Track 2 of the A0 readability work. The operator wanted non-flat ground; the
walkable surface must stay flat, because the character controller is configured
for a plane (SnapToGround=false, gravity float3.zero) and enemies have no
pathfinding. Real elevation is a locomotion + navigation task, not an art one.
The kit therefore avoids the height band that breaks entirely:
SM_Seabed_Hollow_A 442 tris below plane no collider
SM_Seabed_Dunes_A 442 tris +/-0.4 crests no collider
SM_Seabed_Ridge_A 55 tris ~1.2 m rim placement
SM_Seabed_Outcrop_A 120 tris ~1.4 m rim placement
SM_Seabed_Shelf_A 96 tris ~1.4 m rim placement
1155 tris total, all far under the <=800/prop budget, faceted, one material.
Nothing sits at 0.3-0.6 m, which is the range that either clips the diver's legs
(no collider) or becomes a wall you cannot see over (collider). The three tall
pieces sit at the arena RIM outside the 16u wave ring, where the boundary
already blocks the player - so they read as silhouette with no subscene collider
work and zero nav risk.
Two art lessons, both corrected mid-build:
- First pass encoded relief as ALBEDO BANDING from the palette atlas. At
top-down, flat colour bands read as a printed pattern, not form: the hollow
looked like a bullseye and the ripple sheet like woven basketwork. The style
bible is explicit that the read is shape + light. Uniform albedo + real
geometry + faceted normals doing the shading.
- Cutting an organic outline by dropping whole quads gives stair-stepped
edges. Rebuilt in POLAR coordinates so the boundary follows R(theta) exactly.
In-engine: the palette grey read ~2x brighter than the seabed floor, so the
pieces looked like slabs laid on top. Ground pieces now share the floor's own
M_Staging_Seabed; rock pieces use a darker sibling M_Seabed_Rock (0.13,0.19,0.23)
so they read as the same ground family, a shade separated.
Exported per-piece so the Phase-2 pocket generator can place them individually
rather than inheriting a bespoke landscape.
304/304 EditMode green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Operator at the A0 gate: "the world is very static." Part of that was a
regression from today's purge, and the audit's own signature pattern for the
third time: the system exists, the authoring is placed, and it silently
produces nothing.
Server/Economy/RoomFieldSystem.cs was deleted with the run/room FSM in
62e48a3b0. That was correct for the FSM, but the system was also the only
consumer of the ClutterFieldSpawner / CoverFieldSpawner / GeyserFieldSpawner
singletons. Those kept baking into Gameplay.unity and nothing read them:
before: Geyser 0 BlightClutter 0 (spawners configured for 14 + 2 + 3)
after: Geyser 2 BlightClutter 17
So the arena lost 14 destructible clutter pieces, 3 cover pieces and 2
periodically erupting geysers — a large share of everything that moved or
could be interacted with.
The old system could not be revived: it keyed every spawn off RunInfo,
RunRuntime, RoomPlan, RunMapMath, RegionMath and RoomTag teardown, all gone.
ArenaFieldSystem is a gym-scoped replacement that seeds ONCE at world start
and never tears down — Phase 1 is "no world, a gym", and everything
room-shaped belongs to the Phase-2 pocket generator, not here.
Contracts carried over deliberately, each load-bearing:
- baked.WithPosition, never FromPosition (FromPosition resets Scale, a GhostField)
- Geyser NextEruptTick born-correct off the live ServerTick via TickUtil.NonZero,
staggered 60 ticks per instance so eruptions desync; 0 stays "not ready"
- a 6 u keep-out ring around the arena origin (the player's landing spot)
- clutter variant 3 = the explosive hazard, 0-2 inert dressing
- a fixed arena seed: a gym wants the same arena every session
Verified live: geysers stamped 306 / 366 (staggered, Scale 1.00 preserved).
Navigation re-validated per the standing rule that adding Environment cover
can freeze movers, since enemies have NO pathfinding. First measurement showed
all four "frozen" — that was my error: they had already converged and were
attacking. Re-tested by moving the player across the arena: all four closed
23.5->20.4, 24.2->21.2, 23.9->20.9, 22.8->19.7 u through the cover field. No
soft-lock.
304/304 EditMode green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Operator at the A0 gate: "a little too dark to play, not very readable yet."
