Retraining from scratch removes the constraint that blocked these: the
existing checkpoints in Game/bots/promoted/ no longer need byte-identical
geometry.
- Fix the goal aperture constants (were 1.85/1.65, now match
objects/goal.tscn's actual sensor exactly at 1.75/1.5) so a ball crossing
the visible edge can't fail to score.
- Cut a real navigable hole in each end wall's collision
(_build_end_wall_colliders), replacing the previous solid box — the ball
now genuinely enters the net instead of triggering the sensor a hair
before hitting a solid wall. Correct for both FLOOR and ELEVATED goal
modes via _goal_surround_bounds. A separate, slightly wider
GOAL_VISUAL_APERTURE_* pair keeps the collision hole exact while still
giving goal.gd's bezel/rim frame clearance to be seen against the hull cut.
- Resize the play volume 1.5x (INNER_HALF_X/Z/HEIGHT 12/18/12 -> 18/27/18) to
comfortably fit a 5v5 roster: updates every hand-authored literal in
arena_boundary.tscn/arena_base.tscn/the elevated arena variants that
doesn't derive from those constants, adds 5 spawn markers per team, and
rescales ship_observations.gd's normalization scales and arena_02's
cosmetic decoration/nebula-dust shader uniforms to match.
- Bake the ~170 runtime-generated CollisionShape3D nodes into the scene via
a new bake_colliders()/tools/bake_arena_boundary.gd instead of rebuilding
them on every load — a real load-time cost repeated in every parallel
headless training env. Colliders must be direct children of the
StaticBody3D to register at all, so bake_colliders() parents them onto
self and tags them with a group for idempotent re-baking, rather than
grouping them under an intermediate container node. _ready() self-heals:
it skips regenerating only when an existing bake's goal_mode metadata
matches the current one, so the FLOOR-mode bake in the shared scene is
never silently reused by an ELEVATED arena variant.
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.
SDFGI ran with default cascades in a volume that was almost entirely
transparent, so its low-resolution probes had little solid geometry to
capture and contributed blotching across large flat surfaces. With the
boundary now an opaque deck plus an unshaded additive field, it earns
nothing, and the existing ReflectionProbe and ambient carry the lighting.
Each arena also gains a shadowless fill light opposite its key light so the
deck is not lit from a single direction, and passes its own tint through to
the boundary's containment field so the three arenas read differently.
use_debanding was absent. Glow runs at hdr_scale 2.0 with adjustment_contrast
above 1.0, which amplifies 8-bit quantisation on exactly the kind of smooth
gradients the new shell is made of.
The remaining project.godot churn is Godot's own key reordering on save.
Replace NebulaDust's flat unshaded glow material with a custom
ShaderMaterial: a fake per-pixel puff normal on the billboarded quad
feeds a light() override so motes catch the directional light and a
nebula-core color bias, alpha gets a depth-texture soft-particle fade
so motes no longer hard-clip through boundary/decoration geometry,
and a per-particle hash adds subtle sparkle.
Adds sdfgi_enabled and a ReflectionProbe to all three arenas' Environment
setup so surfaces get real bounce lighting/reflections instead of flat
ambient. Converts arena_boundary.tscn's shared glass field material from
unshaded to a shaded, rim-lit material so it reads as glass (dim face-on,
highlighted at grazing angles) rather than a flat tinted overlay.
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.
Josh Creek