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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.