The main menu clipped its own title and bottom button in debug builds. The
project lays out in a hard-fixed 1920x1080 logical viewport
(window/stretch/mode="viewport"), and the only overflow strategy in the
scene was a CenterContainer, which centres its child rather than clipping
and scrolling. With DevSection visible the content measures 1133px against
1080, so roughly 53px spilled off both ends with no way to reach it — and
main_menu.gd grabs focus on a button that may itself be off-screen.
Worth recording because it is counter-intuitive: this is not
resolution-dependent. Because the viewport is fixed, a 4K display magnifies
the same clipped 1080p frame rather than giving the menu more room, so the
fix has to make the layout scroll, not scale.
Each menu is now MarginContainer > ScrollContainer > CenterContainer >
VBoxContainer. ScrollContainer sizes its child to max(own size, child
minimum), so an expanding CenterContainer keeps today's centred look when
the content is short and grows past the viewport when it is tall — which is
exactly when scrolling should start. follow_focus is on so keyboard and
controller navigation cannot strand focus off-screen. Lobby and matchmaking
share the same shape and get the same treatment before they hit the same
wall; settings gained its wrapper alongside the Controls tab.
Also stops the dev bot dropdowns widening the whole menu: they are filled
from res://bots filenames and expand horizontally, so a long checkpoint
name dragged the layout past its 420px minimum.
test_menu_layout asserts each screen's bottom-most control really sits
inside a ScrollContainer. That is a structural guard against the wrapper
being removed or a new section being added outside it — not proof that
nothing visually clips, which was checked by hand at 1000x600, 1280x720 and
1920x1080.
Hard has been a label-only duplicate of medium.json since medium was promoted
on 2026-08-17. Promote 20260823-1734-gen5-s5-intercepts-retry2 into
hard.json so the tier is a genuinely distinct policy, and so the strongest bot
the curriculum has produced survives the next round's checkpoint pruning —
promoted files are never touched by training scripts.
Stage 5 blocked after three attempts, so like medium.json this comes from a run
recorded as decision: "fail". Both failing floors are covered in TRAINING.md:
goal_rate 0.7369 vs 0.75 is marginal, and productive_air_touch_fraction 0.0001
vs 0.005 is a bar no policy in the lineage has approached, against a metric
quantised at 0.01 per ~100-episode window. On every other axis it is the best
yet: upright_fraction 0.757 against a 0.40 floor that the pre-Round-6 lineage
never pushed past 0.331, and forward_motion_fraction 0.479 against 0.20.
Chosen over attempt 2 (retry1) on a tiebreak, not a margin. retry1 posts a much
wider indirect result against medium.json (63-23-14 vs 47-32-21), but a direct
100-episode head-to-head between the two finished 36-39 with 25 draws, so that
gap does not reflect a real strength difference. Attempt 3 is the later
checkpoint (it resumed from attempt 2) and edges every telemetry metric.
Verified: hard.json is byte-identical to its source export, matches easy/medium
on input_size 83, 3 layers and action space, and beats medium.json 19-7-4 in a
fresh 30-episode paired run. Tiers stay monotonic: hard > medium > easy.
That head-to-head also showed a 17% physical side imbalance (physical teams
0-1 = 29-46), reproduced at 13% in the 30-episode check. Inside the 20% bar
used elsewhere and equal across both models, but noted in TRAINING.md as worth
investigating rather than assuming variance.
Lands tasks 1.0-1.8 of multiplayer-todo.md: the pure-function test runner,
net_codec (wire format quantizers/pack-unpack), NetworkManager (ENet
transport, manual polling, min-RTT clock sync), MatchNet (handshake,
protocol/tick-rate gating, roster with team+ready state), lobby.tscn (team
columns, switch team, ready toggle), server_boot.tscn (headless dedicated
server with structured logging and an overrun watchdog), and main_menu.gd's
Host/Join-by-IP UI (connecting overlay, cancel, bounded failure path).
