Aetheria/docs/moddable-ship-authoring.md

Moddable ship authoring: parallel proof

Status: design and proof lane. The existing HullData catalog records, Longinus and Djinni prefabs, and their spawn path remain live until a complete mod ship passes authoring, validation, loading, and play checks.

LineArt proof from Quiet.blend

The numbers in this section and in the compose example below come from an unrecorded probe. Build/quiet.cc is git-ignored and no committed fixture or test reproduces them.

C:\Users\Meta\Desktop\Quiet.blend is a read-only source for this probe. At frame 1, Quiet / Dexter Quiet Lineart evaluates to 1,040 polylines with 3,125 points. Blender 5.2.2 wrote those coordinates, point radii and opacities, material/layer names, cyclic flags, and RGBA into Build/quiet.cc without changing the .blend. C# reopened the same typed record and counted the same lines and points. A second line replacement preserved its record key, schema ID, hull, model asset, and anchors byte for byte. Build/quiet.cc is an ignored draft probe, not an installed ship.

The line positions remain 3D Blender world coordinates. The runtime can lower them to a hologram or schematic view without regenerating LineArt. LineArt evaluation depends on the source scene and camera, so a captured set may be incomplete from another view. Gameplay cell occupancy remains the authored HullData.Shape in the .cc; strokes do not decide armor or mount footprints.

tools/blender/aetheria_ships is a separate Blender add-on in Brokkr's sidebar. It uses Brokkr's configured CultLib Python source and edits the line slot of a ship file's aetheria.ship_authoring visual record and the hull shape and hardpoint slots of the aetheria.hulldata record beside it. To try it, make F:\Projects\Brokkr\surfaces\blender and this repo's tools\blender visible to Blender's add-on search path, enable brokkr_bridge then aetheria_ships, and install msgpack into Blender's Python environment. Create a draft with dotnet run --project tools/AetherDb -- ship-authoring create <ship.cc> <stable-id> <name> [--like <shipped hull name>]; --like Djinni copies that shipped ship's stats and leaves the body and layout empty. Choose that .cc in the Aetheria Ship panel, select an object in its ship collection, and press Bind Ship Collection. The collection stores aetheria.asset_kind=ship, the stable aetheria.id, and a relative .cc path. Select a Grease Pencil object in that bound collection and press Capture Ship Lines. Capture checks the collection ID against the record before writing; object and collection display names are not IDs. Load Ship Layout opens the same .cc file's hull grid and hardpoints in the panel. Toggle occupied grid cells, resize up to 32×32, and edit each hardpoint's type, mount ID, position, footprint, rotation, armor, and firing arc. A footprint uses top-to-bottom rows of # (occupied) and . (empty), separated by /; ##/## is a 2×2 mount. Save Layout to .cc replaces only the hull shape and hardpoint slots. It preserves hull stats, anchors, visual assets, lines, the record key, and schema. Save rejects a changed ship ID or layout revision; reload first if another editor changed those fields. A line capture leaves the loaded layout revision intact. The saved layout is a draft until its mount IDs resolve to visual anchors and C# validation passes. Package Ship turns the bound collection into the package. Tag each anchor object with the custom properties aetheria.role (map-icon, hull-collider, shield, tractor, thruster-emitter, radiator-mesh, weapon-mount, weapon-muzzle) and aetheria.id (the hardpoint's mount ID for a mount), plus aetheria.order if a weapon has several muzzles. Parent a muzzle to its weapon mount object. Thrusters and radiators are mesh objects; the others may be empties. Package exports the collection, Grease Pencil excluded, to ship.glb beside the .cc, writes the anchors, captures the lines when the collection holds exactly one Grease Pencil object, and shows AetherDb's verdict in the panel. It runs dotnet run --project <repo>/tools/AetherDb; the repo is the add-on preference Aetheria repo, or by default the nearest folder above the .cc holding tools/AetherDb. ship-authoring inspect <ship.cc> reads drafts; validate requires complete hull, model, and anchor authoring, and judges ship.glb once it exists.

Objective

A mod author edits one ship .cc file, including the hull schematic and every hardpoint. The file holds two typed records: the ship's HullData and the ShipAuthoring visual package that hull names through HullData.Visual. Blender, through Aetheria tooling built on Brokkr, edits that same record while displaying its visual source. The game assembles an instance from the record and its referenced asset package at runtime. A mod package can be installed without opening the Unity Editor.

Current mechanism

GameData/Aetheria.cc holds HullData: the cell shape, hardpoint footprints, stats, and a Unity Addressables prefab GUID. ZoneRenderer.LoadEntity loads that prefab and expects ShipInstance; EntityInstance and ShipInstance match catalog hardpoint transform strings against manually wired prefab arrays. The new FBX naming builder automates prefab wiring but still emits a Unity prefab and is part of this existing path. Brokkr can capture Blender collections and custom properties; the AetheriaEve Blender authoring v1 contract describes a future collection-to-CultMesh deploy lane, but that lane is not yet an end-to-end ship loader in the current game.

