saved-state writer under combat
FUN_007d5a00's six callees, read from the instruction stream to the next
function start, plus 18 helpers. Lane J named this "the real per-phase combat
pipeline"; the identification of it as the most tractable target was right and
the characterisation was not. It is one subsystem -- destinations, group,
classify, split, execute, destroy -- and it is StarFleet retreat.
Seven saved fields or containers move on this path: ship->fleet membership,
StarFleet objects created and destroyed in the master list, the system fleet
lists, fleet position/location/flight plan/flags, the ServerSystem presence and
explored masks, the per-player PlayerView, and ServerPlayer.GTraf.
Closes struct-recovery.md section 7's open "OID allocation (R2's x16)": the
allocator is at 0x008b8ae0, the counter lives per network node at
IDMap->+0x08 + node*0x14 + 0x10, it is pre-incremented and never issues 0, and
an id is (counter << 4) | (node & 0xF). R2's x16 is the shl 4. A partial
retreat mints one id per group, and that counter is almost certainly the save's
NMnx tag -- labelled hypothesis, with a falsifiable prediction written down
before any run.
New rule: retreating from a system you had not explored marks it explored for
you, writing EFlags and refreshing the PlayerView. New diplomacy rule: a system
whose owner captured it on the current turn loses that owner's ceasefire cover
in the hostile-presence test.
RNG recomputed independently from a different root and with a different tool:
327 functions in the closure once E9 tail-call thunks are followed (the first
pass missed an 8-byte jmp thunk and with it the whole id-allocator chain), zero
calls to the four primitives, zero inlined MT tempering immediates, and one
false-positive 0x11c stride that is StarFleet.FtMS being initialised to -1.
Bound, not proof: 152 indirect call sites in 91 of the 327, four of them on the
main line and flagged for the vtable lane.
Corrects my own first reading of the fleet-creation call: a ret-N tail-call
thunk in the middle of an argument list makes three pushes look like they
belong to the wrong call. Checking ret N against the push count catches it.
The honest limit stands: none of this has ever executed under an instrument.
combat-resolver.md section 10.3's workload now needs a second condition -- the
battle must produce a retreat, or all six phases are no-ops.
The standalone now models the turn's dominant generator cost -- 16 of a measured 18-22
words -- and lands 4 and 2 short of the two calibrated pairs, which is exactly the
per-call-site ledger's split for those turns. The state block is byte-identical; only
left differs. The answer to 'does it match the oracle' is no, by a stated amount, and
tools/rng_oracle_check.py is the instrument that says so.
The tail's last phase is modelled for the six turn-record fields recoverable from the
wire and checked against the record the game itself archived: 480 fields over 80
player-records, 0 mismatches. It stays blocked; --commit-blocked shows exactly which
five fields are missing and what they cost.
By-product, and probably worth more than the phase: the stored bankruptcy elimination
limit is injective in the maximum-income sum it is built from, so every save states the
per-system output term that blocks ComputeBudget. tools/max_income_oracle.py inverts it
-- 25 player-records over the corpus -- and recovers the protection factor as 3.3 from
the saves rather than from the data files. It also shows the engine's -0.15 divisor
disagrees with the game on 6 of those 25.
divergence unchanged: 209->204 and 108->103, 5 closed / 0 regressed on both pairs.
FUN_00893290 is ServerTradeManager::GenerateTradeRaidEncounters --
ServerTradeManagerImpl vftable slot 10 -- rolling Chance(TRADE_RAID_ODDS_PLAYER
= 0.2) and Chance(TRADE_RAID_ODDS_NPC = 0.05) once per player. Both are
strictly inside (0,1) so each is exactly one word, and no back-edge contains
either site, so one word per player per site is a hard bound.
Why no sweep found it: zero direct calls to it exist in the image and its only
reference is a vtable slot. The dispatch is a "call edx" through slot 10 at
0x007d8469 inside DetectEncounters -- one instruction before the DIRECT call
that lane I's closure did follow. Lane I's inventory is not wrong; its stated
caveat about indirect edges was load-bearing, and this is what it was hiding.
strategic-turn-internals.md line 153 had already named 0x00893290 "raid
encounter generation" against these exact StrategyVars. What was missing was
that it is where a turn's RNG goes.
