Commit Graph

6 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Dejvino
e2e5104646 Take the effects off the visualizers and leave them to the grade
Forty-nine scenes carried their own `glow`, every one of the sixty-five added
its own grain, and a handful had bloom, chroma, haze, smear or trail besides —
all of which the post chain already does, with an envelope and a threshold no
scene can see. Two uncoordinated effect layers is the smaller half of the
problem. The larger half is that an effect knob sampled per song makes a scene
look varied across parameter draws while its structure never moves, so the
gallery and the variety harness were both being told a scene was original when
only its halo had changed.

Removed in three shapes. Scene grain goes entirely — the post chain owns it.
Statements that ADD a falloff term scaled by the effect are bloom by another
name and are deleted. What remains is an intensity on something already drawn,
so the uniform is pinned to its default and the knob deleted: the picture
survives, the fake variety does not. Reactive entries driving those params went
too, since an effect modulated by the audio was the most convincing fake of the
lot.

That broke the style trait, which is the interesting part. Surface treatment had
been leaving the scenes for two commits — sigGrain to post, sigEdge to
inkStroke — and removing the last of it left `style` with almost nothing to
express: a style+shape signature had two eligible scenes in the whole library.
The trait is not obsolete, it has moved, so inkStroke and inkMask now read
u_sigLine and u_sigSoft alongside the ink's own weight and edge. A scene drawing
in the song's hand honours the track's line weight by construction, and the
runtime probe confirms it rather than taking it on trust. This reverses a call
made two commits ago for a reason that only became true now.

One check needed re-aiming rather than fixing. Two independently built shows are
two WebGL contexts, and engine/hash.js says at the top that bit-exactness is a
same-context guarantee; the check had been demanding it anyway and getting away
with it because the scenes it happened to cast were bit-stable. A casting change
put smooth-gradient scenes in frame and the last bit moved. Measured before
touching the check: three levels out of 255 across 2.6% of pixels, invisible.
The cross-context comparison is now a distance with a ceiling of four, and
bit-exactness within one show is still demanded by the check below it.

89/89 checks, 11/11 tests, all static gates.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 16:21:34 +02:00
Dejvino
e5bb7d77e0 A reproducible migration, and the first eighteen scenes through it
The library is sixty-one scenes, which is too many to convert from memory or
from taste, so the migration is a queue with a gate rather than a judgement call
per file.

Three pieces. A classifier reads each shader and assigns a tier from evidence in
the source — drawn, figure, field, treatment — so two passes over the library
reach the same answer and the work has an order. MIGRATION.md is the recipe per
tier, written to be followed mechanically. And a gate makes the result
verifiable: `consumes` is now a schema field, the lint enforces it in both
directions, and the per-scene battery renders each scene under two deliberately
distant identities and requires the picture to change.

That gate is the part that matters. Without it `consumes` is a comment, and the
whole inversion becomes unverifiable at exactly the point where it stops being
checkable by eye. With it, a scene that declares the cast and ignores it fails.

Eighteen scenes migrated. Four by hand at the drawn tier — Firefly Drift,
Metaballs, Floating Geometry, Prism Bloom — and ten at the field tier by script,
which is one declaration and one wrapped return. All eighteen pass.

The field tier is honestly marginal and the gate says so: every one of the ten
moves by 37 to 39 of 255, against 173 to 255 for the drawn tier, and the
uniformity across ten unrelated scenes is the tell. That is one global
posterisation applying, not ten scenes expressing anything. Cheap, real, shallow.

The decomposition moved from identity being worth 54% of the container to 158%,
but the stage set changed underneath the measurement and part of that is
Metaballs expressing a cast better than Constellation did. What survives the
caveat is the useful finding: a migrated library scene carries the identity
better than a stage written from scratch to carry it. The four bespoke stages
were the wrong shape of effort.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 21:59:24 +02:00
Dejvino
14d1204e82 Make grain a treatment, tempo a governor, and params commit harder
Grain was in every video. It was added twice unconditionally — every scene
called sigGrain, and the grade added its own on top — so the only thing that
varied between two tracks was how much of it there was. That makes grain the
renderer's fingerprint rather than a decision about one video.

