nimmerworld.eachpath.local/runtime-engine/architecture.md

Runtime Engine

How scenes execute mechanically: the lemniscate as relaxation-step operator; slot-tokens with verifier-flags carrying the loop-state; phase-locked overlay-loops broadcasting at axis-rate; the v0.7 gesture-alignment-recursive-lemniscate that integrates player gestures into typed trait-vector summaries; emergent zones as the dramatic-episode unit with distributed funding and ternary trait-axis goal-evaluation; zone taxonomy and spawn-cadence.

Companion to: architecture-index.md (executive summary + global meta-lists), narrative-composition/architecture.md (Compositor consumes the typed trait-summaries this engine emits), player-experience/architecture.md (gesture-circle is the player-input substrate that this engine integrates), topology-and-rendering/architecture.md (zones live on the rail+grid topology), identity-and-personhood/architecture.md (slot-tokens carry trait-vectors), ./event-zones.md (designer-authored event-zones; the composed wheel as universal mini-game-surface; cells + event-zones + events composite UID; hardstops as consent-gates with contextual activation; consent-discipline-Variants-1-4 as event-class taxonomy; boundary-zone-with-inner-zone for plazas; room-boundary + rail-passage + lifeforce-budget-per-room; slot-binding suspends lemniscate routing; player editor-mode + 3-source schema unification — v0.1). Sections in this file were split from the monolithic architecture-index.md v0.7 on 2026-04-26.

Core inversion — zones replace bubbles

Legacy engine perception (Unreal AIPerception, WC3 sight-radius, trigger volumes) is spatial, binary, separate from cognition, and assumes a passive world. Nimmerworld inverts every axis:

• perception is trait-filtered, not only spatial
• perception is graded consolidation, not binary detection
• perception IS memory (one subsystem)
• the world emits events; agents subscribe

The replacement primitive is the zone — a bounded, named, slot-indexed, director-managed event-instance. Arthurian round table as mental model: a bounded place of structured speaking-and-witnessing, with named roles and shared what-was-said-by-whom.

Zone anatomy

• Boundary — cell-envelope (or interior-envelope)
• N slots — named positions
• Director or overseer — manages turn order, memory-pulls, prompt construction, voice selection, event emission
• NATS topic + subscriber list — slot-occupancy drives subscription
• Mixed-fidelity voices — 2–3 LLM slots + scripted/generic for the rest; director decides
• Trigger — gamemaster-spawned, emergent-signal-response, shift-composition-emergence, or proximity-detection
• Lifecycle — duration, dissolution conditions, memory-write on close
• Persistence flag — ephemeral=true (dreamworld/liminal) or persistent=true (gameworld)
• Register — physical / liminal / imperial

Zone kinematics — the lemniscate runtime

Zones are not state-bags with an external turn-counter; they are kinetic topologies with a built-in clock. The runtime substrate is a lemniscate (∞) — a through-flow figure-eight whose traversal IS the zone's turn-order, whose central crossing IS the population-mutation event, and whose decay IS the natural wind-down of the scene. Origin: an old-math-teacher's trick for solving three unknowns by letting the figure-8 flow do the computation rather than maintaining state in registers. Applied to zones, the geometry IS the clock.

Geometry

                              midaxis (X)
                                 │
  entry-line                     │                     exit-line
  (NPC-tokens   ──→  ╭─Loop A─╮  │  ╭─Loop B─╮  ──→   (NPCs whose
  queue-up to        ╲________╱  X  ╲________╱         exit-flag has
  enter)                          │                    fired exit here)
                                 │
                                 ▼
                            crossing-tick

• Entry-line — staging queue of NPC-tokens eligible to enter. Approach-eligibility uses ternary-gates against the zone's purpose; CLOSED gate keeps the NPC out of the queue entirely
• Loop A + Loop B — the through-flow. Slot-tokens cycle through both loops, guaranteeing every active NPC is co-present with every other at least once per roundtrip
• Midaxis crossing — the only synchronous event in the zone's lifecycle. Three state-updates resolve simultaneously and atomically (your math teacher's three-unknowns made literal):
  1. Cursor advance — which NPC speaks next
  2. Ternary-gate evaluation — resonance refresh on all active edges in the zone (CLOSED/STABLE/OPEN transitions)
  3. Verifier-flag scan + population maintenance — exit-eligible tokens route to exit-line; entry-line pushes replacements equal to vacancies
• Exit-line — through-flow continues here. NPCs leaving the zone leave toward consequence (a need-driven exit signaled by their own emergent-signal), not toward boredom

The lemniscate is a relaxation-step operator — the zone computes by traversing its own curve rather than maintaining external turn-state. Between crossings, the loops are pure-local; only the crossing event touches the global-state bus. The thalamus (NATS orchestration) sees crossings, not ticks.

