Commit Graph
8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
CydandClaude Fable 5 3c289ff10a BT410 5.3.78: the torso twists from the button path; two buffer overruns fixed
BT_FORCE_TORSO sweeps the twist BUTTONS -- the members the streamed direct
mappings write -- so the chain runs without a hand on the RIO.  Live on the
pod: twist sweeps -0.015 to -0.891 rad and back as cmdL/cmdR alternate, at
the resource rate 0.873 rad/s, inside the authored +/-2.443 limits, with
jointtorso resolved.  End to end: attribute id -> direct-mapping destination
-> TorsoSimulation integrator -> skeleton joint -> the canopy eye hanging off
that chain.  5.3.68's table and 5.3.71's integrator both confirmed against
real button semantics.

Two buffer overruns, one of them mine.  Reading TORSO.CPP back caught the
ctor still zeroing dynamicsState[22] after I shrank the array to [16] by
carving the command members out of its front: 24 bytes past the end of every
Torso, on the heap, every mission, since 5.3.68.  A sweep for the same shape
across BT/BT_L4/MUNGA found a pre-existing one -- MECHMPPR.CPP zeroing
reserved[22] against reserved[21].

Both now bound by ELEMENTS().  The rule for this tree: any array carved out
of a reserve block must have its initialiser bound by ELEMENTS, because the
carve is exactly the edit that silently invalidates a literal.

Neither explains the residual host fault (it predates 5.3.68 at 3/3), but
both were real corruption running in every mission -- and the Torso one was
introduced by the very fix that cut the fault rate, which is worth
remembering whenever a rate MOVES instead of going to zero.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 19:52:38 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 d4f105f42d BT410 5.3.69: the cockpit eye sits in the canopy -- site handling in the walk
RecurseSKLFile now walks "site=" children.  Sites get no draw component --
which is why the walk's 26 nodes matched the real capture all along: sites
were never DCS nodes -- and siteeyepoint spawns the cockpit camera with the
donor's exact construction (bt411 btl4vid.cpp:462, decomp FUN_004579a8):
offset = the site's own local rest transform, parent = the site's PARENT
joint's DCS, not the hull root.  World orientation, torso twist and gait all
arrive through chain composition.  The root-DCS eye remains only as the
zero-construction fallback for skeletons with no siteeyepoint.

Measured on the live pod with the RIO streaming: [eye] cockpit eye on
'jointeye', 26 nodes / 19 objects / 1 eye, and the bridge camera sits at
Y = hull + 7.7 -- the exact chain sum jointlocal 5.29 + hip 0.37 + torso 0.31
+ jointeye 1.69.  canopy_eye1.png is the pilot's view, the mech's own nose
wedge visible below the sightline.  Own-mech cage handling is the next layer.

Also: eye_count threading through ReadSKLFile/RecurseSKLFile, and the [skl]
summary now reports it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 15:18:27 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 3c42766f48 BT410 5.3.62: correction -- the fault address was never in our code
Every conclusion that named EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&) as the
fault site was wrong, including the disassembly built on top of it.  Three
independent proofs:

1. ROTATION.CPP is ours, so the function was instrumented directly -- print
   this, &matrix and a local's address on the first twelve calls plus any wild
   pointer.  The run faulted with ZERO [euler] lines: never called.

2. After the probe was added, 0x66D9 disassembles to a two-byte conditional
   jump (jnl) that touches no memory.  The dump reports ErrCode 0004, a data
   READ.

3. EIP 0x66D9 and cr2 0x7000FA64 are identical to the byte across every build
   this session, including builds where the code at that offset changed
   completely.  A fault in our CODE segment moves when the code moves.  This
   one does not -- it lives in the DPMI host, which loads low and never gets
   relinked.

The map lookup was a coincidence: our _TEXT is section-relative from 0, so its
offsets overlap the host's low addresses, and the map will name a function for
any small number.  Before resolving a fault address against the map, confirm it
belongs to our segment -- cheapest check is whether it moves on relink.

What is actually true, by same-binary A/B:

    vRIO DOWN, serial1 still a namedpipe -> mission LAUNCHES
    vRIO UP,   same conf, same binary    -> FAULT

The trigger is a LIVE RIO stream, not an unplugged cable.  The emulator reports
continuous serial1 RX overruns, the fault lands wherever the app happened to be
(terrain one run, the mech's inside view another), and the shipped binary
survives the identical conditions.  A fault at a fixed host address, at
arbitrary points in the app, requiring an interrupt-driven stream, is an
interrupt re-entrancy signature rather than a wild pointer.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 08:22:15 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 475ae3106e BT410 5.3.59: A MISSION RUNS -- the RIO serial port was blocking every load
pod_render_norio.conf is pod_render_rec.conf with one line changed,
serial1=disabled instead of the vrio named pipe.  Same binary, same egg.  With
it, our build launches and the mech walks:

  [launch] state=2 minPriorityEmpty=1 ticks=85316
  [queues] p0=- p1=- p2=BUSY p3=- p4=-
  BTL4Application::RunMissionMessageHandler
  Turning Plasma Score Display On
  [sim] pos=(180.466,10,-358.703) yaw=-0.275605 spd=14.4
  [sim] pos=(251.959,10,-250.498) yaw=-0.89103  spd=14.4

No fault, 290 log lines and counting.  This is the first time the
reconstruction has reached a running mission on the pod.

