Entry 172

"The fire breath: ccEnemyBreath, and the controllers of a field's first enemies"

2026-09-26world

Filescrates/piney-battle/src/breath.rscrates/piney-battle/examples/breath_probe.rstools/test_enemy_breath_rs.pycrates/piney-world/src/combat/breath.rscrates/piney-world/src/combat/mod.rscrates/piney-world/src/combat/weapon.rscrates/piney-world/src/field_world.rscrates/piney-game/src/fx/ambient.rscrates/piney-game/src/session/tests/field_gims.rs

Worklogs 0168 and 0171 handed the dogs', wyrms' and dragons' breaths to the world as calls, and the world did nothing with them. Now the breath is ported (piney_battle::breath), checked against the game, and drawn. docs/engine/battle.md, "The fire breath", has the rules.

The breath is a small particle system. It has 64 flames, each with a ccEff from the enemy's own file. A breath attack starts a flame at the head or neck node every frame (or every other frame) of its window. The flames fan out by their share of the attack, grow, and fade in while flying. A wall stops them, and the ground (15 sizes up) catches them. Once fallen they sink, grow again and fade out. A landed or blocked flame bursts on its 1st, 3rd and 5th frame after: effSmoke, with three ccRandF scatters. Two helpers read the flames' turns: ccSetMat2Rot (the Euler turn of the node's matrix) and mov2rot (the turn of a step). For a kind 0 breath, init turns the node's own world matrix in place and clears its translation. The port does the same to the matrix it is given.

The check. tools/test_enemy_breath_rs.py builds a breath with the game's initBreath, then runs 400 frames of ctrlBreath and setBreath. The rows are the game's four breath rows or made-up ones. The enemy's attack frame counts through them, and its display and fade change now and then. The node turns and moves every frame. The walls and ground answer from the harness's dice. After each step the breath_probe example's breath (every flame and its effect), the node's matrix, the draws, the bursts and ccRand's state are compared. All 24 cases were equal on the first run: 12,717 flames drawn, 1,453 bursts.

In the runtime (piney-world combat::breath):

• The breaths run in the effects' pass over the frame's shows, as the weapon trails do. A flame starts at its node as this frame drew the enemy.
• The flames become ambient sprites on layer 3, from the enemy's file, with the palette set outright (Sprite::clut with an empty old name).
• The bursts are effSmoke puffs.
• The turtles' foot dust (Call::FootDust, worklog 0169) now reaches the effects too. The dust pass looks the foot up by name in the enemy's body as last drawn, and makes it a dust ring at the node's place, from the eet1DustInfo row and the enemy's eneSmoke.

A bug on the way. The field's first enemies never had their breaths: start_entries pushed the constructors' outputs as shows, and presentation took them before the first frame's passes saw them. The same held for the weapon trails' controllers and the dust controllers of every enemy a field or dungeon placed on entry (the portals' enemies, made in the frame, were fine). start_entries now makes the three controllers itself.

The pictures. breath_shots (ignored) searches the level 3-5 areas of Δ in a shuffled order for one with a breather. It keeps Kite alive and the breathers unkillable (Orca fells a Red Wyrm at a blow), then films the fight. A Red Wyrm (row 199) breathed at frame 2569: its fire at the head, then a red stream at Kite, and the bursts' smoke. 720 flames were drawn, with 45 bursts. a_higher_fields_other_races_move and higher_field_shots share a steering helper now. 615 workspace tests pass.