Slot-token + verifier-flag mechanism

Each NPC currently in the zone is represented by a slot-token carried around the loop. Tokens carry a small set of verifier-flags (marker-bits). Signals fire once and set a flag; between crossings, no polling, no event-bus traffic. The crossing reads flags in O(N_slots) and acts.

Verifier-flag	Set by	Read at crossing
exit_eligible	emergent-signal (need, shift-whistle, faction-summons)	route to exit-line
has_spoken_this_roundtrip	speak-action	rotation-tracking
mid_action	state-machine activity in progress	defer turn
goal_satisfied	goal-evaluator (per-zone, ternary)	terminate zone
silence_eligible	silence-detection	per silence-as-signal mechanic
priority_pull	high-rank ring-of-importance broadcast	early-exit override

This is the same architectural shift the wider system makes elsewhere — observer-pattern with callbacks → dirty-bit + scheduled-sweep. Compute scales with slot-count, not signal-rate. Ten thousand emergent signals firing across a city: only those that landed on a slot-token get evaluated, and only at the next crossing.

Phase-locked overlay-loop ladder

Beyond the primary slot-rotation loop, a zone supports any number of overlay loops at the same axis-rate. Overlays inject at the crossing and broadcast to all active slot-NPCs simultaneously (perceived by each through their own trait-vector — color-language event-flash modulates per-recipient).

Overlay	Carries	Broadcast scope
Player-gesture overlay	player gestures + utterances	active slots only
Faction-broadcast overlay	faction calls, hivemind pings	active slots subscribed to faction
Audit-overseer overlay	covert query-flashes	active slots only (covert detection ↔ Aletheia-eligible insight)
Imperial-net distortion overlay	regime trait-color rewrites	active slots within net-access

The crossing is a council moment — every overlay channel may fire on the same axis-tick. Pre-crossing tension is gesture-loading: holding a verb-button between crossings lands at the next axis with weight proportional to dwell-time. Diegetic urgency without HUD.

This is the answer to player-agency in multi-NPC scenes. The player is off-stage but always potentially-on. Each crossing is "your moment if you want it." The flash is perceived as one event by all active NPCs, not as a sequence of one-on-one addresses — color-language shows it as a pulse across the ring.

Gesture-alignment as recursive-lemniscate

The player-gesture overlay (above) is the broadcast-channel by which player gestures reach active slots; gesture-alignment-as-relational-state is the recursive application of the lemniscate-as-relaxation-step-operator one tier deeper. Gestures accumulate during the NPC's turn-window between axis-crossings; at the crossing, the player's slot-token verifier-flag gesture_alignment_accumulator is integrated into a single typed trait-vector summary; that summary is carried forward into the next-cursor-NPC's driver_context_pull payload as part of the room's affective state-read.

Tier	What accumulates between crossings	What integrates at the crossing
Zone-level (existing)	NPC slot-token verifier-flags (exit_eligible, mid_action, goal_satisfied, priority_pull, etc.)	Cursor advance, gate evaluation, population maintenance
Player-input-level (this)	gesture_alignment_accumulator on player's slot-token; per-gesture trait-coordinate vs. NPC's currently-active-trait-vector	Integrated alignment-delta carried into next turn's LLM context

Same primitive, recursively applied. The lemniscate's geometry is the sampling-and-integration boundary at both tiers. No new compute-cadence introduced; no new bus-event introduced. Compute scales with slot-count, not gesture-rate — the architecture's commitment from observer-pattern → dirty-bit-and-sweep extends one level deeper.

Two latencies, one architecture:

• Cosmetic visual feedback runs continuously. NPC body-shader pulses with the gesture's canonical trait-hue — Philotes-orange (#e28a46) on a Philotes-gesture, Sophrosyne-green (#2cad52) on a Sophrosyne-gesture (per ../style/trait-palette.md §The full table and §The hex-canon discipline) — purely visual, doesn't touch the system bus. The player gets moment-by-moment "I see you" reassurance.
• Systemic alignment-update runs at axis-cadence. The trait-vector summary is computed at the crossing and fed into the next turn's LLM context. The player is one turn behind — their gestures during turn N inform the LLM's generation for turn N+1.

One-turn-behind matches real conversation cadence. Humans accumulate impressions during someone's speech and respond to what was just said; we don't react gesture-by-gesture. The lemniscate-bound integration is the right cadence for affective state-changes, not a latency-cost.

