PROCITY/docs/LANES/ROUND38_INSTRUCTIONS.md

PROCITY — Round 38 instructions (from Fable, integrator)

Date: 2026-07-26 · R37 closed green: the floor is level. The kerb is footpath at +0 draws, 14 posters are out of the road, two vacuous gates are dead, the budget is pinned at 292 draws / 124,793 tris (8 draws of margin), the shared instance cap is 256, and ctx.onChunkBuilt is finally subscribable. Round 38 is WAVE 1 — INHABITATION: four items that make the town feel lived in. Three of the four are +0 or +1 draws. None needs a rig, a clip, or John's mocap footage.

Charter: V8_SOMEONE_LIVES_HERE.md · evidence: REVIEW_CITY_PATTERNS.md · animals: ANIMALS_ANSWER.md · R37's rulings and debt ledger: ROUND37_INSTRUCTIONS.md.

THE CORRECTIONS THAT ARE BINDING (adversarial review already killed the naive version)

Do not re-derive these. They cost a review pass each.

1. 1.1 is SIX NEW MIXER LAYERS, not "generalise audio.js:300-311" — audio.js has hardcoded bed layers per source class, not a generic point-source system. There is no panning: playSfx is mono with a gain multiplier, so distance works and direction does not. Say so in the notes or budget a StereoPannerNode. Derive day-of-week locally.
2. 1.2's state field is NOT populated on all 23 towns — newtown_godverse and redhill_godverse carry state: ''. The vacuous arm must be per-town, not per-corpus, or those two silently take a default branch with no SKIP printed.
3. 1.2's skyBias must NOT go through lighting.setSky — externalSky (lighting.js:53) is a one-way latch with no un-set path. Feed the base skyName selection instead. townCharacter(null) returning the frozen literals makes classic byte-identical by construction rather than by flag — that is the right mechanism, use it.
4. 1.3: the ice-cream-container hat is CUT (no street verb exists; index.html binds only ] [ P M T plus a click that enters a shop). And the magpie's territory must scale with the road graph: 370 pole anchors on synthetic vs 10,014 poles / 13,730 tree anchors across 2,593 edges on bendigo_real — a capacity-4 magpie there is a swooping town where you never meet the magpie. R37's own anchor-supply measurement says the same: synthetic 246 poles / 6.8 km vs bendigo 7,325 / 188 km. Spend the cap proximity-first through ctx.onChunkBuilt, which B wired last round precisely for this.
5. 1.4 is built INSIDE buildings.js's existing boxMats InstancedMesh (it already carries shells, parapets and verandah posts, and buildHouse already pushes into it) → hoist, fence run, aerial and tank are +0 draws. A separate world/yards.js cannot reach boxMats and would pay a draw the proposal then presented as its honest cost. Only the alpha washing quads need a new mesh → +1 draw/chunk total, not +2.
6. 1.4's washing needs an INVERTED wind weight. wind.js:38-45 computes wH = clamp(y/4.4,0,1); wH *= wH — top-weighted, base planted. Correct for a gum, exactly wrong for a sheet pegged at the top. At 1.6 m the amplitude is 0.7–4.5 cm, i.e. visually inert. Either write an inverted-weight sway mode or drop the washing this round and say which.
7. 1.4 is synthetic-only until the civic fetch lands (all 21 real towns are 100% use:'shop', one district). It ships on the default boot — which is still the boot every player gets — and extends to real towns in a later round. Scope it honestly; do not fake it.
8. REJECT the hardyards GLBs on provenance (39 GLBs, provenance documented for one file). Generate ours. This was the best licence judgement in the review packet.
9. The budget line every item must answer: margin is 8 draws, and triangles are the cheap resource (~75k spare). A town-wide InstancedMesh is 1 draw at any N; a per-chunk type is +1 × up to 31 live chunks. Prefer town-wide. Cap 256, ≤24 tris/instance.

