Pressing a hotbar key ran hotkey.action(state), which for an equipment
binding calls an itemActions entry's onActivation directly -- Wield,
Drink, Switch on, Pack away. None of those reach console.print or a
popup; most only play a sound. So the whole hotbar was silent: no item
name, no verb, no confirmation the key had registered at all.
patches/hotbar.lua wraps the hotbar VIEW factory, not models/hotkey:
models/hotbar.lua captures newHotkey as a file-local at require time,
and models/world.lua captures newHotbar the same way, both long before
our entry point. views/hotbar.lua is required only by the three states,
which load lazily -- the same ordering argument as patches/slider.lua.
The verb is computed BEFORE the action runs. The itemAction conditions
key off item.isEquipped, which the action itself flips, so asked
afterwards they return the opposite verb and a press that wielded would
announce "Unwield".
Also narrates the empty slot, the silent no-applicable-action branch,
binding and unbinding (sound-only in game), and action-type slots. Says
nothing when the item is missing from the inventory -- the game prints
that itself and patches/console.lua speaks it.
78 testbed checks, 0 failures. The prologue gives the player no items,
so the live path is exercised by planting a torch, binding it to slot 1,
pressing 1 twice and putting the world back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The tutorial teaches "press s to see the contents of containers", and it was
silent. For a sighted player s sets levelWindow.itemsHighlightEnabled, which
draws the top item's icon on every loot-bearing tile in FoV.
We watch that flag rather than binding s ourselves -- it is game-claimed, and
keybindings.getCommand() ignores modifiers -- and speak on its rising edge, so
the player's own binding, hold vs toggle mode and the toolbar icon all work.
The flag is checked both at end of frame and inside the keypressed wrapper,
because in hold mode a quick tap goes up and down within one frame.
Reads the whole tile.loot list, not just the icon's top entry, nearest first,
with each container pushed to the console history for [ ] review.
71 testbed checks, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The item grids said which item you were on ("a torch, slot 3") but nothing
about what it was -- no description, no condition, and no "what does this
refine into", which is the whole of alchemy.
The game already composes all of it in one place: item.getPopupMessage()
(modules/item.lua:199) returns the cursor popup's line list, so read that
rather than re-deriving anything from templates.
It also already gates it behind a dwell -- the popup only fades in after
examinationPopupFadeInDuration (0.4s), so a sighted player who arrows past a
slot never sees the details either. Mirror that instead of inventing a
modality: stop on an item for 0.6s and the details speak themselves, queued.
"=" reads them on demand, Shift+= keeps the name line too. ("r" was the
obvious mnemonic but is a game-claimed scancode, and getCommand() dispatches
on scancode ignoring modifiers.)
New generic hook descriptor.details() returning a LIST of blocks, so each is
also pushed into the console history and [ ] \ walk a long description back
afterwards -- the journal page trick. Only _itemgrid.lua implements it so far.
The other half is the hint panel craft/refine/trade draw permanently beside
the grid, which the popup never contains: recipe components, and price, which
appears nowhere else in the game. The three panels share a shape, so one
reader covers them. Affordability survives only as a red colour in the hint
table and decides whether enter does anything, so it is decoded and spoken.
59 testbed checks, 0 failures: a synthetic ivy_leaves item as the version-bump
canary for getPopupMessage, hasUpvalue over every hint-panel local, four
assertions on the pure settleStep, and an end-to-end "=" press. Not yet
exercised against a live item -- the prologue inventory is empty.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pressing enter/z on an inventory item plays a click and, until now, said
nothing. The click is sound.select: the menu WAS opening every time.
inventory.keypressed -> inventoryWindow.enableItemMenu() builds a second,
nested selection over the grid (modules/item/itemMenu.lua) listing the
actions that item currently allows, filtered from itemActions.lua by
per-action conditions: Activate, Wield/Unwield, Wear/Take off, Switch
on/off, Drink, Eat, Apply, Read, Open, Prepare for throwing/Pack away.
Up/down move in it, enter activates, any other key cancels. None of it
goes through console.print or the cursor popup, so it was silent -- and
since the game has no separate equipment screen, this menu is the only
way to equip anything. Reported by Talon: the torch quest was unplayable.
_itemgrid.lua now checks window.itemMenu first and keeps the grid cell
quiet underneath, since the menu is modal over it. The menu is a closure
with no getters, so lines and currentSelectedAction are read as upvalues
of its own draw(). The item name leads only when the menu opens, and the
"just opened" memory is the menu table itself rather than a flag, which
keeps read() idempotent -- a flag would be consumed by the focus poll and
the real announcement would come out headless.