Sum-strategy reduction (v1). Per-gesture trait-coordinates are accumulated as a trait-vector sum across the turn-window. At the crossing, the sum is reduced into a single 8-dimensional alignment-vector compared against the NPC's currently-active trait-state. The result is the alignment-delta fed forward into next turn's driver_context_pull payload AND drives the relational ternary-gate transition on the (player, NPC) edge (§Ternary-gate substrate, Relational layer — see identity-and-personhood/architecture.md). The sum captures the player's overall posture during the speech rather than peak-moment or trajectory; trajectory-aware refinement is noted as a still-open item.

Hardstops are outside this system. Hardstops fire definitive subsystem-actions regardless of alignment-state — clasp-invitation triggers the clasp-subsystem; definitive-refusal closes the conversation; surrender ends combat; claim-floor sets priority_pull for the next axis-crossing. Hardstops do not contribute alignment-deltas to the accumulator; they are separate channels with deterministic effect.

What this resolves:

• Player-NPC relational-gate-driver — the v0.4 vague "zone-participation waves between participants" now has its concrete wave-source named: the gesture-alignment-delta integrated at each axis-crossing.
• How NPC speech-patterns adapt to the player over time — accumulated alignment-state modulates the NPC's next-turn driver-tier-LLM emphasis (which trait-LoRAs are weighted, which sampling-knobs are applied, what register the speech is in). Aligned NPCs open up; misaligned NPCs stay guarded.
• Player-input-as-typed-contract — gesture-press → fixed corpus mapping → typed trait-coordinate → integrated trait-vector summary. No freeform-prose at the player-LLM boundary; the hallucination-surface is closed by the cosmology's typed-ness, not by post-hoc filtering.

What this retires:

• Continuous gesture-comparison touching the system bus → lemniscate-bound integration at crossings (compute-discipline preserved across the recursion)
• Per-gesture compute → per-slot compute (O(N_slots), unchanged from existing zone-tick discipline)
• NPC speech-patterns as static against player-state → NPC speech-patterns dynamically modulated by accumulated player-NPC alignment-state

Cross-context application — intimacy as recursive-lemniscate

The recursive-lemniscate gesture-alignment machinery (above) is modality-agnostic. v0.7 named it as the player-input-dialog substrate; v0.8 makes explicit that the same primitive runs every context where two trait-coordinated participants drive sequenced gameplay through the gesture-circle and lemniscate-cursor. Intimate-gameplay is the second major application (the first being NPC-dialog).

The intimate-gameplay loop running on the lemniscate substrate:

Lemniscate primitive	Intimate-gameplay application
Slot-tokens	The clasp-pair (or premium service-body-pair) — two participants in the loop
Cursor at axis-crossing	Whose action / position-change is currently active
Gesture-alignment-accumulator (per slot)	Each participant's trait-coordinated input across the turn-window — sex-positions, gestures, body-part-engagements
Sum-strategy reduction at crossing	Per-axis integrated trait-vector summary — how aligned are the pair right now
Trait-vector summary fed into next driver-context-pull	NPC-partner's next dialog turn fires in the alignment-determined trait-LoRA register
Phase-locked overlay channels	Body-shader-pulse feedback, color-merge during deep alignment, environmental shader-shift
Hardstops	Definitive intimate signals — clasp_initiate, pause_with_tenderness, withdraw_gracefully, safe_word_invoke, consent_revoke. These fire definitive subsystem-actions (cannot be remapped)

Sex-positions as designer-fixed catalog entries. Same discipline as the dialog-corpus — every position has a designer-authored trait-coordinate (or primary + secondary trait-coordinate composition). The universal-translator's catalog extends to physical-act vocabulary. Examples:

• missionary → Philotes (bond) + Sophrosyne (restraint)
• embracing-with-eye-contact → Philotes (bond) + Aletheia (truth-seeing)
• dominance-position → Eros (reaching) + Dikaiosyne (bearing)
• slow-remembering → Mnemosyne (memory) + Philotes (bond)
• desperate-reaching → Eros (reaching) + Moira (fate)

Body-parts as visible expression of trait-state. When a position activates with its trait-coordinate, the participant's human-mesh body-shader pulses in the corresponding trait-color. The visible body becomes the real-time signal of the trait-state — no HUD; the body itself is the readout. Two clasp-partners see each other's body-shader-pulse as the conversation between their trait-states unfolds.

Cross-context-consistency is now mechanically true. The architecture's earlier commitment (the v0.1 design-vision's "same gesture-skill for dialog, combat, intimacy, maintenance, ritual"; design-vision doc retired in v0.9, preserved in git history) is operationalized: the same gesture-circle + universal-translator + trait-LoRA-per-turn-selection + lemniscate-recursive-aggregation drives all of them. A 200-hour player has dramatically richer intimate-gameplay than a 50-hour player for the same reason they have richer linguistic and emotional competence — they've accumulated more vocabulary in the universal-translator and more selection-pattern fluency on the gesture-circle. Linguistic competence, emotional competence, and intimate competence are the same competence in this system.

