CydandClaude Fable 5
943219345a
Second operator report, same day: "what is that yellow orange artifact on the
display, it too shows up here and in bt411 but not in the original" -- a
solid vertical bar beside the RANGE readout on the colour head.
It is the same defect as 5.3.83's MFD bleed. Not a similar one: the same
676 pixels.
HOW IT WAS CAUGHT. 5.3.83 shipped a fix that could not be verified, because
the fix makes something INVISIBLE and the A/B rig's boot cockpit already
showed zero MFD extras -- the unfixed build looked perfectly clean. So this
commit adds a POSITIVE CONTROL instead of another argument:
BT_TRANS_PROVOKE fills the colour head's uninitialised
translationTable[64..255] with 0xFF00 -- every high-byte head bit --
rather than the zero the fix installs. Any draw that indexes the tail
then lights ALL the mono heads at once.
On the boot cockpit that lights exactly 1030 pixels: Eng1/Eng2/Eng3 +1030
each, Mfd1 +684, Mfd2 +704, Mfd3 +1074, Comm +676, against 0 extras with the
fix. The bug was firing the whole time. Our heap simply happened to hold
zeros in that tail -- the same luck the shipped binary has been having, which
is exactly why the operator sees the artifact and the A/B rig does not.
THE OFFENDER, NAMED. oormask.py renders which pixels those are and prints
their horizontal run lengths. The mask is a glyph cluster plus 52 runs of
13px -- a SOLID 13x52 BAR at screen (526,228)-(538,279). Solid means a
rectangle in the source art, so decode the art:
BTSEC1.PCX, the colour head's own 480x640 background, contains exactly
ONE out-of-range value in the entire image: index 254, exactly 676
pixels, a solid 52x13 rectangle at (199,526)-(250,538).
The sec port is configured at ROTATION 270, mapping source (x,y) ->
screen (y, 479-x). That puts the rectangle at screen x 526..538,
y 229..280. Measured mask: x 526..538, y 228..279. Same rectangle, to
the pixel.
ONE READ, TWO SYMPTOMS. translationTable[254] is never written (
BuildSecondaryTranslation fills only 1<<numberOfBits = 64 entries), and
DrawPoint ORs the result in unmasked. Whatever the heap left there decides
which symptom the operator sees:
low 6 bits set -> a coloured block on the COLOUR head, beside the RANGE
readout. The yellow-orange bar.
high 8 bits set -> garbage in the MFD / ENG / COMM planes. The bleed.
Both reports, one uninitialised int. It also explains the "not in the
original" asymmetry without needing the original to differ in code: it does
not differ, it is just getting zeros there. And it explains BT411 showing it
too -- both reconstructions inherit the read from the archive.
5.3.83's zero-fill therefore cures both, and turns a heap-lottery into a
guarantee. Still not DIRECTLY observed cured, because no rig we have was
showing the artifact to begin with; that honesty is recorded in the file
header rather than smoothed over.
ALSO IN: oormask.py, barbox.py, vis_provoke.conf, and a README section on
positive controls -- when a fix replaces garbage with a benign value, build
the variant that replaces it with a maximally LOUD value, because that turns
"I see no difference" into a number and separates "the fix works" from "this
screen never exercised the path".
METHOD NOTE, recorded in the README because it nearly cost the fix: three
grabs of one running instance score IDENTICALLY, so the within-boot noise
floor is zero -- and that is the wrong floor. Judging a rebuild needs the
ACROSS-boot floor (~6px on the MFD heads). A single bad grab, caught
mid-draw, read as a 2700px regression and nearly got a correct change
reverted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Scene Restorations
Modern re-renderings of the Division dVS scenes recovered from the Glaze developer drive (see HISTORY.md) and this repo's CONTENT tree. The originals ran on Division Ltd.'s pixel-pipeline hardware in 1994–1997; these tools parse the original data files and re-render them in WebGL, in the browser.
Viewers (open in any browser, fully self-contained)
vwe-archive.html— the Scene Archive: 26 curated scenes across all projects — Star Trek (Enterprise-D, Klingon flyby), Hull Pressure (sea demos, fish schools, sunken temple), BattleTech (polar map with mech lineup, Ravine and desert maps, stadium), Red Planet (Blade arena, the Mars canal milestone demo), and the Canyon/Maya-temple Division demos. Fly camera: drag to look, WASD to fly, R resets.trek-scn.html— the original standalone Star Trek restoration (TREK.SCN and KLNGVID.SCN).
Toolkit
divformats.py— parsers for every Division format found on the drive: textVGF/VMF(DIV-VIZ2 geometry/materials, both the 1995VERSION 2:07and 199602:05dialects, with header SCALE support), binaryBGF/BMF(DIV-BIZ2) — the binary block-stream layout was recovered from Division's own reader source (DPL3/BIZREAD.C, 1994), including all 14 vertex layouts, pmesh/tristrip/polygon connectivity, LOD blocks (newer writers nest patches inside LODs; the largest LOD is taken), and embedded materials/textures/ramps — plusTGAand rawSVTtextures,SPLsplines, andSCNscene scripts.audit.py— scans every.SCNon the drive and reports what fraction of its geometry survives, and in which format.extract_all.py— extracts every scene with ≥60 % of its geometry recoverable (108 of 241 on the drive; the rest reference lost models) intoallscenes.json, resolving models/materials/textures across the drive and this repo's CONTENT dirs.gallery_build.py— curates scenes fromallscenes.jsoninto the self-containedvwe-archive.html(viagallery_template.html).convert.py/viewer_template.html— the original single-scene Star Trek pipeline.
Rebuild
python extract_all.py # requires the sda4/ drive dump beside this repo
python gallery_build.py
Fidelity notes
Faithful: vertices, triangles, material colors and shading ramps, textures,
fog and light parameters, spline motion, camera start positions. Approximated:
Division's rasterizer behavior, point sizes, timing (originals ran at 30 Hz).
Not simulated: event-driven SPECIALFX particles. A few dev scenes had camera
start positions inside geometry; those get overridden or auto-framed cameras
(see START_OVERRIDE in gallery_build.py). Scenes missing one or more
models from the drive say so in their header.