Entry 79

piney-effect: the arrival, hits and numbers, the five spell systems, Data Drain, portals and particles, checked against the game

2026-09-24renderbattletest

Filescrates/piney-effecttools/test_effect_rs.pytools/test_effect_draw_rs.pytools/test_effect_hit_rs.pytools/test_effect_particle_rs.pytools/test_effect_misc_rs.pytools/test_effect_spell_rs.pydocs/engine/effects.mddocs/engine/particles.md

Combat needs its presentation: the marks where a blow lands, the rising damage numbers, the spells, and the portals. 67 and 78 return these as events without drawing them. An effects agent and four helpers have ported the field's effect tasks as a new crate, piney-effect. docs/engine/effects.md and particles.md hold the detail.

What is ported

• The core.
  • ccThEffect / ccEffectCtrl: 500 effects, their dispatch by id, and ccEffect2.
  • The effect files and tables, read at run time, and the EFF chunk (0x0e00).
  • The draw path: ccEff::Draw and the VU1 program mc_DrawEff down to GS primitives, with fog, sort key and near/far culling.
  • ccClump::Draw and ccAnm::Draw's node matrices and transparency. Porting these fixed two drawing bugs of the effects' own: animated transparency per object, and ExtObj copies.
• Kite's arrival. effTransfer, its ring, and effWarpTransfer. These also serve the walking PCs, merchants and party members.
• Hits.
  • ccHitMarkDisp with its spark, ring and photons.
  • The protect effect, the attribute guard and critical.
  • The words: CRITICAL, DYING and NO DAMAGE.
  • The rising damage numbers (ccCtrlFlyFont) and the stacked ones (ccDamUprStr), drawn as the game's own sprite packets on the menu layer.
• Spells.
  • Fall, Tornado, Convergence, Upheaval and Summons at all four levels, and skills 289-294 (289 is the drill missile).
  • ccEffectElementManager.
  • The spells' damage calls, as events on the exact frame the game makes them.
• The rest of combat.
  • Level up.
  • The dying blow.
  • Data Drain's effects: effDrainCtrl, the homing orbs, and the effect after the drain.
  • The magic portal (ccMagicCircle, ccMcPart).
• Particles. All of ccThParticle: the generators, the particles, the 17 kinds of force, and ccConditionEffect.

Checked

• Against the game. Six harnesses, all with 0 mismatches:

  harness	what it covers
  test_effect_rs	the arrival in town, field, moving, faded and warp; the core's draw path over every object kind (2,800 frames)
  test_effect_draw_rs	sprites (random cases), 1,130 clump draws, 630 animation draws
  test_effect_particle_rs	14,359 frames: 1.26 million particle states, 1.02 million draws
  test_effect_hit_rs	hits (2,169 frames, with the real particle system), protect and words (6,003), numbers (5,400 frames, 356,939 sprites word for word)
  test_effect_misc_rs	level up, dying, drains, orbs, after-drain, the portal (10,280 frames), and the math functions to the bit
  test_effect_spell_rs	every attack spell, 102 ids cast three times each (37,057 frames)

• The disc tests. cargo test -p piney-effect runs 27 tests against the disc.

• Re-run in a clean worktree. All six harnesses pass, with the workspace's tests, clippy, fmt and the docs check.

• Shots. 87 frames from effect_shot, of each effect over its life.