lobby: phased UI work now that the hub owns geometry and deja's tape

[aaylward]

Ordered successor to #326, which is the brainstorm. The hub half landed in muchq/MoonBase#1563: rooms now carry a geometry on the wire, one of them is the glasshouse, and the hub polls deja and fans each scored request out as a splat on the glass. This issue tracks what the site still owes, in the order it makes sense to build.

Where the client already is

More is done than #326 assumed:

• roomGeometry.ts already has three rooms, grid, glasshouse and sphere, each a palette, a world mapping, a GLSL block for the ray tracer's ground and walls, attractors, and a sound profile. The glasshouse already draws glass walls. Its own comment says "the hub will one day name one per room" — that day has arrived.
• worldSync.ts dispatches on the LobbyUpdate member and silently drops members it does not know, so the hub's new events are already harmless rather than breaking.
• The geometry today is a local choice cycled by a hotkey. Nobody else in the room sees it.

The wire, as merged

WorldState and the new GeometryChanged both carry a geometry union of plane, sphere or glasshouse, and both carry up to 32 TapeSplats, absent off a glasshouse. A live event arrives as a tape LobbyUpdate.

One TapeSplat is seq, wall (0 is -z, 1 is +x, 2 is +z, 3 is -x), u along the wall and v up it, both fractions in [0, 1), ts in epoch seconds, the context chips oldest first, the actual token, a verdict string, and each predictor's top guess, absent when it had none. No wall height rides the wire: v is a fraction of however tall the client draws the glass. The placement is the hub's, computed from seq, so every client in a room draws an event on the same square inch, and the client draws what it is handed rather than recomputing it.

Phase 1: splat the tape on the glass

The first visible thing, and the one that needs no other phase.

• hubStream.ts learns the tape member and the splat shape.
• worldSync.ts keeps a bounded ring of splats in GameState, seeded from worldState.tape and geometryChanged.tape, deduped by seq, and cleared when the world is left.
• The glasshouse renders them on its walls at wall, u, v: the actual token, the predictors' guesses, and verdict colour, matching /deja (green for the top guess, amber for top-5, red for an anomaly, violet for novel).
• Splats age out using ts, so a joiner handed a minutes-old ring sees a faded wall rather than a wall that looks live.

Open question worth settling while building it: whether a splat animates in, given a joiner receives 32 at once and should not watch a stampede.

Phase 2: the room's geometry comes from the hub

Today the hotkey is local and private; after this, a room looks the same to everyone in it.

• worldSync.ts reads worldState.geometry and handles geometryChanged, switching the rendered room to match.
• The hotkey becomes a setGeometry command rather than a local toggle, so cycling rooms changes them for everybody standing there.
• The movement model and the boundary clamp follow the hub's rules per geometry. The glasshouse floor is exactly the plane's, so that case is free; the sphere is not.

Phase 3: the gap between prediction and reality

The part #1150 is actually about, and the reason the walls are worth looking at.

• Show the actual token beside what each predictor guessed, so the gap reads at a glance.
• Render the context chips, high up and large as the brainstorm asks.
• Consider a sound when a request splats, which is the natural half of the soundscape item.

Phase 4: polish, unordered

• Soundscape beyond the current arpeggio: per-room ambience.
• WebGL touches and more detail in the world.
• Plaza chat as art: a jumbotron or a factory wall instead of only the panel, plus the open question of whether anonymous visitors get chat at all, and the glyph-swapping idea for making plaza chat read as texture.
• A torus, the one geometry from lobby: site half of muchq/MoonBase#1554 — room geometry, deja on the walls, plaza chat as art #326 nobody has built.

Not in scope

The browser never subscribes to deja. The hub is deja's only reader, by the decision on muchq/MoonBase#1150, and the tape reaches the client purely as world state.

[aaylward]

Phase 1 is merged, #345. The glass now shows deja's tape.

