The file table in this README stopped at Phase 6's town crier -- ten rows for a
directory that now holds 38 files, stale across four workstreams. Filling all of
it is not this phase's job; documenting the nine files this workstream added is,
and the table now says plainly what it covers so a reader does not take it for an
inventory.
The rows carry the reasoning worth having at a glance: the validator is the
boundary that turned 22,102 confident wrong pictures into honest absences, the
catalogue's action ceiling is what stops the fallback walk serving the next
body's art, `BridgeBodies` is the one question no code outside ServUO can answer,
and `BridgeUop`/`BridgePng` are written without `System.Drawing` on purpose.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Phase 7 found this on the tree family and fixed it there. It was inline in THREE
places: the body catalogue (phase 3), statics and land (phase 5), and the tree.
`expected != null` treats "" as a real fingerprint, so a caller that serialises a
missing value as an empty string has EVERY fetch refused -- with a sentence that
names no catalog at all ("catalog is now 8159778b"), which reads as a shard
fault rather than a caller one.
All three now go through one BridgeAssets.CatalogMismatch. Three copies of a
comparison are three chances for the next family to get it wrong in a way only a
differently-written client would ever reveal.
BridgeLeases keeps its own `expected != null` and is deliberately untouched:
there the value is a world property, where an empty string is a legitimate thing
to expect.
Verified against a live shard on a stock ServUO install, every family asked three
ways -- with a real catalog, with the field absent, and with an empty string:
cliloc.table walk 67,496 rows, 12 pages
body manifest / fetch 1,095 rows; ok all three ways
static + land fetch ok all three ways
static/land carry their OWN catalog art 66a112c1 vs body 323f284f
a cross-family catalog refused 422
tree manifest / fetch 141 files incl. BOTH empty ones, all three ways
empty files carry a VALID gzip member 2 rows gunzip to 0 bytes
a STALE catalog still refused on body, static and tree
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
The spawn atlas was the one place the platform's rule -- only the sidecar
bridges the shard -- was broken, and it was broken by the component that faces
the internet: SPAWN_ATLAS.md required the website to read the ServUO tree off a
bind mount or a shared volume. This serves those files over the loopback link
instead (docs/link/v8.md 10).
The measurement came first and changed the shape. 10 said the shard would serve
`tree/<label>` -> bytes; against a stock 57.4 tree it cannot. Spawns/trammel.xml
is 4.03 MB, the sidecar discards any inbound line over 1 MiB, and that file as
one base64 row is 5.4 MiB -- it would be dropped, time out, and be re-requested
forever with no error anywhere. Two files on a STOCK tree are in that state.
So a file crosses as 512 KiB chunks, each gzipped: tree/Spawns/trammel.xml/c0
and so on, which is 5's depth scheme doing the same job it does for
body/400/a0/f0 and needing no protocol change to do it. The chunk is the bound
and the compression is only the saving -- nothing guarantees an operator's files
compress, so the ceiling has to hold when they do not, and a 512 KiB chunk that
refuses to compress is still ~683 KiB of base64, inside the wire cap that
AssetBatchBytes' deliberate factor of two leaves room for.
It is a `tree` FAMILY on assets.fetch rather than 14's separate tree.* commands:
phase 5 had already learned that the command is the transport and the family is
a property of the key, and assets.manifest is generalised here the same way.
That reuses the single slot, the paging envelope, the key ceiling and the
mid-import guard -- and leaves `link` with nothing to do for the third phase
running.
But it gets its OWN consent, Bridge.TreeEnabled. AssetsEnabled is an operator
agreeing the website may read their EA-licensed UO client; this is the shard's
own configuration, which they wrote, and which the public bestiary is built
from. One switch could not express both, and the thing that would silently
disappear for an operator who declined the first is their spawn atlas. So the
consent check moved into the family lookup, and assets.sources answers whenever
either plane is on, reporting `families` filtered to what is actually enabled --
which is how a tree-only shard's website discovers there is anything to ask for.
Two defects found, and which harness found which is the part worth keeping:
- An empty `catalog` is not an absent one. `expected != null` refused every
fetch from a caller that sent "", with a sentence naming no catalog at all.
Found by an offline probe that passed one by accident.
- GZipStream writes NOTHING for zero bytes of input -- the header is emitted
lazily, so a stream opened and closed without a write yields a zero-length
buffer rather than the 20-byte empty member. Stock ServUO ships two empty
decoration files, so this broke every import off an untouched tree. The
offline probe reassembled all 141 files and reported success, because .NET's
own decompressor reads an empty stream as empty data and the chunk's
declared length (0) and hash (of nothing) both agreed. Only the live walk,
through a reader on another runtime, disagreed.
Measured end to end against a live shard, the real sidecar and the website's own
reader: 141 files, 11,895,427 bytes, 158 chunks, 3 pages, 1.33 MB on the wire,
512 ms; every file byte-identical to disk; the atlas built over the bridge
identical to the one built off it. A drift check is the manifest alone -- 32 KB,
~70 ms, no file bytes.
The label set is this shard's, never the caller's: a fetch resolves against the
set the shard itself enumerated, and tree/../../Scripts/..., Config/Bridge.cfg
and Saves/Accounts/accounts.xml are all answered `absent` before a path is built
out of them.
Protocol stays 8 and EXTRACTOR_VERSION stays 3 -- this family derives nothing,
it forwards an operator's own file unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
The catalogue asked every body for action 0 and reported the rest absent. 73 of
this client's bodies have no art there and real art deeper — body 820's first
drawn action is 23, and it is a horse — so they rendered as text on the bestiary.
The catalogue now falls back to the first action that has art, and the key names
that action (`body/820/a23`). 1,022 -> 1,095 rows.
Walking the action axis is the one thing that can walk off the end of a body's
slots, and the slots after a body's band are the NEXT BODY'S. Measured here: one
action past the band, 643 of 795 legacy bodies return a fully validated picture
and 452 of those are byte-identical to body+1's action 0 (body 1 action 22 is an
ettin; body 3's is an imp, both confirmed by rendering them). Phase 0's validator
cannot catch that — the record is real — so the ceiling refuses the ADDRESS, in
ResolveAnimation where every caller already goes.
The ceiling is the index banding, never `Animations.GetAnimLength`: for a body
reaching file type 5 as id 34 that function answers 22 while the arithmetic gives
13, and the difference is nine actions of another creature's art.
A fetch serves only the key the catalogue chose for that body. `body/820/a0` and
`body/400/a2` come back `unsupported` with the chosen action alongside, never by
decoding what was asked for.
`EXTRACTOR_VERSION` 2 -> 3 (unchanged input, a different answer). Protocol stays
8 — `action` on a manifest/fetch row is additive.