Ghidra's size is wrong again: real body 1546 bytes ending 0x0089389a, reported
1532, ending mid-instruction. Rule 17, third time.
Seven entry points detoured, each call keyed by __builtin_return_address(0)
with the word cost from left before/after. Three consecutive turns on
ref-turn2: site sums 19/18/20 against independently measured ProcessTurn totals
of 19/18/20, residual 0 every time. The 18-20 spread is now explained rather
than reported -- it is the two gated research draws.
The dominant consumer is FUN_00893290: two Chance calls per player across all
eight player-vector entries, 16 of every turn's 18-20 words, and it is NOT one
of lane I's 22 sites. Lane I said its closure covered direct edges only and
that indirect reachability was unsettled; this is that gap, measured. The
function is unidentified and is the highest-value target left.
Two bookkeeping corrections are in the report tool, not the shim: helper-
internal rows (Chance's own NextFloat) double-count, and 8 calls per turn are
on the StrategyClient's generator, not the strategic one. The first build did
not distinguish generators and reported 44 words against a bracket of 18 --
which is what caught it. A per-site ledger that cannot say which generator a
draw came from is not a ledger.
tools/standalone_report.py drives sots-engine's sots_turn over each
consecutive-turn save pair and diffs the result against the game's own
post-turn save with state_checksum.py, which localises to named leaves and
proves its own coverage by re-serialisation.
turn1-state -> turn2-state baseline 209 diverging, after 204, closed 5
turn2-state -> turn3-state baseline 108 diverging, after 103, closed 5
regressed 0 on both
`regressed` is reported next to `closed` and never netted off. It earned its
place immediately: committing the phase-31 player-status restore turned two
agreeing leaves into disagreeing ones, because the phase writes 1 and the file
carries 4.
The stable-system stand-in feeding the colony pass is a labelled hypothesis and
it survived a changed workload -- the same 3 ntdev leaves closed on both pairs,
six agreements, zero disagreements.
Two things deliberately NOT implemented: the TShn/ltis counters (18 leaves, a
`+1` would close them, but "+1 across one observed turn" is a hypothesis, not a
reading), and the RNG state write-back (an advanced-but-incomplete generator is
wrong in a different way from an untouched one).
dashboard.py gains section 6, reading verify/results/standalone/status.json:
phases modelled/committed per driver, baseline vs after, closed vs regressed,
the subsystem breakdown of what still differs, and the RNG gap. Sections 6-8
renumbered to 7-9; the delta footer tracks the two new counts.
DASHBOARD_README.md documents every number.
findings/control-flow/standalone-scaffold.md has the ranked blocker list.
Predicted at turn 34 with the run in flight, from min_life falling by exactly
1 per turn: the first phase-11 draw on turn 64, exactly 1 word, tail total 1,
bracket = ProcessTurn + 1. The game was played to turn 64 and every clause
held. predict_words, computed before the original ran, said 1 and the
measurement said 1 -- a real check of the model, against 63 preceding turns
where 0 matched 0 and checked nothing.
So the defect lane K warned about is no longer latent: on that turn a
reimplementation modelling ProcessTurn perfectly would have written an autosave
one word out of step.
And the instrument's thinnest part ran live on the same turn -- ProcessTurn
crossed a block boundary (left 11 -> 615, one twist, 20 words) and the bracket
still reconciled to residual 0.
A Von Neumann encounter at Gallandro on turn 54 gave the workload the finding
said did not exist. Auto-resolved, with P10 committed before the click.
P10 predicted a non-zero tail cost and was wrong: res_no_battle flipped to 0
for the first time in 55 turns, the fleet was destroyed, and the generator
moved by zero. The bracket residual stayed 0, so combat proper drew nothing
either -- all 22 words were inside ProcessTurn, exactly as on a peaceful turn.
That is the strong form of lane J's static reading, and it means a
reimplementation can model a turn's RNG while modelling nothing about combat.
One auto-resolved encounter against an NPC is not combat in general, and 10.2
says so at length.
The primitive count went three -> four (this lane) -> seven (lane I) while this
measurement was being taken, and not one number in the ledger moved. That is
the argument for reading state instead of counting calls, stated where it is
now demonstrable rather than merely asserted.