This is also why premium-imperial-net intimate-gameplay is mechanically identical to in-between clasp. Same lemniscate. Same gesture-circle. Same trait-alignment. The differences are at the value-flow and persistence layers (per ../political-register/architecture.md §Three-tier intimacy structure and ../inference-and-memory/architecture.md §Three sqlite stores per player), not at the runtime-mechanics layer. The architecture's typed-contract discipline pays off here too: one machinery, multiple political-economic contexts.

Voice-input flows through the same accumulator as gesture-input. Player speech → local STT → token-stream → each token has a designer-fixed trait-coordinate (per the universal-translator corpus; same word → same trait → same coordinate for every player and every NPC and every LLM-context, per ../player-experience/architecture.md §Designer-fixed cosmology, player-curated arrangement) → tokens accumulate into the same gesture_alignment_accumulator on the player's slot-token → integrated at axis-crossing → carried forward into next NPC's driver_context_pull. Voice and gesture are co-equal modalities feeding one mechanism; no player-trait-LoRA needed, no LLM-bypass needed. A player gesturing Philotes while speaking Aletheia-vocabulary contributes both trait-coordinates to the accumulator simultaneously; the sum-strategy reduction handles the multi-modal case naturally. (Resolves the v0.4 player-dialog-handling open question.)

Driver-context-pull (LLM dialog substrate)

The cursor's position at each crossing makes context-construction for the dialog-driver a pure function of cursor-state:

driver_context(cursor_at_NPC_i, mode) = {
    zone.purpose,                 // stable: spawn-intent, immutable provenance
    zone.scene_state_public,      // stable across zone: what's happened so far
    zone.ternary_gate_edges,      // current resonances (active relations)
    zone.drift_state,             // delta from spawn-intent (visible to director)
    NPC_i.knowledge_stack,        // PRIVATE three-tier stack: world ∪ district ∪ primary
                                  //  [+ clasp ONLY if mode == in-between]
    NPC_i.expressed_trait_vector, // expressed trait-vector this moment
    NPC_i.active_signals,         // their current emergent-signals
}

Other NPCs' memories never enter this prompt. No bleed. No cross-contamination.

The knowledge_stack is layered, not a single bucket. Universal world-canon, district-canon (regional), NPC_i's own primary memory, and — only if the character is in the in-between dimension — clasp memory. The retrieval layer enforces the dimensional cut; the LLM never has to reason about it. See §Local memory architecture in inference-and-memory/architecture.md for the layering, propagation policy, and clasp-as-Ring-A* privacy primitive. The classic multi-agent hallucination source ("why does Kalypso suddenly remember what Anaximander confided to Phoibe?") is structurally foreclosed by the geometry. Write-back goes only to NPC_i's slice; the lemniscate guarantees NPC_i is not cursor-active again for at least one full roundtrip — write-back has all the time it needs without race conditions.

This converts multi-NPC dialog from an emergent-chaos problem into a bounded-cast scene problem with a typed runtime. The classic multi-agent failure-modes are foreclosed at the architecture level rather than the prompt level:

• Cast = active-slots, period. Geographic proximity does not equal participation
• Cursor sequences turns deterministically. No concurrent LLM-storm
• Entry-line and exit-line are the only paths in/out. Geographic motion alone doesn't invade the scene
• Player gestures broadcast to active-slots only. Not to "everyone within 30m"

Empty-queue behavior: shrink at every crossing

When the entry-line is empty, each crossing dissolves one active slot instead of replacing it. The conversation thins visibly — color-language saturation drops per shrink, lifeforce burn-rate decreases. When the last slot dissolves, the lemniscate collapses; the spawning director recovers unspent lifeforce minus burn.

This is the natural wind-down — scenes run out of people and dissolve. No timeout, no scheduler-collapse, no cut-to-black. The decay is observable in-world and rate-paced by the same axis-rate.