Deep frame keys and the bulk-fill switch that §16 planned for this phase were
NOT built: the site displays still pictures, and a complete one-direction
animation set measures 174,453 frames / 281.5 MB against no consumer (docs
§11.2, org lead 2026-09-11).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
The body catalogue is a set; this is not. This client addresses 49,152 static
ids and has art for 39,189 of them, plus 4,244 land tiles of 16,384 -- and hues
multiply the statics by three thousand. So there is no manifest and no scan:
`assets.fetch` grows two more families (`static`, `land`) and answers the keys
the website's own data names.
`assets.fetch` becomes shared plumbing. BridgeAssets now owns the command, does
the reqId/consent/key-ceiling checks once, derives the family from the keys
themselves (§5 made the key the address; a request that also named its family
would have two places to be wrong and one of them silent) and dispatches to the
reader that registered it. A batch must be of one family, because the reply
carries one `catalog` id. `assets.sources` gains `families` -- additive, so the
protocol stays 8, and EXTRACTOR_VERSION stays 2 because no existing key's bytes
change.
Two traps, both in §4.5's family -- a confident, plausible, wrong picture:
- `Art.GetStatic` memoises into a static Bitmap[0xFFFF] and hands back the SAME
instance, while `Hue.ApplyTo` repaints in place. Hue a static once and the
plain key comes back hued from then on, and the next hue stacks on the last.
Measured on this client before the fix. `Files.CacheData` is now off for the
life of the process; `TryHue` re-checks it and refuses rather than risk it,
and the same flag decides whether a bitmap is ours to dispose.
- `PartialHue` decides whether a hue repaints every pixel or only the grey ones,
per item id, out of `tiledata.mul` -- 13,259 of 65,536 ids on this client.
Item 597 is a wooden screen with painted flowers: one mode reddens the
flowers, the other the whole screen. Both decode. The first cut of this reader
bound `TileData` to ServUO's OWN `Server.TileData` (the enclosing namespace
beats `using Ultima;`, and it has a PartialHue flag too), which compiled and
refused every hued key at runtime. Every such type is spelled `Ultima.` now.
Land takes no hue segment: the mode that decides how is an item flag and land
has no equivalent, so `land/3/h33` is refused rather than guessed. `h0` is not a
key either -- hue 0 means "not hued", and the plain key already names it.
Measured through the reader over the whole range: 39,189 statics and 4,244 land
tiles served, and the only refusals are the 9,963 + 12,140 empty index slots
§4.5 predicted. Nothing that carries art is refused.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
ServUO's vendored `Ultima.Animations` reads legacy `anim*.mul` only -- it builds its
five FileIndexes with the constructor that passes `uopFile: null` -- so everything a
modern client moved into `AnimationFrame*.uop` is invisible to it. This adds the one
reader docs/link/v8.md 4.3 reserved for phase 4, and wires it in as a fallback beneath
the legacy path.
What it actually recovers is not what the plan expected, and the difference was
measured before any of this was written:
- Of the EIGHT player-character bodies 4.8 assigned to this phase, only TWO are in
the client at all: gargoyles 666 and 667, in AnimationFrame3.uop. The six ghost
bodies (human 402/403, elf 607/608, gargoyle 694/695) are in no package. The five
packages hold 10,724 entries between them and the
`build/animationlegacyframe/%06d/%02d.bin` name scheme claims every one, so there
is no other naming they could be hiding under.
- The same fallback reaches 233 further bodies the catalogue had nothing for, so the
working set goes from 787 to 1,022 (57 Monster, 26 Animal, 97 Equipment, 50
unlisted, 3 Human, 2 Sea). The catalogue was already 366 Equipment bodies before
this, so its character does not change.
Decided with the org lead before building: the fallback applies to every body rather
than to player bodies alone; ghost ids leave the player-body set entirely (no client
has art for any of them, and listing them only advertised keys that cannot exist); the
UOP path gets its own PNG encoder rather than Bitmap.Save; and a host without
libgdiplus keeps the flat NO_IMAGING refusal rather than serving a partial catalogue.
Three things about the reader:
- It is not the never-sweep rule being broken. That rule exists because a legacy
index is addressed by POSITION, so asking the wrong file returns a giant spider
that decodes cleanly. A UOP entry is addressed by the hash of a name containing the
body id, and the payload declares that id again for `Group.TryOpen` to check, so a
hit is proof of identity. Measured: no hash appears in two packages.
- Validate-as-we-go replaces validate-before-calling, because here we ARE the
library: the block chain is bounded against the file, the record against the file,
the inflated length against the declared one, the frame table against the payload,
and every run header against both the record's remaining bytes and the bitmap it
writes into. Measured the way 4.5 was -- across every UOP body on a stock client it
refuses nothing that carries art. The one body it refuses (286) declares a 0x0
frame, which the vendored decoder treats as absent too.
- No System.Drawing anywhere in it, which is what 4.4 promised: the decode fills a
ushort[] of ARGB1555 and BridgePng encodes that directly (zlib around net48's
raw-deflate-only DeflateStream, CRC32, one IDAT, filter 0).
EXTRACTOR_VERSION 1 -> 2: every client file is byte-identical and the answer is
different, which is exactly what that number exists to say. The UOP packages join
`assets.sources` and the catalogue id, so patching one is drift; `Ultima.Files` cannot
resolve them (its table predates UOP animations) so BridgeUop.FindClientFile does it,
case-insensitively by enumeration for Linux hosts. Manifest and fetch rows carry a new
`source` field (`legacy` / `uop`).
Protocol stays 8 -- no message shape changed, only fields added.
Measured on the live rig (real sidecar, real ServUO, this machine's client):
1,022 rows in ONE page, 1,409 ms cold; six player bodies, all six with art for the
first time (400/401/605/606 legacy, 666/667 uop), all at direction 0; 1,016 at
direction 1; the six ghost bodies absent; 45 duplicate-hash groups of which exactly one
is new, bodies 1531/1532, two distinct records whose first frames match -- legitimate,
and provable only because each payload declares its own body id. The gargoyles were
rendered and looked at, because 4.3's whole point is that this failure mode produces
confident, wrong pictures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Two request families, and they run on opposite threads on purpose.
`assets.bodies` (BridgeBodies) answers the question only code inside ServUO
can: the atlas knows a creature by the class name in Spawns/*.xml, the client
knows it by a body id, and nothing in the tree declares the mapping. Construct
the type, read Body.BodyID, Delete(). That is world mutation, so it answers on
the CORE thread and is the one family here that does not take the asset
worker's slot -- and the batch is capped at 100 names, REFUSED rather than
truncated, because a truncated answer is indistinguishable from a complete one
from the website's side.
`assets.manifest` / `assets.fetch` (BridgeCatalog) are the catalogue, on the
worker. The manifest carries { key, sha256, bytes, width, height } and no
pixels, so an Update fetches only what moved; the fetch carries base64 PNG.
The scan keeps the bytes it hashed rather than decoding all 787 sprites twice.
