355 lines
19 KiB
Markdown
355 lines
19 KiB
Markdown
# Master of Vega — build plan and findings
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**Read this before touching `src/games/mastervega/`.** It records the traps
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found while building it; several were only discovered by instrumenting the soak
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and would be very easy to reintroduce.
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Master of Orion clone. Registered as `mastervega`, category `arcade-console-pc`
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("Video Games"), iconFrame **92**. MOO1 rules with three MOO2 conveniences
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(colony building queue, colony detail view, hireable leaders). Preset ship
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hulls with an auto-refitting **Mark**, no ship designer. Tactical grid combat.
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Empires are the ten **species** themselves — this game deliberately does *not*
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use `data/opponents.json` or `ui/Portrait.js`.
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## Architecture
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Split enforced by import discipline, modelled on `totalannihilation/` rather
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than `civilization/` (whose scene grew to 1792 lines).
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**Headless — zero Phaser imports, importable by Node:**
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| File | Role |
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|---|---|
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| `VegaRules.js` | `compileRules(json)` — validate + index the rules file |
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| `VegaGalaxyGen.js` | Deterministic galaxy: shapes, stars, planets, Gabriel-graph starlanes, homeworlds |
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| `VegaLogic.js` | The engine: colonies, sliders, buildings, research, fleets, combat dispatch, council, victory |
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| `VegaShips.js` | Preset hulls + Mark auto-refit; the knapsack loadout |
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| `VegaCombat.js` | Tactical battle **stepper** |
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| `VegaAI.js` | AI empire controller |
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| `VegaDiplomacy.js` | Treaties, attitudes, council politics |
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| `VegaLeaders.js` | Leader pool, offers, postings |
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| `VegaZoom.js` | Star-map zoom ladder (Phaser-free so it is headlessly checkable) |
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**Render tier:** `MasterOfVegaGame.js` (scene), `VegaStarMap.js`,
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`VegaSidePanel.js`, `VegaNebula.js`, `VegaSystemView.js`, `VegaColonyView.js`,
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`VegaCombatView.js`, `VegaScreens.js`, `VegaArt.js`, `VegaFx.js`.
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### The star map's command panel
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`VegaSidePanel.js` is MOO1's right-hand column: docked, hidden until something
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is selected, three modes — **star** (class, worlds, colonies with their
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production read-out, forces in orbit, and a *View System* button), **fleet**
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(one row per ship stack with a −/+ count), **order** (distance, ETA, who is
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waiting there, Accept / Cancel).
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The panel owns no state. `MasterOfVegaGame` decides what is selected and calls
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`showStar` / `showFleet` / `showOrder`; the panel only reads the engine and
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reports clicks back through callbacks. Selecting a fleet arms it: the next star
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click is a destination, not an inspection — except the fleet's *own* star, which
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drops the selection and shows the system, because otherwise a fleet could never
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be deselected by clicking where it already is.
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**Splitting is the count selector, not a separate command.** `sendDetachment()`
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sends the selection and leaves the rest behind as its own fleet. There is
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deliberately no "split and stay" button: `consolidateFleets` merges idle fleets
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in the same system at the start of the owner's next turn (trap 17), so a
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detachment that does not leave immediately simply un-splits itself. A detachment
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gets a fresh fleet id and therefore does **not** inherit the parent's fleet
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leader.
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Three things in `sendDetachment` are load-bearing and each is verified in
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section 4b:
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* The request is validated **against the actual stacks before totals are
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compared** — otherwise asking for nine of a stack of three reads as "all of
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them" and silently sends the whole fleet.
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* Duplicate entries for one stack are **summed** before the availability check,
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or 2 + 2 of a stack of 3 passes twice.
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* A refusal is **total**: the reachability probe runs on a copy, so a rejected
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order never leaves the fleet carved in two with the pieces going nowhere.
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The star map gained `blockPointer` (a drag or a wheel starting over the panel
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must not pan or zoom the galaxy underneath it) and `onEmptyClick`, which uses
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the `currentlyOver` list Phaser passes to the input plugin's `pointerup` — an
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empty list is a genuine click on the void, which is how the panel is dismissed.
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### Colony management is two screens, not one
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Everything about a world used to be crammed into the right-hand column of the
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system-view modal: header, summary, five live sliders, the build queue, *and*
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the whole add-to-queue catalogue. It did not fit, and it knew it — the catalogue
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loop ended in a bare `break` once it ran off the bottom of the panel, silently
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dropping buildings the player was entitled to build.
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It is now split by what the player is actually doing:
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* **`VegaSystemView.js`** *inspects* a world. The right column shows the planet
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at the full 192px the `planets` sheet is cut at, its type/size/richness/
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gravity, and — for our own colonies — a **read-only** picture of the same
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numbers: allocation as five tinted bars, the queue as four lines with
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cumulative ETAs. Nothing there responds to a click except **View Colony**.
