v0.7.0 — four game types, a lobby you can read and leave, and a multiplayer game that makes a sound

The multiplayer set-up, the lobby, the start of a game, and four signals a remote client had never
been sent. Reasoning, the preset table and what was verified how: CHANGELOG.md.

- Co-op, Competitive, Cutthroat, Solitaire and Custom, on both screens, from one shared block —
  they had drifted, and each was missing a question the other asked.
- A player reads the whole rule set before taking a seat, may leave a lobby or a running game, and
  keeps a seat across a reload. The host may clear a chair. The browser remembers every game it is
  in, not just the last one.
- The start of a game is drawn: a handoff beat, an announcement, the code and type in the header.
- Sound, the timetable flash, announcements and the just-drawn badge now reach a remote client;
  justDrawn goes to the seat that drew it and nobody else.
- Played on StartOS, which found the rest: an Extra belongs to the player who played it, the board
  never named the Superintendent, bot seats were reported as absent players, and rule section
  numbers are out of every string a player reads.

Also carries the previous session's Heavy Grade documentation work — asked again, answer unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016JczK5i33ZNSf2PtzZqdhS
This commit is contained in:
Jesse.Markowitz
2026-08-23 05:46:42 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 42adfda390
commit 06db36e5b5
41 changed files with 4387 additions and 588 deletions
+70 -31
View File
@@ -10,29 +10,48 @@ train into an occupied Subdivision. Get that wrong and two trains meet at speed.
## Status
**v0.4.8 — solitaire is playable in a browser.** The whole game runs client-side: the engine is pure,
imports nothing outside itself, and never touches `Math.random`, so a static host is all it needs.
**Solitaire is playable in a browser and multiplayer runs against a server.** The solitaire game runs
entirely client-side — the engine is pure, imports nothing outside itself, and never touches
`Math.random`, so a static host is all it needs. Multiplayer adds an authoritative server for the
seats a shared game requires.
- **Rules** — specified, with **three open questions** left. Thirteen gaps in the original prototype
rules were found and closed; three more came after, and are in `TODO.md`: where the Local's coach
stands while its engine works (a §A.4 question), Poling — the one card in the deck with no defined
behaviour — and whether a Heavy Grade's orientation is rolled or chosen at setup.
The current version is in [`package.json`](package.json), and every page stamps it with the commit
and build date, so what is deployed can always be identified from the page itself. This section
deliberately no longer names one: it went stale for six releases.
- **Rules** — specified. Thirteen gaps in the original prototype rules were found and closed, and the
three that came after were all settled in v0.5.0: a coach may be set out at the Office (§A.4),
Poling stays out of the deck at zero copies since the source records its effect only as "TBD", and
**a Heavy Grade's orientation is rolled from the seed, never chosen by a player** — see
[`docs/rules/implications.md`](docs/rules/implications.md) §10 for each ruling and its reasoning.
- **Card faces** — every card's printed values specified.
- **Architecture** — seven documents, including a 20-component build plan and the multiplayer plan.
- **Code** — the engine, the bot, the balance harness, the replay viewer and the playable page. A
game can be saved, shared, replayed and stepped back through.
- **Not built** — the multiplayer server (Phases 0 and 1 of the plan are done: seat and player are
separate, turn state is per player, and the page talks to a `Session` rather than to the engine, so
a remote one drops in without the page changing — but there is no server, no turn submission and no
per-player push), the 22 opponent-directed cards, and real audio.
- **Code** — the engine, the bot, the balance harness, the replay viewer, the playable page, and the
server. A game can be saved, shared, replayed and stepped back through.
- **Multiplayer — built and running.** `src/server/` serves a lobby (create, join, preview, leave,
add a bot, start, and a stream), turn submission, per-session state and persistence, with its own
tests under `test/server/`. Games survive a release rather than being destroyed by one. A player
weighing a join reads the **whole rule set before taking a seat**; a seat survives a browser
reload; anybody may leave and the host may clear a chair; and the four transient signals that make
a game feel alive — sound, the timetable flash, an announcement, the badge on the card you just
drew — reach a remote client, which they did not before v0.7.0. What is still open is in `TODO.md`
under Multiplayer — chiefly that **a player cannot see what the others did**, and that a lost
session token still locks someone out of a running game from a genuinely fresh browser.
- **Not built** — the opponent-directed cards (the Action and Space-use categories, held out of every
deck until they have an implementation, along with the defensive cards whose only purpose is to
answer them), and real audio. No screen offers a control for the opponent cards any more: the
toggle could not do anything, so both screens state the fact in words instead.
Balance is *not* where it should be: the developer bot averaged 7.0 Revenue against a target of 20 —
of which ~5.4 was the "one Revenue per train that completes its run" rule, so the working freight and
passenger economy is still only ~2. That rule is now a **setting that defaults to off**, along with
the passenger and freight rates and the opening hand, so the economy can be read on its own and the
alternatives can be played rather than argued about. Nothing in this file or in `TODO.md` has been
re-measured at the new defaults; `TODO.md` says why, and says which of it is the bot and which is the
deck.
