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Details

CB-WP-0016: the drop target that was never there

Provenance (tier S, one paragraph in lieu of survey and ADR): the human
check that kept INTENT stage 1 open was run and the drag was broken.
Root cause, worth more than the instance: drop targets were ids, and an
id must be unique, so exactly one element could ever be seat-0. The
relationship-graph circle took it and the seat card that every action
card's own text points at -- 'drag Attack onto a seat' -- silently had
none. A seat is drawn twice and both drawings are the seat; the document
model could not express that.

Drop keys are now data-drop. Any number of elements may carry the same
key, so a seat is droppable on its card and on its graph node. Measured
on a live server: seat-0/1/2 each appear twice, id survives only on
cb-status which is the one element the script looks up, and
down=action-attack&up=seat-1 returns ok.

Second defect: a drop on nothing returned without posting and without
touching the status line, so a broken target was indistinguishable from
a working page. resolve already refuses rather than defaulting, which is
right; refusing SILENTLY is not. The page now reports the raw fact --
'took action-attack, let go over nothing droppable' -- which names
elements, not moves, so ADR-0007 control 5 holds.

And the honest part: the general check added here -- every offered
affordance names a key that exists, driven through Policy::choose over
four real bot games -- does NOT catch the reported defect. seat-0 did
exist, on the graph circle. It is kept because a wholly absent target is
a real class, and paired with a targeted regression test that does catch
it. Three mutations, each red for its stated reason, including the
reported defect reintroduced; only the targeted test fires on that one.

A cb-play assertion matched id="action-ground" as a substring while
describing itself as checking the page; rewritten through drop_keys.

make all exits 0. Stage 1 stays open: verified by tests, mutation and a
live server, not by a human dragging.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-02 20:48:18 +02:00

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Intent

Clay-Borg is a rebuild-from-scratch simulation and games engine framework: it assimilates and optimizes techniques and implementations useful for games, simulations, and robotics.

It is not another monolithic game engine. It is a capability-assimilating development engine with three distinct properties:

Clay — its canonical models, contracts, rules, and tools remain malleable.
Borg — mature, optimized libraries are assimilated behind controlled interfaces rather than copied or exposed directly.
Product-driven evolution — abstractions are extracted from working games, beginning with GROUND — A Game of Bonds and Rivalry: DARVO Edition, rather than invented in isolation.

The central rule:

Own the semantics; assimilate the implementation.

Clay-Borg owns what an entity, object, command, event, card, zone, relationship, game, simulation, asset, plugin, and capability mean. External libraries (wgpu, Rapier, Bevy ECS, Wasmtime, Quinn, egui, Serde, tracing, …) provide optimized implementations of rendering, physics, networking, serialization, and similar functions behind canonical ports. No external library type should leak across a canonical interface.

Why GROUND first

GROUND requires modest physics but sophisticated social state, simultaneous decisions, and constrained sequences (a binding DARVO deny/attack/reverse state machine, a typed relationship graph, commit/reveal simultaneous resolution). It must stay playable headless — no rendering, no rigid-body simulation required to run or test the rules. The 3D tabletop is a projection and interaction surface for the game, not the definition of the game.

The most important design decisions

Build GROUND first, not a general engine first.
Keep rules independent from rendering and physics.
Use commands and events as the authoritative mutation mechanism.
Provide null, reference, and optimized implementations of important capabilities.
Never leak assimilated-library types into canonical interfaces.
Use server-authoritative physics and deterministic semantic rules.
Treat player visibility as a projection, not a UI afterthought.
Make every defect reproducible as a scenario and replay.
Give coding agents bounded work packets and stable commands.
Attach TargetRevenue phases to versioned improvements and evidence bundles.

First product

A headless, replayable, and agent-readable GROUND rules engine that can be projected onto an increasingly physical virtual tabletop, while every new capability remains replaceable, measurable, and financeable through TargetRevenue.

Implementation order

Headless GROUND — full authoritative state, 2–6 players, commit/reveal, relationships, DARVO, GROUND practice, CLI player, replay and scenario tests, simple bots. No rendering, no physics.
Inspectable 2D table — card/token/hand/relationship-graph visualization, drag-to-propose, debug inspector, hot-seat play. Open on one human verification. The first run of it (2026-08-02) found the table legible and the drag broken: drop targets were ids, an id must be unique, so the relationship-graph circle held seat-0 and the seat card the page points at had none. Fixed in CB-WP-0016 — drop keys are data-drop — and verified by tests, by mutation, and against a live server, but not by a human dragging, which is the standard that found it. Run cb-play --serve 0, open the printed URL, and drag an action onto a seat card.
Physical 3D tabletop — wgpu renderer, Rapier-backed physics, camera and pointer controls, snap zones, asset importer.
Networked sessions — authoritative host, private projections, commit/reveal protocol, reconnection, replay verification, spectator mode.
Game creation framework — object prototypes, scene/zone editors, card/deck importer, package validation, Wasm game components.
Prove generality — implement one deliberately different fixture game; only then promote duplicated GROUND abstractions into the stable Clay Canon.

No concept becomes canonical merely because it looks general. It becomes canonical after surviving a second concrete use.

Sister repositories

ground-game — the authoritative home of the GROUND boardgame itself (rules, editions, content). Clay-Borg implements the engine that simulates it; game-semantics questions defer to that repo.
target-revenue — the canonical home of the Target Revenue Framework and the TRSL license text this repo is released under.

Provenance

This intent is distilled from the fuller architectural exploration in history/260730-InitialExploration.md, which also covers the runtime substrate, simulation kernel, physics subsystem, world-building layer, tabletop domain framework, networking architecture, the agentic inner loop (work packets, CLI surface, quality gates), and the TargetRevenue business-control model in full detail.

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