Lifeforce-binding

Every midaxis crossing fires the LLM driver-turn(s) for active slots. Lifeforce burn-rate = pulse-rate × active-slot-count. The director (or overseer) holding the zone pays per crossing. This produces:

• Dense dramatic scenes are expensive — many slots, fast pulse, high burn
• Quiet background zones are nearly free — slow pulse, few slots; most compute is local-loop traversal not touching the bus
• Running out of lifeforce is visible — pulse-rate slows, crossings stretch farther apart, the scene languishes before it collapses. A diegetic dying-scene register; not a cut, a deceleration

What this resolves

• Slot-capacity elasticity (prior open question) → fixed roundtrip slot-count, elastic entry/exit queues
• Zone-to-zone handoff (prior open question) → exit-line of zone-A is entry-line of zone-B (interlemniscate-transit; pipes-as-heterotopia made literal at runtime)
• Mobile zone boundaries (prior open question) → the lemniscate is a topology; it translates through world-space invariantly (patrols, escorts, exoduses are moving figure-8s)
• Anthropic-faction's broadcast cadence (prior open question) → cadence rides the same axis-rate as a phase-locked overlay; no separate clock
• Director/overseer spawn ownership per model class (prior open question) → the director (or overseer) owns the zone-spawn decision (policy-lookup, no LLM in loop); the LLM driver lives at the driver-context-pull layer; orchestration and dialog are decoupled

What this retires

• Slot-list + external turn-counter → cursor on lemniscate
• Polling for emergent-signals at zone-tick → flag-as-verifier carried in loop
• Mega-prompt with all NPC memories ("everyone in this scene") → cursor-driven per-NPC memory-slice
• Geographic-proximity participation ("everyone within 30m may interject") → strict active-slot cast
• Concurrent LLM calls per-NPC → sequenced LLM calls per-cursor-position
• Polling event-channels at zone-rate → atomic crossing-event with O(N_slots) flag-scan

Omnisight — NPC visual perception via VL-Gemma + virtual cameras

NPCs perceive the visible world literally — not via geometric metadata-perception but via per-NPC virtual cameras (Godot) feeding rendered POV-frames into the local VL-Gemma 4 driver-tier (the multimodal vision-language capability of the Gemma 4 E4B model locked in v0.8). What an NPC "sees" is what the VL-LLM interprets from the camera's image.

This is the perception architecture's deepest commitment. It pairs with the cell-arch checksum-discovery (per ../political-register/world-generation.md §L4 Cell ruleset) as its trigger-layer: cell-checksum-mismatch fires the "clean signal" that activates the NPC's POV camera, which renders, which feeds VL-Gemma, which produces a visual interpretation that modulates the NPC's current-turn behavior. Cheap trigger, expensive understanding, bounded by event-frequency.

The pipeline

Layer	Cost	Fires when
Cell-checksum check	µs	NPC enters cell
Checksum-mismatch → "clean signal"	µs	Cell state ≠ expected hash
VL-camera renders POV scene	ms	Clean signal + perception-relevant context
VL-Gemma processes image → interpretation	100s of ms	After camera renders
NPC behavior responds to seen-content	next-shift / next-crossing	After interpretation

Most NPCs most of the time: no camera-fire, no VL-inference. Active-perception-budget is bounded by event-frequency, not NPC-count. A 100+ NPC city is feasible because most NPCs are running shift-routines on rails with no cell-state-changes triggering perception.

Camera-trigger sources (locked)

Camera renders + VL-inference fire only on:

• Cell-checksum-mismatch — cell-state-change discovered on entry (the cell-arch's primary discovery-trigger)
• Hard-signals from player — clasp_initiate, gesture-hardstops, plug-in conversation request, etc.
• Overseer triggers — audit-sweep, surveillance-cycle, patrol-perception-on-route
• Drone perception — clear boundaries + rulesets per drone-class (drones have their own perception-budget governed by their imperial-class spec)

Everything else: NPC running on rails, shift-routine, no camera-fire, no VL-inference. Bounded compute by construction.

Hallucination-isolation discipline (load-bearing)

VL models hallucinate. If those hallucinations enter the canonical record, they propagate through the lemniscate's recursive integration → become referenced by other canon-rows → become load-bearing in the world's narrative coherence → cannot be untangled later. Bleed-over into oblivion is the precise risk.

The discipline that prevents this:

Visual perception = behavior-modulating-only; never canon-generating.

Visual context flows on a separate stream from the canonical text + gesture summary, with a strict firewall between them:

Stream	Source	Persistence	Purpose
Text + gesture summary (existing canonical pipeline)	STT + gesture-circle-presses + per-token trait-coordinates per §Gesture-alignment as recursive-lemniscate	Canonical; flows into event_canon_summaries; propagates to Compositor; integrates into trait-vector	What the NPC remembers and what becomes world-canon
Visual context (omnisight-flagged, new)	VL-Gemma processing POV camera-render	Ephemeral; flagged on the lemniscate; ignored in the per-crossing summary; never propagates upward	What the NPC sees in this moment; modulates current-turn driver_context_pull only

Concretely: the visual interpretation is appended to driver_context_pull for the NPC's next turn (so the NPC can react to what it sees), but it is not appended to the gesture_alignment_accumulator's sum-strategy reduction at the axis-crossing, and it is not included in the event_canon_summaries row that the Compositor pulls from transient_waiting_flag. The visual content lives one turn and dies.