It is now described rather than dialled (look/grain.js): a mode (off /
constant / swell / sections / transient), a cell size in pixels, a refresh
rate in frames, a mask (uniform, shadows, highlights, edges, bands) and a
chroma amount. Roughly 45% of tracks get none at all. The non-constant modes
carry a per-frame envelope computed in Show._postAt from frame and features
only, so preview and export still agree. Scene-side grain is gated the same
way, and a module can decline it outright with `texture: 0` — crisp line work
should stay crisp. The post tab grew a real grain block so any of it can be
forced per track.

Slow songs got fast scenes. `motion` bias was mostly section energy with
tempo as a small correction, so a 70bpm track's drop asked for nearly as much
speed as a 150bpm one. Motion is now tempo-dominated, and every `rate: true`
param is additionally scaled by a per-track rateScale — measured, 84bpm now
samples its rate params at 0.276 of range against 148bpm's 0.571.

Parameter sampling also commits harder: extremity starts at 0.45 rather than
0.25 and shapes the draw more aggressively. This was first pushed to 0.82 and
backed off to 0.72, because the gates caught the overshoot — seeds began
collapsing onto the same range ends and a sparse scene sampled at its low end
rendered effectively black.

Fallout worth recording: turning the default grade grain off exposed two
scenes that were never really animating. Dust Chamber and Eclipse Field
passed the Phase 7 movement gate only because per-pixel noise was moving
underneath them; both now breathe on their own fixed clock, and Dust Chamber
needed a brightness floor as well. Four scenes (Classic Wave, Silk Ribbon,
Kaleido Tunnel, Slow Orb) express the style trait ONLY through grain and so
cannot opt out yet; they hold a reduced share at 0.35 pending real edge and
softness response.

Phase 3's look-space check now measures its closest pair relative to image
brightness, the same correction Phase 10 already documents for sparse scenes:
the absolute number was being propped up by grain rather than by look-space
width. Five new Phase 10 checks cover grain distribution, treatment variety,
envelope range, the texture opt-out, and tempo. 93/93 pass.

Two transport bugs, both stale state surfacing in the UI:

- Loading a track replaces audio.src, which stops playback silently, so
  state.playing stayed true and the play button stayed on pause — the first
  click after a track change only flipped the flag back. Added stopPlayback().
- The controls row wrapped mid-song because two readouts that change length
  while playing were sized by their content: the clock crossing ten minutes
  and the section label whenever a scene name is long or a crossfade appears.
  The clock is now fixed-width with tabular figures and the section label is
  the row's only flexible item, laying out at zero width and ellipsising into
  whatever space is left. The two spacers competed with it for that space and
  are gone; its own text-align does their job.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-06 07:04:27 +02:00
Dejvino
ca5a68eb84 Phases 8 and 9: shots, and a production design per track
Both phases come out of the manual gate — watching whole tracks — and both
fix something no automated check was looking for.

Phase 8: shots. A section is a STAGE of the song and can run ninety
seconds; one scene held that long reads as a still image with a wobble on
it. Each section kind now gets a roster of three or four stage visuals
instead of one scene, and each section is cut into shots that rotate
between them on phrase lines, never holding past 22s. The roster stays per
kind, so a track's drops still cut between the same images and the video
keeps its identity; the anchor opens each section and the rotation returns
to it, and when a companion is due it is the least recently shown one.

The arc driver stopped working in sections and started working in cues, one
per shot, so a shot cut and a section change take the same code path and
differ only in transition length. The default transition is a slow
dissolve — two bars calm, one loud; a straight cut is reserved for
sections above the energy threshold, because on calm material a cut reads
as a glitch rather than as an edit.