Phase 2 is smaller than written. Part of it had to land in Phase 1: the client's Geometry gains a glasshouse member, the glasshouse room asks for it, and geometry equality compares the union tag rather than sphere radius. That was not optional. The room called itself a plane, so entering it sent no setGeometry, the hub's world stayed flat, and the hub only polls deja while somebody stands in a glasshouse. The wall would have been permanently empty in production while every test passed, because the tests seeded the ring directly. The review panel's wire lens caught it by reading the hub's smithy model rather than the diff.

So what remains in Phase 2 is the inbound half and the sharing:

• worldSync reads worldState.geometry and handles geometryChanged, switching the rendered room to match, so a room looks the same to everyone standing in it rather than each visitor choosing privately.
• The hotkey becomes a setGeometry for the room instead of a local skin change.
• The movement model and boundary clamp follow the hub's rules per geometry. The glasshouse floor is exactly the plane's, so that case is already free; the sphere is not.

Phases 3 and 4 are unchanged.

Also filed while reviewing: #346, player labels paint over the lobby panel and chat, at the same z-index the splat overlay had. Pre-existing, one-line fix, not this PR's to make.

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Generated by Claude Code

[aaylward]

Phase 2 is already done, delivered by #345's fold-in rather than by a PR of its own. Verified on main at c229712:

• Geometry carries glasshouse, and the glasshouse room asks for it.
• worldSync routes both worldState.geometry and geometryChanged to the renderer.
• useThoughtsGame.onGeometryChange redraws the room when the hub names a new shape, and roomForGeometry picks the skin, falling back by surface kind when the hub puts a room on a shape no room was written for.
• The hotkey sends setGeometry rather than changing a local skin, so a room's shape is the room's and everyone standing there redraws together.
• Movement and the boundary already follow the surface, since surfaceFor/frameAt/walk are per-geometry.

Nothing is left in Phase 2. Phase 3 is next, and it is now a bigger idea than "show the gap".

Phase 3, revised: comets out of deep space

The splats currently appear in place and fade. The wanted feel is closer to the cyberspace sequences in Hackers (1995): neon wireframe towers in a black void, dense monospace readouts crawling over every surface, hard glow, strong perspective.

• A deja event arrives as a comet out of deep space, flying in from far outside the room toward the glass.
• It splats against the outside wall at the hub's point, so the impact is seen from inside through the glass.
• The impact smears the event's data across the glass, digitally: the token, the context, the guesses, rendered like something that hit hard and ran.
• The smear fades after a few seconds, or as soon as the next comet sails in, so the wall reads as one live impact at a time rather than a wall of stickers.

Open question for the build: a joiner is handed up to 32 splats at once, and thirty-two comets would be the stampede the current code already guards against. The obvious answer is that seeded splats are already-faded residue on the glass, and only live events fly.

Phase 4 is unchanged, except that the soundscape item now has an obvious hook: a comet impact wants a sound.

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Generated by Claude Code

[aaylward]

Phase 3 landed in #347, merged.

The gap between prediction and reality reads at a glance now: impact reveals the context lane, the actual token with its verdict, and both predictors' guesses with their probabilities, on a dark plate against the lit glass. Events arrive as comets out of deep space and smear on the outside of the pane rather than appearing as stickers.

What phase 3 asked for, against what shipped:

• Actual token beside each predictor's guess — done, bigram and net each on their own line under the headline.
• Context chips, high up and large — done as the lane above the token, trimmed to the last four. The wire bounds neither the number of context tokens nor their length, and a plate as wide as the lane pushes the token off the side of a phone.
• A sound when a request splats — not built. It is the natural half of the soundscape item and belongs with phase 4's per-room ambience, so it moves there rather than holding phase 3 open.

One thing worth recording for whoever picks up the polish: the comet launches seven room-widths out, so it is a sub-pixel dot for roughly the first 85% of its flight and only reads in the last quarter second. On screen it pops more than it sails. That is a design number, not a defect, and #347 did not change it — but if the flight is meant to be watchable, shortening the launch distance or stretching the near phase of the pace curve is the knob.

Remaining: phase 4, unordered — per-room ambience (now including the splat sound), WebGL detail, plaza chat as art, and the torus.

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Generated by Claude Code