Items also now read "equipped", which is part of the focus key on
purpose: after Switch on the menu closes with the cursor unmoved, so
otherwise the re-read is suppressed as unchanged and the action still
feels silent. Now: "Switch on" -> "a torch, equipped, slot 3".
New patch (the 6th) wraps the inventoryWindow factory for the dead case:
when getActionsList returns nil -- an item with no applicable actions --
the game does literally nothing, not even the click, which by ear is
indistinguishable from a dropped keypress. Says "<item>, no actions".
The prologue inventory is empty, so the live path is unverified; the
testbed instead builds an itemMenu from a synthetic item and asserts the
two upvalue names still resolve. That is the version-bump canary for this
descriptor, not proof of the wording. 38 checks, 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Walking blind, the hard part is not "what is next to me" -- that is `/` --
but "what changed when I moved". Rounding a corner reveals a room, stepping
back hides it, a rat walks into sight behind you, and none of it is spoken.
Shift+/ cycles three modes:
settled (default) changes accumulate while moving, spoken once you have
stood still for 0.4s
always every step reports its own change
off
`settled` diffs against the state at the last ANNOUNCEMENT, not the last
step, so a long walk gives one combined summary that is a genuine net
change: something that came into view mid-walk and left again before you
stopped is not mentioned, and something visible throughout is mentioned
once. Summing per-step diffs would report both. A single step is the
degenerate case -- you are already standing still.
Arrivals and departures are deliberately asymmetric. Membership is current
FoV only (never rememberedFoV), but furniture drops out of FoV constantly
indoors as walls come between you and it, and "the bed is out of view"
every other step is noise. Arrivals are reported for every watched
category; departures only for creatures.
Terrain is unwatched by default -- water arrives dozens of tiles at a time.
Step detection polls playerActor.x/y as walltones does, so pathing, portals
and pushes are covered with no game function wrapped; the scan is a 14-tile
box and runs only on a step or a due settle, never per frame.
snapshot() and diffText() are pure and exposed so the testbed can assert
the wording and the FoV invariant directly instead of capturing speech.
34/34 testbed checks, 0 failures. Game footprint unchanged: main.lua | 1 +.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
All 23 states now have descriptors; 5 patches applied.
Final two descriptors:
- keybindings_menu has two panels (commands and keys) with independent
selection, so it reads currentlyActiveWindow to decide which one has focus.
Announcing the wrong panel's row would be actively misleading, since the two
lists are unrelated.
- research is a 2D node graph rather than a list, and its nodes are drawn as
icons with no text label, so the id is the only identifier available. What
actually matters is researched / locked / cannot afford / available: without
the affordability part the screen is unusable by ear, because pressing enter
on an unaffordable node silently does nothing.
status.lua adds two pull keys -- ' for health and active effects, , for the
current action -- plus unprompted damage alerts.
Damage is polled from actor.hp rather than hooked. ingame.checkInterruptions
exists but only fires for interruptions during queued movement, so damage taken
on your own turn never reaches it. Polling catches every source (combat, poison,
fire, falling) with no game edit. Damage speaks immediately and interrupts;
healing queues, since it is worth knowing but never urgent.
patches/popupstack.lua wraps popupStack.add, the single entry point for loot,
recipe, lore, map, quest, tutorial and bestiary popups. None of these go through
console.print, so they were entirely silent before.
speech.immediate now logs to the console like queued speech does. It bypasses
the frame queue and so also bypassed the flush-time logger, which meant damage
alerts fired correctly but were invisible in the testbed transcript. Prefixes
are now: ! interrupt, * immediate, space queued.
26/26 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
The slider turned out to be genuinely generic: modules/slider.lua is a factory,
so one wrapper on it narrates all four users -- craft, refine, trade and
ingame_wait (the wait-N-turns screen). Same leverage as the console.print and
inventoryCursorPopup patches.
The options screens do NOT share it, though: config_menu changes values through
config.increase/config.decrease, so it needed its own descriptor. It reports tab,
option name and value, and its focus key includes the value so left/right
re-announce even though the focused option has not moved.
states/_itemgrid.lua is now shared by inventory, craft, refine and trade, all of
which build a views/inventoryWindow. It stays silent while
confirmationWindowEnabled is set so the slider owns speech during quantity
selection instead of the two fighting.
testbed gains walkTo(), which navigates using the game's own pathfinder rather
than hardcoded direction sequences -- those drift as soon as anything moves the
player. The config test only adjusts a value when the focused option is
demonstrably safe, and puts it straight back.