StrategyServer::Write tags both words itself: S+0x8 is ModCount and S+0xc is
Frame. addresses.json has the name on the wrong word and lane T's
PhaseCounter is the one the wire calls ModCount. The saves confirm it
independently -- ModCount 0/12/24 across turn1/2/3-state, 241/412 across Zuul
16/23 -- and those deltas are exactly the 12-44 per turn measured live. So the
'writer nobody has identified' question dissolves: it is a modification
counter, it scales with the empire, and there is no single writer to find.
The players=8 flag is withdrawn. The offset is right, pinned by the ctor's
four-vector enumeration at 0x0085b120 with no frame arithmetic needed, and the
count is right: the vector is empires + one rebel-AI per empire species + four
NPC pseudo-players, so 8 on the Human saves and 7 on the Zuul ones against a
lobby that says 2 in both. My draft claimed the hook read 8 on both saves. It
read 7 on the Zuul one. I generalised from one run without re-reading the
other, and a check aimed at something else caught it.
Re-ran lane J's image-wide tempering-immediate scan at real instruction
boundaries and audited it site by site. Sixteen functions carry the two masks
inside a decoded instruction, 67 occurrences, and a brute byte scan finds zero
orphans -- recall is complete. Of the sixteen:
* ONE IS A FALSE POSITIVE. 0x008cca30 has no temper chain at all; the four
bytes read as the second mask are the rel32 displacement of a call.
* FOUR ARE RNG ENTRY POINTS, not game code -- the tempering there is the
primitive's own. Two were known; 0x004f7670 and 0x008e6e30 were not.
So the figure is ELEVEN game functions with inlined draws over 28 sites, not
fourteen. Exactly ONE of the eleven is reachable from StrategyServer::ProcessTurn
(0x007aa240, depth 4) and one more from OnAllCombatDone_Tail (lane J's R2). The
other nine are map setup, the lobby, the network layer and two scripted
encounters, all reached through vtable slots with no direct caller -- so their
absence from the turn closure is proved for direct edges only, and that caveat
is stated as loudly as the result.
Both functions lane J handed over are read completely from the instruction
stream:
0x004f7670 (84 B) is Mars::RNG::NextUInt -- ONE WORD, UNCONDITIONAL, no loop,
no branch but the lazy twist. ECX is the generator OBJECT, where NextFloat
and NextInt take the object PLUS FOUR; ProbabilisticJump uses both conventions
0x6b bytes apart. Ghidra's size is right here, which is worth saying.
0x007aa240 (Ghidra says 944; the body is 953 and ends past the reported range)
is the encounter-detection roll. ONE INLINED NextFloat PER (contact, detector)
TRIAL, drawn BEFORE the accept test, so a detector holding neither of two
specific techs still burns a word and can never succeed. The accept test is
`thresh >= r` -- equality accepts -- derived from the fcompp/test ah,5/jp
encoding rather than the mnemonic. The outer repeat-until-no-progress loop
cannot redraw a pair: the "tried" bitset is filled above the back-edge target
and never cleared, so the whole call is bounded by |contacts| x |detectors|.
Three more draw entry points nobody had listed: a float range (one word, and it
NARROWS TWICE), a triangular integer range (at least two words), and a
truncated-normal range whose two draws are BOTH inlined and which costs two
words per attempt with an unbounded attempt count -- and which scales by 2^-32
where NextFloat scales by 1/(2^32-1). Two divisors, one image.
RECONCILIATION, stated honestly. The complete draw-site inventory of the
ProcessTurn closure is 22 sites: 21 entry-point calls plus the one inlined site.
This lane adds two previously-uncounted sources to that list and accounts for
NONE of lane Z's 18-20 words per turn with certainty, because both new sources
are gated and neither has been measured. Lane J's prediction that these two
functions would explain the gap is NOT confirmed. What is now provable is the
negative: there is no twenty-third mechanism, so the 18-20 words are distributed
among exactly these 22 sites. The search space closes; the count does not.
Also corrects, in place: my own Ghidra comment claiming the masks are a Mars
variant of MT19937. They are the textbook masks applied before the shift
instead of after -- (y & 0xff3a58ad) << 7 == (y << 7) & 0x9d2c5680, verified
over 200k words -- so mars::rng was never wrong, but a scan for the textbook
constants finds nothing in this image.