The ledger

1.1 — SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE: the audio inhabitation layer (E + B, F gates)

The review's only unqualified SHIP. The manifest ships 7 ambience / 9 sfx / 7 music and not one animal, domestic or seasonal sound. A dog going off behind a paling fence, a mower two streets over, a radio through a window, sprinklers, a roller door, a distant magpie carol — the sound of a life happening off-screen, at a seeded anchor so it is the same dog on the same street every time you walk it. E: ~30-line numpy generators in gen_audio.py's PACK registry, deterministic via crc32(name), 🟢 original by construction. B: the six mixer layers + seeded anchor placement + distance falloff. Budget: zero draws, zero tris — the only item in the epoch that cannot touch the budget under any circumstance. Audio pack ~10 MB → ~11 MB against a 25 MB cap. Gate (F): keep the falsifiability control verbatim — point one table entry at a non-existent key and assert the leg FAILS. Every other gate this round copies its shape.

1.2 — TWENTY-THREE TOWNS: the per-town character vector (B + E, F gates)

Twenty-three real towns currently differ only in street layout and shop names. Give each a ground palette, an ambience mix and a sky bias. ground.js's add() merges each surface class into ONE mesh for the whole town regardless of size (verified: exactly 5 meshes) — a palette swap is +0 draws / +0 tris, the strongest cost claim in the packet. gravel (verge) and reddust (outback) already ship in the manifest and are selected by nothing. E: 3–4 new gen_skins.py --local grounds (dry summer grass, cool-temperate grass, red-dusted bitumen, coastal sand) so "Darwin is red dust, Hobart is cold light" is real.

1.3 — THE MAGPIE (B + E, F gates)

Swooping season: for ~six weeks of the game's year, one bird on one street will not let you walk past it. Real behaviour — a 6-week window Aug–Oct, and ~90% of males never swoop, so one bird, not a plague. A static mesh on a scripted parabola (the tram's verified position-is-a-function-of-(seed,time) contract), wing wave through wind.js's amplitude uniform, byte-identical at amp 0. +1 draw / ≤900 tris. Gate (F): keep "the day-roll clears the latch and localStorage gained no new key" verbatim — the best single arm in the packet and a genuine delta-law falsifier.

1.4 — BACKYARD AUSTRALIA (B + E, F gates)

Hills Hoists, paling fences, TV aerials, water tanks. 181 house and yard lots on the default boot with nothing in them. Per correction 5, inside boxMats: +0 draws for the box props, +1 draw/chunk only if the washing ships. Measured headroom: the residential district walks at 157 draws / 31,651 tris worst (edge 16, 20 live chunks) against a main-spine control of 263/123,602 on the same build — ~143 spare draws where these props land.

Laws

Everything standing, plus: every item states its draw cost against the pinned 292/300 and its tri cost against ~75k spare · every new gate ships its falsifiability control demonstrated · classic stays byte-identical by construction where possible (1.2's townCharacter(null) is the model) · ?noassets fallback for every asset · pathspec-atomic commits · no tag — wave 1 is content, the epoch tags when it is whole.

⚠️ Tree hazard: a separate background session is editing web/js/world/venue.js (capping town-wide pool instances on real towns). No lane touches venue.js this round. Expect it dirty; commit around it by pathspec.

Order

1. Parallel: E (the asset wave) + B (all four runtime items, procedural-first so nothing blocks on E).
2. Then F: the four gates, full qa.sh --strict --matrix, round close. No tag.

ROUND CLOSED (Fable) — THE TOWN IS INHABITED. All four items, all green, no tag.

qa.sh --strict --matrix: 7 passed · 0 failed · 0 warn · 0 skipped · flags_check 0/0 with all four new gates inside it · MATRIX GREEN 10 towns × 7 gates, 0 fetches under ?noassets.

THE BUDGET: 292/300 STANDS — margin is still EIGHT, not six. My naive sum (292 + 2 = 294) was wrong, and wrong in our favour: the pinned worst frame is a NIGHT frame, and both of wave 1's draw-spending layers are structurally zero at night (the washing comes in, the magpie roosts). Wave 1's one draw is spent in daylight, where the walked peak sits ten draws lower. F reproduced the R37 pin to the byte, twice (292 / 120,145 / 31 live chunks) on a control tree, then isolated every delta by flag revert: ?yards=0 at night returns all three control numbers; ?yards=0 at noon isolates the noon +1 to the washing alone.

