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Author SHA1 Message Date
Dejvino
10eeddcf6d A guidance document for building visualizers that vary
HOWTO-visualizers.md gets a scene working. Nothing said how to make one look
different from song to song, which is the thing the library is worst at and the
thing every measurement this epic has been about.

Written as evidence rather than advice: each claim carries the number behind it,
so a later change can contradict it. Several already contradict things believed
earlier in the same week.

It records the failures at least as carefully as the wins, because they were more
informative and each looked obviously right beforehand — effects as parameters
inflating a score without changing a picture, concentrating disturbance instead
of adding it, the roster-size theory that a direct sweep found to be nothing, and
reading a form as a metric rather than drawing it. It also documents what the
descriptor cannot see, since half of "why is my score low" is there: brightness,
colour, rotation, quality, and layout for anything that fills the frame.

And it is explicit about which numbers to trust. Direct render comparisons have a
noise floor of zero; aggregate ratios swing enough to have produced four
withdrawn conclusions in one epic.

Ongoing by design, with the open questions listed: coupling has never moved off
zero, fixed-geometry scenes have no known route to variety, and the 0.04 bar was
set against scores that were depressed by a measurement bug.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 16:45:38 +02:00
Dejvino
c6d96c9d40 A gallery, and a debug index to reach it from
Sixty-five visualizers, six renders each, one per song — each carrying that
song's whole identity: its cast, ink, lattice, palette and a fresh parameter
draw. Side by side, a scene that cannot be changed by the song is obvious in a
way no aggregate could show, which is the complaint this answers.

It scores as well as shows. Each row carries the mean structural distance
between its own six frames, on the same descriptor the variety harness uses and
with colour excluded, so six palettes cannot disguise one image. Sorted
least-varied first, because browsing sixty-five scenes hunting for the
repetitive ones is precisely what a sort order should do for you.

The result names names. Thirteen scenes barely change across six songs, and they
fall into two groups that were already known separately. The ink-only
migrations — Analog Wow, Halftone Misprint, Pitch Shatter, Block Mosh, Scan
Tear — are the shallow tier flagged in MIGRATION.md, where the whole migration
was one posterisation. And Moiré Grid, Isometric Blocks, Quasicrystal, Truchet
Fold, Voronoi Shatter and Apollonian Gasket are the structural twin cliques the
library sweep found weeks of measurement ago, arriving here by a completely
different route: the sweep compared scenes to each other, the gallery compares a
scene to itself, and they agree on the same offenders.

debug.html collects the tools, since there are now enough of them that knowing
which to open is its own problem. It also carries the two things a newcomer
would otherwise learn the hard way: which measurements are safe to steer by
(direct render comparisons) and which are not (aggregate ratios), and what to do
when a page renders perfectly and does nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 07:13:54 +02:00