Three things worth stating about the shapes:
- It pages on the WALL CLOCK as well as on bytes. The rows are ~90 bytes and
the whole catalogue is one page by the byte budget, but building it means
decoding hundreds of sprites against a 10 s reply timeout.
- `catalog` is derived from the client files (sizes, mtimes, both direction
settings, EXTRACTOR_VERSION), not minted per build -- the cache is released
when idle, and a fresh id per build would force a restart mid-import although
nothing about the client moved.
- ARGB1555 is expanded to 32bpp here rather than handed to GDI+, because what
it does with a one-bit alpha channel varies by platform and a black rectangle
behind every sprite would pass any test that only checked the bytes decoded.
Nothing trusts the library's success. Every body goes through CheckEntry and
AnimationRecordSane before it is decoded, which is what keeps the 357 bodies
whose index entry reads `length 0` -- and which the decoder hands back the
PREVIOUS creature's bitmap for -- out of the catalogue.
Walked on a live shard: 787 rows in one 734 ms page; bodies 320, 607, 666 all
absent rather than wrong; 783 at direction 1 and 4 at direction 0; all 455 stock
creature classes resolved at ~190 ms per 100 with zero mobiles leaked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
`PageBuilder` keeps 256 bytes back for the envelope it still has to write, so a
field appended after `Close()` is spent outside that reserve. It fits today by a
wide margin — the largest measured page was 524,086 of a 524,288 budget, and the
budget is half the line cap on purpose — but "nothing is written after Close()"
is the invariant worth having, because the next family to page will copy this.
No behaviour change; the field moves earlier in the same object.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
The shard reads its own client's `Cliloc.enu` and serves it over the bridge, so
the operator stops installing UOFiddler, building a converter against its
`Ultima.dll`, and copying a 5 MB file to the web host every time they patch.
`BridgeCliloc.cs` is the one decoder protocol 8 writes rather than calls
(docs/link/v8.md §4, §9): a port of UOFiddler's `MythicDecompress` +
`MoveToFront` — Beerware, so clean to bring into a GPL-3.0-or-later tree —
rewritten against plain arrays, because the upstream is `Span<T>` /
`ArrayPool<T>` / `BinaryPrimitives` code and ServUO targets `net48`.
The algorithm is deliberately unchanged, including the parts that read oddly.
The three-region count/cursor/end table and the symbol-table shifts are
upstream's, because a tidier rewrite of somebody else's format decoder is a
chance to be subtly wrong in a way that produces plausible text. Two bounds
checks were added and they are the only behavioural difference: the upstream
indexes its payload unchecked, which is safe for a file the client wrote and is
not safe for a file this shard was handed.
Measured on a stock client: 4,989,921 bytes read, decompressed and parsed in
**290 ms**, yielding **67,496** non-blank rows in id order. That number is the
acceptance test — it is what UOFiddler's own DLL produced from this same client
through the converter this phase deletes, so an independent implementation
agrees to the row. Zero U+FFFD; the 696 non-ASCII rows carry correct curly
quotes; the longest row is a 12,149-character EULA, which is why the record
length is read unsigned.
Blanks never reach the wire — ~56,000 of the 123,490 entries are empty strings
the client reserves, and the website discards them at import anyway.
Also on this plane:
* `assets.error` gains a `code`. Phase 1 chose between 403 and 400 by looking
for the word "disabled" in an operator-facing sentence, which makes prose
load-bearing; `DISABLED` / `NOT_FOUND` / `UNREADABLE` / `UNAVAILABLE` /
`BAD_REQUEST` say it directly.
* `Accept` and `Fail` are internal rather than private, because the asset
plane's single slot and its refusal frame are shared by every family on it.
The cursor is a cliloc NUMBER, not an offset: the decoded table is cached for
five idle minutes and released after the last page, so it can be dropped and
rebuilt between two pages of one import, and an index would then silently mean
something else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Asset Bridge phase 1 (docs/link/v8.md §16). Sidecar half: RunicGateway/link#41.
Docs half: RunicGateway/docs#236.
The transport for protocol 8, plus phase 0's validator promoted into the overlay
and extended to animations — which is where the interesting part is.
## 357 of the 1,144 "decodable" bodies are wrong pictures, on a STOCK client
Phase 0 measured the art path and left the animation half unbuilt. It has the same
defect, and it is worse: `GetAnimation` decodes through
`new MemoryStream(m_StreamBuffer, false)` — the whole shared buffer, not the
`length` bytes just read into it — so a truncated or absent record does not even hit
end-of-stream. It sails on into the previous animation's bytes.
Measured directly, because no count could tell:
| Decode body 320 (`lookup 22638982, length 0`) straight after… | Comes back |
|---|---|
| body 12, the dragon | the dragon, 176x167, identical hash |
| body 34, the wolf | the wolf's dimensions, 35x34 |
| body 400, the human male | the human, 27x63, identical hash |
The catalogue is **787 bodies, not 1,144**. Importing the other 357 would have written
duplicate creature portraits into the site showing whichever body the walk decoded
before them.
The record walk refused **0** real bodies on the stock client — the false-refusal
measurement §4.5 says the boundary depends on.
## And four of the twelve player bodies, not six
§5.2 listed the elf ghosts (607, 608) as decoding. Their index entry is `length 0`;
what came back was the elf female at her exact dimensions, because 606 is what the
walk decoded immediately before. Confirmed the same way — 607 after the dragon is
the dragon. Phase 4's UOP decoder now covers eight ids rather than six.
## What is here
- **`overlay/Scripts/Custom/Bridge/BridgeAssets.cs`** — the plane. Accepts on the Core
thread, hands off to a dedicated asset worker, returns immediately. Three rules, all
answering a specific failure:
- **one slot**, second request answered `bridge.busy` (425). `Emit`'s queue is bounded
in *lines*, so 10,000 queued 200 KB replies is 2 GB of shard memory; the bound that
holds is flow control, on the side where the memory is.
- **byte budgets** (`AssetBatchBytes`, 512 KiB) under the sidecar's new 1 MiB cap. The
factor of two is load-bearing: a page always admits its first item, so it may
overshoot by one, and the headroom is what makes that land on the wire.
- **replies, never events** — no `reqId`, no answer. An uncorrelated frame is an event
by definition, and §3.1 is why none of this may be one.
- **`PageBuilder`** — one paging envelope (`more`/`cursor`/`cut`) for all five families
that will page, defined before the first one needs it. `cut` matters: "short page" has
three meanings and only `end` means finished.
- **`assets.sources`** — stage 1 of the import gate, its first user.
- **`BridgeAssetValidator.cs`** — promoted from `tools/`, plus `ResolveAnimation` (the
never-sweep-file-types rule as code, with no loop and no fallback),
`AnimationRecordSane` and the frame walk.
- **`EXTRACTOR_VERSION`**, **`overlay.toml` protocol 7 → 8**, `AssetsEnabled`.