Measured rather than guessed, and the diagnosis was NOT "add light":
seabed _BaseColor (0.08,0.12,0.15) — the floor was painted near-black, so it
reflected ~10% of anything and could never read as a surface
fog colour (0.02,0.10,0.12) — distance faded to VOID rather than to murk;
real water scatters, so far things should get lighter and lower-contrast
ColorAdjustments contrast +10 on top of ACES — the low end was crushed twice
Vignette 0.28 — ate the periphery, which is where threats arrive from
Murk pass (operator picked "murk + closer camera"):
BaseFogColor/ExpeditionFogColor -> (0.06,0.20,0.25) [WorldAtmosphereConfig
drives RenderSettings every frame, so the CONFIG is the real knob]
M_Staging_Seabed albedo -> (0.18,0.26,0.30)
contrast 10 -> 4, vignette 0.28 -> 0.16
camera Distance 17 -> 14
That fixed the void but INVERTED figure-ground, which the numbers caught:
player 0.144 | rock 0.269 | flora 0.258 | warm haze 0.368
The protagonist was the second-darkest thing on screen. The shoulder lamp is a
forward-facing spot tilted 26 deg down — it lights the seabed ahead and never
its own wearer — so the diver had no personal light at all. Raising KeyWarm
would have lifted the scenery by the same amount and left the ratio unchanged;
only a light that TRAVELS with the diver changes it. Added ~SuitGlow: a warm,
steady point light at torso height (FeelConfig.SuitGlowIntensity 5 /
SuitGlowRange 4.5, live-tunable, 0 = off). "Light is territory", made literal.
player 0.144 -> 0.320, now above rock 0.282 and flora 0.250
figure-to-murk contrast 1.32x -> 2.94x, with scene brightness unchanged
304/304 EditMode green. Awaiting the operator's eyes on the result.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Found by running the A0 style-proof against the SHIPPING scene instead of
ArtStaging (which judges static glTF bakes on an import shader, with zero
SkinnedMeshRenderers and no Animator — it cannot answer "does the game look
like this").
Player-facing bugs fixed:
- AC_PlayerTopDown/AC_EnemyTopDown "Death" had ZERO outgoing transitions.
Any State enters on IsDead and nothing ever leaves. The player ghost is a
persistent entity, so its Rukhanka animator never resets: once you died you
rendered sprawled on the seabed permanently — sim fully respawned, moving and
fighting, visually a corpse. Added Death -> Idle on (IsDead == false).
- AmbientMotionSystem drift was still the deleted biome system: key 0 =
"meadow", MeadowMoteColor (0.62, 0.85, 0.60) = GREEN motes, 600 of them in a
36x7x24 box following the camera — the most off-palette thing in the frame.
Its x>500 region probe pointed at space now holding zero renderers. Collapsed
to one cold marine particulate; dropped the 4 dead mote colours + AridWind.
- FeedbackFx.MakeParticleMaterial built Sprites/Default with NO texture, so
every procedural particle rendered as a hard SQUARE. Added a procedural soft
dot (no Resources.Load — build-stripped; asset-free presentation is the rule).
- Game.unity carried a stock Unity "Directional Light" (warm-WHITE, 1.05, Soft)
outranking KeyWarm as a second competing shadow caster, plus 6 orphaned
LandmarkLights — four at x=1030/1530 lighting a kilometre of empty water, two
with no renderer within 12u, two of them purple. All 7 deleted. Added RimCold
for silhouette separation; key:fill set to the tuned 3.9:1; WarmPool -> Soft.
ArtStaging (kept as a lighting lab): KeyWarm 0.15 -> 0.85 — it was the only
shadow-caster yet sat BELOW GloamFill 0.22, which destroys form by definition
and is what read as "flat". StagingAmbiance was attached to nothing and its
flora wiring searched for a Game.unity parent, which is what read as "static";
it also force-played the combat one-shot pool, now restricted to looping
emitters. Flicker raised to a measured x2.11 cold swing vs x1.03 warm.
304/304 EditMode green; death-recovery, palette and particulate all verified
live in Game.unity Play.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
M8 — ProjectM/EmissiveGloam had no DOTS instancing but is bound to
M_Drowner_EyeGlow on EnemyDrowner.prefab, a baked GHOST prefab that
Entities Graphics renders through BatchRendererGroup. Its skinned sibling
has carried the pragmas since 07-16; this one was simply missed, and murk
hides the symptom (CLAUDE.md: "a dark-lit screenshot MASKS material
bugs"). Added #pragma target 4.5 + multi_compile DOTS_INSTANCING_ON +
UNITY_SETUP_INSTANCE_ID, and a DepthOnly pass so the glows stop being
absent from the URP depth texture (soft particles / SSAO / DoF punch
straight through them otherwise). Verified: shader compiles, isSupported,
2 passes, 0 messages.
