Entry 224

Mutation's movers, town AI and spawns, and two sidecar passes

2026-09-27volumes

Filescrates/piney-gen/src/syms.rscrates/piney-gen/src/xfer.rscrates/piney-battle/src/follow.rscrates/piney-battle/src/kite.rscrates/piney-battle/src/ai_move.rscrates/piney-battle/src/entry.rscrates/piney-battle/src/event.rscrates/piney-battle/examples/battle_probetools/test_battle_fellow_rs.pytools/test_battle_kite_rs.pytools/test_battle_event_rs.pytools/test_battle_navi_rs.pytools/test_battle_spawn_rs.py

After the party AI (worklog 223), five more battle harnesses failed on Mutation: fellow, kite, event, navi and spawn. With them, the chat and enemy motion harnesses, whose random streams moved, showed two more gaps. All fifteen battle harnesses now pass on Mutation and still pass on Infection.

The probe's shared readers

The fellow, kite and navi requests each kept a copy of the party AI's read_ai, ai_json and message helpers, without Mutation's new ccAI fields. The probe ran out of tokens on every such request. They now use party_ai's. Navi adds its navigation block after the shared fields (ai_fields). About 450 duplicated lines are gone.

Rules Mutation changed

• ccAI::FollowTarget. The member turns to its target at any distance (Infection only beyond noTurnRange).
• ccAI::CheckFrontObstacle. The probe line reaches 1.5 bodyHit.radius. Infection's was bodyHit.radius + 1.1 speed.
• Kite's arrival by warp (act 13). The fade runs to frame 50 and the act ends after 60. Infection's ran to 40 and ended there.
• ccAI::ActInTown.
  • A party member stands back (actType 100, mode 1, stopped) while it or Kite goes through a gate (act 12).
  • When Kite is lost (off the lists, or the member out of the party), acts 3, 94 and 97 also stop the member. Act 3 also drops the command when Kite is gone.
  • Act 96 neither greets Kite nor goes to him while he rides the Grunty (pgRideFlag).
• ccRegisterEnemyList and ccAnalyzeEnemyList.
  • A start too near the list's end moves back, so that all ccRegisterEnemyRange rows fit. Infection stayed on the last row instead.
  • The analysis reads the range's rows and compares the first three.
• The hit record (Event::NoteHit, worklog 223) carries whether the character has an AI. The game writes through a null pointer otherwise, and the harnesses record the call with 0.
• ccTransPosW2P, P2W and FW2LW. Without a player (plw.pw null) they leave the position as it is. The port follows this for the magic circle's particles (McPart::main). The other FW2LW users always have a player in play.

The harnesses

• Fellow, kite, enemy motion and spawn hook the hit record, as test_battle_rs does. Fellow points the player global at the character whose affect function is Kite's Influence. That function reads Kite's AI through the global.
• Event reads the ccAI fields back through volume.ai_at. It had read Infection's offsets, which on Mutation land on the new hit fields.
• Chat lets Mutation's remarks run natively, as it does every other line, and compares their text. It had inherited the party AI harness's remark hooks.
• Navi compares ActInTown's lines by their bytes. The game passes a string's address. The same string sits in two tables, so a table-and-row lookup was ambiguous. The probe gives the volume's text (ChatTexts).
• Spawn.
  • The port names an object's destructor (ccEntryObj +0x1c8) by Infection's address. The harness sends those names to the port and writes the volume's addresses into the game. It maps every ccDest* function Infection names, both ways.
  • Mutation's DUNGEON allocates its floors. Their number is at +0x430, and the gimPos slots run to 75 per floor (Infection's fixed 750). rotate sits behind a pointer at +0x7cc, and edit is at +0x934. The harness gives ten floors (750 slots, as the port keeps).

Two sidecar passes (piney-gen syms)

Mutation's ccThEvHold was placed inside ccEvent::Execute. The ref pass had taken a "likely start" after a jr $ra in the middle of Execute's switch. The real function starts after a thread's endless loop, which entries() does not list.

• The ref pass now skips a start whose code branches below it. No function does that. This also drops the __sinit_system.cpp rows on all three later volumes, which were a string table.
• A new prefix pass. An Infection function not named yet is placed when its first 24 masked words are shared by no other Infection function and open exactly one unnamed start in the volume. The starts include those after an endless b loop. It names six functions on Mutation (ccThEvHold, ccPlayerStart and others) and five on each of Outbreak and Quarantine.
• Adding the loop starts to entries() itself cost the order pass about 330 names, so they stay local to the prefix pass.