The hang was never starvation, a deadlock, or a refill loop -- it was VOLUME,
the first candidate I listed and then talked myself out of.  530 renderer
events queue at priority 0 during load; BackgroundTasks::Execute runs exactly
one task per call round-robin over seven tasks, and the 1ms frame budget is
always blown here so no extra background passes happen.  That is ~9 events per
real second, so a load legitimately takes ~60s.  The fault arrived at ~40s,
before the backlog could clear.  Every 'the queue never drains' reading was
really 'the process dies before it can'.

The disproof was already in hand: the post tally climbed to 530 and went FLAT,
which means nothing was refilling.  p0=BUSY with nextReady=1 is equally
consistent with a large finite backlog still draining, and I read it as refill.

Why the RIO port: the pipe has no server attached, which should behave as an
unplugged cable.  The emulator log shows steady serial1 RX overruns, our build
prints 'RIO never came back from test mode!', and the SHIPPED binary prints
'lost RIO analog request' and launches anyway on this identical rig.  So an
unplugged RIO is survivable and our handling of it is not -- a real defect, not
a rig artifact, since a pod with an unplugged RIO cable should still boot.

The wild reference at EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&)+0x19 is still
unexplained, but it is now reproducible on demand by enabling serial1 rather
than being a coin flip.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 23:23:29 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 4cf09917ce BT410 5.3.57: the crash is deterministic, and the real blocker is the load gate
The previous commit's attribution was wrong and is corrected in the roadmap.

WRONG: 'the crash is the skeleton walk's' rested on 0 crashes in 2 runs with
the walk disabled -- a 25% coin flip presented as evidence.  The oldest
preserved dump has no [skl] line and ends on the old 'couldn't figure out how
to MakeEntityRenderables' fallback, so it predates the walk and faults
identically.

WRONG: 'it lands at different points each time'.  Every dump carries the same
numbers to the byte (cr2 7000FA64, EIP 66D9).  What varies is how far the log
gets, not where the fault is.

Resolving the address through btl4opt.map names it exactly:
EulerAngles::operator=(const LinearMatrix&)+0x19, a read through the matrix
reference.  A binary scan finds all three call sites of that operator pass a
stack local, so the 1.79GB pointer still has no static explanation -- that is
now its own open item rather than a guess.

Two theories killed cleanly by the new BT_STACK_LOG probe and a binary scan:
ESP drift (drift=0 over 2002 frames; exactly one callee-cleans function exists
in the whole binary) and an undersized stack (our PE and the shipped one have
identical 1MB/8K geometry).

What the probe found matters more: the application is parked in state=2, which
is LoadingMission, not WaitingForLaunch.  Priority 0 is where the interest
manager queues renderer events during load, the gate needs that priority empty,
and it never empties -- so the mission never launches and the renderer holds a
blank screen by design.  The fault arrives ~30s into that wait.  Runs that DO
launch never print a single [launch] line.  So 'crashes half the time' and
'hangs during load' are one event seen twice.

A 15x disagreement between two clocks looked like a reconstruction slip --
BTL4.CPP passes GetTicksPerSecond() where ApplicationManager wants a frame
rate.  Checked against the shipped binary before touching it: same instruction
sequence, same kind of static float pushed.  Authentic.  Documented so nobody
'fixes' it.

Also swept every subsystem DefaultData against its real C++ base.  Fifteen
chain past their immediate parent, but fourteen skip only classes that add no
handlers and no attributes, and no class's attribute-ID base disagrees with its
index chain -- so there are no gap slots there.  The one real defect: Generator
is a HeatSink but chained to Subsystem::MessageHandlers, so it ignored every
ToggleCooling message.  Fixed (compiles next build).

Tooling: podrun.sh stages the build over BTL4REC.EXE, exports the host-side VPX
board env -- without which the run dies at the iserver handshake rather than
merely rendering nothing -- and archives every run's log, marking it -CRASH
when it faulted.  Before this the only preserved dump was an accident, on a rig
where each run costs four minutes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 21:41:38 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 15d509c8a8 BT410 5.3.52: frame rate measured properly -- the missing mech skeleton is the real gap
The pod updates every few seconds.  Measured by sampling a head window every
2s (emulator/render-bridge/headrate.py): OURS changed in 5 of 12 samples,
SHIPPED in 1 of 12.  So the reconstruction is not slower than the shipped
binary -- the emulated board is just expensive.  Caveat recorded with it:
ours was being driven by the throttle hooks while the shipped exe ignores
them and sat parked, so treat those as same-order, not a win.

