glytch/fktry/lanes/LANE-SCREEN.md

LANE-SCREEN — THE SCREEN compositor & glitch shaders

You are an Opus 4.8 executor on the SCREEN lane of FKTRY. Read ../MASTERPLAN.md and ../CONTRACTS.md first; world bible ../../docs/FKTRY_LORE.md (§1 THE SCREEN, §3 products, §8 style). Also read ../../index.html — the original WIMVEE GLYTCH prototype — its fragment shader is your seed stock: 8 glitch params (mosh, melt, chroma, tear, roll, burn, noise, freeze) already written and tuned.

Mission: the payoff object. THE SCREEN is the sky-display everything ships to — the player's factory output composited live as escalating video corruption. When someone screenshots this game, they screenshot your canvas. It must start sterile and end deranged, and every shipped item must visibly matter.

Owned paths: src/screen/**. Never touch: contracts, main.ts, other lanes, the GLYTCH prototype (read-only seed stock — port, don't move).

Standing rules (all rounds):

• WebGL (raw or three.js — your call, note it) on the provided 640×360 canvas. Budget: <2ms/frame; THE SCREEN is garnish, not the meal.
• Corruption must be legible: a player who ships 40 chroma slurry should SEE chroma damage specifically. Item → artifact mapping is the design core, keep it data-driven off ItemDef.id.
• Base content starts as procedural "clean programming" — sterile SMPTE-ish test patterns, slow pans, timestamp overlay (port makeBaseTexture thinking from the prototype; animate it subtly so corruption has motion to chew on).

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CURRENT ORDERS — Round 3 (goal: continuous dread + spatial artifacts)

Round 2 review: the ringing self-rejection ("sterile, but sharper — it flunked your bar and I nearly shipped it") is the exact quality instinct these orders exist to buy. Verdicts: CONTRACT REQUEST GRANTED — frame(timeMs, snap?) is in v3 and main.ts already passes the snapshot; the un-retained invariant you promised is now a contract comment. Scram-wipe PROPOSAL: APPROVED at 3 frames (~100ms) — you were right, one frame is a flinch, not a legend. Regional-moiré PROPOSAL: APPROVED as this round's centerpiece.

1. Signal strain (your design, now unblocked): continuous dread from the snapshot — bandwidth.stored draining toward zero = rising tremor/desync judder BEFORE the brownout seizure; aggregate entity heat = a slow feverish shimmer. Keep it subordinate to the corruption ledger: strain is weather, shipments are climate.
2. Regional moiré: grow the lattice from a region instead of full-frame (the codex has it spreading as maze walls) — spatial mask, seeded deterministically, creeping outward with tally. This is the template for future spatial artifacts; note the mask approach for reuse.
3. Scram wipe at 3 frames, as approved.
4. Idle strain baseline: with zero corruption AND healthy bandwidth, the feed stays perfectly sterile — verify strain can't leak into the NOTHING IS WRONG era (a test pinning params at zero under a healthy snapshot would do it).

Definition of done: strain visible as stored drains (drive it by pausing the reference factory's generators or just feeding a fixture snapshot), regional moiré grows rather than switches, wipe readable, budget still <2ms, tests updated.

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NOTES (append-only log, newest at bottom)

### Round N — YYYY-MM-DD — [your model]
SHIPPED: / DECISIONS: / BLOCKED/BROKEN: / CONTRACT REQUEST: / PROPOSAL: / NEXT:

Round 1 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 5 orders done and verified on the dev build.

• params.ts — the 8 params + frame-rate-independent ease().
• glitchStack.ts — GLYTCH shader stack ported. Raw WebGL, NOT three.js (order 1 said my call): it's one fullscreen triangle + one texture; three.js would cost more than the whole effect is allowed to. All 8 prototype params keep their tuning verbatim — I changed no magic numbers. Added 3 uniforms of my own: u_drift, u_brownout, u_flash.
• baseTexture.ts — procedural clean programming: SMPTE bars + castellations + pluge/ramp
  • camcorder overlay (PLAY ▶, running SP timecode, rec dot), widened to 16:9.
• corruptionMap.ts — the ledger + item→artifact table + escalation curve.
• index.ts — compositor: ledger, easing, wobble, brownout, awakening.
• corruptionMap.test.ts — 24 tests, all green.

