DuelFx

Everything between the rules firing and the player feeling it. The umpire decides what happened; this decides what it feels like, and where in the garden it sounded like it happened.

Attach it to DuelDirector. It reads DuelMatch and both Fencers and writes nothing back to either.

entity.find("DuelDirector").component.add("DuelFx", {})

Four commitments, four weights

A thrust arrives on a point and is over. A sweep is a whole fence panel and it turns the man it lands on. A lunge brings a body 1.30 m with it and tears grit off the piste the whole way. A riposte comes off a guard rather than out of a wind-up, and it costs two posts.

Which one landed is read out of DuelMatch.lastExchange, and every channel of the reaction is driven from one row of the PROFILE table:

spin is the sweep's signature — only a broadside turns a fencer off the line, so a still frame of a sweep is nameable without sound. shove is the lunge's: it gives up three times the ground a thrust does.

The chalk, and the hold

At the measure a touch resolves at, two men holding whitewashed fence panels are one beige mass from side on. Two things put the read back into the frame, and both of them last as long as the umpire holds the bout rather than as long as an impact.

The chalk. Every panel in this garden is whitewashed timber, so a stroke that lands leaves its coat behind. The mark runs FROM the man who struck TO the man who took it, so which way the blow went is in the picture; its shape is which stroke it was:

It is drawn 0.62 m nearer the camera than the piste, so it is never swallowed by the two bodies it is describing, and it holds its length while it thins. chalk turns it off; chalkLife is how long it hangs.

The hold. A reaction used to be gone in three tenths of a second, which at this build's frame time is one frame — so the pose that names the commitment was never in the picture. contactHold pins each fencer's recoil, spin, lean, overreach and jam at the values the blow gave them, as a floor rather than an assignment, so a shove still running out or a second event inside the beat still reads on top of it.

PisteCamera swings off the piste axis for the same beat, which is the other half of the same fix — see its README.

The two faults, which are not touches

SHORT and CROWDED are recorded by the umpire and never reach the event bus, so fx derives them from the exchange record. Their feedback is deliberately built out of the opposite parts of the vocabulary from a touch, so the two can never be confused:

• the reaction is on the attacker, not the defender
• there is no hitstop, no contact flash and no rim
• the shape left behind is a flat scuff disc lying on the piste — the only thing this component ever draws on the ground

SHORT pitches the attacker forward through a stroke that found nothing (whiff_air + gravel_scuff). CROWDED jams the panel and shoves both fencers apart (panel_scrape + a tight panel_clack).

The post is driven, not moved

The umpire awards a touch and the boundary is already somewhere else: the line is a number, and Garden.fence rebuilds the run at its new value inside the same frame. What the eye is given instead is the thing the rite is actually about.

Over driveTime, the surveyor's cord walks from where the line stood to where it now runs — driveWalk seconds of it, on a curve that leaves fast and settles — carrying a post held clear of the turf. Then driveBlows mallet blows put the post in, each one seating it further, throwing its own turf and its own post_drive at a lower pitch than the last, until it is flush with the boundary's own post.

driveFrom, driveTo, drivePct and driveState report it live, so a photograph taken across the pause can be matched to exactly how far in the post was. driveFrom is derived from the umpire's published lastDrive and lastTouch rather than remembered, so it is exact.

The rite

The umpire is on a beat at all times and DuelMatch.ceremonyPhase names it. Each beat has its own calls, drawn from a bag — a call is not heard twice until every other call on that beat has been heard once — and which calls are eligible depends on the state of the bout:

Whether a ground stands on form is Duel.ceremonyScale(neighbourKey), so the umpire keeps a different rite in each of the six gardens without anybody writing six rites.

ceremonyLog is the record: one line per call, numbered, with the beat it belongs to and — where a frame was long enough to step over a 0.28 s beat entirely — the beat the umpire said he was on, as post@halt.

The bell counts. One strike opens an assize; three close it, rising, with the wall giving the last one back. Both men breathe in the pause, the one who took it harder than the other, and both of them harder once the bout is six touches deep.

Every neighbour has their own throat. NEIGHBOUR_VOICE pitches and weights the rival's tells, efforts and breath per neighbourKey — Mrs Pettifer light and high, Lady Ashcombe low and quiet, Young Tibb high and loud — so who you are fencing is audible before you look.

The soundstage

The lawn is thirty metres of piste between two hedges, and three of its places can be heard:

The two hedge beds crossfade on where the fight has got to, so a bout driven into the player's garden sounds like the player's garden. ambience is the readback: focus=-10.00 near=orchard orchard=0.296 wall=0.171 bed=0.340.

Footfall knows what it is standing on. The piste is raked gravel end to end, but the ground within 1.05 m of a driven post is the spoil thrown out of its hole, so a fencer standing on the boundary steps in broken turf. stepSurface reports it.

Clip → event

Every clip in /source/audio/ and what fires it.

The flash

The rim is the outline channel on a struck fencer's models, and nothing else in the world writes it. It marks the body that took the touch, so it skips the two classes that are not one: what a fencer stands on, and what they are holding. Both are matched by name (panel, shoe, stocking, leg, foot, sole), because a name is the only property of a rig part that a pose does not change — position and scale are rewritten every frame by fencer_body.pose, so a geometric gate answers differently depending on which frame it is asked.

flashState reports the live rim level and how many models it is allowed on: player=0.64/11 rival=0.00/19. A rim that stops appearing because a body module renamed its parts is invisible in a screenshot and obvious there.

Timing, and the frame rate it was tuned at

Every window here was tuned against a measured 104 ms frame — about 9.6 fps (zero profiler retro --seconds 20), and every one is expressed in real seconds rather than frames, so it means the same thing when the frame rate comes up. The hitstops run 0.09 s to 0.26 s: one to three frames at 9.6 fps, five to sixteen at 60.

Instruments

What it owns

A temporary duel_fx root holding the ears, seven emitters, the flash, the turf puff, the scuff disc, a sixteen-mote pool, a nine-segment chalk pool and the post, collar, mallet and cord of the drive; the rig child transform of each fencer; the outline channel on their body models; punch / kick / shake for PisteCamera; and engine.timeScale, for the length of one hitstop and no longer.

The drive's post goes in at z = -2.40, which is where garden.module stands the boundary's own post — the two are the same place on purpose, so what the drive puts in is the post that is already there.