Entry 128

"Skeith's cinema: the bars and the skill's name"

2026-09-25battlerendertest

Filescrates/piney-world/src/cinema.rscrates/piney-world/src/combat/boss.rscrates/piney-world/src/field_world.rscrates/piney-world/src/lib.rscrates/piney-world/examples/cinema_probe.rstools/test_cinema_rs.pydocs/engine/boss.md

In the game, when Skeith casts its magic or starts its Data Drain, black bars slide over the top and bottom of the picture. For the magic, the skill's name ("Judgement") fades in within the top bar. The rules already raised Out::Cinema (113), but nothing drew it; 117 listed the cinema as waiting.

ccBossEffCinemaFade

The cinema is a state machine with six modes, stepped once per frame by ccBossEffManager::Draw before the boss's task.

• Slide in. The bars start 30 logical lines off the picture. Each frame the remaining distance is divided by 1.5, and it becomes 0 once it is under 1.
• Hold. The name's transparency rises by 1/15 a frame.
• Slide out. The same slide in reverse, with the name fading out.
• The bars. Each frame each bar is a one-frame ccScFade::EntryFlash, an element deleted when done: black at alpha 0x80, 512 x 30, on the cinema's layer (241).
• The name is a ccMask over the top bar, cell 0 of its texture. The texture comes from _g_cinemaSkillName (gcmn 0x005eb040); row 2 is Skeith's x11 TEX_ske_skl.

piney_world::cinema::Cinema is the port. BossRun steps it at the start of the boss's frame and takes Out::Cinema after Main. BossLook finds the name's texture when the boss's files load, and the field world draws the cinema on layer 241.

One thing the game leaves to chance

Init never sets tempDat, which holds where the bars were last drawn. The first Draw after the cinema is switched on uses it. On a fresh (zeroed) heap that puts both bars at y 0 for one frame. The harness has exactly that, so the port starts from 0 as well. What the PS2's heap really leaves there is not known.

Checked

• tools/test_cinema_rs.py (new). It builds the game's ccBossEffCinemaFade by its constructor, with a manager holding it, over the gcmn overlay. It runs eight runs of 300-600 frames: the cinema switched on and off at random with numbers 2, -1, 0, 5 and 70, Draw every frame, and cinema_probe alongside. Every frame matches: the name drawn or not (transparency bits, wv), every bar's y bits (and its constant frames, colour and size), and which ons set a name (SetTex("x11", "TEX_ske_skl")).
• cinema::tests::slides_in_and_out.
• skeith_act_shots (the magic) shows the top bar with "Judgement" over the arena.
• The workspace's tests, clippy and fmt pass.