Followed by an adversarial review (Opus subagent) that found and fixed two
real bugs - an unvalidated player_name broadcast that let one client's
oversized name head-of-line-block the reliable channel for everyone, and a
server-side roster leak across a host/re-host cycle - plus three gaps in
the test suite itself where a claim of "verified" wasn't actually backed
by what the test checked. All five two-process smoke tests plus the
pure-function suite are green with the strengthened assertions in place.
Lands the non-networked Phase 0 tasks from multiplayer-todo.md (ship/camera/
arena refactors, sim constants, background FPS handling) plus a first pass
at exposing graphics/performance settings (presets, resolution scaling,
vsync, FPS cap, perf overlay) and a GPU profiling harness for the
real-hardware follow-up in task 0.15b.
20260816-2126-gen5-s4-handling-retry2 exhausted its three attempts and
missed only the 0.80 training goal-rate floor, at 0.7731. Every
evaluation gate passed: 65-22-13 versus promoted/easy.json, 87% non-draw
against an 80% floor, 12.6% physical-side imbalance against a 20%
ceiling, and both handling telemetry floors clear. The round improved the
goal rate monotonically across attempts (0.537 -> 0.683 -> 0.773) and the
checkpoint plays well by hand, so close Stage 4 by human override.
Promote it to Game/bots/promoted/medium.json. Medium and Hard both point
at the new policy: Hard stays a label-only duplicate until a stronger one
earns hard.json, which keeps the tiers monotonic rather than leaving Hard
weaker than Medium.
generation5_state.json flips that log entry to "pass" with a
decision_override block preserving the original verdict and reasoning,
and advances to Stage 5 attempt 1. This is what passing_entry() needs to
resolve Stage 5's resume checkpoint and evaluation reference, and what
league_pool() will need at Stage 6; --skip-to-next-stage would advance
the stage without marking anything as passing and die immediately.
generation5.sh now pulls before launching. Each stage ends in
commit_progress()'s push, which fails and kills the run hours in if the
box is behind origin.
Arenas inherit from a new arena_base.tscn instead of restating ~40 shared
lines each; only sky/ambient/glow/tint/decoration vary, exposed via new
Arena exports since nested Environment properties aren't overridable
through scene inheritance. Bot construction and score-keeping move onto
GameMode, shared by match and spectate modes while preserving their
differing GameSettings-override behavior and the HUD's score-row
duck-typing. HUD instruments share a HudInstrument base for the
smoothing-weight calc and angle-lerp helper. Also dedupes
MAIN_MENU_SCENE_PATH into ScenePaths and documents why DIFFICULTIES
tiers share one checkpoint.
Enable glow/bloom, color adjustments, and MSAA+FXAA across all three
arenas so emissive ship/station accents actually bleed light and edges
read cleanly. Expose the player-facing knobs (anti-aliasing mode, glow
intensity, brightness) through a new Settings screen off the main menu,
persisted via a VideoSettings autoload that scales each arena's own
tuned Environment values on load rather than overwriting them.
Introduce arena_02 (Nebula) and arena_03 (Asteroid Field) alongside
arena_01, listed in a new ArenaRegistry (scripts/arena_registry.gd) as
the single source of truth for available arenas. Free Play lets the
player pick an arena from the main menu; Match/Spectate each pick one
at random per session; Training keeps its own fixed arena_01.
Nebula gets an RL-style visual treatment: a near-invisible glass
boundary material shared by all arenas, a baked equirect nebula sky
texture, a drifting-dust particle system, and a Blender-modeled
station/debris/planet decoration set. GameMode gains a
_get_arena_scene_path() hook so modes can instantiate their arena in
code instead of hardcoding it in the scene.
Replace the raw checkpoint dropdown with curated Easy/Medium/Hard presets
that drive GameSettings' bot model/reaction_ticks/action_noise overrides.
Move raw-checkpoint testing and Spectate mode into a dev-only section
hidden via OS.is_debug_build() so they disappear from release exports.
Josh Creek