# Changelog

*Last updated: Friday, April 3, 2026*

## Active Areas

| Area | Changes (30d) | Status |
|------|---|---|
| Main loop & systems | 9 churn | Active — intent-based architecture solidifying |
| Dialog system | 10 churn | Active — projectiles, camera, rendering |
| Render core | 15 churn | Active — text pipeline, font atlas, globals |
| World state | 8 churn | Active — intent storage, component management |
| Player mechanics | 6 churn | Stable — character bundle, player states |
| Shader system | 4 churn | Active — gizmo lines, dissolve, snow light |

## Recent Changes

### Intent-Based Architecture
- **Completed major refactor** (3 weeks ago): Systems now communicate through one-frame `Storage<T>` intents instead of direct function calls.
- **Intent types**: `FollowPlayerIntent`, `StopFollowingIntent`, `CameraTransitionIntent`, `SpawnParticleIntent`
- **Consumer pattern**: Systems read intents from world storage, act on them, then remove them. Producers don't import consumer modules.
- **Documented pattern** in `docs/intent-based-architecture.md` with full execution order contract.

### Dialog System Suite
- **Dialog state machine**: Ink-based story progression with display timer, projectile phases, parry mechanics.
- **Projectile system**: Spawns physics-driven projectiles with parry windows; detects hits vs. evasion vs. parries (I/J/L buttons).
- **Dialog camera**: Auto-frames all dialog participants; transitions smoothly between follow-cam and dialog-cam via intent; computes centroid + spread.
- **Bubble rendering**: Billboard-based text with word-wrap, dynamic sizing (tail height → body dimensions), border/fill colors, RGBA text atlas.

### Text & Font Rendering
- **Font atlas pipeline**: Pre-rasterized glyphs (16×8 grid, 124px cells) from Departure Mono font.
- **Text measurement**: Character-width aware layout with line wrapping against max bubble width.
- **Vertex-based text**: Custom `TextVertex` (position, UV) fed into dedicated text pipeline with view-proj uniform.

### Particle System
- **Intent-driven spawning**: `SpawnParticleIntent` queues particle emissions; `particle_intent_system` transfers into persistent `ParticleBuffers`.
- **Configurable emitters**: Burst count, lifetime range, speed range, directional spread (cone), gravity, size range, color gradient.
- **Snow particle integration**: Spawned continuously at camera position for screen-fill effect.

### Render Pipeline
- **Global renderer via thread-local**: `render::global` module centralizes `Device`/`Queue` access for loaders and systems; long-term goal is explicit `RenderContext` params.
- **Gizmo shader**: Fragment shader outputs world-normal as axis color (X=red, Y=green, Z=blue) for entity transform editing.
- **Snow light accumulation**: Persistent texture tracking deformation; blue-noise dithering maps snow brightness into tile pattern (brightness > threshold → dither step).
- **Dissolve shader**: Blue-noise masked alpha cutoff; controlled by `enable_dissolve` uniform.

### Tree Occlusion & Instances
- **Tree dissolve system**: Per-instance dissolve amounts lerp toward targets at configurable speed.
- **Occlusion detection**: Instances between camera and player dissolve based on perpendicular distance to camera-to-player ray.
- **Instance buffer sync**: Tree instances updated into GPU buffer after dissolve state changes.

### Trigger & Event Flow
- **Sphere-based triggers**: Continuous state tracking (Idle ↔ Inside); fires `TriggerEvent` with `Entered`/`Exited` kinds.
- **Activation filtering**: `TriggerFilter::Player` specifies which entity types can activate.
- **Event queue**: Events collected in `world.trigger_events` and consumed by dialog system to spawn bubbles.

### Player State Machine
- **State hierarchy**: Idle, Walking, Jumping, Falling, Leaping (dash), Rolling.
- **Transition logic**: Grounded checks, input presence, airtime duration.
- **Physics per-state**: Damping on enter (Idle), horizontal input application (Walking), vertical velocity control (Jumping).

### Editor & Inspector
- **Dear ImGui integration**: Inspector window with player state display, entity transform gizmos.
- **Entity selection**: Right-click picking; gizmo renders for selected entity when editor active.
- **UI mode gating**: Systems check `editor.wants_keyboard()`/`wants_mouse()` to suppress game input during inspector focus.

## Stability

| Area | Last Changed | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Physics manager | 80+ days | Stable |
| Camera follow | 30 days | Stable — intent system reduced coupling |
| Movement component | 30+ days | Stable |
| Mesh loader | 30+ days | Stable |
| Spotlight sync | 30 days | Stable |
| State machine physics | 30 days | Stable — core transitions unchanged |
| Debug colliders | 30+ days | Stable |

## Open Threads

- **Global renderer thread-local**: Marked for gradual migration to explicit `RenderContext` parameters on systems/loaders. Current implementation works; refactor is low-priority.
- **Text rendering completeness**: Font atlas + text pipeline in place; scaling and color support functional. No known issues.
- **Dialog parry mechanics**: Projectile system complete; integration with Ink outcomes working. Gameplay tuning (PARRY_WINDOW_RADIUS, HIT_RADIUS) ongoing.
- **Tree occlusion performance**: Occlusion system runs every frame; no visibility culling yet. Scalability unknown for >100 trees.