## Hashing had to come off the request path
§6's gate is (size, mtime) first, hash only when those differ. The first call has nothing
cached, so that still means hashing 1.06 GB — inside the sidecar's 10 s reply timeout it
does not fit. So hashes are computed on their own thread (deliberately not the single-slot
worker, which would answer every status poll `bridge.busy` for the whole pass) and the
reply carries `hashing`/`complete`.
Measured on the real rig: first call instant with `sha256: null`, second call **44 ms**
with every hash present.
## Verified on the wire, not just compiled
Real ServUO 57.4 + the real sidecar + the real client. `GET /assets/sources` → 200,
`X-UOLink-Version: 8`, `imaging: {ok: true}`, and §4.6's diagnostic firing on a live
client: `artDataFile: artlegacymul.uop`, with `art.mul` and `artidx.mul` both carrying
`shadowedBy`. Live events kept flowing through the new capped reader with no warnings.
Not exercised live: the disabled-plane 403 and the busy 425 (both unit-tested on the
sidecar side; the shard halves are a config read and a lock).
- [x] AI-assisted — Claude Code (Opus 5)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
docs/link/v8.md §16 phase 0. §4 chose to CALL ServUO's vendored `Ultima`
rather than reimplement it, on the evidence of a PowerShell probe against a
stock client — neither the process nor the client the extractor will run in.
This runs the same decoders from inside a running ServUO 57.4 against a
client broken in 21 catalogued ways, and it found more than a crash.
Adds, all under tools/ and therefore never deployed:
* BridgeAssetProbe.cs — the sweep, plus BridgeAssetValidator, a prototype
of the validate-before-calling response chosen for §4.2's residual risk.
Runs off the Core thread, snapshots Race.AllRaces on it, and writes the
id it is ABOUT to touch to a checkpoint file before every call.
* BridgeMythicCliloc.cs — the §9 Mythic cliloc reader in net48 C#, ported
from UOFiddler (Beerware) with every file-derived index bounds-checked.
Phase 2 promotes this into overlay/.
* patch_client.ps1 — builds the patched client in five tiers. Hashes every
file it touches in the SOURCE before and after and aborts on a change.
* an `assetprobe` verb on BridgeRigDriver, so stock and patched can be run
against one boot rather than two shard processes.
The findings are written up in tools/scaffolding/README.md. The four that
change what phase 1 has to build:
* FileIndex's UOP constructor ends `MulPath = uopPath`, so artLegacyMUL.uop
wins outright and art.mul/artidx.mul are never opened on a current
client. A validator bounding offsets against art.mul is not approximate,
it is nonsense — the first run refused 34,299 good statics on that
mistake, and every refusal looked like a real finding.
* 22,102 WRONG PICTURES on a stock, unmodified client. Empty UOP index
slots read `lookup 0, length 0`; Seek treats that as a hit, and
LoadStatic decodes zero bytes into a shared buffer it reuses, only ever
grows, and fills from a Read whose return value is discarded — so the id
renders the previously-decoded asset. The mul path does not do this
(artidx stores -1), which is why the earlier probe counted 32,766 of
them as "ok". A bulk import that trusted the library would have written
22,102 duplicate images under ids that have no art.
* The validator caught all 8 record-level defects — 7 of which the library
rendered without raising anything, including a verdata lookup past
verdata.mul's own end (Verdata.Seek is bounds-checked nowhere) and an
8000x8000 bitmap allocated from two bytes in a file. It refused NOTHING
across 49,151 statics and 16,384 land tiles on the stock client, which
is the number that makes the boundary defensible.
* §4.1's crash reproduces in-process: one Ultima.Gumps.GetGump(2) and the
ServUO process disappeared — no catch reached, no console line, the
checkpoint file the only record. "Nothing calls Ultima.Gumps" is now an
earned safety rule.
§9 is proven: 123,490 entries in 218 ms, byte-identical to UOFiddler's own
output, with no UOFiddler installed and nothing copied to a server.
Not covered, and named as phase 1 work: the animation path has no validator
at all, and the patched wolf decoded something else in silence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Protocol 7, amended in place. The at-most-once store had two cases and needed a
third.
A handler that THREW keeps its key and stores the failure — correct, because it
may have applied half of itself, and that is the failure this file exists to
prevent. A handler that RETURNED had its reply stored and replayed for ever. There
was no case for a handler that ran to completion and deliberately REFUSED, and
every refusal on this plane is a guard: a missing runId, an unknown item, a cap, a
rate limit, a write that failed and left the value alone. Nothing happened — and
remembering the refusal froze it as the key's answer, so a refusal that WAITING
FIXES could never be retried past.
`uo.world.save` is the case the acceptance walk found it with, and the module says
in as many words what it expected: "429 is the shard's save rate limit, and it is
the one refusal on this plane that waiting fixes … which is what makes a phase
boundary retried rather than abandoned." It was not achievable. Six attempts over
four minutes — three automatic, an operator retry, three more — every one
answering the same frozen sentence, "the last save was 227 seconds ago". The
number could not age because it was the first reply being replayed, and a step's
idempotency key is one value for the life of the step, so the operator's retry
control could not escape it either.
So a refusal releases the key. The refusal is still emitted to the caller, which
is what ends the attempt; it is simply not remembered as this key's answer. A
refusal is recognised by its `kind` ending in `.error`, matched on the suffix so a
handler family added later is covered without extending a list here.
`bridge.error` is excluded deliberately — that is the reply this file writes when
a handler threw, which is exactly the case whose key must be kept. Both completion
paths are covered, including a deferred handler that refuses after its timer arms.
The safety argument is that "nothing happened" holds for every `*.error` reply
here — audited across BridgeWorld, BridgeOneShots, BridgeLeases and
BridgeParticipation, where every refusal is a pre-mutation guard or follows a
`Write` that failed. It is a property this file cannot verify, so it is written
down as a rule handlers must keep: do not answer `*.error` after changing the
world. Report a partial change in an `ok` reply, as the item grant does with
`granted`/`missed` and the despawn with `removed`/`gone`/`refused`.
Verified on a real shard: the same key 25 seconds apart now answers "the last save
was 15 seconds ago" then "40 seconds ago" — a number that moves, with no
`replayed` marker — while a SUCCESSFUL reply is still replayed unchanged, so the
at-most-once guarantee is intact where it matters.
`Status()` gains a `refused=` counter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
The shard half of protocol 7 part b. Two lease planes whose value lives on
something already in the world, and two verbs that cannot be taken back.
A LEASE HERE MUST BE PERSISTED, AND THE CONFIG PLANE'S MUST NOT
11b's fail-safe is stated plainly in its own header: a lease that never reaches
disk means a shard restart is a FREE restore. That argument depends entirely on
the leased value being memory-only too, and here it is not. A spawner is an Item
and is in the world save; a seasonal entry is written to
`Saves/Misc/SeasonalEvents.bin` by ServUO's own `EventSink.WorldSave`. So a
restart does not put either back -- it puts the CHANGE back and throws away the
deadline timer that was going to undo it, leaving the world at the leased value
with nothing here remembering it is borrowed.
