Vili

Vili is the GameCult Persona animation daemon.

It owns the bridge from Persona performance intent to body-motion generation. Its first backend is Kimodo on Raven, running through Docker Engine inside Ubuntu-24.04 WSL with NVIDIA GPU passthrough.

Front Door

• Value: a warm, supervised path from a text prompt to generated body motion. Vili runs Kimodo as a resident GPU worker on Raven and returns motion artifacts (motion.npz, optional BVH) for a job, with Idunn health and an Eve operator surface.
• Problem: Personas and games need generated motion, but cold per-request container runs took about 195 seconds per 1 second clip, versus about 54 warm. One daemon owns job identity, worker lifecycle and artifact references so callers do not touch Docker, WSL or model state.
• Entry points: scripts/vili-daemon.mjs (the daemon; npm start, npm run health, npm run smoke, npm run provider), scripts/kimodo-resident-worker.py (the resident worker), POST /motion/generate (see Motion Generation), docs/verse-service-contract.md and docs/motion-pipeline-target.md.
• Live: the resident Kimodo worker on Raven, POST /motion/generate, GET /smoke, the CultCache service store, and CultNet/RUDP health to Idunn. It has motion.npz and optional BVH output on the SOMA skeleton; there is no FBX export.
• Planned (target, 2026-10-20): FBX animation export on the SOMA skeleton and a text-prompt-to-Unity-clip path with no hand steps, with each artifact recording prompt, constraints, seed and model. Retargeting stays with the consuming engine; see docs/motion-pipeline-target.md.

Authority

• Vili owns animation job intake, Kimodo runtime checks, Kimodo resident worker lifecycle, generated motion artifact references, and its operator/provider surface.
• Personas and Weksa may propose performance intent, gesture prompts, and constraints.
• Kimodo owns motion synthesis.
• Future renderers own retargeting, playback, facial performance, camera, and lip sync.
• Odin discovers Vili; Odin does not own Vili's state.
• Vili is started at boot by its scheduled task on Raven today; nothing restarts it after a crash, and Idunn does not manage it until its admission is ruled (deferred until RPS has its clips). Idunn would not own animation decisions.

Local Runtime

On Raven:

scripts\restart-vili-daemon.cmd

Default compatibility endpoint:

http://10.77.0.4:8824

Vili is not an Idunn target today. Its lifecycle is the GameCult\Vili scheduled task on Raven, and GET /health is an operator lowering. Admission to Idunn is motion-pipeline❓vili-under-idunn.

Vili also writes daemon-owned service state to:

.vili\vili.service.cc

That CultCache store owns the provider advertisement, operator state, Eve surface, command boundary, and transport profile. The adjacent JSON files are compatibility exports for tools that have not learned the .cc store yet.

Important routes:

• GET /health
• GET /provider-advertisement
• GET /operator-state
• GET /eve/operator
• GET /eve/deck/providers
• WS /eve/deck/vili.animation
• GET /smoke
• POST /motion/generate

Motion Generation

POST /motion/generate exposes Kimodo's generation surface through the resident worker. Vili owns job identity, persistence, timeout handling, worker lifecycle, and the output stem; Kimodo owns synthesis and model-specific export formats.

Minimal request:

{
  "prompt": "a person gives a small friendly wave",
  "duration": 1,
  "diffusionSteps": 20,
  "bvh": true
}

Batch requests can use Kimodo-style metadata:

{
  "meta": {
    "texts": [
      "a person gives a small friendly wave",
      "a person takes one careful step"
    ],
    "durations": [0.5, 0.5],
    "num_samples": 1,
    "diffusion_steps": 20
  },
  "numTransitionFrames": 3,
  "cfgType": "regular",
  "cfgWeight": [1.5],
  "seed": 6101,
  "bvh": true,
  "bvhStandardTpose": true,
  "saveExampleDir": true
}

Supported request fields:

• prompt / utterance plus duration / durationSeconds
• texts plus durations, or a full meta object
• inputFolder / input_folder for a container-visible Kimodo input folder with meta.json and optional constraints.json
• model; changing the requested model restarts the single resident worker
• diffusionSteps / diffusion_steps
• numSamples / num_samples
• numTransitionFrames / num_transition_frames
• constraints as an object/list, or constraints, constraintsPath, or constraints_path as a container-visible path
• seed
• cfg, cfgType / cfg_type, cfgWeight / cfg_weight
• bvh, bvhStandardTpose / bvh_standard_tpose
• noPostprocess / no_postprocess
• saveExampleDir / save_example_dir
• timeoutMs, workerTimeoutMs

Vili intentionally does not accept an arbitrary Kimodo output path. Generated artifacts are written under .vili/artifacts/{jobId}/ and referenced from the job record. Kimodo-SOMA-RP-v1.1 produces NPZ and optional BVH output, Kimodo-SMPLX-RP-v1.1 also exports AMASS NPZ, and Kimodo-G1-RP-v1.1 also exports CSV when that model is resident.

Current Runtime State

Raven has a Hugging Face token installed at /root/.cache/huggingface/token inside Ubuntu-24.04. Vili mounts that token read-only into Kimodo containers and passes the standard Hugging Face token environment variables.

Vili keeps Kimodo warm through a resident worker container named vili-kimodo-worker. The worker loads the model once, exposes /health and /generate inside WSL on 127.0.0.1:8825, and serializes generation through the loaded model. Because Raven's Docker Engine runs inside WSL, Vili also keeps a tiny WSL sleep-loop alive while the worker is resident so the Docker substrate does not disappear underneath the model. GET /health observes worker state without launching model load. GET /smoke verifies the backend and starts the resident worker when it is absent.

Verified on 2026-06-12: the resident worker loaded Kimodo-SOMA-RP-v1.1 on Raven's RTX 4060 Ti in about 100 seconds. Five warmed service-path generations of a 1 second clip at 20 diffusion steps averaged about 54.4 seconds each, roughly 0.0184x realtime. The old per-request docker run --rm kimodo_gen path measured about 195 seconds per 1 second clip and is no longer the generation authority.