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* **`VegaColonyView.js`** *runs* one. Full screen, on the world's own backdrop
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art, with a semi-transparent panel carrying the live sliders (each with a
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padlock) and a **Build Queue** button that flies out a 760px queue manager to
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its left: reorder with ▲▼, remove with ✕, and a scrolling catalogue where every
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buildable quotes its cost, its ETA at the current construction rate, and what
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it does.
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The colony screen opens *directly* from the system view rather than through
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`MasterOfVegaGame.openModal`, which refuses a second modal while one is up — and
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this one has to stay up, because it is what keeps the star map inert underneath.
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`D.colony` (70) sits above `D.modal` (60) so the two stack; the system view hides
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its layer and pauses its orrery tick while the colony screen is in front, and
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rebuilds on the way back.
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Repeat counts are a **display** concern only. `enqueueMany` pushes N separate
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entries, so `processColony` and the save format know nothing about repeats;
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`collapseQueue` folds a run of identical ships back into one "× N" row for
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rendering. A part-built entry never joins a run, so the head item's progress bar
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always means something.
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Four functions back all of this and they all live in `VegaLogic.js`, not in the
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views — `collapseQueue`, `moveQueueRun`, `colonyBuildRate` and `queueEtas` — for
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two reasons. The two screens quote the same numbers and must agree, and the
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index arithmetic in `moveQueueRun` fails *silently* when it is wrong (see below),
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so it needs to be somewhere the Node verifier can reach.
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> `moveQueueRun` is the sharp edge. Moving a "× 5" row is five splices, and the
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> two directions do **not** use the same indices: going **up**, the copies still
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> behind keep their slots so both ends advance together (`+ k`); going **down**,
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> pulling the head copy out slides the rest of the run into the slot it vacated,
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> so the *same* pair of indices moves every copy. Using `+ k` for both — the
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> obvious first guess — interleaves the run with its neighbour
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> (`s,s,s,f,f` → `s,f,s,s,f`) without throwing. Section 6 asserts the
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> contiguous result in both directions.
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State is plain JSON with the RNG cursor inside it (`state.rngState`,
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explicit-step mulberry32), so replaying a seed reproduces the galaxy, the
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battles and the winner exactly. `serialize()` strips `rules` and every
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underscore-prefixed memo cache.
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## Traps found during the build
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Each of these was a real bug that produced a plausible-looking but broken game.
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1. **An immobile hull froze the entire fleet.** `fleetSpeed()` returned 0 if
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*any* ship in a fleet was immobile. A completed Star Base joins the fleet
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over its own colony — which is the empire's main battle fleet — and from that
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moment `canSendFleet` refused every order. Instrumented over one game:
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**338 of 338** valid attacks (in range, strong enough, at war) were refused
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for this reason. No colony could ever be attacked, so no war could be won.
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Fix: `fleetSpeed` skips immobile hulls; `sendFleet` splits them into a
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garrison that stays behind; `consolidateFleets` keys on mobility so the
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garrison is never re-merged.
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2. **Conquest was unreachable without bombardment.** Even at a 2500-turn cap,
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*no empire was ever eliminated*: a cornered empire's beaten fleet always
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retreats to its last fortified homeworld and denies the attacker the clean
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orbit an invasion needs. `bombardPopKill` and the Stellar Converter's
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`planetCracker` were declared in the rules but never implemented. Implementing
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orbital bombardment (MOO1's actual answer) made conquest work immediately.
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3. **The invasion window never opened.** Two versions of this failed the same
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way. Requiring `defenseHp === 0` never worked because combat resolves on the
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attacker's turn and the *defender's* turn rebuilds the batteries first.
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Requiring an empty sky failed too — a besieged colony finishes a ship every
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few turns and that one hull blocked the landing indefinitely. Measured: 1268
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colony-turns under hostile orbit, **2** invasion attempts. Now the rule is
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orbital *superiority*, and surviving defences fight as ground support.
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4. **Transports never left home.** `manageFleets` had an early
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`if (power <= 0) continue`, and transports carry no guns — so transport
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fleets skipped every movement branch. 3495 idle observations against 12 in
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transit. They now escort the main battle fleet.
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5. **The AI threw transports away.** Without a forecast it launched every
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landing regardless of odds: 1971 failures against 130 successes.
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`invasionForecast()` now gates it — success rate went to ~91%.
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6. **Nobody ever met anybody.** Contact required flying a ship into an occupied
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system, so most galaxies had no diplomacy and no wars at all. Empires now
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also make contact by proximity (`economy.contactRange`).
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7. **The Council could never elect anyone.** Every empire stood as a candidate
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and therefore voted for itself — 30 sessions in an 800-turn game, all null.