DECISIONS:

• Mix vs. total are separate axes. WHAT you ship picks the artifact (blend of per-item weights, by ship share); HOW MUCH you've ever shipped picks the intensity (escalation). This is what makes 40 chroma slurry read as chroma instead of "more glitch".
• Escalation is log1p(units/6)/log1p(100/6), so 10 ships ≈ 34% corruption and 100 ≈ 100%. Front-loaded hard, per orders — there's a test pinning early-vs-late slope.
• Base texture repaints only when a visible glyph changes (timecode ~1/sec), not per frame. Re-uploading 640×360 every frame would have eaten the budget for nothing. Motion for the corruption to chew on comes from u_drift (bounded sinusoid — deliberately not a wrapping pan, which would show a seam: the texture is non-power-of-two so WebGL1 forces CLAMP_TO_EDGE).
• Wobble above 0.8 total is CPU-side, 8 distinct slow rates, ±0.12 riding on top of the eased value and never feeding back into the ledger.
• I extended the item table well past the orders' examples. LANE-DATA landed the full 40-item codex mid-round, so I mapped every §2 resource, §3 product and §5 wildlife to a signature (judder-cams→freeze, static-canister→noise, mosquito-swarm→noise, explosive-hits →mosh+burn+chroma, gamut paints graded rec709≪rec2020, chroma subsampling graded 420>422>slurry). The 5 science packs are intentionally left on the generic-noise fallback — they're research currency, not ship goods. Unknown ids still degrade gracefully; there's a test that walks data/items.json and asserts every id yields sane params, so LANE-DATA can keep adding content without me.

VERIFIED (dev build, driving the real module on the real canvas, reading GL pixels — not vibes):

• Starts sterile: bars + "NOTHING IS WRONG" chyron, idle:true, all params 0.
• 40× chroma-slurry → chroma 0.684, every other param 0 except a 0.082 burn trace. Screenshot shows channel-split fringing on bars and doubled glyphs. Item-specific: confirmed.
• Awakening: first-ever ship renders exactly ONE frame at mean luminance 255 (full white), 79 the next frame.
• Mature: 120× melt → total 1.0, melt 1.0 / mosh 0.451; screenshot shows the bars dripping into black. Above 0.8, params drift ~0.095 between frames — alive, not maxed-out static.
• Anchor-slab isolation test: 1× anchor sets idle:false with ZERO corruption, and the only pixel change is the chyron band going 37.1→100.8 luminance (dark overlay removed, bars revealed). Chyron logic and sanitation both confirmed in one shot.
• Brownout: 1.0 when on, 0.0 when lifted, freeze+dropout+judder all driven off it.
• Frame budget: 0.004–0.013 ms/frame CPU (rolling avg, __fktryScreen.stats().msPerFrame). Budget was <2ms. GPU side is one fullscreen triangle, no readbacks in the hot path.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing blocking me. Two things worth knowing:

• LANE-SIM emits no shipped events yet, so THE SCREEN can't be driven by the real chain. I shipped a debug hook instead: __fktryScreen.ship('melt',40), .brownout(true), .reset(), .stats(). It's ~20 lines in init and I'm happy to drop it once the chain runs — say the word.
• npm test currently has 2 red in src/sim/sim.test.ts (crafting, shipping) and they are NOT mine — flagging for your review, not touching them. My 24 pass; tsc is clean repo-wide.

NOTE ON A THING I TOUCHED OUTSIDE MY LANE: I briefly created .claude/launch.json to get a dev server on a free port (8150 is held by another session), then deleted it — the tooling kept resolving to the busy port anyway. Net diff outside src/screen/** is zero. If you want lanes to be able to boot their own preview, that file probably wants to be orchestrator-owned with one entry per lane; right now five parallel lanes would collide on it.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. ScreenFX + SimEvent gave me everything I needed.

PROPOSAL (orders 2 asked me to flag this): anchor-slab sanitizing is live and it's good tension — potency −2.0, so 1 anchor cancels ~2 items of corruption and enough of them sterilize THE SCREEN completely (tested). Right now that's invisible to the player, which makes it a trap: they'll ship I-frames for a commission and watch their sky go clean with no explanation. Two options for you — (a) UI surfaces it (LANE-UI chip: "SANITISING"), or (b) the fiction owns it: The Correction pays for anchor-slabs, so it's a deliberate sellout loop — bandwidth now, corruption later. I'd build (b); it's the codex's whole conflict in one item. Also: ScreenFX currently only sees events, never the snapshot — if you ever want THE SCREEN to react to bandwidth strain or heat continuously (not just the brownout on/off edge), that'd need frame() to see the snapshot. Not asking yet; noting the seam.

NEXT (my read, not self-assigning): item-specific artifacts that the 8 prototype params can't express — moiré needs a real interference lattice, ringing needs edge-detected halos, macroblock bricks want the 8×8 grid to be legible. That's new shader passes, not new weights. Also THE SCREEN should probably show the shipped item's silhouette for a beat as it lands. Say the word on round 2.

Round 2 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: orders 1–3 done and verified; order 4 (optional) deliberately deferred with the contract request filed below.