So the Bridge gains its THIRD save file, `Saves/Bridge/Leases.bin`, written by
the same `EventSink.WorldSave` that writes what it describes, with deadlines
re-armed at load. A deadline that passed while the shard was down fires AT ONCE:
the promise was "back at baseline by then", and extending it would silently turn
a two-hour lease into however long the outage was. Config holds are still not
written down -- the same argument, applied to planes where its premise is false.
A TARGET IS A SERIAL OR A UniqueId, AND BOTH ARE NEEDED
A serial is what `[props` shows a GM. An `XmlSpawner.UniqueId` is what the
shard's own `Spawns/*.xml` carry -- and it is not a convenience: a dropdown built
from serials is IMPOSSIBLE, because serials are assigned when the world is built
and nothing off-shard knows them. A lease addressable only by serial could have
no authoring list at all.
`Spawner` and `XmlSpawner` share all four property names, which is a fact about
this tree rather than a convenience: the spawn files load as XmlSpawners while
`[add spawner` makes the native one. And it is `MaxCount`, not the `Amount`
EVENTS_PLAN.md named -- there is no such property. `MinDelay`/`MaxDelay` are
TimeSpans, so the wire carries seconds.
The allowlist is checked against the object's OWN type, which is the sentence the
whole plane rests on: a serial is a number a caller chooses, so that check is all
that stands between `Spawner.MaxCount` and any item on the shard. Reflection is
bounded three ways -- the pair must be in the catalog, the property must carry
`CommandProperty` (so this can never reach further than `[set` could), and its
CLR type must be one this file renders.
THE SELF-CHECK, AND THE ONE FAILURE NO PROBE CAN CATCH
§N10 in full: a config key is probed live (write, read back, restore) because
there is exactly one of it. A property CANNOT be -- thousands of instances and no
canonical one, so probing would mean writing to somebody's spawner at boot. What
is verified instead is everything verifiable without touching the world.
And `TreasuresOfTokuno` is excluded by name, because `IsActive()` reads its own
`DropEra` rather than `Status`: the write succeeds, the value reads back, a
compare-and-set restore passes, and the capability does nothing at all. That is
N10's "capability that lies" in its purest form and the only way to find it is to
read the source. §G also called this toggle "small and safe" -- it is safe, but
`OnStatusChange()` generates or removes world content for six of the eight.
THE ONE-SHOTS
Who receives a grant is answered HERE. The website has the list too, but a module
cannot read core's tables, so the alternative was a new core surface handing
participants to a module. Not needed: 11b's participation ledger already holds
them, keyed by the same serials. A run with no ledger is a 404; a run whose
ledger is open and empty is a 200 with `granted: 0`, because an event nobody
attended still happened. An undeliverable grant is DELETED rather than dropped --
`AddItem` failing on a full backpack would otherwise leave it at (0,0).
A save stops the world, so it is rate-limited rather than capped, counting
ServUO's own autosave as the last one. Refused, never queued: a queued save would
land at a moment nobody chose.
VERIFIED
Compiles clean (0 warnings, 0 errors). Then a full walk on the real local ServUO
57.4 world against the release sidecar:
- all six catalog keys survive the boot self-check; `current` is correctly absent
on the targeted rows and filled when a target is named;
- a spawner reads the same by UniqueId and by serial;
- TWO RUNS ON TWO SPAWNERS BOTH SUCCEED while a second run on the SAME spawner is
refused -- the whole reason for the targeted ref;
- a GM edit behind the plane's back yields `lease.drifted` and the world is left
at 55, not reverted; a clean release restores to baseline;
- ToT refused with its own reason, a bad status refused, Fellowship toggled;
- grant: no ledger 404, empty ledger 200 `granted: 0`, unknown item 400, over the
stack bound 400; save 200 then 429 inside the interval;
- BOTH HOLDS AND BOTH LEASED VALUES SURVIVE save + clean shutdown + restart, the
deadlines re-arm, and a release across the restart still compare-and-sets;
- with only a CONFIG lease held, `Leases.bin` is 8 bytes and names nothing;
- refusals: targeted-with-no-target, untargeted-with-a-target, out of range, over
30 days, a target that is not there, and a `ChainChest` refused as a spawner;
- 90 seconds becomes `00:01:30` and the baseline reads back as 18000;
- a deleted target reads `unreadable` and releases `targetGone: true`.
The test world was never saved after the deliberate deletion, so it is intact.
Refs: docs/link/v7.md §11-§14, docs/website/EVENTS_PLAN.md Phase 12b
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Five verbs an author sees -- creatures, an enhanced "boss", an oracle NPC, a
temporary gate, decoration -- and ONE command family underneath them, because
every one of them ends in the same sentence: an object exists, and this run
owns it. `world.spawn` / `world.despawn` / `world.owned` carry a `what`
discriminator, and the per-verb differences are fields rather than kinds.
The ownership registry is PERSISTED, and that is forced rather than chosen. A
spawned creature is in the world save, so it survives the restart that proves a
town-crier line gone -- which already rules out reconcile-by-boot-stamp. But the
record of which run owns which serial has nowhere else to live: in memory it is
lost in the restart the creatures survive, and only in the website's ledger it
is not held here at all, so `world.despawn` would delete whatever serial it was
handed and "never touches a creature it did not create" would have no mechanism
behind it. So the Bridge gains its second persisted file beside
`Participation.bin` -- written by the same world save as the objects it
describes, so the two cannot get out of step.
The oracle is ours rather than `XmlSpawner2.XmlDialog`'s, and that engine is the
reason for both halves of the decision. Its `SpeechEntry` is the evidence the
shape is right -- `Text` plus comma-separated `Keywords`, a keyword-less entry
as the greeting, a proximity range, a conversation lock. It is also why not to
build on it: `SpeechEntry` carries an `Action` string, XmlSpawner's
command-scripting language, which would leave an arbitrary-command field one
step from an event author. `Mobile.OnMovement` (delivered to every mobile in
range -- the `HandlesOnMovement` filter applies only to Items) and
`Mobile.HandlesOnSpeech`/`OnSpeech` are native virtuals and are all it needs.
Every `Bridge.EventsMax*` REFUSES rather than clamps, on `LeaseMaxDurationSec`'s
argument from 11b: the shard's bound exists for the case where the website is
wrong. `Bridge.EventsEnabled` gates all of it -- spawning is the same consent
11b introduced that switch for, not a third one.
Decoration carries an `itemId`, because `Static` accounts for 5031 of the tree's
decoration placements under 1992 different graphics: for that class the graphic
IS the identity. Never applied to a `BaseAddon`, whose own ItemID is not what a
player sees. Containers are refused outright -- teardown would delete whatever a
player had left inside.