B's control-346 is adjudicated, not merely cited. As a delta it was the wall-clock ped-spawn trap and B was right to hide the sim — but ">300" is a claim about the world, and neither existing method could adjudicate it (one photographs a half-dressed street, the other arrives clean at 27 chunks). F built budget_walk.py --method stepsettle — fixed-yaw stations, each drained then held N real rAF frames, so R+1 residue and a full crowd land in one frame. The sign flip is the finding: the settle is +3 draws at noon, −9 at night, because at night the settled street retires near rigs to impostors and a sampler that never waits never sees the crowd go home. Highest number anywhere — 4 methods × 2 trees × 2 segments × 5 towns — is 292. Nothing read over 300.

F corrected its own R37 pin: corpus tri worst is 130,727 (fitzroy), not 124,793 — and it reads 130,727 on the control, so it is R37's 8 m station spacing vs this round's 2 m, not a wave-1 cost. Station spacing is a bigger lever on a walked worst frame than settle policy.

What shipped: 21 distinct palettes across 23 towns at +0/+0 (classic byte-identical by construction — townCharacter(null) returns the v1 literals with the same material cache key) · 36 yard lots that had rendered as blank shopfront sheds since v1 are now fenced backyards, and the box props are −2 draws because those lots used to fall through to buildShopfront · the magpie at +1 draw / 182 tris, season now 23 distinct positions across 24 towns · six audio layers at zero draws that pan (B refused the no-panning limitation and added a StereoPannerNode; F proved the pan is a bearing: yaw 0/90/180/270 → +0.00 / +0.85 / −0.00 / −0.85).

Three self-caught errors, one per lane — the round's real signature. B's own season mechanism was vacuous: keyed on citySeed alone it made 24 of 24 towns a constant 214 days from swooping season, and it would have gated green because ?magpie=1 forces the state. F's own pan arm used two bearings, read ±0.00, and would have called a working panner inconclusive — four bearings now. E generated a perfectly good 1,121-tri paling_fence that B rejected on measurement (905 instances = 1.01 M triangles against ~75k spare), producing the sizing law this round paid for: an asset's budget is tris × the instance count the placement rule implies — get the instance count from the consuming lane before generating anything that tiles or repeats per-lot.

Assets: trellis2_mlx swap verified 1.92× (and it hid a trap — sorted(rglob)[0] was picking the untextured candidate); six sounds; four grounds; three GLBs published and sha1-verified in both directions off the public depot; and two decisive failures — hills_hoist and tv_aerial cannot be generated (TRELLIS returns thin wire as thousands of fragments; no voxel size keeps a 30 mm pole and a 2 mm wire at 600 tris), deleted so nothing could catalogue them, permanently primitive at +0 draws. The magpie shipped reading as a crow; E tinted it by projecting anatomical windows through the UVs in the mesh's own frame (a 100-island smart unwrap has no island that announces itself as "nape"), and Fable verified the render by eye: pied and unmistakable at 64/48/32 px.

Carried: two magpies now exist (B's 182-tri procedural bird ships; E's 894-tri tinted GLB is a named upgrade at birdGeometry()/birdMaterial()) — filed for a side-by-side screenshot, not forced · magpie.js carries two stale tri comments (154 vs measured 182) · §1.4 is synthetic-only until the civic fetch, and its gate skips loudly on real towns rather than passing vacuously · audible output is unverifiable headlessly and every run prints so — nobody in this loop has ears · A's D1–D4 · the matrix budget column is bookmark numbers · ?r=3 breaches at 307 · the ?classic=1 selector question.

Standing

Nothing needs John. Carried debt (R37's ledger, unchanged): A's D1–D4 · the matrix's budget column is bookmark numbers · ?r=3 breaches at 307 · should ?classic=1 show the town selector at all.