The slider patch is applied and confirmed by the self-test but not exercised
live: ingame_wait is unreachable in the prologue because tutorial_bed overrides
bed's tryInteractFunction with an empty function by design, and the crafting
screens need an alchemy table and real items. Recorded as a NOTE rather than a
failing check, since it is a property of the game and not of the mod.
25/25 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Adds descriptors for actions_menu, worldmap, alchemy_table, journal, character,
inventory, and a shared one for the full-screen prose states (menu_text,
ingame_message, menu_message). The prose states also push their text into the
console history, so the existing review keys walk the manual paragraph by
paragraph rather than delivering it as one unusable utterance.
Two driver improvements, both prompted by real failures the self-test caught:
- menus.getAnyUpvalue finds a file-local across all of a state's functions and
one level into inner closures. Safe because a Lua file-local is a single
shared upvalue. Needed because actions_menu and worldmap build their lists in
open() and never reference them in keypressed, so the named probe function
found nothing. The generic probe path now falls back to this.
- menus.hasUpvalue checks that a local exists rather than that it holds a value.
getUpvalue cannot distinguish 'no such local' from 'declared but currently
nil', which made the self-test report PROBE BROKEN for worldmap, whose
'local options' is nil until the screen is first opened.
patches/popups.lua now stands down for any state that has a descriptor.
inventoryCursorPopup.set only fires when an item is under the cursor, so empty
slots and empty tabs were silent and you could not tell the cursor had moved.
The inventory descriptor reports item-or-empty plus slot and tab instead.
21/21 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Three-level navigation as specified in D2: Ctrl+PageUp/Down cycles categories,
PageUp/Down cycles kinds, Shift+PageUp/Down cycles instances of that kind, Home
announces where it is.
- categories.lua: flag-first classification into Creatures, Items, Alchemy,
Interactables, Exits and Terrain features, reusing the game's own 'exit' tag
and excluding the six nameless mechanical templates.
- tracker.lua: scan, cache, navigation, announcements.
Caching keys on level name, player position and turn: position because
everything sorts by distance to the player, turn because creatures move and
containers empty. Scans run on keypress, never per frame.
FoV is respected throughout -- creatures only when currently visible, tiles when
visible or remembered -- so the tracker never becomes a cheat.
Home reports path length alongside the offset, via the game's own
calculatePathFromPlayer. Straight-line distance is misleading indoors, where a
chest three tiles north through a wall can be twenty steps away.
Corrects D4 in docs/05-decisions.md. I had claimed tile.tryInteract cleanly
separates 'the player can do something here' from scenery. It does not: 'wall'
carries a flavour-only tryInteractFunction ('You touch the wall. It's cold and
rough.'), so every wall segment was promoted into Interactables -- 13 in the
starting house, burying the chest and cauldron. Structural tiles
(blocksMovement and blocksVision) are now excluded before the tryInteract test;
containers and furniture block movement but not sight, so they survive.
12 kinds/19 instances instead of 13/32.
13/13 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
- describe.lua: shared spatial formatting. 8-point compass and Chebyshev
distance, since the game moves 8-directionally and Euclidean would overstate
diagonal travel. Verbosity setting, because sweeping eight neighbours and
inspecting a single tile want different amounts of detail.
- states/ingame_observe.lua: narrates the game's existing examine cursor.
- surroundings.lua: probe one direction, scan all eight, or report location,
without moving anything or touching game state.
- patches/popups.lua: wraps inventoryCursorPopup.set, covering inventory, craft,
refine and trade in a single patch.
Q3 resolved as augment rather than relay: the game's descriptions carry no
position, which is fine on screen and useless by ear, so distance and direction
are appended.
Examine mode is polled rather than driven by levelCursorPopup. That popup is set
from an animation-completion callback, so unless the player has enabled the
game's quickExaminationPopup option the text arrives a full keypress late -- in
testing you heard the previous tile while standing on the next. Polling
level.cursorX/Y is same-frame and setting-independent.
hotkeys.isCtrlDown/isShiftDown are now overridable fields rather than direct
love.keyboard calls: real hardware state cannot be faked by love.event.push, so
without that seam every modifier-gated hotkey would be untestable.
11/11 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Wall tones: stop the previous tone per direction before playing the new one.
The tones are 2.33s mono; steps land far faster than that and up to four
directions sound at once, so overlapping them stacked into a continuous drone
instead of reading as a per-step cue. Cutting the old tone also means the
distance/volume you hear always reflects where you are standing now.
ingame_dialogue descriptor: speaks speaker and message on a node change, but
only the response on a selection change -- re-reading the whole speech every
time you move between responses would be unusable.
