Player Interface and Input¶

This document owns the player-facing interface: device-independent actions, context changes, binding and prompt rules, accessibility, feedback channels, and the boundary between expressed intent and the physical simulation. Combat, magic, traversal, camera, and the fictional HUD consume this contract; they do not invent competing input semantics.

Easy to Command. Hard to Judge.¶

The player expresses purpose, direction, timing, target relationship, and commitment. The tribrid body handles routine balance, grip, foot placement, joint coordination, and force application. The pipeline is:

device signal -> binding/context resolver -> action lifecycle -> intent -> motor/physics request -> shared world result

An action request begins producing attributable feedback immediately. Weight appears in acceleration, momentum, stopping distance, recovery, fatigue, and consequence—not in ignored input or unexplained delay. An unreachable request produces the best physically reachable attempt and a readable cause; it is never silently rejected or snapped into an impossible pose.

Actions, Not Device Buttons¶

Bindings map devices to stable actions. The default layout is provisional and replaceable without changing simulation meaning. A binding may be a button, axis, pointer gesture, touch gesture, or accessible hold/toggle variant.

Movement and weapon direction remain independent. A leftward step does not force a leftward cut. A camera correction does not rewrite movement intent. Context changes select which actions are available, but never change the meaning of a physical result already released into the world.

Action Lifecycle¶

Every gameplay action has explicit phases where relevant: requested, forming, held, released, committed, resolved, and cancelled. The lifecycle is not a hit-window or cooldown substitute.

• A held bow draw, guard, channel, or construction preview remains physically and cognitively legible.
• Releasing a projectile or magical effect commits its existing trajectory, energy, and provenance; cancelling afterward cannot erase it.
• Redirecting a still-reachable melee motion requests a physical change in momentum. It is not an animation cancel.
• Input buffering is bounded, context-aware, and visible. It may preserve a request during a short transition, never an attack that was already released or an effect the world has resolved.
• Focus loss, device removal, modal-menu entry, or disconnect cancels unsafe uncommitted input. It cannot cancel a fired arrow, released spell, collision, or persistent world change.

Contexts and Prompting¶

The resolver exposes exploration, traversal/flight, combat, casting, build/creation, dialogue, inspection, and menu contexts. Context changes publish a versioned action map and clear only actions unsafe to carry across the boundary. Prompts name the current action and show its active binding/device, then update after rebinding. The action identity is stable across devices; the binding presentation is intentionally device-specific so the player can discover the control.

Conflicting bindings are reported before commitment. An intentional overlap is allowed, but the prompt explains which action wins, whether the input is tap/hold/axis-sensitive, and how to reach the other action. Menus never consume an input visibly intended to fire or strike, and leaving a menu cannot discharge a held effect.

Combat and Ranged Control¶

Combat uses the same action grammar for fists, rigid armour, melee weapons, arrows, magic, shockwaves, and absorption. The player judges range, angle, support, momentum, cover, target visibility, and commitment; the controller coordinates the body. Guard is a real weapon or ward in space. Evasion is a reachable body trajectory, never an invulnerability state.

Ranged weapons consume the authoritative wind, rain, material, and projectile state. The bow remains the primary aiming interface: draw length, arrow orientation, body sway, and observed trajectory teach the shot. The default presentation does not require a traditional crosshair, but an optional accessible aim cue may show launch direction, predicted drop, or uncertainty when those facts are physically available to the character. It may not reveal hidden targets, future wind, or a guaranteed hit. Crossbow readiness, reload, arrow persistence, lightning ignition, magic influence, and impact remain physical states.

Magic: Use, Shape, Create¶

Known magic is immediately usable from prepared slots or an equivalent remappable selector. Shape opens a bounded authoring view for understood components: form, force, trajectory, timing, target relationship, material response, persistence, and nature. The preview is a hypothesis, not a consequence-free sandbox; costs, conflicts, instability, and required knowledge are shown. A live-world test is consequential even when its effect is temporary: if it can consume resources, create danger, or alter an observation, it must be explicitly confirmed before it runs.