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MOO1's rule: the **two largest** empires stand and everyone else votes
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between them.
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8. **…and then it elected someone every time.** A dominant empire won its own
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council vote a hundred turns before it could finish a war, so conquest never
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completed. MOO1's **refusal to submit** (the defeated candidate walks out and
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the election is void) restored the balance.
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9. **Combat had a decisive first-strike bias.** Firing was sequential, so
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whichever side acted first in the round contact was made won. Mirror matches
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swung from 100% to 0% attacker depending on tier, because the parity of the
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contact round changes with fleet speed. Damage is now **banked and applied
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together** at the end of the round.
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10. **…and then ties were resolved in a fixed direction.** Symmetric fleets
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reach the disengage round *exactly* tied astonishingly often; giving the
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attacker every drawn battle produced a 44pp bias. The coin is now flipped.
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11. **Every battle stalemated on the round cap.** Two causes: in-combat repair
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(6% of hull/round) outpaced damage, and the attrition tail of an even fight
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is enormously long. Repair was cut to 3%/6%, and a **disengage rule** now
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makes the weaker side withdraw at round 25 rather than grinding to the cap.
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12. **An all-missile ship ran dry and stalemated.** At some tiers missiles score
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better damage-per-space than beams, so a pure knapsack built ships that
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emptied their racks in five rounds and then sat unarmed. `MISSILE_SHARE`
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caps missiles at 40% of tonnage. This is a design rule, not an optimisation.
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13. **Researching a weapon could make ships worse.** A greedy "best
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damage-per-space" fill mounts one oversized gun and strands the leftover
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tonnage — the cruiser's beam damage *dropped* from 42 to 28 on learning
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Death Ray. The loadout is now an unbounded **knapsack**, which is provably
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monotonic in tech because researching only ever adds candidates. The one
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sanctioned exception is the tier where missiles first appear (see the
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verifier's section 4).
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14. **Waste ran away and killed every colony.** Population fell 50 → 20 with 868
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accumulated waste. Cleanup is now **mandatory** and taken off the top,
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pro-rata from the other channels — MOO1's eco slider snapping to the
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minimum. Related: factories beyond what the population can staff are
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**mothballed** (`effectiveFactories`), or a shrinking colony keeps polluting
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from factories nobody is left to run and can never recover.
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15. **Espionage leaked the whole tech tree.** Crediting raw espionage score made
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every empire a spy agency; all five reached 60/60 techs, making the
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per-species availability roll meaningless. Only the surplus over a baseline
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now counts.
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16. **The Council never convened.** `colonizedFraction` measured against *every*
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star, but a third of systems hold only gas giants and belts, so "half the
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galaxy colonised" was unreachable. It now measures against settleable stars.
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17. **Fleets proliferated to 281.** Ships completing while the local fleet is in
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transit each spawn a new fleet. `consolidateFleets` merges idle fleets each
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turn.
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18. **Dead empires left ghost fleets** on the map forever. Caught by the soak's
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invariant checker, not by playing.
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19. **Worldgen fairness could not always be satisfied.** On large sparse
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galaxies a homeworld can have *no* star inside its opening fuel range, so
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there was nothing to upgrade and that empire simply could not expand.
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`guaranteeNearbyWorlds` now seeds new worlds when it must.
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20. **Zoom could pull back past the edge of the map.** The zoom ladder was a
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fixed `[0.35 … 2.0]`, which only ever suited the *huge* galaxy — on a small
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one the bottom two steps showed the map floating in empty space, and
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`clampPan` allowed another 160px of slack on every side on top of that. The
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ladder is now built per galaxy in `VegaZoom.js`, anchored so its bottom rung
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is exactly the zoom at which the galaxy covers the viewport, and the pan
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clamp has no slack. Kept Phaser-free so the verifier can assert the
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invariant directly (section 3b).
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21. **`slider()` only works inside a container at the origin.** Its drag maths
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is `apply(p.x - c.x)` — a *screen* coordinate minus a *local* one. That is
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only correct while the parent container sits at (0, 0), which every
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`modalShell` layer does. Nest one inside a panel container at x=1416, or
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anything that tweens, and the knob jumps by the parent's offset and drifts
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during the animation. It is why `VegaColonyView`'s `panelLayer` is at the
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origin with every child in absolute coordinates, and why the flyout — the
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one layer that moves — deliberately contains no sliders.
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22. **A mask is a rendering concern; Phaser still hit-tests through it.** The
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colony screen's catalogue is the game's first scrolling list, and a row
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scrolled out of sight remains perfectly clickable unless something says
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otherwise. Every row handler asks `scroller.contains(pointer)` first. Two
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related traps in the same helper: the wheel catcher must be added *below*
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the content or it swallows every row click, and a `GeometryMask`'s Graphics
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has its own world transform and does **not** follow a moving parent — the
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flyout tween drags it along by hand in `onUpdate`.