Fragment validated by generating to a scratch path (797 entries, no duplicate
name); the tracked header is untouched while lane Z is in flight. Eight
prototypes, nine plate comments and eight pre-comments written back to Ghidra.
The second save's numbers were not in the first draft's table. Correcting my
own correction: on a turn-19 Zuul game the counter moves 16, 21 and 44 times
between ProcessTurn entries, against 12-14 on an early two-colony game. So it
is not a driver-invocation counter and not a constant either.
Lane J landed rule 16 (inlined draws are invisible to call-graph sweeps) while
this run was in flight, and it bears directly on three claims here that rested
on direct-call sweeps. Those claims now rest on the behavioural measurement
instead, which is immune to it: ProcessNodeSpaceTravel moved the generator by
0 words on 16 observations and node-line decay on 8. The instrument does not
ask which function drew, only whether the generator moved.
Lane J's resolver map and this ledger pair up: the resolver has no
unconditional draw, so its prediction -- a plain fleet battle costs the same
18-22 words as a peaceful turn -- is testable with these hooks as soon as
someone builds a save where two hostile fleets meet.
We consume 18-22 generator words per turn and model none of them as a count.
All of it is inside StrategyServer::ProcessTurn; OnAllCombatDone_Tail costs 0
on every turn observed; the residual outside the two drivers is exactly 0. The
generator does not move between turns at all, so the interval a standalone has
to reproduce is closed at both ends.
The instrument reads generator STATE, not calls, and that choice paid: the
image has four draw entry points, not three (NextUInt 0x004f7670 is in no
lane's primitive set) plus inlined draws in twelve functions, two reachable
from the turn roots. A primitive-counting hook would have undercounted
silently.
Checked against the save files independently: the turn-6 autosave pair gives
18 words read from the two Sim.RNG blobs, and with twists == 0 that number
never passes through a twist implementation -- so the two instruments do not
share the hidden assumption they could have.
Corrections to combat-done-tail.md, in place:
* the node-line 0x20000-fleet check runs AFTER the Chance(0.5f) call and
cannot gate the draw; the expiry test is NodePath::RemainingLife 0x006e2130
and is now a formula rather than a description
* StrategyHost::Autosave is ret 8 and returns the std::string* in EAX
* SNMAllCombatDone IS delivered every End Turn (8 of 8) -- lane K's inference
was right; the stronger no-encounter reading is narrowed, not closed
* S+0x8 advances 12-14 times per turn, not twice
Node-line decay still has not fired. The hook reports the distance instead of
the absence: 51 of 53 lines are permanent, the mortal ones are dug ~1/turn by
the Zuul, each ~40 turns from expiry. It stays a labelled hypothesis.
Closes lane K's #1 ranked gap: FUN_007d5af0 under phase 6 of
OnAllCombatDone_Tail, the second RNG source in the strategic tail.
RNG inventory (the deliverable that matters). The resolver draws nothing
itself. Three sites in its subtree, each behind a function with exactly
one caller:
R1 RNG_NextInt @0x007bb69b (node cannon) 1 word w.p. 3/4, mean 4/3
R2 an INLINED RNG_NextFloat @0x007a84bd 1 word per back-eng candidate
R3 RNG_NextInt @0x00852ec7 (project pick) >=1 word per successful roll
R2 corrects combat-done-tail.md 3, which reported no NextFloat in the
subtree: the draw is inlined, so the only call-graph edge it leaves is
FUN_007a7f30 -> RNG_Twist, which reads as a bare Twist and is not one.
An image-wide instruction-boundary scan for the MT tempering immediates
finds 14 game functions with inlined draws; two of them, FUN_004f7670
(84 B) and FUN_007aa240, are reachable from StrategyServer::ProcessTurn
and are candidate mechanism for part of lane Z's unexplained 18-20
words per turn.
Also: the real body is 7641 B, not Ghidra's 7499 (which ends
mid-instruction); only 8 non-stack stores and 1 indirect call in the
whole function; 23 EVENT_* keys in the closure, five of them new to the
campaign's combat picture (plague is decided inside combat); the
resolver's subtree DOES write the SETurnResults accumulator at
S+0x2f4[PlyrIdx]+0x90 via FUN_007baef0 -> FUN_007b9df0; and
sizeof(Game::TacReport) = 0x94, enumerated twice.
