The suite spent 88% of its step time asleep: 564 s of steps, 496 s of
them in sleep(n) - fixed spans estimated by hand and then copied from
step to step. That is why it was slow, and why it flickered.
The signal is afterFrames(count, timeout) in ui/render.ts, exposed as
__gm.afterFrames(). It wakes the loop itself, because an editor that
draws nothing would never redeem a promise of a frame, and it gives up
after a timeout instead of hanging the run. settle() in the harness
waits two drawn frames (~32 ms) instead of 150-300 ms and falls back to
sleep(150) when the hook is missing (an old build): silently not
waiting would make every later check a coin toss.
Every action goes through it now - click, doubleClick, wheel, drag,
dragAsset, press, typeText, select, mutate, undo, redo - and with that
about 550 sleep() calls behind those actions became redundant, helpers
that are nothing but a mutate in a coat included. What a frame cannot
answer got its own condition instead: waitUntil(expr), play()/stop()
waiting on __gm.state.mode rather than on 300 ms, saved() for the
autosave (the two hand-written polling loops sampled at 300 ms for
something that arrives after a second), and showTab() as a real tool -
47 places called evaluate("__gm.showTab(...)") raw, and 24 of them
waited for nothing at all and read the old panel.
564 s -> 243 s of step time, the waiting share 88% -> 76%. Three kinds
of wait were kept, and each one bit when it was taken away: loading
bytes (textures, fonts), game time that a repaint cannot stand in for
(time scale, shader and particle clocks, the live values a running
graph carries), and the inertia the scroll step measures on purpose.
Two things the new speed uncovered, both real: 25-animation read the
frame menu unfiltered and had frozen an incomplete list (the CI failure
on c990dbc), and 33-render-on-change measured idleness while the
autosave of the step before was still painting - it waits for
saveStatus to leave dirty/saving now, so it measures that nothing
happens any more instead of that it waited long enough.
Load scene sets a flag on the World like Stop and Restart do; the swap
happens after the tick, and the last wish of a tick wins. Exactly one
thing crosses over: the SharedState, so global variables and global
machines keep what they know while everything local is built anew.
Loading the scene that is already running rebuilds it, which is what
"reset the level" means when the score must survive.
A run starts either from the start scene (a new project field, set from
the asset panel and marked with an arrow in the list) or from whatever
scene is open. The toggle next to Play says which question is asked and
remembers the answer in localStorage: it is a way of working, not part
of the game.
Sounds no longer end because a scene ends. A voice belongs to the
behavior that started it and stops right after On destroy, so the scene
swap is no longer a special case at all. For the enemy that plays its
explosion and destroys itself in the same breath there is now a
detached input on Play sound.
The scene selector stays usable while a run plays, because a double
click in the asset panel already did the same thing unguarded. It moves
what the editor looks at, not what the run plays.
Sounds follow the road fonts already paved: the file goes to the server
content-addressed under its sha256, the project keeps a named asset that
points at it, and nothing is ever re-encoded. The format is read from the
file's own signature, not from what the browser claims - the same .m4a
arrives as audio/mp4, audio/x-m4a or as nothing at all.
Playing is two nodes. "Play sound" takes the asset and may raise or lower
its volume; every call is its own voice, so two jumps in a row are two
jumps heard. Its loop input is a choice of three - from the asset, on,
off - because a checkbox has to spend one of its two positions on "not
set" and would lose a case: an asset that loops could then never be
played once.
Below the graph core stays browser-free: NodeContext hands out an asset
id, BehaviorSystem resolves it against the project and folds the asset's
own volume and loop into the call, and only viewport/SoundLibrary knows
about Web Audio. A run without a sink plays nothing instead of throwing.
The CI browser is muted, so the ear is no witness: the debug hook counts
started and stopped voices, and step 34 reads that counter.