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### Ship rows carry video, so they have to be pooled
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Every place a ship is listed — the side panel's task force, its in-transit,
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garrison and order lists, and the colony catalogue — now shows a looping
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**commander video** beside an upside-down picture of the hull, and opens a
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centred detail window (`VegaShipDetail.js`, depth `D.detail` 76) with the clip at
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its full 256px, the hull at 192px, `hull.desc`, the derived stat block and the
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loadout the knapsack settled on. Everything in that window comes out of
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`designFor`; no new data was added.
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Two things about it are load-bearing.
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**The portraits cannot be created inline.** Both hosts rebuild their entire body
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on every click — `VegaSidePanel.rebuild()` on each − / +, `rebuildFlyout()` on
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each enqueue — so building the portraits with the rows would tear down and
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re-create a decoder per row per click, restarting every loop under the player's
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cursor. `createShipMediaPool` in `VegaShipMedia.js` keeps them in a layer the
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rebuild does not touch, bracketed `beginFrame()` … `endFrame()`; unclaimed
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entries are hidden and paused, never destroyed. The colony catalogue wipes with
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`removeAll(true)`, so its pool layer is lifted out with `detachPool()` first and
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re-homed into the fresh scroll column afterwards — inside `content`, so it
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scrolls and masks with the rows it belongs to.
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**Duplicate Video objects on one cached video are fine — the note at the top of
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`openSpeciesDetail` is more cautious than it needs to be.** Checked against the
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Phaser 3.90 source: `Video.loadHandler` builds its own element with
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`document.createElement('video')`, and `preDestroy` → `removeVideoElement()`
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detaches only that instance's. The cache holds a URL, not a shared element. That
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is what makes the fallback ladder usable at all: a species with no ship clips
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shows its portrait video on all seven rows at once. The cost is decode time, and
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pausing is how it is paid — the panel pauses on `hide()`, and both hosts pause
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while the detail window is up, since that window has its own portrait at 256px
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and there is no point running both. (The reparenting in `openSpeciesDetail` is
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still fine and still halves the decoding there; it just is not a correctness
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requirement.)
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A missing clip is a **legitimate fallback, not a bug**, which is why the verifier
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reports `7/80 recorded` rather than failing. What it does assert is that nothing
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*declared* is wrong — every key must equal `shipVideoKey(species, hull)`, which
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is the trap the `colonyship` / `ship-human-colony.mp4` filename mismatch sets.
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## Balance reference (27-game AI soak)
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```
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outcomes: { conquest: 17, council: 7, timeout: 3 }
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turns: min 110, median 282, max 800
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AI turn time: 0.45 ms average (budget 50 ms)
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mirror-match bias: < 5.2pp at every tier, zero stalemates
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wins spread across 8 of 10 species
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```
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## Files touched to register the game
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`src/data/gamesRegistry.js`, `src/main.js`, `src/scenes/GameRoomScene.js`
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(`slugDispatch`), `src/data/assetManifest.js`, `src/scenes/PreloadScene.js`
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(eager-loads `mastervega-artwork.json`), `src/services/soundtrack.js`
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(`hacker`).
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## Verification
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```bash
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node tools/verifyMasterOfVega.js # ~1221 checks, ~60s
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node tools/verifyMasterOfVega.js --quick # 1220 checks, ~15s
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node tools/verifyMasterOfVega.js --games=50 # a deeper soak
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```
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Twelve sections; section 2 runs the real procedural painters against a Proxy fake
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canvas and cross-checks every declared artwork path against the filesystem
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(portraits, stills, world backdrops), section 4b is the fleet-order engine behind
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the command panel, section 6 covers the colony economy plus the slider padlocks
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and the queue reorder/repeat API the colony screen drives, and section 10 is the
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self-play soak with invariants and a turn-time budget.
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Note for section 6: the padlock and queue blocks mutate `st.colonies[0]`, and the
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soak below them measures every colony against its own ceiling — so they snapshot
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that colony's sliders/locked/queue and put them back. A unit test that leaves a
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colony reconfigured makes the soak measure something else.
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Note for 4b and anything like it: `addFleet` **merges into an existing fleet at
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the same star**, so a test that adds ships to a homeworld is really testing "the
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starting fleet plus mine" and its counts mean nothing. Clear `st.fleets` first.
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**Never browser-tested.** Everything above is engine- and Node-verified only.
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## Art
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All sheets are optional and start `path: null`; `VegaArt.js` paints stand-ins at
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the identical frame geometry. See `src/games/mastervega/sprites.md` for the
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frame maps. Frame indexes are append-only.
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