Entry 228

Mutation's gate: the bracelet's refusal, the keyword screen's marks and levels

2026-09-27volumes

Filescrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/gate.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/words.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/tables.rscrates/piney-gen/src/manifest.rstools/test_fieldui_rs.py

The field menus' harness had 14 failures on Mutation. Five of them were the Chaos Gate, which the story goes through. Each difference below was found by running Mutation's own code against Infection's.

The keyword screen's level (ccAnalyzeEnemyList)

Mutation's ccAnalyzeEnemyList (gcmn 0x00444c20) reads ccRegisterEnemyRange. ccInitRegisterEnemy sets it to 3, and nothing else writes it. If the list is too short for three rows from the rank, the window moves back to the last three rows, where Infection repeats the last row.

• piney-battle's copy already had this rule. The field menus' copy (Words::analyze_enemies) now has it too.
• The harness never ran the init, so the game read an unset range and wrote stack garbage into areaLevel. It now sets the range to 3.

The keyword screen's marks (GtNewMenuDisp)

The attribute marks test each of a word's nine fields against 255. Mutation tests the dungeon size (field 1) against 0 instead, and its colour treats a 0 as unset. The empty slots' placeholder word has a dungeon size of 0, where Infection's has 255.

GtNewMenu

• Kanji alpha. Proccess 7 (the address shown), and OK in proccess 8, set kanjiAlpha to -24, so the words fade in again.

• The refusal. The new-keyword, random, Word List and history menus each gained the same check in their Warp. If eventStatus[40] is set (the bracelet off, which already hides Data Drain), and the area's GetEventAreaNumber is on a list of 16 story areas (101, 92-99, 118, 119, 123, 108, 16, 66, 91), the menu goes to proccess 30 instead:

  1. Proccess 30. The target is put back on the gate, and the dim and the window go out.
  2. Proccess 31. After seven frames, Kite's line opens (a bad feeling, so not now), with no voice.
  3. Proccess 32. When the line closes, the menu shuts.

• The data. piney-gen reads the check from GtNewMenu's code:

  • the lb of eventStatus[n];
  • the table and the $gp count its loop runs over;
  • the record built into $a1 for ccMessage::Open.

  The result is fieldui::gate_refusal. Infection has none, and neither do Outbreak's and Quarantine's GtNewMenu.

• The harness. A new scenario, test_gate_refusal, covers this: the Word List's area 16 with the bracelet off. The game goes through proccesses 30, 31 and 32, and the port matches it frame for frame.

The harness now has 9 failures on Mutation and none on Infection.