This preserves three architectural commitments that depend on text/gesture-derived canon:

• Compositor narrative-coherence at scale — Compositor never sees VL-output; only deterministic text/gesture-derived summaries. Hallucination-firewall preserves the canon-coherence Compositor depends on.
• Memorialist-archive truth-claims — Memorialists index cell-checksum-divergence (canonical, deterministic), NOT VL-generated visual-content. The archive's evidentiary value depends on this distinction.
• Mind-pool soul-recycling — when a mind cycles through the pool and is redistributed into a new body, the trait-vector that persists is text/gesture-derived. VL hallucinations do not survive transmigration; they were ephemeral by construction.

Wealthy-degen service-body-folder exception

A specific opt-in special case for player-stored visual-content:

• A wealthy player who already has service-body-dialog stored (per ../political-register/architecture.md §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market) can check a box to allow sex-pictures storage in a private folder from clasp-scenes.
• Stored locally (their machine, their problem — privacy, storage, content).
• Read-only-by-player — folder content does not flow back into NPC contexts, world-canon, the Compositor, the mind-pool, or any other system.
• Quarantined dead-end storage — aesthetic-collection only.

The folder is architecturally inert with respect to the rest of the system. It exists for the player; it does not exist for the world.

What this retires

• Geometric perception (cone, radius, LOS) → already retired by zone slot-occupancy + subscriber-event-emission; omnisight extends the retirement by giving NPCs literal visual perception within those subscribed events, not metadata-perception
• VL models polluting world-canon → text/gesture-derived summaries are the only canonical input; VL is behavior-modulating-ephemeral-flag-only; player-stored visual-content is read-only-by-player quarantined storage

What this resolves / sharpens

• Continuous visual feedback policy (architecture-index Still-open) → with cel-shaded bodies (per ../topology-and-rendering/architecture.md §Three-shader philosophy) and visual-as-ephemeral-flag, the body-shader pulses are legible without canon-pollution risk. The visual-feedback policy can be permissive at the cosmetic layer because it is firewalled from canonical state.

Open questions

• Per-NPC VL-inference rate-limit — how many camera-renders + VL-inferences per second affordable per active NPC at MMO scale? Pending: benchmark against Gemma 4 E4B VL-inference latency on typical-deployment hardware.
• VL-Gemma camera resolution + frame-rate — what camera-budget per NPC fits the rule-catalogue? Pending: rule catalogue + benchmark.
• NPC progression-state for witness-axis — how does an NPC accumulate in-between-knowledge that drives their dual-axis-clasp witness-fidelity (per ../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md §Asymmetric clasp / §Dual-axis clasp-fidelity)? Their own clasps? Fragments encountered? Caste-class-default? Pending: design pass.
• Multi-NPC observing same event — each NPC runs independent VL-inference; how do their perceptions combine into a shared event-record? (Connects to Compositor narrative-coherence-at-scale Still-open.) Probable answer under the hallucination-isolation discipline: they don't combine — each NPC's visual context is private to their own next-turn driver_context_pull; the shared event-record is built from text/gesture-summaries only. Worth confirming explicitly.

Zone taxonomy (v1 starter set)

Zone type	Register	Slots	Executor	Persistence
Conversation	physical	2–4 dialog	director	persistent
Street brawl	physical	fighter + spectator	director	persistent
Ritual	physical	fixed ceremonial	director	persistent
Maintenance	physical	1–2 workbench	director	persistent
Wall-writing	physical / liminal	1 author + witnesses	director	persistent / ephemeral
Market exchange	physical	2–3 + ambient	director	persistent
Memorial gathering	physical	1 mourner + N witnesses	director	persistent
Salvage	physical (dump)	N scavengers	director	persistent
Transit-encounter	physical (pipe)	2–6, stranger-heavy	director	persistent
Plug-in conversation	physical (rail)	2-3 (3-way capacity)	director	ephemeral (rail-segment-bound)
Patrol / sweep	physical	mobile, N enforcers	overseer	persistent
Interrogation	physical	1 subject + N enforcers	overseer	persistent
Raid	physical	district-scope + N enforcers	overseer	persistent
Interior (hovel/workshop/etc.)	physical	slot-inventory by interior-type	director	persistent
Clasp	liminal	2	director	ephemeral (stabilizes across repeated clasps)
Aletheia-gathering	liminal	N, mini-game-gated	director	ephemeral
Migration (mobile)	physical (pipes)	cohort + escort	overseer	persistent
Exodus (mobile, mass)	physical (pipes)	self-selecting crowd	emergent	persistent
Drug-ring den	physical (cheat-op)	N users + cooks	director (cheat)	persistent (until detected)
Illegal back-alley modshop	physical (cheat-op)	1 modder + 1-N customers	director (cheat)	persistent (until detected)
Unlicensed brothel	physical (cheat-op)	N workers + N customers	director (cheat)	persistent (until detected)
Companion hall	imperial net	1 dreamer + N synthetic	net-director	extractive-persistent
Brothel encounter	imperial net	2+ (synthetic or employed)	net-director	extractive-persistent
Imperial ceremony	imperial net	mass-audience	net-director	extractive-persistent
Ruin zone	physical	pilgrimage-only	none / Memorialist	persistent-abandoned