Create composes a new design from understood principles. The player validates it against a declared environment, names and versions it, saves or discards it, and can return to it during play. Failed compositions expose the causal failure. A design cannot bypass physics, perception, costs, telegraphing, resistance, counterplay, or world history. Angel structure, demon analysis, and human faith are three approaches to one tribrid system, not three control schemes.

Camera, Perception, and Feedback¶

The camera follows its separate contract. Rebinding, lock-on, camera-relative movement, shoulder changes, and camera assistance preserve a stable input reference and cannot reveal an opponent or route the character cannot perceive. Cutaways remove enclosing geometry only when doing so preserves the authorized view; they never remove enemy cover or hidden world state.

Important results have world feedback and, where appropriate, optional interface feedback: body posture and wounds, weapon position, sound, light, rain and foliage response, impact, material change, subtitles, captions, haptics, and inspectable journals. Feedback distinguishes request, attempt, contact, and consequence.

Accessibility and Assistance¶

Profiles may remap controls, replace holds with toggles, reduce simultaneous-input burden, preserve a requested guard or facing objective, reduce camera shake and motion, enlarge text, increase contrast, add captions and non-colour signals, and provide equivalent audio, visual, haptic, or textual feedback. They may delegate routine motor execution among physically reachable trajectories.

They do not grant aim magnetism that bends a projectile, hidden information, invulnerability, an invisible parry window, different contact rules, weaker enemies, or erased consequences. Accessibility changes expression and presentation; the authoritative world resolves the same realized trajectory for every player.

HUD and Fiction¶

Combat has no whole-body or per-limb hit-point bars and no floating damage numbers. Wounds change anatomy and physical capability; they do not subtract from a displayed pool. The survival interface presents wound locations, impairment, bleeding, fatigue, and regeneration load through the body, movement, sound, and accessible equivalents. Fatigue is not a replacement generic stamina pool. Wounds and Mortality owns these states.

The absorption counter is a separate narrative count of consumed beings, not a health or damage measure. Its drain and break remain as specified in The Counter and the HUD.

True God removes that counter and the persistent fictional survival measurement overlay: no lethal overload remains to track. It does not remove the usable interface. Subtitles, captions, remapping, settings, menus, codex, faction relationships, body inspection, prompts, and required accessibility communication remain available. Real and Present God retain survival feedback about bodily condition and regeneration. This distinction is narrative, not a reason to hide controls or accessibility information. Exact visual layout remains to be designed without reintroducing HP or damage numbers.

Determinism and Multiplayer¶

Action records carry ActionId, lifecycle phase, binding identity, action-map version, context version, device-independent value, simulation tick/order, and player/entity identity. Prediction and rollback may replay those intents, but authoritative hits, projectile paths, magic admissions, destruction, and environmental changes remain shared. Cosmetic particle density or camera presentation may vary; world truth may not.

Acceptance Fixtures¶

The interface is ready for a vertical slice when tests demonstrate:

1. default and rebound controls produce identical action semantics while each prompt shows the active binding and device;
2. tap, hold, toggle, assist, and device-loss paths cannot discharge unsafe effects accidentally;
3. movement, guard, attack, cast, build, and inspect actions respond within the common input-latency target: less than 50 ms from device input to the first attributable on-screen response (the same target used by body physics);
4. unreachable requests produce physically attributable attempts rather than silent refusal;
5. aim cues obey perception and wind uncertainty;
6. UI-only Use → Shape → Create previews do not mutate the world before confirmation; a live-world trial is explicitly confirmed as a committed test and its resource/danger consequences are recorded;
7. accessibility profiles preserve realized contact and consequence parity;
8. True God removes fictional measurement while retaining usable accessibility and navigation UI; and
9. replay/rollback with the same action records reproduces deterministic combat and environmental outcomes.