Chasing "more detailed looking enemies" turned up the reason detail never landed, and it was
not the art.
boot.js built combat as `createCombat({ scene, world, bus, rng, flags, player })` — no `assets`.
createCombat defaults it to null, so createEnemies got null, so `assets?.get?.('models', type)`
returned null for EVERY archetype and every enemy in the game has been quietly drawing its
procedural primitive. Lane D's GLBs loaded correctly, verified correctly, and were never once
rendered. spore_pod has been an icosahedron since the day it shipped; the Giardia and H. pylori
meshes from an hour ago were cones.
This is the nastiest shape a bug can have: the fallback path is INDISTINGUISHABLE from success.
`assets.get('models','spore_pod').geometry` was there and correct every time I checked it — I
was checking the loader, never the pool that consumes it. Measured after the one-word fix: pool
geometry goes 42 verts -> 6056 (spore_pod), and the new pathogens render at 2234 (Giardia) and
2500 (H. pylori).
Also in: the entity matcap the same investigation was written to prototype. emissiveMat takes an
optional matcap and applies it as LUMINANCE ONLY — sampled, reduced to luma, multiplied into the
core — so an amber foe stays exactly amber and a cyan commensal stays exactly cyan. The
ART_BIBLE readability law that the whole friend/foe system rests on is untouched by construction,
while the silhouettes stop being flat glows and start reading as lit, wet, three-dimensional
organisms. Switchable with ?matcap=0 for A/B, and absent-safe if D's matcap never shipped.
Weapons and pickups deliberately keep the flat look — a tracer is not a creature.
Net effect for playtest: this is the first build where the pathogens are actually visible as
pathogens. The GLB pipeline was correct for weeks; the wiring was one word short.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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