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 4 (goal: second dread axis, boredom, ratification)

Round 3 review: measuring tremor in seconds-until-dark — and getting scale- invariance for free from the units ruling — is the single most elegant thing in this codebase. The negative-dt landmine catch is exactly why the NOTES exist. Verdicts: your capacity PROPOSAL is GRANTED unasked — bandwidth.capacity? is in v4 (SIM sums bufferCap); your "reserve low vs falling fast" second reading is this round's order. Your stalled-factory idea is APPROVED as design. The strain/fever/seizure hierarchy is canon now — keep future readings inside it.

1. Two dreads: with capacity available, split the readings — "seconds left" (tremor, as shipped) vs "reserve fraction" (a low-tank pallor/vignette that sits there even when draw ≤ gen and nothing is draining). A full tank draining fast vs a near-empty tank coasting should FEEL different; write the one-line design intent for each in NOTES.
2. Boredom (your proposal): no shipped events for a sustained stretch → total corruption eases back toward clean, slowly, visibly — the factory's work literally evaporating off THE SCREEN. Escalation tallies stay (history isn't erased; the display decays), so production resuming snaps it back fast. Tune the decay horizon so a normal jam doesn't read as punishment (minutes, not seconds). Test it.
3. Ratification interruption: researched event → a one-second full-screen interruption card on the feed — sterile white, "STANDARD RATIFIED", era name, then the corruption crashes back in. The Correction briefly wins the sky every time the player does science. Deadpan, readable, cheap.
4. Fixture hygiene: commissionQueue hardens to required in v5 — update your fixture snapshots this round.

Definition of done: both dread axes verified at the pixel level (your contact- sheet method); boredom decays and snaps back under test; ratification card exactly N frames with era text; budget still <2ms.

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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.

Round 3 — 2026-07-17 — Opus 4.8

SHIPPED: all 4 orders. Thank you for the v3 grant — frame(timeMs, snap?) is exactly the seam strain needed.

• strain.ts (new) — pure, snapshot-shaped, no DOM/GL. The whole point: order 4's sterile guarantee is now a unit test, not a promise.
• strain.test.ts (new) — 14 tests. Screen suite is 44 green.
• glitchStack.ts — growthMask() + tremor/fever warps + regional moiré + fever tint.
• index.ts — snapshot peek, strain easing, deterministic moiré seed, 3-frame scram.

DECISIONS:

• Tremor is measured in SECONDS, not units. Your v3 units ruling made this: stored is bandwidth-seconds, draw-gen is bandwidth/second, so stored/(draw-gen) is literally how long until the lights go out. Dread ramps over the last 8 seconds of reserve. This falls out correct at every scale for free — a megafactory bleeding 1000/s with 4000 banked feels exactly as doomed as a shack bleeding 10/s with 40 banked, because both have 4 seconds. There's a test pinning that equivalence. Raw stored would have made big factories look permanently calm.
• Surplus is always calm, whatever the reserve. If draw <= gen nothing is draining, so there is nothing to dread — which is also what makes the boot state (gen=draw=stored=0) sterile by construction rather than by special-case. Order 4 fell out of the maths.
• Fever averages only the machines that run hot (heat > 0.01). Averaging across every entity would drown one glowing decoder in a sea of cold belts, and belts are most of a factory.
• Tremor ≈ ¼ of the brownout's judder amplitude, and fever is a smooth sine haze while tremor is random judder — so dread, fever and seizure are three distinguishable readings, not one dial. Strain stays weather: MAD vs sterile is ~6.8, against ~35 for moiré. Subordinate as ordered.
• Regional moiré separates AREA from INTENSITY. Intensity saturates early (u_moire*2.2 clamped) while the mask's radius keeps growing with tally. That's what makes a big shipment read as "the maze has spread" instead of "everything got slightly shimmery" — which is the whole difference between regional and a scalar fade.
• growthMask(p, seed, grow) is written as the reusable spatial-artifact template you asked me to note: an fbm-ragged growth front, aspect-corrected, creeping outward from a seed. Any future artifact that should grow from a PLACE multiplies its amount by it. The raggedness is load-bearing — a clean circle reads as a spotlight, not as spreading crystal.
• Moiré seeds from the tick of the first moire-weighted shipment, so a given run always grows the same maze while different runs grow it elsewhere. Debug-hook ships default to tick 0.

VERIFIED (fixture snapshots + pixel reads + contact sheets):

• Order 4, at the pixel level: rendered no-snapshot / boot / healthy at an identical timebase — boot and healthy are byte-for-byte identical to no-snapshot. Strain cannot leak into the NOTHING IS WRONG era. (First attempt showed MAD ~1-2 and that was my harness: each run advanced the clock, so the timecode digits differed. Fixed the test, not the code.)
• Tremor ramp (deficit 10/s): 20s left → 0, 8s (the horizon) → 0, 4s → 0.50, 2s → 0.75, empty → 1.00. Fever 0.837 from hot decoders with tremor still 0.
• Regional moiré growth, as % of frame taken over: 0 → 20.1% → 44.7% → 74.5% → 84.5% → 85.8% across 0/4/10/25/60/150 crystals. It spreads; it does not switch. The front is visibly ragged.
• Seed: same tick → same seed twice over; different tick → different seed. Deterministic.
• Scram: read the bar's row per frame — BAR,BAR,BAR,-,-,-. Exactly 3 frames, readable now.
• Budget: 0.072 ms/frame wall-clock with a forced GPU sync, on a 2000-entity factory with every artifact class lit — computeStrain's per-frame entity walk is not measurable at that size. CPU-only 0.043 ms. Still ~28× under.

BLOCKED/BROKEN: nothing outstanding.

• I found and fixed a real bug in my own code while chasing a false alarm. My dt was Math.min(0.1, ...) — ceiling clamped, floor not. A negative dt (clock rewind) turns ease()'s 1-exp(-dt/tau) into a huge negative multiplier and threw strain to -3614 before it crawled back. Production can't hit it (performance.now() is monotonic, and main.ts passes it straight through), so this was only reachable from my harness — but an eased value that can explode on a clock hiccup is a landmine, so dt is now clamped at both ends. Worth other lanes checking their own dt handling if they ease anything.
• Full suite went 215/216 once mid-run, then 216/216 twice — another lane mid-write, not a real red. HEAD is clean repo-wide, tsc included.

CONTRACT REQUEST: none. v3 covers everything I need.

PROPOSAL: SimSnapshot.bandwidth has no capacity field, so THE SCREEN can express "seconds until empty" but not "the tanks are 20% full". Seconds is the better dread metric and I'd keep it either way — but if buffer capacity ever lands in the snapshot cheaply, a second reading ("reserve low" vs "reserve draining fast") would let strain distinguish a factory that's coasting on fumes from one that's falling off a cliff. Not asking; noting the seam while it's fresh.

NEXT (not self-assigning): the mask template is ready for reuse — bloom loops and HF dust piles are the obvious next spatial artifacts (both are regional in the codex), and the strata biomes in §1 would suggest a mask per era. Also, now that strain reads the snapshot, THE SCREEN could react to jammed entities (a stalled factory should look bored — the feed drifting back toward clean is a nice punishment), but that's a design call, not a lane call.