Ghostlight/docs/architecture/schema-future-mechanisms.md

Future Schema Mechanisms

This note parks the useful pressure from notes/evaluation.md without treating that critique as doctrine. The current v0 schema is still a character-state and prompt-projection seam. The future runtime needs mechanisms that turn state into changing social behavior.

Current Boundary

The v0 agent-state schema should stay focused on:

• canonical character state
• directional relationship stance
• observer-local perceived overlays
• memories, goals, values, and scene-local dialogue packs
• enough event interpretation to support prompt projection

Do not inflate schemas/agent-state.schema.json into the whole simulator before the projection examples prove what the runtime actually needs.

Mechanisms To Preserve For Later

Event Appraisal

Each participant needs a private read of the same event. A single exchange can be betrayal to one agent, exposure risk to another, and flirting-with-knives to a third. The current schema now allows private_interpretations on events as a lightweight bridge.

Future work should make appraisal reusable enough to drive state updates, memory retrieval, and action affordances.

State Transitions And Consequences

mean, plasticity, and current_activation describe state. They do not yet define how state changes. Future transition machinery needs:

• activation decay
• event-driven deltas
• sensitization or habituation
• effects on related variables
• rules for when mean changes versus only current_activation

The current event_effects field is a projection-facing placeholder, not the final transition engine.

Structured Beliefs And Secrets

String beliefs are useful for authoring, but simulation needs structure:

• holder
• subject
• claim type
• confidence
• evidence
• visibility
• emotional charge
• whether the belief is private, shared, public, rumor, false, or contested

Secrets need similar structure: owner, known-by, suspected-by, exposure cost, protective strategies, and what can leak through action.

Action Affordances

The system needs to choose among possible moves instead of jumping from state to dialogue. Future projection examples should expose candidate affordances such as probing, evading, bargaining, softening, escalating, repairing, threatening, or walking away.

The important rule: affordances should be justified by goals, appraisals, capabilities, costs, relationship stance, and scene pressure.

Conversation State

Dialogue needs explicit continuity:

• active topic
• open questions
• evasions
• accusations
• face-threats
• commitments
• promises, refusals, and ruptures
• who has the floor

This belongs close to projection because it changes turn shape immediately.

Resources And Capabilities

Cat's debt, taxi condition, mobility, and institutional exposure are not just backstory. Oz's drone integrity, signal secrecy, anonymity, and physical safety are not just flavor. Future schemas need concrete resource and capability fields so desire does not masquerade as ability.

Dyads And Shared Relationship History

Directional relationship stance should remain. A separate dyadic layer may also be needed for shared history:

• relationship type
• phase
• shared events
• shared secrets
• unresolved ruptures
• rituals
• dependency structure
• communication pattern

Do not collapse this into one symmetric relationship object. People are not that tidy unless the author is lying to save RAM.

Social Knowledge, Reputation, And Institutions

The Aetheria setting needs institutions with teeth: sanctions, authority, surveillance, reputation effects, access control, role expectations, and public knowledge. Future work should distinguish private belief, shared belief, public fact, rumor, common knowledge, and institutional record.

Memory Retrieval

Memories need more than salience and confidence once the runtime starts moving:

• recency
• emotional charge
• retrieval triggers
• decay
• reconsolidation
• intrusive, avoided, cherished, rehearsed, or distorted status
• schema effects
• whether another agent knows the memory

The current memory bundle is enough for the first projection seam. It is not yet the memory engine.

Embodiment And Nonverbal Channels

Oz proves this one immediately. The operator, drone body, observable channels, leakage risks, and physical affordances are separate facts. Future projection needs embodiment because social meaning leaks through movement, timing, silence, distance, posture, and constrained bodies.

The projected-local-context seam now carries a first embodiment/interface surface, but the canonical schema still lacks a proper reusable embodiment model. Future work should promote body form, native habitat, movement channels, assistive or translation infrastructure, and visible nonverbal signal channels only after more projection examples prove the required shape.

For Aetheria faction work, embodiment projection must check the lore vault before writing. If the faction page supports only general habitat aesthetics or social affordances, keep generated action at that level and record the missing ergonomic detail as a source-lore gap instead of inventing a confident local interface.

When a blocking gap is found, patch the AetheriaLore source before treating the detail as available to projection. Ghostlight can discover missing granularity through scene generation, but the lore vault should become the durable source of the elaboration.

Promotion Rule

Promote a future mechanism into the main schema only after it has survived at least one reviewed projection example or runtime slice where it clearly changes the output. Until then, document it here, test it in examples, and do not let the ontology grow antlers for sport.