What did cost us 3x was mine: BT_MECH_LOG/BT_LAUNCH_LOG write per-frame lines
and DEBUG_STREAM=cout is redirected to COM3, so every one goes through an
emulated serial port.  Turning them off took the wire from 480 to ~1480
bytes/sec.  pod_render_quiet.conf is the conf to use for timing work.

And a correction to my own earlier framing: wire bytes/sec is NOT a frame
rate.  Shipped pushes ~8900 B/s against our ~1480 and the difference is
CONTENT, not speed -- shipped submits the mech and we do not:

    OURS:    L4VIDEO.cpp wrong video resource type for object mad.skl
    SHIPPED: (no such line)

The mech's model resource is a SKELETON.  The engine's default
MakeEntityRenderables accepts only Object/Rubble and rejects anything else
with exactly that message, because skeletons are the GAME renderer's job.  So
our arena renders but the MECH IS ABSENT, and with it the cockpit interior --
one unimplemented path explaining both the missing model and the lower wire
volume.

Next brick is now precisely scoped: answer MechClassID by reading the .SKL
notation pages into a dpl_DCS hierarchy and hanging the per-node .BGF
geometry off it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 14:04:35 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 09192367c0 BT410 5.3.51: THE 3-D WORLD RENDERS -- reconstruction to emulated board to a picture
emulator/render-bridge/first-3d-frame.png: the arena from the pod -- sky,
horizon, ground, the arena structures along the skyline -- at ~31fps on the
VelociRender bridge.

The whole chain now works in our build: MakeVideoRenderer ->
BTL4VideoRenderer over DPLRenderer -> board boot -> Renderer::LoadMission ->
DPLReadEnvironment for the art paths -> 40/40 arena objects loaded -> mission
launch -> per-frame submission over the wire.

The mistake worth remembering: the run was never stalled after
InitializePlayerLink.  I called that from a 150-second sample and it was just
too short.  CheckLoadMessageHandler reposts every second and will not advance
until the min-priority event queue drains, and with the video renderer in the
mission that takes minutes.  A BT_LAUNCH_LOG trace showed the queue draining
and then both RunMissionMessageHandler calls, the plasma display, and the
first sensor tick -- matching the shipped binary line for line.  The renderer
deliberately holds a blank screen until RunningMission (L4VIDEO.CPP:5100), so
'black' was the app still loading, not a rendering bug.

Zero unbuildable entities, zero geometry failures.  The frame is static only
because the mech is parked with no input, and the camera in the bridge title
is the bridge's own viewer, not the game's eyepoint.

Also banked the launch-gate trace (BT_LAUNCH_LOG) behind an env var.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 10:30:20 -05:00
CydandClaude Fable 5 060078e4ae BT410 5.3.50: geometry loads -- the bring-up no-op was suppressing the base
DPLRenderer::LoadMissionImplementation (L4VIDEO.CPP:6007) is not empty: it
calls DPLReadEnvironment (which opens L4DPLCFG/btdpl.ini and sets the dPL
object/material/texmap paths from the objectpath= entries) and then
LoadNameBitmaps.  The 'bring-up no-op' installed earlier therefore did not do
nothing -- it REPLACED that, so the loader never learned where the art lives
and every dpl_LoadObject returned NULL.

I justified that no-op by pointing at VideoRenderer's bare Tell and
GaugeRenderer's identical one; neither is our base.  Check the ACTUAL base
before overriding in this engine and chain it unless there is a reason not
to.  DPLReadEnvironment is private to DPLRenderer, so chaining is the only
way a game renderer can reach it at all.

  before: 40x 'couldn't load object', 'NULL instance', run ends,
          wire ~24 bytes/sec
  after:  0 failures, run continues, wire ~12 KB/s (1.17MB climbing),
          bridge live at 88fps

Proved it was ours and not the rig by running the SHIPPED exe under the same
conf: it loaded every object.  That A/B is cheap and is the right first move
whenever the pod misbehaves.

Still black: the bridge camera sits at its default (0,10,0), so the wire
carries state and object loads rather than a populated scene.  The mech and
arena entities still need MakeEntityRenderables bodies.

Rig improvements, both from the user: nosound is fine on the SLOW clock (it
is the FAST SOS clock that needs the AWE32), which saves ~4 min and ~300MB of
audio taps per run; and serial3=file + '> COM3' gives a live unbuffered log,
so a run that does NOT crash is finally readable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 09:09:04 -05:00