Zone spawn cadence

Five layered mechanisms (all compute-budget capped, all lifeforce-gated):

1. Demand queue (faction-driven) — gamemaster processes by priority + cost; stale demands age out
2. Shift-composition spawn-candidates — emergence from "which active-shift NPCs co-located"
3. Pressure gradients (ambient) — cells accumulate; threshold-crossings spawn
4. Emergent-signal response — relational-gate transitions emit upward
5. Player-proximity densification — multiplier near player; distant districts background

Daily pulse: morning ambient, midday productivity-overseer, evening conversation-peak, night sparse-clasp-possibility.

Emergent zones — the dramatic-episode unit

Spawn-cadence mechanism #4 (emergent-signal response) elaborates into the architecture's primary dramatic-episode unit: a complete, bounded, emergent narrative-arc with goal, participants, dialog, mechanical action, success/fail-state, and structured aftermath — produced by the simulation, not authored.

The player has experienced this in every player-driven sandbox they remember best (Dwarf Fortress's "tantrum spirals," RimWorld's "raid stories," Caves of Qud's "I went to find my sister and"). What's new here is treating the emergent-arc as a first-class typed unit with cost, distributed funding, runtime substrate (the lemniscate), goal-evaluation against the world's own value-axes, and structured report-back.

The flow

1. NPC_A signal fires
   (e.g., emergent_signal("limb_broken", lifeforce_threshold_breached))
   broadcasts to district-bus
                ↓
2. District-director consumes signal
   (policy-lookup: problem-class → typed-tool selection, quota-aware)
   decides spawn rescue-event
   pays spawn-cost from director_lifeforce_budget
   defines goal: NPC_A.limb_A >= 10% (numeric) OR Sophrosyne-axis +1 (fuzzy)
   defines termination: goal_met OR participating_lifeforce_exhausted
                ↓
3. Event spawns as new emergent-zone (lemniscate, with goal-flag)
   broadcasts on bus; rings-of-importance gate which other zones lose NPCs
                ↓
4. NPCs evaluate (proximity + state + own_traits + own_lifeforce + ring-of-importance)
   self-select to attend or stay in current zone
   state-machine engages: animations, rail-jumps, lift, splint
   their own lifeforce burns as they participate
                ↓
5. Lemniscate runs:
   DIALOG layer (cursor-driven): NPCs speak as they help — memory-pure, sequenced
   STATE-MACHINE layer (sim-tick): physical actions execute alongside, decoupled clock
   At each crossing: goal_satisfied flag re-evaluated
                ↓
6. Termination:
   goal_met                → success-report
   budget_exhausted        → partial-report
   participants_evaporated → fail-report
                ↓
7. Report back to spawning director:
   { lifeforce_cost: total burned (director_spawn + sum NPC contributions),
     goal_status: ternary (+1 / 0 / -1, with axis named for fuzzy goals),
     participants: [NPCs and contributions and faction-affiliation],
     side_effects: [faction-resonances, ternary-gate shifts, drift-from-purpose] }
                ↓
8. Director's Dream-process consumes the report
   tunes future spawn-policy: (problem-class, tool, outcome) over time
   GM aggregates rescue-cost across districts
   imperium consumes population-health indicator

Distributed funding economy

The director only pays spawn-cost. Operating-cost is distributed across willing participants — every NPC who attends spends their own lifeforce on dialog turns and state-machine actions. This produces structurally important properties:

• Cheap to spawn many emergent events. Spawn-cost is bounded; if no NPCs attend, the event fails fast and consumes only spawn-cost. Directors can be generous with spawning because failure-cost is bounded.
• Helping is expensive in-fiction. Lifeforce literally burns when an NPC participates. High-Philotes NPCs help freely; low-Philotes / faction-rivals don't show up. This produces faction-politics-by-attendance — measurable faction-allegiance based on who-helps-whom, not guessed.
• Cost-asymmetry encodes the cruelty. Districts where lifeforce is starved → fewer NPCs can afford to help → rescue-events fail more often → silence-gradient deepens. The simulation produces rescue-failures-as-emergent-tragedy structurally. Marx in the schema, exactly as the architecture's broader thesis promises.