Target authority map for the parallel lane

• Owner: a mod-owned .cc file holds two records. Its HullData owns the ship's authored hull semantics: schematic, hardpoints, and stats. Its ShipAuthoring document owns the visual package: model path, anchor-to-node associations, and schematic lines. HullData.Visual is the only binding between them; a hull names exactly one of Prefab and Visual. A ship ID is stable across display-name changes.
• Inputs: the authoring record; a Blender visual source identified by the record; compiled mesh, texture, and material artifacts; references to gear designs where the game requires them.
• Outputs: a validated runtime hull design and an assembled visual/physics ShipInstance. The assembly and any catalog row are derived products.
• Derived state: Unity objects, component arrays, collision components, particle emitters, and schematic UI. Installed equipment, damage, heat, cargo, ownership, and position are live game state.
• Forbidden writers: Blender object names, Unity prefabs, generated catalog rows, and runtime components may not independently decide the schematic, hardpoint type or footprint, armor, drag, or mount identity. Geometry nodes carry stable IDs; the .cc document gives them meaning.
• Shared path: Blender validation, command-line validation, editor preview, and runtime loading read the same typed record and invoke the same semantic validator. A bad mod is rejected before partial scene construction.
• Cut line: no existing ship path is removed during proof. Migration later deletes or demotes the old ship-specific catalog/prefab authority for each migrated hull; it does not keep two writable definitions of that hull.

ship-authoring validate, the catalog composer, and the visual importer call the same ShipAuthoringStore.Validate(hull, visual); that shared path is true of the C# callers only. The Blender side checks grid bounds and footprint shape (ship_cc.py) and nothing semantic. Blender edits the hull grid, hardpoints, and captured lines in the typed source records; inspect reads incomplete drafts. Unity's Aetheria / Preview Mod Ship Package imports a validated package from disk, resolves stable GLB node IDs, and draws the captured polylines directly as 3D line segments. Point opacity and color are retained; radius and material-specific stroke styling are not rendered yet. The game reads mod records through the boot path described under Runtime catalog seam.

Runtime catalog seam

AetheriaStores.CatalogTypes routes ShipAuthoring to the shipped catalog, but the shipped catalog contains no ShipAuthoring record. This stays correct only while nothing writes a ShipAuthoring through a catalog-writable cache on Aetheria.cc; a mod ship's authoring record lives in its own ship.cc and in the derived catalog.

CultCache routes ItemData to one home backing store, and ActionGameManager.CultCache holds that store for the entire play session. Attaching each mod's .cc as another item store would violate the cache's one-home invariant. ship-authoring compose instead derives one runtime catalog from the shipped catalog and validated mod packages, preserving all shipped record keys. Each mod's stable ShipAuthoring.Id yields separate deterministic keys for its copied HullData (mod-hull:<id>) and its runtime authoring record (mod-ship:<id>). A mod's ship.cc stores its two records under those same keys, and compose copies them verbatim, so the derived catalog holds one hull per mod ship and HullData.Visual names the mod-ship record. The generated catalog is disposable; the shipped catalog and each mod's source .cc remain the owners. A player session opens one catalog snapshot and cannot hot-swap its designs beneath existing entities.

Each immediate child of the mods directory has an ID matching its directory name and contains ship.cc plus the GLB at the record's relative ModelAsset path. Every referenced anchor uses an aetheria.id custom property exported into a GLB node's extras. Compose checks the asset, unique IDs, and every reference before atomically replacing the derived catalog. For example:

dotnet run --project tools/AetherDb -- ship-authoring compose GameData/Aetheria.cc GameData/Aetheria.modded.cc GameData/Mods

The game does not need this command: at boot, when GameData/Mods holds a package, it composes the derived catalog into Application.persistentDataPath (ShipModCatalog.ResolveCatalog) and opens that file instead of Aetheria.cc; with no package it opens the shipped catalog. The derived file is recomposed on every launch. A playable ship is still outstanding. In the Quiet probe, 206 shipped records became 208 derived records: one mod-hull:quiet and one mod-ship:quiet. A missing GLB node ID was rejected without changing the previous derived file. The probe's four anchors and zero hardpoints are only a data-path smoke, not a playable Quiet design.