Phase 9: production design. With cuts every fifteen seconds the next
problem was that the images being cut between shared nothing but the
palette. What a music video actually shares across shots is a location, a
cast, a camera operator and an art direction, so each track now generates a
personality in four traits (shape, camera, space, style) off the look seed.
The traits reach shaders as uniforms plus four helpers in the contract, and
each scene expresses them its own way: Classic Wave's rings take the
signature polygon, Metaballs merge as one, Floating Geometry no longer
picks between a box and a circle because the production already decided.

The part that makes it a design rather than a filter: scenes DECLARE which
traits they honour, a track is built on one or two, and a scene that does
not honour all of them is not cast in that track. The library shrinks per
track on purpose.

Two gates keep the declaration honest — lint greps each shader for evidence
of every trait it claims, and a render check measures that each declared
trait actually moves the image (41 scene/trait pairs, weakest response 64
of 255). A layer with no personality renders bit-identically to before,
which is what keeps every earlier sweep and regression valid.

Checks changed rather than added:
  - P4 scene-change and drift checks now measure per shot, not per section;
    the crossfade check reads its length off the cue.
  - P5 flash sweep runs per shot, so the visuals that only appear
    mid-section are measured too.
  - P6 preview/export parity primes first (as both real paths do) and
    compares at the one-LSB tolerance Phase 7 already uses. Measured over
    four consecutive shows: 3 frames at delta 1, then bit-exact — GPU
    variance on first render, not a divergence.
  - P2's contract-uniform list is derived from the contract instead of
    retyped, so the signature uniforms cannot fall out of sync.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 20:04:33 +02:00
Dejvino
59180948d0 Phase 5: compositing depth ("C" complete)
Multi-layer stacks with blend modes, feedback, post chain, and a 3D
particle layer proving the compositor is genuinely hybrid. Looks now
generate accent layers from a different family, composited additively at
low opacity, weighted by section energy so intros stay sparse.

Adds flash-rate safety (engine/flash.js), which was not in the original
plan and should have been. This generates beat-reactive video for
publication, and rapid light-dark cycling is the photosensitive-epilepsy
trigger; WCAG 2.3.1 caps it at three flashes per second. Classic Wave
measured 7-8/s at every output resolution from 96x54 to 1920x1080, so it
was a real hazard rather than a sampling artefact.

Root cause was general, not one bad shader: `u_time * u_speed` where speed
is reactively modulated. Phase is elapsed*rate, so changing the rate at
time T jumps phase by T*delta — sixty seconds in, a 0.05 wobble throws the
phase three whole units between consecutive frames, and it worsens as the
track runs. Fixed by introducing rate params:

- schema flag `rate: true` documents and marks them
- Layer.resolveParams skips reactivity on them
- ArcDriver skips drift on them
- validateModule rejects a reactive entry on one
- lint-scenes greps shaders for `u_time * u_X` and fails if X is unmarked,
  so no future scene can reintroduce it

Every rate param across the six scenes is now marked. Two checks were
needed to find this: a per-look flash check, and a per-SCENE sweep at
aggressive params, since the look generator only samples part of the space
and a scene can hide an unsafe region for a long time.

Gate 10/10. Worst flash rate now 1/s. Feedback stable over 10,000 frames
(luminance 0.17-0.59, no saturation or decay). 0.17ms/frame at 1280x720.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 11:38:26 +02:00
Dejvino
c9b80308d2 Phase 2: param schema, auto-binding, generated UI
All five party-stage shaders now ported. Each declares its params
declaratively; uniform binding, UI controls, seeded sampling and arc
automation all derive from that one block, so a new scene costs a shader
and a schema and nothing else.

Port changes: LED-grid masks stripped, hardcoded colours replaced with
palette lookups, magic numbers lifted into params. Psychedelic Drift's
internal 15-second scene timer removed — keeping the visuals moving is the
arc driver's job, and it knows where the song's real transitions are.

ParamPanel generates controls from the schema alone and knows about no
specific scene; a hand-written control would be a bug.

Gate 8/8: schemas valid, uniforms accounted for in both directions, all
scenes compile and render, 128 range-sweep frames with no black, blown or
flat results, every param exposed in the UI, edits clamped, presets
round-trip and survive schema drift.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 11:14:04 +02:00