Balance is *not* where it should be, and this file no longer quotes a figure for it. It used to say
"the developer bot averages 7.0 Revenue against a target of 20", which stopped being true the moment
the transit rule it names was defaulted to off — that rule was worth ~5.4 of the 7.0, for traffic
nobody had to work. Measured at the current defaults the bot means about **zero**.
The three rates — passenger per coach, freight per load, train per transit — are **settings fixed when
the game is dealt**, along with the opening hand and where an Extra may start, so the economy can be
read on its own and the alternatives played rather than argued about. Run
`node src/sim/harness.ts 400 standard` for today's number rather than trusting one written here;
`TODO.md` says which of the gap is the bot and which is the deck.
Versions follow the convention at the top of [`CHANGELOG.md`](CHANGELOG.md): third digit for fixes,
second for a set of features, 1.0 for the first release that deserves the name.
@@ -46,14 +65,18 @@ station-master/
├── docs/
│ ├── rules/ ← the ruleset, card reference, glossary, decision record
│ ├── architecture/ ← how it is built, and what the pieces are
│ ├── plans/ ← worked plans for a single change, kept for the reasoning
│ └── design/ ← board layout studies and rendering samples
├── public/replays/ ← saved games published to the site's replay directory
├── public/
│ ├── replays/ ← saved games published to the site's replay directory
│ └── images/ ← art the build copies into the site
├── scripts/ ← build and deploy the static site
├── src/
│ ├── engine/ ← pure rules engine: no I/O, no clock, deterministic from a seed
│ ├── server/ ← the authoritative multiplayer server: lobby, sessions, persistence
│ ├── sim/ ← bot, harness, replay, board rendering
│ └── web/ ← the playable site: splash, game, replay viewer
└── test/
│ └── web/ ← the playable site: splash, game, lobby, replay viewer
└── test/ ← including test/server/ for the server's own suite
```
Start with [`docs/design.md`](docs/design.md) — it indexes everything. Commit messages stay high
@@ -62,7 +85,9 @@ level; [`CHANGELOG.md`](CHANGELOG.md) carries the reasoning and the measurements
## Development
Requires **Node 22.18+**, which runs TypeScript directly by type stripping. There is no build step.
Requires **Node 22.18+**, which runs TypeScript directly by type stripping — so there is no compile
step, and the engine, the bot and the tests all run straight from source. (`npm run build:web` is a
separate thing: it assembles the static SITE into `dist/`.)
```sh
npm install
@@ -104,16 +129,30 @@ is the thing this machinery exists to prevent.
`fromSave` replays it exactly — that one property gives save, share, undo, restart recovery and
post-game replay. Events are a DERIVED stream: they narrate what happened and drive the display,
and they do not reconstruct the position. The phase driver mutates state and then describes it, so
fourteen of the forty-six event types are never reduced. Anything that needs to rebuild a game
roughly a third of the event types are never reduced at all. Anything that needs to rebuild a game
replays the intents.
- **Never call `Math.random()`.** One ambient random call silently breaks replay.
- **Track is a deck card, but the opening district is dealt.** 96 of the 235 cards are track — the
largest category — so a district is built from what you draw, and building it costs you the
industry or train you drew instead. The opening hand is the exception, and it is now **chosen when
the game is dealt**: three random cards (the default, and the prototype rule), six random cards, or
three track and three other from two separately shuffled piles. The last of those is the only one
that guarantees you a district to build; deal six and you open over the limit of three, so the
first turn is spent choosing. See `TODO.md`.
- **A game is one of four TYPES, and a type is a set of defaults rather than a ruleset.** Co-op,
Competitive, Cutthroat and Solitaire (`src/web/presets.ts`) each name an opening hand, an Extra
rule, three revenue rates and the victory conditions; picking one fills the form, and changing any
of them selects **Custom**, which keeps the scoring of the type it came from. The type is *derived*
from the numbers rather than stored, so a saved game carries no name that can disagree with what it
actually is. Both screens that deal a game — the lobby and the New Game dialog — ask the same
eleven questions through one shared block (`src/web/settings-form.ts`), because for two releases
they each had a question the other lacked. What separates the types: Co-op alone pays for a
transit, Cutthroat alone lets an Extra be planted in another player's district and has no shared
failure condition at all beyond three collisions in a Day, and the Revenue floor is a formula in
the table size and the length (3 per player per Day in Co-op, 2 in Competitive) rather than a
number.
- **Track is a deck card, but the opening district is dealt.** Track is the largest category in the
deck by a distance — so a district is built from what you draw, and building it costs you the
industry or train you drew instead. The opening hand is the exception, and it is **chosen when the
game is dealt**: three random cards (the prototype rule), six random cards, or three track and
three other from two separately shuffled piles. The last of those is the only one that guarantees
you a district to build; deal six and you open over the limit of three, so the first turn is spent
choosing. **Every game type now deals six** (Jesse’s call, v0.7.0) — the engine's own fallback,
`SOLO_CONFIG`, deliberately did not move with it, because every sim measurement is taken against
that. See `TODO.md`.
- **What the work pays is a setting too.** Passenger revenue per coach, freight revenue per load and
train revenue per transit each run 0–5 and are fixed when the game is dealt. The first two default
to 1 and pay at both ends of a movement — boarding *and* detraining, loading *and* unloading. The