Registration order was the only thing deciding what a widget was drawn
over, which forced a domain to keep one ordered list of every widget it
owns — the one shape that cannot be split into a file per widget.
A widget now says where it belongs: Layer, the eight LayerScene..LayerCursor
constants, the optional Layered interface and LayerOf for wrappers. Draw
runs from the bottom layer up, Tick from the top down, and registration
order only breaks ties inside a layer. Every built-in declares its own;
anything that stays quiet sits on LayerHUD, so existing HUDs come out where
they were.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A connection between two scenes had to be hand-built as a hotspot: an area,
a cursor, a GoTo, and a flag check written out again for every door. Scene
now carries Exits, and the engine expands each one into a hotspot.
- Exit{To, Label, Side, Area, Needs, Blocked, OnLook, OnTake} in scene.exit.go.
With no Area an exit is an edge strip, sized as a fraction of Game.SceneArea()
so a game whose HUD covers the foot of the window gets strips inside the
painting. Game.ExitLook / Game.ExitTake supply the look and take responses
once for the whole game, so the phrasing is not repeated per exit.
- Game.SceneHotspots(name) is the scene's own hotspots followed by its exits,
cached per scene. Authored hotspots come first, so a painted thing beats the
edge strip wherever the two overlap. HotspotAt and HotspotDebug read it.
- Game.CurrentScene() / PreviousScene(), both persisted in the save file. The
engine tracked the current scene but exposed no accessor, so every game had
to shadow it to know where it was.
- Back() returns to the previous scene — what an exit with an empty To binds
to, for a scene reachable from several rooms whose way out is a direction
rather than a place.
- Validate rejects an exit naming a scene nobody registered.
Generated hotspots are named ExitName(To) ("exit:street", "exit:back"), so the
location graph can be read straight back out of the registered scenes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>