The visual importer uses Unity glTFast's runtime import to read the package GLB asynchronously and map its stable node IDs to Unity transforms. It keeps a partially loaded object inactive and destroys it on failure. ShipModShips preloads one assembled, inactive prototype per hull that names a Visual, at boot and before the game scene loads. ShipAuthoringStore.Validate owns which hardpoints carry anchors and which role each anchor plays. Mount anchors exist only for hardpoints that show on the model: weapons, radiators and thrusters. Each such hardpoint needs an anchor whose id is its mount id: thruster-emitter for a thruster, radiator-mesh for a radiator, weapon-mount for an energy, ballistic or launcher hardpoint. An internal hardpoint (reactor, sensors, shield and the rest) has no anchor, and an anchor taking its id is refused. A thruster's or radiator's anchor node is a mesh: the thruster's is not rendered and is the surface its exhaust emits from, the radiator's is rendered. A weapon mount is a point, and each one needs at least one weapon-muzzle anchor whose ParentId is the weapon's mount id. articulation is reserved for pivots and is never a mount; no pivot is planned until pivots move onto HullData. ShipModPlan then maps the validated pair to ShipInstance slots and refuses nothing itself. The shared effects (shield, tractor beam, ping, explosion, map and invisible materials) come from the Addressable ShipModTemplate prefab. ZoneRenderer.LoadEntity clones the prototype when the hull names a Visual. Gameplay reads a mod ship's records from the derived catalog; the package directory supplies only the GLB. capturepreset still writes the shipped catalog. Continue refuses a run naming a design the catalog no longer holds (RunSave.RequireDesigns), naming the missing mod ships.

Proof gates

1. A typed .cc record round-trips between C# and Blender's Python runtime, preserving unknown future fields and record identity.
2. Blender edits schematic cells and hardpoints in that record. Package Ship writes the anchors and ship.glb from the bound collection: each object tagged aetheria.role becomes an anchor whose id, and GLB node aetheria.id, is the object's aetheria.id. It then runs AetherDb ship-authoring validate, which judges the GLB too: node ids, and a mesh under every thruster and radiator anchor. The model supplies geometry, not a second copy of hull semantics.
3. A command-line validator rejects malformed cells, overlapping or dangling hardpoints, missing model nodes, and unresolved asset references with precise errors. It changes no live catalog or scene on failure. The composer now performs this check for a package before replacing its derived catalog.
4. A packaged mod ship loads in a built Unity player without Unity Editor or Blender installed. Runtime assembly creates the same components the current ShipInstance expects and uses the existing simulation rules.
5. Spawn, equip, thrust, fire, shield, damage, save/reload, and schematic UI work for the mod ship. Only then is a shipped hull eligible for migration.

Unity batch smokes

Both run in batchmode against a package the tests generate: set AETHERIA_SHIP_FIXTURE_DIR while running ShipModCatalogTests.TheFixturePackageIsCompleteAndItsGlbCarriesAScene and it leaves mod.skiff/ship.cc and skiff.glb there (the GLB carries a tetrahedron mesh on the map, collider and thruster anchors, plus a weapon mount and muzzle). Neither takes -quit: both are async void and end the Editor themselves.

• -executeMethod ShipModPreview.Smoke -shipModPath <dir>/mod.skiff/ship.cc [-assemble] imports the GLB and checks the anchors; -assemble also builds the ShipInstance from the template.
• -executeMethod ShipModPlaySmoke.Run -shipModPath <dir>/mod.skiff/ship.cc [-shippedCatalog GameData/Aetheria.cc] composes a derived catalog with the package, runs ShipModShips.Preload, instantiates the ship through ShipModShips.Instantiate (the call ZoneRenderer.LoadEntity makes) under a bare parent transform, and requires thruster and weapon hardpoints (each weapon with a muzzle), one MeshCollider over a readable mesh, and a map icon. It prints SHIP_MOD_PLAY_SMOKE thrusters=N weapons=N collider=ok mapicon=ok and exits 0, or logs the exception and exits 1. It uses no scene and no zone.

Structural and build budget

The proof reuses HullData simulation semantics, CultCache .cc persistence, Brokkr's Blender host, and the current ShipInstance behavior. It adds one authoring document type and validator, Blender-facing layout and line editing, a disposable catalog composer, and one runtime GLB/line visual importer with an Editor preview, ShipInstance assembly and boot-time preloading. No daemon, second gameplay simulation, or Unity prefab generator is added. The existing FBX builder remains available to existing content but is not an input to this lane. Its retirement follows migration.

Focused checks use Aetheria.Shared and tests/Aetheria.Shared.Tests under netstandard2.1 / net10.0, Python CultCache interoperability checks, and the Unity 6000.3.24f1 Editor compile and play probe. No workspace-wide build or new executable target is justified for schema work. The current catalog is 12.7 MB; it is not rewritten during the proof. The worktree starts clean from 4b594e11; unrelated Unity scene and material edits remain in the original checkout.