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Going-Commando/docs/plan
ReaperOfVeriod aff977e8c5 Correct the tfrag pointer-field claim, and show morphing regenerates VU packets
Two corrections to the previous commit, both from continuing the RAM comparison.

1. The previous commit said the RAM comparison "names two fields the disc-side
   work had left as data and an unnamed word". It does not. +0x10 is
   TfragHeader::data and +0x38 is TfragHeader::cube_ofs, both already named in the
   struct. What RAM adds is that both are POINTERS -- relocated by adding the
   block's RAM base -- rather than plain offsets. That is still worth knowing, but
   it is not a naming.

2. The previous commit attributed the 8.6% of rewritten bytes to "morphed
   positions with topology and UVs left verbatim". That is wrong, and patch 1 shows
   why. Comparing 4 KiB, disc 0xdf60 against RAM 0x855f60:

     bytes differing      354 of 4,096 = 8.6%
     contiguous runs      120
     longest run          8 bytes
     extent               +0xc1 through the end of the window

Patch 1 has 83 positions and 83 vertex-info entries, of which 13 morph. If
morphing rewrote position fields alone, the differing bytes would be a 13/83 slice
of a 498-byte position array -- a couple of dozen bytes in one contiguous region.
Instead 354 bytes differ, spread over 120 short runs across the whole window.

So the loader is not patching positions in place: it REGENERATES the VU packet
stream for the current morph state. That is what morphing is on this hardware --
VU1 GIF packets, not a CPU-side vertex array.

Consequence for verification, and the reason this is worth committing rather than
just noting: the plan of "map RAM vertices to disc indices and solve for the weight"
does not work against this memory image. The positions are inside regenerated
packets, so there is no stable per-vertex correspondence to read a weight out of.
Verifying the morph weight against the original needs the CAMERA DISTANCE at the
savestate, so the weight can be computed from the derivation and compared with the
rendered result, rather than read back out of RAM.

Population figures gathered on the way: 833 of 833 patches parse, carrying 43,613
vertex-info entries; 499 of 833 patches have at least one morphing entry, and
patch 0 -- the first record -- is base-only with none.

Also fixed a measurement error mid-run: I compared patch 1 at disc 0xdf60 against
RAM 0x855f00, off by 0x60, and got "every byte differs". The corrected base is
0x855f60.
2026-10-13 05:08:08 +02:00
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