`tools/scaffolding` gains `worldgone <serial>`, which deletes an object behind
the registry's back. It is the one outcome the rig cannot reach by asking the
bridge -- every bridge verb that removes an object also drops its row -- and it
is what a player's sword does every time they kill an event creature.
Verified on a real ServUO 57.4 world (206k items, 42k mobiles) against the
release sidecar: all five verbs place; every ceiling refuses; a container and an
unknown type refuse; one run cannot despawn another's object; the registry and
its objects both survive a save and a clean restart (`pruned: 0`); a creature
deleted behind the registry's back comes back `gone` rather than `removed`; and
a five-second gate is collected by the shard's own deadline with `world.expired`
on the wire.
Refs: docs/link/v7.md, docs/website/EVENTS_PLAN.md Phase 12a
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Protocol 6 amended in place. Two mechanisms behind one new default-off gate,
`Bridge.EventsEnabled` -- deliberately not `AdminWriteEnabled`, because enabling
the admin plane is consenting to staff moderation from a screen a human is
looking at, and this is consenting to the world being changed and watched on a
schedule, unattended.
BridgeLeases: a live config value held for a bounded time, with the deadline
honoured on the shard whether or not the website is heard from again, and a
compare-and-set restore that reports `drifted` rather than overwriting a GM's
deliberate change. Memory-only -- nothing calls Config.Save() -- so a restart is
a free restore.
BridgeParticipation: presence in a declared area plus kill credit inside it,
keyed by character serial, persisted in the world save. The Bridge's first
persisted state, because a run spans hours and an in-memory tally would regress
every attendee's score after one restart. Its snapshot is also the first handler
that DEFERS, which makes `bridge.busy` reachable for the first time.
And it immediately found a defect in 11a: BridgeIdempotency.Busy built its frame
with Begin("bridge.busy") and then appended a diagnostic `.Str("kind", ...)`, so
the object carried two `kind` fields and every JSON parser takes the last. The
sidecar answered 200 instead of 425. Renamed `busyKind`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
A command carrying an `idempotencyKey` is now executed at most once: a repeat is
answered with the original reply rather than re-run. That is the precondition
every world verb in Phase 12 is waiting on, and it is what let `uo.broadcast`
stop being un-retryable.
The gate sits in BridgeBoot's inbound dispatch, not in each handler, so it covers
every kind including ones a later protocol adds. A command with no key behaves
exactly as it did before, which leaves the admin screens unchanged.
Four rules, each a decision rather than an implementation detail: reserve on
receipt (so a handler that defers is covered, answering `bridge.busy` to a repeat
in flight); a key that has begun is never released, not even when the handler
throws; a replay is stamped with the REPEAT's correlation id, because the
sidecar's reqId is fresh per call and replaying the original would hang the retry;
and the bound is loud, because an evicted key is the guarantee's one hole.
`champ.boss.killed` rides along because a bump costs a release, a bundle and an
operator update on every shard. It fires from EventSink.CreatureDeath, detected
by type so a boss that popped and died inside one sweep is still reported, and it
carries the damage table that exists at the death and nowhere else.
overlay.toml protocol = 6, in this commit rather than a later one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
`BridgeMarket.Signature()` diffs shop name, owner, map, coordinates and the
item/price list -- the things a LISTING is made of. Protocol 5 added a `fees`
block to the frame and the change detector never learned about it.
So a vendor quietly running down its gold altered nothing the sweep compared,
emitted no frame, and `uo.vendor.expiring` -- the notification whose entire
subject is a vendor running out of gold -- could fire only by coincidence: when
somebody happened to reprice an item on a shop that was already broke. Proved on
the engagement Phase 11b live rig by setting a vendor's held gold to zero and
watching no frame follow.
The signature carries the DERIVED values, `exempt` and `periodsRemaining`, not
the raw ones. An integer division moves only when the shard's own answer to "is
this vendor in danger" moves; `HoldGold` changes on every sale and `NextPayTime`
on every tick, and keying on either would re-emit a fat listing frame for a shop
whose listings had not changed.
Emit CADENCE, not frame shape: no field added, PROTOCOL_VERSION untouched, and
`overlay.toml` unchanged. The general form is worth carrying forward -- a
sweep-based kind has a change detector, and a field added to the frame but not to
the detector ships correct and arrives never.
Also adds `tools/scaffolding/BridgeRigDriver.cs`: the shard driven from outside
the game over a polled command file. A walk asserts what happened BETWEEN two
steps, so the steps have to be separated by the observer rather than by a
hard-coded delay -- and ServUO's console takes a fixed verb set, so `[p5probe`
cannot be typed at a headless shard at all. Never deployed; `deploy.ps1` copies
only `overlay/`. The README gains the two ServUO facts the walk cost a rebuild
each to learn: a condemned house cannot be refreshed, and only a clean shutdown
emits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three emitter changes and the overlay's protocol declaration, in one PR because
"The bridge is a contract": overlay.toml must be bumped in the same change as the
emitters or the next bundle silently fails to compose.
BridgeSweeps — house.decay gains ownerName and a nested `schedule`
{dynamicDecay, nextStage, decayPeriodSec, estimatedCollapse}.
estimatedCollapse is emitted only where ServUO can actually know it. Dynamic decay
(Core.ML) draws each stage's duration at RANDOM when the stage is entered, so
NextDecayStage is exact for the next transition and nothing beyond it is known —
collapse becomes exact only at IDOC, where the next transition IS the collapse.
Static decay is a pure function of LastRefreshed and DecayPeriod, so it is exact at
every stage. Emitting it anywhere else would publish a guess as a fact, and on the
website's side that becomes a dated promise in someone's mail.
BridgeMarket — vendor.listing gains ownerAcct and a nested `fees` block.
ownerAcct is the one that matters structurally: the frame has carried ownerName
since v3, but a character name joins to nothing — only the game account is the
website's link key. The fees block resolves PlayerVendor.PayTimer's dismissal rule
(pay > totalGold => Destroy) on the shard, because both halves of that comparison
differ between ServUO's two vendor systems and re-deriving them downstream would be
a second implementation of a rule that lives in core.
No daysRemaining: under the old vendor system a pay period is a UO day
(Clock.MinutesPerUODay, about two real hours), so the obvious name would be wrong
by a factor of twelve on exactly the shards least likely to notice. periodsRemaining
plus the interval, and dismissalAt as an instant. A commission vendor has no pay
timer at all and reports exempt with no schedule — "never dismissed" is not the same
as "dismissed in 400 days".
BridgeEvents — a new account.login.result kind.
EventSink.AccountLogin is a veto hook that fires BEFORE the auth decision, and
AccountLoginEventArgs constructs with Accepted = true, so the existing
account.login.attempt fires on successful logins too and cannot carry a verdict. A
security rule built on it would have mailed "someone tried to get into your account"
every time the player logged in.
