Aetheria/docs/three-gates-scope.md

Three Gates: Shipping Scope

Date: 2026-09-11

Aetheria ships as a short rogue-lite run on the existing Unity game: start at the Entrance, fight through three boss chokepoints, reach the Exit. Everything the player earns comes from what they destroy. More systems come after this ships, one at a time.

Core loop

Fight -> loot -> sell and refit at stations -> push to the next gate.

Work, in order

1. Run structure. Death deletes the saved run (ActionGameManager.Die currently leaves PlayerSettings.SavedRun intact). Reaching the Exit shows a win screen. Credits persist in the save instead of the hardcoded 15M on ActionGameManager.
2. Bosses as gates. Galaxy.PlaceFactionsMain already puts boss zones on Entrance-to-Exit chokepoints and SavedGame.BossZones stores them. ZoneGenerator spawns the faction BossHull with an authored loadout in its boss zone; wormholes out of that zone stay locked until the boss dies. Difficulty scales per section.
3. Reason to fight. Kills already drop gear and cargo (EntityInstance.cs). Add Sell and Repair to station services (TradeMenu is buy-only; no repair exists).
4. Fire control owns hits. Manual aiming goes away. The player (and AI) targets an item on the enemy schematic; a fire control system in ServerShared resolves where shots land, making the existing damage localization matter. See below.
5. Navigation planner. Replaces steering for agent movement. See below.
6. Minimal narrative. One Ink beat per boss (pre-fight hail, aftermath), played through the existing LocalMenu Ink player. Story placement (StoryProcessor, commented out at Galaxy.cs:239) stays off.

Items 3 and 6 can land wherever there is room; 1 and 2 come first.

Fire control

Aiming in space is not fun, and no human aims well enough for the schematic damage model (armor -> item -> hull per cell) to matter. Fire control moves skill from aim to decisions: which subsystem to hit, when to commit fire against heat and visibility budgets, what each weapon group is for. Player and AI share it, so AI accuracy is no longer superhuman by construction.

• Owner: fire control in ServerShared. Decides hit, cell, and damage.
• Inputs: target and selected item, sensor/detection quality, range, target deviation from the predicted intercept, lock time.
• Outputs: schematic hits applied by DamageSchematic, which moves from Gameplay/EntityInstance.cs into Entity.
• Demoted: the seven Unity weapon effects (Projectile, GuidedProjectile, Laser, ConstantLaser, HitscanEffect, Lightning, ConstantLightning) and HullCollider become presentation only. Their Physics.* queries no longer decide damage.
• Projectiles still fly toward the predicted intercept; the hit is resolved on arrival against how far the target deviated, so maneuvering is evasion.
• Deferred Unity-physics surfaces: ship collision (HullCollider), loot pickup (ShieldManager), TractorBeam, Mine. Not blockers.

Invariant: game simulation runs independently of Unity. ServerShared enforces this at compile time (Aetheria.Shared.Unity.asmdef sets noEngineReferences), but Unity-owned hit resolution breaks it behaviorally: the simulation compiles without Unity yet cannot resolve combat without it. That was a velocity compromise. Moving hit authority into fire control restores the invariant, and lets the planner and a balance harness simulate combat.

Navigation planner

Everything is a gravity well, and steering cannot navigate one. Escaping a well means pumping energy: rocking (the classic mountain-car problem) or thrusting tangentially to spiral out. Stealthy movement means riding terrain and thrusting rarely; thrust adds visibility (Behaviors/Thruster.cs:83).

Approach: sampling-based model-predictive control (MPPI-style). Each agent rolls out candidate thrust sequences over a cheap model of the real dynamics (thrust, Zone.GetHeight slope, drag from Ship.cs) and follows the best. Cost = goal progress + thrust x visibility + threat exposure + heat. Rocking, tangential escape, and surfing emerge from one cost; personality is cost weights.

The player's predicted coast path is an itemized capability: a navigation computer behavior that runs the same rollout model and draws the result. Without the item, surfing is learned by feel.

Open risks: drag may bleed too much energy for surfing to work; the height field is time-varying (gas giant ripples, moving bodies), so rollouts must sample it at future times. Loadout quality scales by section rather than biasing toward the largest items.

Out of scope for now

Economy simulation, hauling, mining yield, crafting/blueprints, reputation changes, story placement, multiplayer and Economy.Server, a headless server deployment, and the CultMesh/daemon rebuild (parked in F:\Projects\AetheriaEve).