Every level banks one choice. Choices queue, and are spent at an NPC in the
hub: walk to it, press E, take one of three weighted options. Seven upgrades,
all data — split shot, glass cannon, spread, sniper, doubleshot, poison,
eraser — and SimWorld gained no per-upgrade branch to run any of them.
The four ambiguities in the brief were settled with the user first, since
each changes what gets written:
damage base x (1 + sum additive) x product multiplicative. The flat
+5% every upgrade carries, spread's -10%, doubleshot's -50%
and glass cannon's +100% pool; sniper multiplies on top, so
two snipers is 4x and not +200%.
glass half the LEVELLED maximum, multiplying if taken twice, so the
price does not fade to a rounding error by level 15.
poison independent stacks, not a refresh.
split +/-45 degrees from the original heading.
Independent poison stacks sound expensive and are not: every dose lasts the
same number of ticks, so doses expire in the order they were added, the
pending expiries are a plain FIFO, and PoisonTrack only ever looks at its
front. O(1) per actor per tick however many are live.
Stats are derived from the upgrade list and never stored, the way level is
derived from experience -- a saved stat cannot disagree with the upgrades
that produced it. Upgrade riders (split charges, poison, erase chance) travel
on the bullet instead, because a shot in flight has to keep what it was fired
with rather than gaining Poison because the shooter just took it.
Two invariants this collided with, both now pinned:
- bullet speed gained a ceiling. Wall collision samples once per tick, so
anything over a tile per tick tunnels; two snipers asked for 2480 u/s
against a 1920 threshold, and a tunnelling bullet looks like a bullet.
- BULLET_INTEREST_RADIUS rose to 2900, because an upgraded player shot is
now the longest-travelling bullet in the game. test_interest measured
the worst case from static content, which upgrades quietly invalidated.
Choosing is intent checked three ways: a choice must be owed, the index must
name one of the three options the SERVER put on the table, and the player
must be standing at the NPC. The offer is rolled once and persisted, so
closing the screen is not a reroll and neither is a crash.
tools/diag_upgrades.tscn covers level -> banked choice -> refused in a
dungeon and refused across the room -> taken at the NPC -> new stats ->
on disk. Bots never walk to the quartermaster, so the smoke test cannot.
Known gap recorded in the roadmap: at PLAYER_BULLET_DAMAGE = 6, the +5% the
first upgrade carries rounds back to 6 and visibly does nothing. It comes out
right in aggregate, but the fix is a balance edit across content.gd and so is
the user's call.
check.sh clean, 357 tests, SMOKE PASS (18 assertions), all four diagnostics
green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The gap Stage 1 left open: snapshots were encoded once and broadcast to every
peer in an instance, so clients were handed enemies the fog then hid. Fog is a
rendering rule -- a modified client draws whatever it holds -- so that was no
defence at all. Snapshots are now encoded per peer, and actors beyond
ACTOR_INTEREST_RADIUS (800u) are never sent. Measured cost of four filtered
encodes against one shared: 95.6us vs 24.9us, or 0.032 ms/tick amortised over
the snapshot interval.
Two asymmetries worth keeping:
- The observer's own player record is never filtered, however far out the
arithmetic puts it. The client reconciles its prediction against that record,
so dropping it breaks the player's own movement rather than hiding someone.
- Only bullet SPAWNS are filtered, never despawns. A client told about a bullet
must always be told it died, or it keeps a phantom.
Bullet spawns use a much wider radius (2200u) than actors, deliberately. An
enemy appearing at the edge of sight is cosmetic; a bullet withheld at spawn
that later flies into view is invisible damage. The floor is longest bullet
travel + fog radius -- 1500 for the Warden's Collapse snipe -- and
test_interest.gd recomputes that from live content, so adding a faster or
longer-lived bullet fails a test instead of producing bullets that wink into
existence.
Also clamped bosses to their room. A no-op today since every boss is
stationary, which is exactly when the invariant is cheap to establish: boss
rooms have no door that locks, so the only thing keeping a fight in the boss
room is the boss, and Stage 5's movement work would otherwise break it quietly.
146 tests (was 137). check.sh, test.sh and smoke.sh pass. Stage 1 has no
partials left; docs/ROADMAP.md now records the three interest radii and the
floor each must respect.
claude