M7 — EnemyRigTools was dead at EVERY entry point. All eight hard-coded
prefab paths were deleted by DR-051, and the template check ran BEFORE
the idempotent in-place branch, so even re-running a builder on an
existing prefab failed. The three shipping skinned creatures were
unreproducible. Now the template only matters when there is no output to
edit in place, and a new creature templates off the shipping EnemyDrowner
ghost (GhostTemplate) instead of the deleted Enemy.prefab. Retired the
four menu items that drove the deleted Werewolf/Kaiju/Charger bestiary
rather than leave them advertising entry points that cannot work.
Deleted 19 materials with zero references from any scene, prefab,
ScriptableObject, script or settings asset — verified three ways, not
from the audit's list. Kept everything with a live reference, including
several the audit's asset-only scan called dead but which code loads by
path (M_Skinned_Palette, PixelOutline, M_Env_Fallback).
NOT fixed here, deliberately: MakeMat still points each creature at a
per-PACK Synty atlas rather than the shared palette. That is a visual
decision about the shipping Drowner/Grindylow, not a mechanical fix — the
doc-vs-reality gap gets reconciled in Art_Direction_Lantern instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The approved staging character is now in the shipping animated Player.prefab:
- Re-exported the skinned kit FBX dome-less + the Synty Mark-V helmet skinned to the Head bone (3
submeshes brass/gunmetal/glass); replaced the old fused dome.
- Split materials: brass armour, dark-teal undersuit, gunmetal tank pack, warm shoulder beacon, teal
porthole glow.
- ★ per-instance _BaseColor gotcha: the hit-flash system sets URPMaterialPropertyBaseColor=(1,1,1) on
every player render child, which REPLACES the material _BaseColor -> flat-color materials washed
cream. Fix = drive color via a solid-color _BaseColorMap texture (DiverTex/), not _BaseColor.
Verified live in DevSandbox from the game camera: copper Mark-V + brass armour + teal undersuit +
gunmetal tanks + warm beacon, animated, reads at true game scale.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Re-exported the skinned kit from the ONE master .blend with the reshaped diving helmet, grouped into
Metal/Beacon/Porthole SMRs. Darkened the helmet (M_Diver_Metal_Skinned flat gunmetal - the AnimatedLitShader
was multiplying the tint by the gold PaletteAtlas sample, so the atlas map is cleared to force the flat dark
base), kept the warm shoulder-lamp beacon, dimmed the porthole (M_Diver_PortholeGlow_Skinned), shifted the body
to a cool diver tone. Rebuilt Player.prefab via the proven PlayerRigTools graft chain. Verified live in
DevSandbox from the game camera: the gold-dome lamp is gone. Remaining full-match gap (brass-armour/teal-
undersuit split + the shoulder/boot silhouette edits) needs the Synty body replaced by the .blend body.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Global fill cut (KeyWarm 1.25->0.15, CausticsSpot 32->9, GloamFill 0.5->0.22) so the scene
goes dark-except-where-ours-reaches; WarmPool point light -> downward warm SPOT = a defined
ground-territory disc that lights the suit top-down (a low point light was blasting the chest
into a blown bloom streak). Suit lamp + Drowner gloam emissives extracted from .glb sub-assets
to durable .mat assets (M_Suit_LampWarm_Staging, M_Drowner_GloamAccent_Staging). Recomposed the
triad (crate in-pool / Drowner faced-to-camera at the lit edge / suit center). Grayscale-verified:
the beacon dome is the value winner + the warm disc reads as territory. Suit pose still T-pose
(a Blender rig sitting; A3-adjacent).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ProjectM/EmissiveGloam — URP HLSL, HDR emission (Bloom-catching), with the
readability 'steady=true / flicker=false' channel as a material param
(_FlickerAmount), no script. Applied to the staging flora bulbs (cold, flicker).
The other two master shaders already exist (Lit URP graph, AnimatedLitShader).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The material-decision keystone (Art_Direction_Lantern / Lantern_Art_Pipeline_Recipes):
one shared palette atlas + ~3 materials, zero per-asset texturing.
- PaletteAtlas.png: 8x8 swatch grid encoding the ontology (warm-gold light / corpse-green
+ cold-blue gloam / lure-red bait / white-hot conversion / neutral / steel); sRGB, point,
no-mip, clamp, uncompressed.
- M_Lit_Palette (statics, Lit URP graph), M_Skinned_Palette (creatures/suits, the
deformation-aware AnimatedLitShader with per-instance tint + vertex-colour), M_Emissive_Gloam
(URP/Lit + HDR emission; hue/intensity = the gloam param axis). All wired to the atlas.
Dedicated master-shader graphs (flicker param, Hybrid-Per-Instance on statics) + the
style-proof scene are the next A0 steps. Verified by material values, not just a render.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
kronic