The verdict is read one Core slice later via DelayCall(Zero). That needs no core
patch AND does not depend on handler subscription order, which ServUO does not define
and a shard's own scripts can change. reason is omitted on an accept, because
ALRReason's zero value is Invalid and would read as a failure reason. The address is
resolved inside the handler, since AccountLogin_ReplyRej disposes the NetState before
the deferred read runs. The password is never read, logged or emitted.
tools/scaffolding/BridgeProtocol5Probe.cs drives all three on a live shard, and the
README records the two traps it took to get there — both of which produce SILENCE
rather than an error, so each looks exactly like a broken emitter:
* An in-process login probe can never produce accepted:true. AccountHandler calls
acct.HasAccess(e.State) BEFORE it checks the password, and a null NetState fails
that. Only a real socket proves the accepted half — and it is the better test
anyway, since it also produces the real ip.
* Forcing a decay stage on a house that cannot decay emits nothing at all. Only
Condemned and ManualRefresh houses decay; an AutoRefresh one — and the owner's
NEWEST house is always AutoRefresh — has a DecayLevel getter that calls
ResetDynamicDecay() and reports Ageless, wiping the forced stage before the sweep
reads it.
Verified on the local rig against the release sidecar: a house walked
Fairly -> Greatly -> IDOC carried estimatedCollapse on the IDOC frame and only there;
every vendor's periodsRemaining matched funds/chargePerPeriod, including one at 0
whose dismissalAt equals its next tick; a real socket login gave
accepted:false reason:BadPass and then accepted:true. Compiles clean against ServUO
57.4 reference assemblies.
Docs: RunicGateway/docs link/v5.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the screenshot rig needed and the dressing pass could not give it
(runicgateway.com PLAN.md §13 phase 9).
GUILDS. The world had none — the guild board on the site was two rows of week-old
cache for guilds that had been deleted, and the website's Teams reconcile from that
board, so Teams was empty too. There is nothing to rename here: a guild has to exist
before it can be called something, so this builds four of them out of characters the
seeder already made, with a leader, two officers per guild and an alliance across the
first two. Idempotent by name, and a character already in a guild is never moved.
IDOC. "Houses in danger" reads a column the ingest only writes when the plugin reports
a house CHANGING stage; the registry frame carries the stage too, but the ingest leaves
that column to the transition feed so the two cannot clobber each other. A house that is
already collapsing when the site connects is therefore invisible: the sweep baselines it
at IDOC and no transition is ever emitted. The staging is now two passes — prime a few
houses at a middle stage at boot, collapse them 150 seconds later — so the site watches
it happen. Where too few houses can decay at all, their owners' accounts are backdated,
which is the same lever the seeder pulled and the same one a real shard pulls when
somebody stops playing.
Also: "Bridge Test Shop", left over from a hand-run smoke test, now gets a name like
every other vendor.
Both of the site-side asymmetries above are recorded as product observations in the
file rather than patched from here.
Test scaffolding, in tools/, never deployed — deploy.ps1 copies overlay/ only.
Verified against the local ServUO tree: four guilds and their rosters reached the
website over a real sidecar, and two houses reached "Houses in danger".
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
BridgeSeeder builds a world at realistic scale, which is what the bridge needed;
it never needed the world to look like anything. So a vendor is `seed vendor`
trading as `Seed Shop 810`, a character is `Seed004A` and a house sign reads
`Seed House 12` — and every one of those strings travels the whole bridge and
lands on the marketplace, the guild roster and the housing pages of the website.
That is fine for a protocol test and wrong for the marketing site's screenshots
(runicgateway.com PLAN.md §13 phase 9, D42/D46).
BridgeDemoDress renames them in place and seeds nothing: prices, listing counts,
decay stages, fame and skills stay exactly as the seeder left them, so the data
keeps its provenance and only the strings a human reads change. Names come from
fixed tables hashed off each object's serial, so a re-run reproduces the same
world and screenshots can be retaken later and still match.
It also does two things the screenshots needed and nothing else provides:
- stages a few condemned houses back into the last decay levels, because decay
is a live process and "Houses in danger" is empty by the time anyone looks
- sets a known password on seed_000, because logging a character in is the only
way to make the online roster non-empty and the seeder assigns a random GUID.
The password is read from Bridge.cfg, never compiled in.
Test scaffolding, in tools/, never deployed — deploy.ps1 copies overlay/ only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
installer#22's release run built every artifact, pushed its tag, then took a 500
from POST /releases one second later and exited 22 -- leaving the tag orphaned
with no binaries. Re-running published it unchanged, so the 500 was a race with
the tag push rather than a bad request.
This repo's release step has the same two gaps verbatim, and it is where the
whole problem was first seen.
`curl -sSf` prints no response body on an error status, so such a failure leaves
only "curl: (22) ... error: 500" in the log and the cause has to be inferred
from timestamps. Every call now captures the body and prints it on failure.
Nothing retried, so a transient 5xx became a permanent orphan. The POST now
retries five times with a 5/10/15/20s backoff. 4xx is deliberately not retried:
a bad token or a malformed body will not improve by being sent again.
The asset upload gets the same treatment. That matters more here than anywhere
else: this release ships an overlay tarball and a SHA256SUMS, and a release
whose checksums do not cover the tarball they advertise is worse than no
release, because that file is the trust anchor and the installer verifies
against it.
The third gap is the one this repo proves. The orphan-tag recovery in the plan
step is VERSION-SCOPED -- it computes VERSION from the newest tag plus the bump,
then only checks refs/tags/v${VERSION}. That recovers an orphan on the very next
run and is useless afterwards, because once any releasable commit lands the next
run computes a NEW version and never looks at the old tag again.
v0.1.0 was the proof, and the proof is pointed: the commit that ADDED that
recovery was itself typed "fix(release): preflight credentials and recover the
orphaned v0.1.0 tag", so it bumped the version to v0.1.1 -- and the run that
introduced the recovery stepped straight past the tag it was written to rescue.
The tag stayed orphaned from 2026-08-04 until today.
So the plan step now sweeps every v* tag and warns about any without a release.
It warns rather than recovers, deliberately: publishing an old version would
mean building today's tree and shipping it under a tag whose tree it is not,
which is worse than the inconsistency it fixes. It never fails the run either --
a sweep that can break a good release is a sweep someone will delete.
v0.1.0 itself is deleted, on the org lead's decision. Nothing referenced it: it
is three releases behind, and no published bundle names it -- not even
bundle-2026.08.04, because the tag never had a release for a bundle to point at.
It was 724262548b, the merge of #7, recorded here
so the tag can be recreated if that turns out to be wrong.