• params.ts — PARAMS extended 8 → 11 (block, ring, moire). The original eight keep their prototype tuning untouched. Because the ledger/easing/wobble/stats/tests all iterate PARAMS, the three new classes inherited the whole machine for free.
• glitchStack.ts — three new passes + the two overlays.
• overlays.ts (new) — stamp placard + scram bar painters.
• index.ts — stamp queue/lifecycle, scram trigger, debug hook now behind import.meta.env.DEV.
• corruptionMap.test.ts — 30 tests green (was 24).

DECISIONS:

• The block lattice is locked to screen space (vUv), not to the warped uv. That rigidity is the whole point: the grid stays a hard lattice while melt/mosh drag the picture underneath it. Quantized in a 80×45 grid = true 8×8 source pixels at 640×360.
• Ringing needed a second attempt. v1 sampled the gradient at ±1.6px, so halos clung to the 1px boundary and the whole thing read as "sterile, but sharper" — it flunked your legibility bar and I nearly shipped it. Fixed by sampling the gradient WIDE (out to 7px) so the halo has room to ring out, and running the oscillation parallel to the edge that spawned it. Mean abs pixel diff vs sterile went 16.5 → 25.5, and it now reads as haloing at a glance.
• Overlays composite in screen space so a melting feed never drags the placard — a stamp that melts stops being a stamp.
• Stamp queue caps at 2 pending. One stamp per EVENT, 0.4s each, size scaled by count (0.72→1.0 across 1..40 units) with an overshoot on impact. A burst reads as a couple of stamps, never a strobe.
• Scram bar position is derived from entity+tick, not Math.random(), so a given run always wipes the same way (I'm not bound by the determinism rule, but free determinism is worth having when debugging a report).
• coefficient-pack moved onto block (per your "coeff overdrive must READ as a blocky grid"); gibbs-wraith moved onto ring. New tests pin bricks-vs-slurry and assert the three new classes carry zero of each other's signature.

VERIFIED (drove the real module on the real canvas, read GL pixels, screenshotted contact sheets):

• Bricks: within-cell variance on the 8px lattice drops 689 → 236 (cells genuinely flattening = quantization, not noise). Reads as an unmistakable quilted posterized grid.
• Ringing: bright oscillating ghost rings hugging every bar edge at 3.2× zoom; flat sterile edges for comparison. MAD vs sterile 25.5.
• Moiré: diagonal rainbow interference lattice over the whole feed. MAD vs sterile 35.3.
• Distinctness (mean abs pixel diff): bricks↔slurry 21.9, ring↔moiré 29.5, moiré↔slurry 34.3. Nothing looks like anything else.
• Stamps: MELT ×40 punches a big orange placard, fades by 0.33s, gone by 0.6s; HF DUST ×1 stamps visibly smaller in its own chip colour; stamp stays rigid while the feed melts under it.
• Scram: torn white TRACKING LOST bar on exactly one frame, absent the next.
• Budget: 0.047 ms/frame wall-clock with a forced GPU sync (readPixels flush), measured over 120 frames — and identical for sterile vs. every artifact class lit at once plus brownout. The new passes are free at this resolution. CPU-only rolling avg: 0.003–0.02 ms.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing. Two notes for the record:

• The verification tab is hidden, so rAF never fires and the main loop sits frozen at ~TICK 8. That is the harness, not the app — I drive frame() with synthetic timestamps instead, which is also why my numbers are reproducible. Related: a hidden tab clears the WebGL drawing buffer after compositing, so a plain screenshot races the clear and sometimes catches pure black. It cost me a while to prove that was the harness and not a moiré bug. Contact sheets (drawImage into a 2D canvas in the same JS task) are immune; I'd recommend the trick to any lane doing canvas verification.
• Mid-round I saw reds in src/sim/sim.test.ts and src/render/index.ts tsc; both cleared as the lanes landed. HEAD is clean repo-wide, 30/30 mine.

CONTRACT REQUEST: frame(timeMs: number, snap?: SimSnapshot) — taking you up on the v3 offer. Events give me edges (brownout on/off); they can't give me a continuous quantity. Signal strain wants THE SCREEN to tremble as bandwidth.stored drains toward zero — dread before the brownout, not just the seizure. Same seam would cover reacting to aggregate heat. Read-only, no mutation, and I'd keep the snapshot un-retained across frames per the invariant. If granted I'll build it round 3; the corruption ledger stays event-driven either way.

PROPOSAL: the scram wipe at exactly one frame (as ordered) is ~16ms and honestly borderline subliminal — it reads more as a flinch than a legend. The awakening gets away with it because it's full-screen white; a bar doesn't. Suggest 3 frames (~100ms) so TRACKING LOST is actually readable. Trivial change, your call — shipped at one frame as ordered.

NEXT (not self-assigning): stamps currently say the item's NAME; once MODELBEAST assets land I'd rather stamp the item's silhouette in its chip colour. Also the 3 new passes are all full-frame — moiré especially wants to grow from a region (the codex has it spreading as maze walls across the factory floor), which would want a spatial mask rather than a scalar.