Two structural errors made and corrected before publication are recorded
in 7.3 and 4 rather than quietly fixed.
Gates run separately: clean-room check OK; host ctest 36/36.
gen_addresses.py distinguishes "addr" (VA -> RVA) from "offset" (a member
offset). Three lane-K entries used "addr" for offsets and generated negative
RVAs, which broke the engine build. Two are re-expressed as offsets; the third,
StrategyServer_off_RNGPtr_S_frame, is withdrawn - addresses.json already has
StrategyServer_off_RNG = 0x16c for the S frame alongside off_RNGPtr = 0x168 for
S+4, which is precisely lane T's rule. The second call site found this lane
confirms it rather than correcting it.
The second turn driver, 0x007d92a0, read byte for byte. Corrects turn-driver.md
section 5: of the four subsystems it said live here, only bankruptcy does.
- 36-phase map with strides enumerated (EncounterResults 0x178, Encounter 0x74,
member 0x44) and the arity check that logs but does not return.
- Phase 7 is encounters.clear(), not a filter: the erase pair is the same
four-argument shape vector<Encounter>::operator= uses, and both arms converge
three instructions later.
- Bankruptcy: ProcessBankruptcy at phase 15, UpdateBankruptcyLimits at phase 31.
Three corrections to formula-gaps Q1 - the divisor is the double
-0.15000000596046448 not -0.15, the per-system income term is clamped at 0
before summing, and the 3.3 factor lives in .bss and is DB-loaded.
- Turn results are FILLED here (phases 6, 11, 18 write S+0x2f4[PlyrIdx]) but
rotated by ApplyEncounterResults and dispatched by SynchronizePlayer as event
0x25 afterwards. sizeof(SETurnResults) = 0x11c, enumerated five ways.
- BuildTurnEvents is misnamed: it is the setup/load/rejoin resync push, gated on
a pending descriptor, and references no EVENT_ string at all.
- TurnEvents_Write and TurnEvents_Read are swapped in Ghidra (layouts.json is
right). sizeof(TurnEvents) = 0x18, enumerated four ways.
- The autosave: StrategyHost::Autosave 0x00895210, its four localized paths, the
rotation that fires only on the post-turn call, the connection detach around
the write, and why the payload carries nothing time-, name- or machine-derived.
- Two RNG sources in the tail that nothing models: one NextFloat per expired node
line, plus draws inside the combat resolver. Both run before the autosave.
- S+0x8 advances twice per turn, not once.
Repo-wide correction: the research-event roll costs one or two RNG words, not
one. Fixed in unlock-cascade.md, addresses.json and lane-u.json; the captured
compare artefacts under verify/results are left alone as run records.
Phase map for both turn drivers, byte-for-byte from objdump rather than the
decompiler. Corrections that matter:
- the end-of-turn tail is UNCONDITIONAL. turn-spine.md 2.4 step 11 said it is
deferred when encounters are pending; that came from reading an inlined
std::vector destructor as a branch (both arms converge at 0x007dcb38). There
is no branch on the encounter snapshot in the function, and 0x00794ad0 does
not build an encounter list -- it builds the 15 ship-action type ids.
- ServerPlayer::ProcessTurn takes one float argument and never reads it.
- the ResearchRollPending site runs AFTER ProcessResearch, not before, and
clears the flag only when the roll actually fires. Threshold is a strict
0.5f < progress/Cost. Both consumers located by a full displacement scan.
- EVENT_NO_RESEARCH's gate is 'completed nothing this turn', not 'nothing
available' -- 0x00584e50 collects RESEARCHED techs, not available ones.
- a fired research roll costs one or two RNG words, not one: the plague branch
draws a second NextInt and posts EVENT_PLAGUE_OUTBREAK.
- two StrategyServer bases four bytes apart, and two per-turn counters.
- new: the research refund at 0x008914aa, previously unmodelled.
45 addresses in ghidra/addresses.d/lane-t.json (669 -> 722 entries, no dupes).
