
only after everyone had picked a loadout and pressed go, and all it can
do then is decline to start - which reads as the host's button being
broken.
- at LAUNCH, beside the revision check, so a member seated before the
guard existed still cannot race.
The room screen shows BUILD <version> against an offending row, because a
host is owed the reason as well as the refusal. An absent value counts as a
mismatch: a build older than the key cannot be trusted to match. Both
guards stay - the revision still refuses a mix known to simulate
differently even where the build strings agree.
THE DUPLICATE KEY WARNING. environ.ini is applied line by line, so a second
copy of a key silently beats the first. A TARGETFPS added at the top of the
file was overridden by the one the template ships further down, and the test
it was written for looked as though it had failed rather than never having
run. Now: "TARGETFPS is set twice - line 1 and line 8; the LATER one wins",
naming the key and both lines, because which and where is the whole value.
THE MISSING FACTS. TARGETFPS appeared nowhere in the log, so no run could
be checked afterwards against what it was actually asked for, and
interpolation only announced itself when switched off - there was no way to
confirm from a log that it was on. Both are now stated outright, with a
warning when a frame target differs from the physics rate AND interpolation
is off, which is the combination that steps.
Verified: the duplicate warning names lines 1 and 8 of a file carrying both,
the frame line reads "144 fps, drawing on exact physics steps" with the
mismatch note when interpolation is off, and "60 fps, drawing interpolated
across the physics step" with no note when it is on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
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