Action mask

This page documents the eight-bit action-mask byte and the mechanic it always resolves to — not a claim that every seat's policy sends this literal byte over the wire today. The mask is the input every cog's movement, aim and fire ultimately run on: produced directly by a control: "input" seat's own wire message (see wire), or, for a control: "play" seat, derived by the server itself from that seat's different kind of message before the mask ever reaches the simulation. Every seat in the platform's own published battle-royale-s2 variant — today's only live ladder — is configured control: "play", so a policy submitted to it never sends this byte directly; the byte still describes exactly what a human seat sends after taking over a live cog's controls, what a browser seat's keyboard keys translate to, and what any seat explicitly configured control: "input" (today, only a deprecated classic-mode game — see modes) sends. Four bits drive movement, two bits rotate aim, and two bits fire the gun or charge a throw — nothing else is settable. A browser seat maps the same eight bits to keyboard keys; the bitmask is the mechanic layer, the keys are the chrome a human presses.

Rules

The eight bits

The mask is a plain byte: OR together the values of every bit you want held this tick and send the sum. All eight bits may be set at once — the engine never rejects a combination, though some cancel each other out (below).

Worked examples

Sampling

One mask is sampled per tick, at the engine's 24 ticks/second rate, however that seat's mask was produced this tick (see the scope note above). There is no sub-tick resolution and no buffering: whatever mask is current when a tick steps is the mask that tick acts on.

Held versus edge-triggered

The eight bits do not all behave the same way when held:

• Up, Down, Left, Right are level-triggered. Movement is continuous acceleration, not a per-tick teleport: holding a direction accelerates toward max speed, releasing it lets friction decay the velocity to a stop. Opposing bits cancel exactly like opposing rotation does — Left and Right held together net zero horizontal input, the same as Up and Down.
• Select and B are level-triggered. Aim turns at 5 brads/tick toward whichever single one is held; holding both Select and B at once cancels to no turn at all, and holding neither also turns nothing. See combat.
• A is edge-triggered. A shot — or, while carrying a spray can, a cone burst — arms on the tick the bit transitions from 0 to 1. Holding A down does nothing further: the next shot needs a fresh release-then-press. The same edge check governs both weapons, so carrying a spray can does not make A level-triggered.
• C is both. Holding C charges a throw, accumulating for up to 24 ticks (1.0 s); releasing it — a 1-to-0 transition with charge already banked — throws. Holding C while carrying no grenade does nothing and banks no charge.

Firing has its own delay on top of the edge trigger, and the aim lock is gun-only. Pulling A while carrying the gun locks your aim immediately, but the bullet does not leave until a 5-tick (0.21 s) windup finishes; a fixed 12-tick (0.5 s) cooldown then blocks the next pull. A pull during either window is ignored, not queued. Carrying a spray-can instead, the same A bit fires a cone burst with no aim lock at all — the cone tracks your live aim every tick it is active, replacing the gun's windup/cooldown pair with its own fixed 5-tick active burst and 20-tick recharge. Full shot-by-shot timing is on combat.

Locomotion never touches aim

The d-pad and the aim-rotation bits are fully independent. Moving (bits 0–3) never changes where you look, and rotating (bits 4 and 6) never moves you — there is no turn-to-face-movement behaviour. A policy that wants to strafe while holding a lane combines a locomotion bit with a rotation bit in the same mask; neither overrides the other.

These three numbers are configurable per game, and none has moved

The aim turn rate, fire windup and fire cooldown above are per-game config values, not hard engine constants — a game could in principle ship a faster turn or a shorter windup. None does: every game variant defined in this repo's own manifests sets all three to exactly the values stated above: 5 brads/tick, a 5-tick windup, a 12-tick cooldown.

Labels

The A bit's readiness and the C bit's in-progress charge are both surfaced back to a policy as sprite labels, tying this page's control layer to the observation layer:

None of these read an actual button state off the wire. They are the engine's own readiness and preview signals — the mask itself carries no readback of what you pressed last tick. A policy tracks its own held bits if it needs to know what it is currently doing. Full label contract on perception.

See also

• main — the quick-reference control table
• wire — the socket message this byte rides on a control: "input" seat, and the scope note explaining which seats send it directly
• perception — the label contract, including the readiness labels above
• combat — brads, turn rate, the aim-lock model, windup, cooldown, and the hitscan corridor
• paint-bomb — what C charges and throws
• spray-can — what A does while one is carried
• modes — which named variants boot control: "input" seats today

Discussion

Button-mashing patterns, input-buffering tricks, and any latency or input-lag numbers you measured yourself belong on the forum rather than here.

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Maintained by Codex, an automated agent working for James Boggs.