Two more bugs found by the testbed:
4. Nested states.switch announced in reverse. ingame.open() sees
world.pendingDialogue and switches straight to ingame_dialogue; because we
announce after realSwitch returns, the inner announcement fired first and the
outer one interrupted and clobbered it, so entering a conversation said
'Game' rather than 'Conversation'. Now we stay quiet if we are no longer the
current state.
5. The game already numbers response text ('1. (Continue)'), matching the number
key that picks it, so our own numbering produced '1. 1. (Continue)'.
9/9 testbed checks, history unit tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pulls menu focus narration forward from Phase 4: it was a blocker, since the
screen name was spoken but not the selected option, so the game could not be
started at all.
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
- menus.lua: descriptor driver supporting both D3 backends (upvalue probe and
patched-announce), sharing one render per screen. Probe self-test included.
- Descriptors for main_menu, settings_menu, load_game, new_game, narration.
- testbed.lua: drives the game by code via love.event.push, so input takes the
same path as a human keypress. Coroutine-based, and navigates by READING focus
rather than counting keypresses, which drifts when options are disabled.
Three bugs found by the testbed and fixed:
1. love.keypressed was still bound to the pre-wrapper states.keypressed.
states.setup() captures love[callback] by value and runs before us, and
main.lua does not define love.keypressed itself, so wrapping the states table
field alone had no effect. Now reassigns love.keypressed/textinput.
2. Focus can move with no keypress: main_menu.mousemoved assigns selectedOption
from cursor position, silently overriding selection including at startup.
Focus is now polled in the update hook instead of announced only on keypress.
3. Probes sometimes need chaining. narration.keypressed only calls
continueNarration(), so the text locals are upvalues of that inner function.
Verified: main menu -> new game -> name entry -> intro narration -> gameplay,
8/8 checks passing, including console.print capture and its (x2) fold.
Known gap: ingame_dialogue announces 'Game' and reads no dialogue text.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game-file footprint unchanged: still one line in main.lua.
Console (Q4: speak everything queued, cancelled by explicit action):
- history.lua keeps our own unbounded history, since the game's console buffer
expires entries after 3s. Mirrors the game's (xN) coalescing so what is heard
matches what is on screen. The review cursor holds position while new lines
arrive rather than being yanked to the tail mid-read.
- patches/console.lua wraps console.print, calling the real one first so a bug
on our side cannot swallow a message the player would otherwise see.
- Any keypress reaching the game silences the pending speech backlog.
Hotkeys: [ and ] review, Shift+[/] jump to ends, \ repeat, Shift+\ copy.
Chosen from scancodes the game does not bind. Note keybindings.getCommand()
ignores modifiers, so Ctrl+Up would read to the game as a movement -- our keys
are consumed and never overlay a game-claimed scancode.
Wall tones (Q5: on step, 3D-positioned, radius 5):
- Direction and distance are deliberately decoupled. The listener sits at the
camera 4 units above the plane under an inverse distance model, so placing a
tone at the wall's real position would make distant walls quieter (the
opposite of the request) and collapse the stereo pan. Instead the source sits
at a fixed radius in the wall's direction at listener height, and volume is
computed explicitly from distance.
- Step detection polls player coordinates rather than hooking movement, so it
covers walking, pathing, portals and pushes for free.
- Respects FoV/rememberedFoV; never leaks unseen geometry.
tests/test_history.lua: 16 assertions, all passing, pure Lua.
Not yet verified in actual play -- needs a human at the keyboard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Establishes the mod skeleton and gets speech working end to end.
Game-file footprint: one line in main.lua.
- accessibility/init.lua: sole entry point. Patch registry, hooks states.switch
(announces screen changes) and states.update (per-frame speech flush, avoiding
an edit to love.update). Startup self-test prints what resolved -- the canary
for when a future game version moves something we hook.
- accessibility/speech.lua: TTS wrapper. pcall-guarded so a missing DLL degrades
to silence instead of crashing. Queues utterances within a frame and joins them,
since one game turn emits several console.print calls and speaking each with
interrupt would leave only the last audible.
- accessibility/stateNames.lua: spoken names for the 28 states.
- accessibility/vendor/love2talk: vendored TTS library, see VENDORED.md.
Loads Tolk.dll by absolute path via love.filesystem.getSource() and adds that
directory via SetDllDirectory, so the DLLs live in the project instead of
needing an elevated copy into Program Files.
Verified with lovec against NVDA: TTS available, speech channel yes,
'Main menu' spoken on startup.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
