Devlog #046 - Main Street Opens Up

Devlog #042 ended with ten choices on $MAINS01.MSG.

The route was continuous from power-on, but the city itself still behaved like a beautifully reconstructed lobby. The rows were real, their visibility came from the current city record, and their geometry matched the original. Most clicks still stopped at the first unresolved owner.

That frontier has moved.

Main Street now acts like a hub. Several of its raw owner ordinals execute their original handlers, consume the appropriate random or calendar state, return through the common owner suffix, pass through the central dispatcher, and arrive at real destination presentations.

The city is beginning to branch.

Raw Ordinals, Not Row Numbers

The visible order of $MAINS01 is not fixed.

City flags can hide some options and leave others in place. A row that appears first in one city may appear third in another. The selected input path therefore returns the raw owner ordinal published by the original owner.

Every new action is keyed to that identity.

For example, raw ordinal 0008h is the option whose resource text describes a scenic grove where the party can wait and relax. Its screen position is city-dependent. Its owner identity is not.

This distinction allowed the same clean action to work across the Quickstart city range without attaching behavior to a screenshot coordinate.

Day Streets and Night Streets

Several Main Street actions branch according to the original hour classifier.

The classifier uses the raw 24-hour game state. Day is the signed range from hour 5 through hour 18. Other hours select the night owners.

That produces paired destinations:

daytime main street  -> $MAINS01
nighttime main street -> $MAINS02

daytime side streets -> $SIDES00
nighttime side streets -> $SIDES01

The actions do not merely inspect a clean Hour property. Their COAB paths preserve the original RNG call, any requested calendar advance, event maintenance, the later hour classification, state publication, and common post-action predicates.

The clean projection receives the resulting raw destination and presents the matching resource.

The practical result is simple: walking through the city at night no longer uses the daytime menu with darker colors. It follows different original controllers and different MSG resources.

The Grove Branch

Raw owner ordinal 0008h gave the new graph one of its first paired destination families.

The selected action:

$MAINS01
-> EA14[8]
-> one RNG(0064h)
-> hour classification
-> state 0021h or 0022h

State 0021h presents $CITYG05.MSG. State 0022h presents $CITYG06.MSG.

Both owners use the generic MSG engine, but they remain distinct canonical owners with separate resources and separate certificates. Their first selected row returns through a shared parent epilogue, preserving the current state. Other grove actions were left closed until their own consequences could be proved.

The branch later gained certified exits back toward the ordinary city graph. That made the grove a place the player can enter and leave, not a decorative dead end.

CITYF00 and the Missing Middle of the City

Another Main Street action publishes state 001Bh.

The state atlas resolves it to ovl_0050:1CEE, an owner that presents $CITYF00.MSG. The first assessment was deliberately destination-aware: there was little value in certifying a click that only reached an unresolved state number.

Once the destination presentation was closed, the action became useful.

$CITYF00 led to further certified routes, including returns toward Main Street and the side streets. Related state 001Fh work opened the docks presentation and its own selected return.

This filled in a part of the city graph that had previously existed only as raw state labels and old runtime correlations.

Markets, Docks, and Business Hours

The city data and owner predicates also control service destinations.

The reconstructed routes now include marketplace and docks presentations, along with day/night resource selection and original fare or option text where those paths have been certified. The owners still decide which options are present. The generic message engine only lays out the rows they publish.

A later city-square action advances one hour and routes to a marketplace state. The destination uses the original post-calendar classification to choose the appropriate business or night presentation.

This matters because “go to the marketplace” is not one timeless transition. The original path may consume RNG, advance the calendar, maintain events, cross a day boundary, and choose a different destination owner.

The clean action keeps that behavior without exposing the calendar owner’s raw stack frame to the product layer.

The Central Suffixes Matter

A local action often writes a plausible next state before the parent owner is finished.

Afterward, the parent may still run a common sequence of event, city, and record predicates. Any of them can replace the state.

Early in the project, it would have been tempting to stop at the local write and declare the route complete. The newer Main Street work follows each selected action through:

local handler
-> owner-specific action
-> common post-action predicates
-> owner epilogue
-> resident central redispatch
-> destination owner
-> stable destination presentation

Only then does the clean route expose the transition.

This is one reason the raw-state graph has grown more trustworthy even as it has grown more complex.

Midnight Is Not Just Hour Zero

Time passage exposed another important edge case.

Advancing from hour 23 by one hour is not equivalent to assigning zero to the hour field. The original calendar path performs date maintenance, event maintenance, and ordered RNG reseeds. It may cross the month boundary or reach callbacks that are not yet supported.

A selected Quickstart midnight route is now certified for the exact same-month shape. Unsupported rollover and callback paths still fail closed.

The clean session therefore no longer has a generic AdvanceHour escape hatch that mutates only visible time. Certified actions compose the original calendar effect or stop.

That is less convenient and much safer.

Main Street Is No Longer One Screen

By the end of this work, the selected $MAINS01 owner had executable transitions for all ten raw owner ordinals, each with its own exact constraints. Some outcomes remain unavailable in the clean frontend because their destination owners or rare branches are still closed. The action identities themselves are no longer a blank table.

The route can now move among:

city square
main streets
side streets
churches
groves
markets
docks
day and night variants
several service and encounter states

Not every row in every destination is complete. Combat, special encounters, saint and potion consequences, and many service actions remain frontier work.

But the city is no longer a single corridor ending at Main Street.

It is a growing network of original owners, joined by the same generic MSG machine and the same central state dispatcher.

The next step was not another navigation edge. It was letting the player open systems that sit beside the city menus: Party Info, the character sheet, saints, and the interior life of a church.