Files
interactive-story/backend/app/starter.py
T
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 44edece67e M9: a campaign you can actually get back
A campaign could already be exported and imported. What could not survive the
trip was everything that explains it: the state events behind the authoritative
document, the prompt each turn was actually given, the passages it was shown,
the summaries that carry long-story continuity, and which take belonged to which
turn. An imported campaign could be read and could no longer say why it was what
it was — and a manual correction, the one state change no narration explains,
was indistinguishable from something the story had established.

The bundle is now `ai-dnd-adventure-v3`, and the version is the design rather
than a side effect. Everything added here could have been another optional key,
the way persona, Save Points, narrative state and imported knowledge each were.
That mechanism stops working at exactly this addition: a v2 file with no prompt
provenance is ambiguous between "written before M9" and "written by M9 from a
campaign that has none", and those are different facts about a campaign. A
version number is how a recovery file states what it was capable of recording.
v1 and v2 still import, and every seam from pre-active-head onward is tested for
the rule that an older file is never reinterpreted under a newer assumption.

Two categories became three. "Chosen travels, derived is recomputed" was enough
until stored prompts had to be decided: they are derived, and they must travel
anyway. The test that separates evidence from cache is not "could this be
recomputed" but "would a recomputation answer the same question" — a rebuilt
search index answers the same question, a rebuilt prompt says what the turn
would be told *now*, which is the opposite of what the inspector is for.

Also here: a real SQLite backup, through the online backup API rather than a
file copy, taken while the application is running and verified before it is
kept; story cards settled as compatibility-only legacy data and taken out of the
narrator's prompt, because they were the untracked path around knowledge
authority that IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN §73 already forbade; and no schema
change at all, proved against a database M8's own code wrote.

Three defects, found by running the milestone's own tests rather than by reading
them. Deleting a campaign leaked its FTS index rows, and SQLite then handed the
freed ids to the next source imported into any campaign, which failed with an
integrity error that Reindex could not repair — both ends are closed, and a
database already carrying the damage now repairs itself. An imported node with
no state snapshot was being stamped with the campaign's head state, so an Undo
to turn 2 showed what the story knew at turn 20. And the snapshot relink did not
persist at all, because it mutated a dict in place on a column SQLAlchemy tracks
by assignment: it looked correct in memory and wrote the wrong ids to disk.

Carrying per-turn prompts looked like it would halve the length of campaign that
can be restored. Measured — and after compressing them inside the file —
everything M9 added costs 12% of it: the import ceiling moves from about 318
turns to about 279, against a 100-turn certification target. The dominant cost
is not M9's at all. The per-position narrative state document is 74% of a
bundle, and v2 already carried it.

Backend 1,102 passed / 14 skipped / 0 failed. Frontend 145 passed. Lint,
production build and Docker build clean. Verified across two server processes
with two data directories, and in a real browser against a real narrator.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Qyn3oRd4D6pi72nKBG725B
2026-09-07 01:55:45 -04:00

95 lines
3.9 KiB
Python

"""Gives every new guest a short adventure that is already played.
A guest arriving on an empty account has nothing to look at, and the demo turns
are limited, so learning what the app does used to cost one of them. This copies
a small pre-played adventure into the new account instead. It opens on a story
with real turns in it, and the turn summaries show what the world-state engine
records: the changes it applied, and the changes it refused.
The file in `starter_data/` is an ordinary export bundle, produced by
`GET /api/adventures/{id}/export` and trimmed to its first two exchanges. To
replace it, play a new adventure, export it, and overwrite the file. Nothing
else here knows what the story contains.
The copy is the guest's own from the first moment: they can edit it, branch it,
delete it, or export it, and nothing links it back to the file. A returning
guest is not given a second one, because this runs only where a guest row is
created.
"""
import json
import logging
from pathlib import Path
from sqlalchemy.orm import Session
from . import bundle, models, seed
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
STARTER_FILE = Path(__file__).resolve().parent / "starter_data" / "pokemon-league.json"
def _load() -> dict | None:
"""Returns the starter bundle, or None when the file is missing or invalid.
The file ships with the server, so a failure here is a packaging mistake
rather than bad input. It is still tolerated: a guest with no starter
adventure can play, and a guest who cannot be created cannot.
"""
try:
return json.loads(STARTER_FILE.read_text(encoding="utf-8"))
except (OSError, ValueError):
logger.exception("Starter adventure is missing or unreadable; skipping it.")
return None
def give(db: Session, user: models.User) -> models.Adventure | None:
"""Copies the starter adventure into `user`, and returns it.
The caller commits. This writes rows and does not commit them, so a guest
and their first adventure land in one transaction: an account is never left
half-populated.
Failures are logged and swallowed. The starter is a convenience, and losing
it must not cost the visitor their session.
"""
payload = _load()
if payload is None:
return None
try:
# A savepoint, so a failure halfway through writing the tree discards
# only the starter's rows. Without it the caller's next commit would
# flush whatever part of the adventure the session still held.
with db.begin_nested():
story = bundle.plan(payload, bundle.check_format(payload))
# The starter ships with no imported knowledge, so the derived
# report is always empty here and nothing reads it.
adventure, _ = bundle.materialize(db, payload, story, user.id)
_link_scenario(db, adventure, payload)
return adventure
except Exception:
logger.exception("Could not give user %s the starter adventure.", user.id)
return None
def _link_scenario(db: Session, adventure: models.Adventure, payload: dict) -> None:
"""Points the copy at the demo scenario it came from, when that seed exists.
A bundle does not carry a scenario id, because the id is local to one
database and an export outlives it. The link matters anyway: an adventure
has no cover art of its own, and inherits the scenario's. Without it the
starter shows a monogram tile while the demo it came from shows its own
artwork.
The name is read from `scenarioTitle` in the file. If no seeded scenario
answers to it, the adventure keeps a NULL `scenario_id`, which is the same
state an imported bundle is in and costs only the artwork.
"""
title = str(payload.get("scenarioTitle") or "").strip()
if not title:
return
scenario = seed.find_seeded(db, title)
if scenario is not None:
adventure.scenario_id = scenario.id