Entry 68

The Chaos Gate menus, the opening's tutorials and item boxes, and the gate a target again

2026-09-23uiworldtest

Filescrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/gate.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/getitem.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/party.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/words.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/tutorial.rscrates/piney-desktop/src/kanji.rscrates/piney-world/src/lib.rscrates/piney-game/src/world.rstools/test_fieldui_rs.pytools/test_desktop_rs.pytools/test_desktop_menu_rs.pytools/test_demo_rs.pytools/test_toppage_rs.pytools/test_morph_rs.pytools/test_field_rs.pytools/test_dungeon_rs.pytools/test_desktop_data_rs.pycrates/piney-demo/examples/demo_probe.rsdocs/engine/field-ui.md

The user could not use the Chaos Gate. Two things stood in the way:

• the gate's menus were not ported;
• the gate never became the command target, so the action button had nothing to open.

The field UI agent ported the menus. The target was a one-line bug in 65's port.

The menus

• The Chaos Gate.
  • Its pages:
    • 28 GateMenu (Random, New Keyword, Word List, Warp History, Other Servers);
    • 57 GtRandomMenu;
    • 58 GtNewMenu, with the keyword entry;
    • 59 GtListMenu;
    • 60 GtRecordMenu;
    • 61 GtTownMenu.
  • The area words are in words.rs.
  • The warp. A warp enters the words (areaCodeSet) and updates gateRecord and areaCount. It then takes the party out (TransferOut at frames 5, 35 and 65), and from frame 211 asks every frame for the area the words make (SetGenerateCode).
  • Not ported. 62, the gate hack, is a cinematic with its own stream and minigame.
• The opening's tutorials.
  • 77 PartyInMenuT (Party > Add, walked through);
  • 78/79 (the gate and New Keyword);
  • 80-83 (the skills, target and chat lessons);
  • 84/85 ItemBoxMenuT.
  • A game bug, kept. The game's jump table case for 84 has no break, so ItemBoxMenuT runs twice a frame under 84. The port does the same.
• Items got. 29 GetItemMenu and 30 ReplaceItemMenu cover the item got, 99 already held, a full bag, exchange and give up. AreaItem draws a box's item from the area's lists.
• Shared code. menus/party.rs has PartyInMenuDisp and LevelDisp, for Party > Add (68) next.
• New requests (docs/engine/field-ui.md has the table):
  • Affect (EntryAffect: 11 opens the gate's circle, 0 closes it);
  • Flash;
  • KeepLayers;
  • AreaCodeSet;
  • TransferOut;
  • DeleteNoPartyMember;
  • GoToArea;
  • ChangeArea;
  • AreaLevel;
  • AddMember;
  • four orders to a member's AI (ChatOrder, ManualOff, ManualModeAi, RemoteCmd).

"Log Out" lost its L

• The bug. kanji::extract dropped any glyph whose start came out below byte 1 of the texture. The first glyph of the texture's last row starts at byte 0, so PERSONAL's eighth row drew " og Out".
• The fix. The guard is now below 0. Only the nibble write at byte -1, the one that lands outside the texture, is skipped. tools/font.py has the same change.

The gate as a target

• The bug. World::game_ctrl put the gate on the command list at its world position. Everyone else there is at posP, relative to Kite. The gate therefore sat about 6,300 units away and was never in range.
• What the game does. ccChgate::main (0x00459280) sets posP (+0x50) to ccTransPosW2P of pos (+0x40) every frame.
• The fix. The port now does the same.
• What the user sees. The gate becomes the target within a few steps. X opens menu 28, and the circle lights on the ground.

In the runtime

piney-game's world mode takes the new requests:

• Affect goes to the gate or an NPC through the new World::affect.
• AddMember fills the next party slot. That member's panel then shows from its spcParam record and charTbl name.
• AreaLevel and AreaCodeSet are kept.
• GoToArea and ChangeArea are shown in the window title until the fields exist.
• The rest are no-ops for now: the flash, the party's warps, and the orders to its AI.

The UI's World now carries:

• the server;
• the area level;
• free story-area slots, (-1, -1). Zero would have read as area 0 barred.

Seven harnesses ran old builds

• What I saw. The desktop suite failed the new every-row string in the clean worktree, but passed in the main tree with the same kanji.rs.
• The cause. test_desktop_rs.py builds its probe with cargo, which follows CARGO_TARGET_DIR. It then runs the binary from ROOT/target/release/examples, which does not. In a worktree whose build goes elsewhere, the harness ran whatever binary was left in target/: here, a build from that morning.
• Where else. The desktop menu, demo, top page, morph, field and dungeon harnesses had the same path.
• The fix. All seven now take the probe from CARGO_TARGET_DIR when it is set, as the world, field UI and battle harnesses already did.
• What it means. Earlier clean-worktree runs of those suites, such as the desktop and top-page runs behind 64, may have tested older code. They were re-run below with fresh builds.

Fresh builds turned up two failures that the old binaries had hidden:

• The data screen's harness. Its Python copy of SaveState::fresh still wrote only ok and cancel. Since 64, fresh writes all eleven button assignments. The game's ccSaveData::Init (0x001743d0) writes them too: 0x40, 0x10, 0x80, 0x800, 0x100, 0x40, 0x20, 8, 2, 4, 1 from +0x8404. The copy now writes them as well, so the saved cards match again.
• The demo probe's lighting command. It lit models through convert::mmat with an identity transform and read one vertex per triangle corner. Since the near-plane cut (61), a vertex at w 1 is cut away, so the probe got nothing and panicked. Lit models run VU1's lit program (whole triangles, no cut). The probe now asks for that, with positions shrunk to fit the GS space. The colours depend only on the normals and the lights.

Checked

• Against the game. tools/test_fieldui_rs.py now has 33 tests, all matching the game's ccThMenu frame by frame. They cover every gate page, the warp's requests, each tutorial and the item menus.
• The "L" fix. test_desktop_rs.py and test_font.py include strings that fill every row.
• In a clean worktree. The workspace's tests, clippy (including piney-fieldui with trace), fmt and the docs check pass. With fresh builds, these suites pass against the game:
  • the field UI;
  • the desktop's four (desktop, menu, data, name);
  • demo;
  • top page;
  • morph;
  • field;
  • dungeon;
  • world;
  • font.
• Shots from the runtime. "Log Out" is drawn whole. The gate targeted, then the Chaos Gate menu over the lit circle.