Entry 174

"The church's black screen: a field set-up's windows on the set-up's own screen"

2026-09-26ui

Filescrates/piney-desktop/src/setup.rscrates/piney-desktop/src/kanji.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/lib.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/message.rscrates/piney-game/src/area.rscrates/piney-game/src/session/tests/event11.rscrates/piney-stream/examples/stream_time.rsdocs/engine/event-vm.mdBUGS.md

Story 11, in the church on the Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground: Balmung's and BlackRose's streams played, and then the screen stayed black. The title read "loading 1" with Kite in act 13, just before Data Drain.

What the church does. Event 11's block 22 plays streams 8 and 9 in the set-up's pass at phase 0. Block 24 runs in the pass at phase 2, after the field's files load and before the field's tasks start. It opens four info_now windows ("The book. / Open the book." and the three after it), then plays streams 10-12 and gives Data Drain. A window in a pass below phase 4 is not the menu's ccMsg. The event makes its own window on the set-up's black screen (docs/engine/event-vm.md, "Instructions that take frames").

The bug. The field host sent those windows to the field UI. The field UI neither steps nor draws until play, so the load's hold showed black. The pass then waited on a button for a window nobody could see. Its voice requests also sat unsent until play.

The fix. The desktop's set-up already had the right screen (piney_desktop::setup::SetupScreen). SetupScreen::with now builds it from fonts and a window texture already read, and the field UI keeps one. While set_setup is on, the windows and announcements open, are checked and close there. The area turns it on for its passes (Setup::Pass), draws the screen while a window is up (a stream the scripts play still wins), and passes the window's voice and sounds on. The church now shows the four lines, white on black with no frame, and the book's streams follow.

event_11_church_ends_with_blackrose_out now asserts that a textured draw (the glyphs) is in the frame while the load holds on message_open 11 24. It fails with the set-up screen switched off and passes with it on. Of Infection's scripts, this is the only field set-up with windows: events 10 and 31 have them in the desktop's set-up, which already had its screen.

On the way: stream_time (piney-stream's examples) times each step and GPU draw of a stream, for the Skeith lag that BUGS.md lists. It can also write a range of frames (--shots) and print a frame's draw commands (--dump). Stream 5's only slow draw is frame 1834, at 151 ms.