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.
`Variables` pushed `Font` under the menu's mask edge: `locate` still finds the entry, a click there
lands on nothing, `__gm.fontPicker()` is null and reading `.captions` throws. Only step 31 carried
the scroll workaround, so step 30 fell. The helper moves to `lib/scaffold.mjs` as `pickAssetType()`
and both steps use it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A particle source can wear a shader asset the way a sprite does, and it is the
cheapest place in the editor to wear one: a shaded sprite gives up its batch and
costs a draw call of its own, while `ParticleContainerPipe` breaks the batch for
every field regardless. Five hundred shaded particles are the one call five
hundred plain ones were.
The fragment the compiler emits needed no change, only a second vertex stage:
Pixi's particle vertex is GLSL ES 1.00 and ours is ES 3.00, so it is translated
rather than invented. What it sees is a particle's picture, not its life — the
buffer carries five fixed attributes and takes no sixth, so age, index and seed
stay on the graph, which is what the graph is for.
Two things the issue did not ask about:
`Shader.resources` is an accessor over the names its constructor declared, so a
slot that is not declared becomes a loose JS property and is never bound. The
adaptor writes `uTranslationMatrix` into whichever shader the container names —
without an empty block for it the vertex gets no matrix and the particles land
elsewhere.
`schemaOf` in serialize.ts hung on `schema !== schemaFor('sprite')`, an identity
check a source never satisfies, so its shader values would have been dropped on
save.
A source is the one asset drawing rows from two graphs, so a name can arrive
twice. Its own row wins and the uniform keeps its default; nothing is rejected
on the shader's side, because the collision exists only at this one wearer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Particle age and shader time each read performance.now() off their own
library, and the world got the frame's delta straight from the ticker. Three
clocks, so a global time scale would have been three multiplications and a
pause three separate freezes.
core/time.ts holds one clock instead: it accumulates dt x scale per frame
rather than reading the wall clock, and Editor.tick hands the very step it
took to the play session, the editor run and the animation preview. Delta
time, particle age, shader time and that preview are the same quantity now,
so the scale is a single multiplication and a pause is that scale at 0 —
nothing underneath needs rebasing, because the clock itself stands still.
The Math.min(dt, 0.1) caps in PlaySession and EditorRun are gone: the cap
(MAX_FRAME) now sits on the raw frame before scaling, and capping twice would
make the world run slower than the particles at scale 2.
A pause gates the scale rather than overwriting it — effectiveScale() answers
0 while paused, and for anything that is not a positive finite number, while
gameClock.scale keeps its value. A slider later survives a pause that way;
the issue asks for none yet.
The clock goes back to zero at both ends of a run, so a run is reproducible
from second 0 and the scene view looks freshly loaded after Stop. Resetting
only on Stop would not do it: the editor clock runs on afterwards, and the
next Play would start at "seconds since the last Stop".
The trap in that: ParticleField keeps its origin as an absolute second of
this clock, so after a reset it lies in the future and every particle would
age backwards. One line in sync() starts such a field over, which covers the
scene, the game and the tab preview at once — and fixes an older bug of the
same shape, where releasing a particleTime() freeze left the preview empty
for good.
Found while measuring that: ParticlePreview stood at second 0.5 by computing
the clock reading that would mean 0.5 since the field started. Over 200000
random origins the round trip misses the last bit in 18.8% of them and shows
one particle too few in 9.4%, because floor(0.5 * 20) comes out 9. The check
had been flaky since it was written. The panel hands the field the age itself
now (ParticleField.hold), and the faked clock is gone.
833 checks (824 + 9), 931 unit tests (921 + 10).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Behavior and Container draw an icon because isSymbolType() is true for them,
but that predicate does not mean "draws an icon" — it means "is editor
decoration". Four places read it that way: collectWorldItems, GameViewport.
collectFrame and syncDrawOrder all drop symbols out of the running world and
the game picture, and placementOf() gives them an upright unscaled box.
Listing 'particles' there would have handed the source an icon and taken away
its particles, in the scene view as well as in the game.
So the two questions are two functions now. hasSceneIcon() says a type draws
an icon; isSymbolType() keeps meaning decoration. The icon itself is a
SceneViewport decoration, which is editor-only for free because GameViewport
never syncs decorations.
A ring (r 10, #c26a1f) with four sparks, upright and unscaled like the other
symbols, its middle left open — unlike Behavior and Container a source draws
something of its own, and the field is densest exactly there. The name sits
beside it and a dashed line runs to the parent, same colour.
Found while writing the tests: the source's grab box scaled with its transform
while the icon did not, so the two came apart. placementOf() returns only the
translation for 'particles', making the box the upright 24 x 24 that covers
its icon. The source's own transform still feeds every particle untouched.
824 checks (821 + 3).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Speed and Prewarm are not state and not a second loop: both are arithmetic
on the clock argument the field already passes to every particle formula.
fieldTime = elapsed * timeScale + prewarmOffset, a pure rule next to
liveRange, called at the one place ParticleField.sync forms its time, so
preview and world inherit it together.
Prewarm offsets by one lifetime because that is the smallest offset which
fills a continuous emitter; a burst is dead at time >= lifetime, so the
same offset would skip it entirely and it is suppressed there.
The tab's slider counts wall-clock seconds, so its span divides by the
scale. A missing row falls back to 1 / off, so old project files need no
migration.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three reports plus one found on the way.
Hold only froze the *picture*: the preview computed a fake second while drawing,
the library clock kept counting underneath, so letting go jumped to "how much
would have passed by now". That is the flip side of the formula model — a thing
that is a function of the clock is not stopped, its origin is moved.
ParticleField.rebase() does that; hold(null) calls it with the second stood at.
The Hold label now mirrors the preview's state instead of its own click history,
so dragging the slider (which holds too) reads `Run`, and Restart puts a held
preview back to 0.00 s rather than leaving it on the second it stopped at.
previewProps only read defaultsFor('particles'), so the panel showed the type's
defaults while the inspector showed the asset's rows. AssetBase.props is a full
bag on a graph asset as well — asset.props now lie over the defaults, the
asset's texture is resolved instead of always drawing a white square, and the
slider's span follows its lifetime. The span is re-read in tick(), because the
rows are edited in the inspector and the tab hears nothing about it.
The preview moves from under the graph to beside it, past a draggable splitter:
a graph is read across, so width is what it can spare and height is not.
AssetTabEditor grows a body() hook for that — the base class still stacks header,
strip and canvas, a subclass may put something next to the canvas.
Found by the full run, not reported: the graph canvas's empty-state hint ran
38 px past its frame now that the preview takes 280 px away. It is cut with
truncate() like any other label.
816 checks (809 + 7).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The asset type `particles` is placeable and carries a graph at the same time —
`behavior` was the blueprint. Because a continuous emitter gives birth to particle n
at time n/rate, the whole field is a function of the clock rather than of the frames:
no ring-buffer bookkeeping, exact time jumps, reproducibility as a measurable property.
compile.ts follows compileShader's frame but emits JS closures into a Float64Array
instead of GLSL, and without eval; a node with two consumers is evaluated once.
Drawing is one Pixi ParticleContainer per source, so one draw call.
Collision, wind and braking in flight are out for good — that is the price of the
formula model, not an omission.
The tab count goes from nine to ten, which is exactly the case #84 was built for one
day earlier: at 1280 px the row no longer holds every tab, so guard 14b now asks for
hidden.length > 0 instead of === 0.
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