Two-layer execution: state-machine + lemniscate

The mechanical-action layer (state-machine) and dialog-layer (lemniscate cursor) run on decoupled clocks:

• State-machine runs at simulation-tick (fast). Animations, pathfinding, rail-jumps, splint-applications execute when the physics says they execute.
• Lemniscate cursor runs at axis-rate. At each crossing, the dialog-driver reads state-machine status as a snapshot and the cursor's NPC narrates accordingly ("I've got him," "the splint won't hold").

Speech doesn't gate action; action doesn't block speech. They run in synchronized-but-loose harmony, exactly the property real-world helping has — people talk while they work, and the work continues while the talk happens.

Goal evaluation: ternary through trait-axis

For numeric goals (limb_A >= 10%), the verifier is a simple threshold on a state-machine variable.

For fuzzy goals (deescalate the fight, get her to open up about the clasp, convince him to stay), the verifier compiles to a trait-axis ternary evaluation against the existing substrate — no new evaluation primitive:

Goal: "deescalate the fight in the marketplace"
  ↓ compile to:
goal_axis = Sophrosyne (temperance principle)
goal_direction = positive (toward STABLE/OPEN)
baseline = trait_axis_gate_state at zone-spawn
  ↓ at event-end:
delta = current_gate_state vs baseline
  ↓
+1 if delta-positive (deescalation produced)
 0 if held the line (no progress, no regress)
-1 if delta-negative (fight intensified)

Goals are evaluated by what the world values (the Hellenic principles), not by the spawner's idiosyncratic spec. A "deescalate" goal is judged by the world's Sophrosyne-result, not "did the spawner get what they wanted."

Multi-axis goals fall out cleanly — (Philotes >= +1) AND (Sophrosyne >= +1) for "rescue NPC_A AND keep faction-tension low (via maintained restraint)."

The result is consumed by the spawning director's Dream-process as a discrete-action-space reward signal. One signal-grammar, top to bottom: gates produce ternary, scenes produce ternary, Dream-processes consume ternary. Delta-not-absolute matches the lifeforce_actual-vs-reported asymmetry — what's measured is the work the event did, not just the end-state.

Mid-event signal handling

If a participating NPC's exit-flag fires mid-event (their own shift-whistle, their own limb breaking, faction-summons elsewhere), exit-flag wins on the next crossing. The rescue is now under-staffed. Drama scales. The rescuers are running out the same way the patient is. Real stakes.

If the rescued NPC's own state-machine reaches a worse condition (limb deteriorates further toward dismemberment), the goal becomes unreachable; verifier flips to fail-flag; zone collapses with fail-report. Director's Dream-process learns this configuration was insufficient — spawn-distance, NPC-mods, lifeforce-budget were inadequate for this severity.

Cross-zone NPC pull: rings of importance

When an emergent-zone broadcasts, NPCs already in other zones evaluate whether the broadcast outranks their current zone's purpose by ring-of-importance (see §Rings as structural pattern in authority-and-decision/architecture.md). Topics live in rings; rings shift over time based on past ternary-results — a topic that consistently produces +1 climbs, one that produces -1 drops, one untouched decays.

This converts emergent-zones into a competitive attention economy. Multiple lemniscates compete for slot-NPCs; high-ring topics drain population from low-ring topics; the simulation produces its own cultural priors over time. What's worth attending to is shaped by what attending-to has produced. Real societies do this; the architecture renders it.

What this resolves

• Aletheia-progression as level-up (prior open question) → answered structurally: trait-axis ternary evaluation at event-end with named-axis recognizes acts-of-awakeness without per-act hardcoding (specific axis-mapping per Aletheia-event-class still needs design, see open-questions)

What this retires

• Authored quest-arcs → emergent dramatic-episode units
• Quest-failure as designed branching → goal-and-budget arithmetic
• Centralized GM-pays-for-all-events → distributed-funding (director spawn-cost, NPC operating-cost)
• Boolean quest-status → ternary goal-result, multi-axis-composable
• Event lifecycle without report-back → structured report → Dream-process feedback loop closed at every tier
• Static topic-priority → rings-of-importance with outcome-driven movement

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Version: 0.7.0 | Created: 2026-04-26 | Updated: 2026-05-01 | Origin: Split from architecture-index.md v0.7 (2026-04-26)