- cinematics play: `SMSG_TRIGGER_CINEMATIC` resolves through `CinematicSequences.dbc` → `CinematicCamera.dbc` → a `Cameras\*.m2` whose camera record is an eye path, a look-at path and a roll — cubic tracks with the full step / linear / Bézier / Hermite dispatch the bone loops collapse to step-or-linear (every shipped fly-by is Bézier), planted at the row's origin and facing (`Rz(+facing)`, checked against vmangos's own waypoint table: 8.5 yd mean on the human path, 154 with the other sign); FOV is per shot (the Undead intro authors 90°, the rest 45°), roll is authored around whole turns, the flight ends at the sequence band's end, a trigger arriving before the loading cover lifts is latched and started when it does, ESC skips through `CinematicFrame`'s own `OnKeyDown` (`StopCinematic` has zero native callers), and every path acks — natural end, ESC, or an unresolvable trigger immediately, as before; `.debug play cinematic <id>` replays any of them
- a cinematic hides the HUD — `UIParent:Hide()` reaches nothing here because the HUD frames are not its children, so the ALT-Z draw-level hide is used and the letterbox moves out of FrameXML onto Bevy UI nodes where that hide cannot reach it, recomputed per frame (bars only wider than 4:3, the picture cropped to 2:1) — and the restore only un-hides a UI this module hid
- a lit particle's normal is world up, one constant per draw, not camera-facing: Onyxia's always-on floor haze read about four times brighter from a level camera than from above because the shader dotted a to-eye normal against a fixed light; the reference uploads row 2 of the view matrix — world +Z carried into eye space — on every vertex and carries the light into the same frame, so the rotation cancels; 400 lit emitters (the waterfalls, chimney and campfire smoke, Westfall dust, Dun Morogh snow) stop brightening and dimming as you turn
- the `play` profile drops ThinLTO — rustc #86049 was intermittently poisoning the incremental link with `_anon.<hash>.llvm.<id>` symbols promoted by an earlier compile (48 unresolved across 7 codegen units; 1065 such symbols → 0 after) — and `benilla-formats` stops taking `image` with default features, which had been compiling a complete AV1 encoder into a crate that writes two PNGs: 499 → 466 workspace crates
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a player build ships beside the dev one — dev chords and probe surfaces go dark, and a gate enforces what a player can still reach, by medium not by module
- the binary carries its own shaders and its shipped UI, finds the WoW folder by itself, and keeps its local state in one benilla-config folder
- the glue screens get a capture shutter, and the engine stops depending on the protocol crate
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The voidwalker's eye glow vanished whenever the camera rose above eye level.
Three investigations said depth; measuring the depth buffer inside the live
quads said otherwise — the fragments reached the framebuffer every frame, and
the body's own transparent batches painted over them. The real client draws a
model's particles after that model's batches, always. Ours now does: every
effect carries a draw-order rung sized to clear exactly its own model.
- Widened to every effect family after asking "what else does this fix": ribbon
trails (a wisp's streamers wove six batches deep into its own body and
flickered as the head whipped) and 3-D model particles (Cone of Cold's
shards). A census over all 9,691 models found 967 whose own body could paint
over their effects; all take the rung now.
- The skinning lane is ours end to end: every rig's joint matrices live in our
shared GPU buffer, written only when a rig actually moved, and our shader
reads them. The engine's lane rewrote the entire joint buffer every frame and
swept every entity in the world for changed transforms — that machinery now
runs against empty sets. Another 6.7 CPU ms off the worst reported dungeon
spot, which now holds a flat 60 fps with p99 under 19 ms.
- Getting around while developing: Ctrl+Cmd+G lands your character where the
free-fly camera is, and Alt-clicking the world map teleports you there (both
ride the server's own teleport, GM-gated). The frozen-body coordinates the
panel used to copy while flying now follow the camera.
- A stuck main thread now diagnoses itself: a watchdog samples our own stacks
and prints where the time went, and a hung teardown names its last system
instead of hanging the window.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