Verified by extracting every run block from the YAML: bash -n clean across all
of them, the YAML parses, no empty template token, the asset loop still the
tarball-and-checksums pair rather than link's three binaries, the retry loop
exercised against a stubbed curl across seven cases, and the sweep run against
the real repositories -- reporting v0.1.0 before the deletion and clean after.
Typed ci(...) rather than fix(...) on purpose: the plan step bumps on feat/fix,
and this changes no artifact, so a release here would be an empty one. That is
the same rule the fix commit above tripped over.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Protocol 4 is still on `edge` and unreleased, so this amends it in place rather
than bumping: `PROTOCOL_VERSION` and `overlay.toml` both stay at 4. A bump is
only owed once a protocol has reached `main`.
Phase 1 shipped the roster member as the standard actor object, which carries no
guild rank. The consequence surfaced in Teams phase 2: the website could only
learn leadership from the board's single `leader` field, so `getTeamLeaders()`
could return exactly one member — while a UO guild routinely has several at rank
4, and TEAMS.md §2.5 treats multiple leaders as the normal case.
Roster members now carry `rank` (0-4, 4 being Leader per RankDefinition.Ranks)
plus `rankCliloc`, or `rankName` when a custom rank definition uses a literal
string instead of a cliloc. Only the raw rank goes on the wire: ServUO names the
five standard ranks with cliloc ids and ships no text for them, so this shard
cannot produce "Warlord" without a client-file table it does not have. The
website module has one, and resolving a game term is its job in any case.
`withGuildRank` is a parameter on `Actors()` rather than a change to the shared
actor writer. Rank is a property of a mobile's membership of THIS guild, not of
the mobile, and every other actor this bridge writes is a bystander, a killer or
a governor, where guild rank is meaningless. `WriteActor` is split into a
fields-only writer so both forms share one definition of an actor.
## The trap this found
**`PlayerMobile.GuildRank` returns `RankDefinition.Leader` for anyone at
GameMaster or above, whatever their actual rank.** It is a gameplay convenience
so staff can operate a guild stone, and it is emphatically not a claim about who
leads the guild -- but it is what the only public accessor returns, and the true
value sits in a private field. Emitting it verbatim would have published every
staff member in a guild as a guild leader on a public website.
Staff are therefore written with no rank fields at all. A staff account that
genuinely leads its guild shows as an unranked member, which is a visible gap
rather than a false claim -- the right way round, given the name on that roster
reaches a public page.
## Verification
This repo has no CI build, so compiling is not evidence. Run against the local
ServUO tree with a throwaway probe that synthesised a guild from real
PlayerMobiles across the rank ladder, with one account promoted to GameMaster.
The emitted frame:
tester rank 4 cliloc 1062959 (Leader)
Seed000A rank 4 cliloc 1062959 (Leader) <- two at once, the point of this
Seed000B rank 3 cliloc 1062960 (Warlord)
Seed000C rank 2 cliloc 1062961 (Emissary)
Seed001A rank 1 cliloc 1062962 (Member)
Seed001B no rank fields <- GameMaster, stored rank 0,
getter reported rank 4
The probe printed stored vs reported rank per member, so the getter's substitution
is recorded rather than inferred: `Seed001B storedRank=0 reportedRank=4
access=GameMaster`. The line parsed as valid JSON.
`dotnet build Scripts.csproj` clean, 0 warnings. Probe deleted, tree rebuilt, and
`deploy.ps1 -Verify` reports 0 changes against the overlay. The shard was killed
without a world save, so the synthetic guild did not persist (Guilds.bin still 0
bytes).
**The sidecar needs no change.** It treats roster members as opaque values and
never reads a field inside one -- `accumulate_roster` moves them and
`upsert_guild_roster` stores them, both by value. That is the forwarder design
paying off.
Refs docs/link/v4.md §2.3
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Protocol 2 could say how many members a guild had, not who they were, and there
is no EventSink for leaving a guild — so PROTOCOL_2.md §10.1 deferred the whole
membership half. This closes it.
The sweep now holds each guild's member serial **set** instead of folding it into
the signature as a sum. That buys two things. A set comparison cannot collide,
where a sum could: one member joining and another leaving between two passes
offset each other and the guild looked unchanged. And a set can be *differenced*,
which is what makes a per-member `guild.leave` possible without a core tap —
departures are simply the prior set minus the current one.
A changed set also re-emits `guild.roster`, the full member list. That is what
lets the departure events stay advisory: a consumer building a "so-and-so left"
feed wants them, but a consumer holding a membership table only needs the roster,
so nothing downstream has to replay deltas to stay correct. On a guild's first
sweep there is no prior set, so nothing is reported as leaving — an unknown
roster becoming known is not 155 people leaving at once.
A roster is the only fat frame this plugin emits — measured at roughly 69 bytes
per member against a real 155-member guild — and the sidecar reads a line with no
length bound. So members per frame are capped (default 500, about 35 KB), and a
guild over the cap is split into frames carrying `seq`, `more` and `total`. Every
realistic guild emits exactly one frame with `seq` 0 and `more` false, which is
the same shape as if chunking did not exist. Verified against the real sidecar
with the cap forced down to 50, which produced 50/50/50/5 across four frames.
The reconnect baseline is spread rather than fired in one pass. `OnConnected`
clears the diff caches, so every guild looks changed at once, and building
hundreds of fat frames in a single Core-thread tick is exactly the stall this
bridge exists to avoid. At most GuildRosterGuildsPerTick guilds emit a roster per
sweep; a guild over budget keeps its old member set, so it still reads as changed
next pass. The sweep re-arms itself after 2s while a baseline is draining, so
catch-up takes seconds rather than one full sweep interval per batch.
BridgeJson gained the array writer it never had — there was no way to express a
list of objects at all. Every field helper emits a leading `,"name":`, so Actor
is split into a bare-object writer that both the single and array forms use.
overlay.toml protocol -> 4, in this commit rather than a later one: CI folds it
into the release manifest and the installer refuses to pair an overlay and a
sidecar that disagree, so a bump landing separately from the emitters would
silently fail to compose into a bundle.
Verified on a live ServUO shard against the real Rust sidecar (not a stub): 155
members seeded from real PlayerMobiles, four roster frames reassembled to 153
entries on the board after two members were removed, two guild.leave frames with
the correct serials, and the departed serials absent from the re-emitted roster.
Refs: docs/website/TEAMS.md Part 12 Phase 1
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
"## Deploy" led with deploy.ps1 and mentioned the installer only
afterwards, which is backwards now that the installer is released.
- Deploy leads with the installer, with the by-hand overlay copy
(INSTALL.md Appendix A2) as the supported alternative.
- deploy.ps1 gets its own subsection as the developer path: it deploys
from a working tree, which is the one thing the installer cannot do,
and it installs no sidecar and checks no protocol pairing.
- CONTRIBUTING: note that changes reach shards through a release, so a
change that only works when deploy.ps1 copies it does not ship.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>