The late column

Every other column measures a preset’s first half second, and so do the suites: the sanity gate captures 30 frames and the report’s longest settled capture is 48. A world that empties out over seconds passes all of them. A slow_decay seed filled just under the rule’s own density can lose almost all of its light inside 15 s with every gate green, and the only instrument that looked further, the horizon, holds one stimulus and so never re-fires the reseed that would rescue it under music.

late looks 15 s in, for every system, in a one-column block under the frame-cost block. Sparse Decay below is the report test’s fixture, a near-dense slow_decay seed (fill 0.45) with no reseed; the two voxel rows are shipped presets:

  preset           late
  Voxel Ember     3.166
  Voxel Nebula    1.494
  Sparse Decay    0.070
  ...
  EMPTIED Sparse Decay late=0.070

The stimulus is 900 frames, 15 s at the capture step. Bass, mid and treble hold the realistic levels throughout, each with its slice of the band array. Every 30 frames from frame 0 (120 BPM), onset goes to full scale and beat fires, for that one frame, and the clock fields step with the beat as they do in count’s clock. It is the cheapest sequence that keeps firing every edge a preset can bind, so a world that empties out under it would empty out under music. Only two frames are read back, so the run costs 900 renders and 2 readbacks per preset at 96x96.

The ratio is cover at frame 899 over cover at frame 29, both taken against frame 29’s own ground with the threshold cover uses. The two frames sit at the same phase, 29 frames after a pulse. Above 1 the world grew; near 1 it held. A frame 29 that lit nothing has no ratio, and the cell prints -. --json carries the same reading as late, with the two frame indices, the pulse period, the size and the flag beside it, and omits the key where the text prints -.

The tenth. A row at 0.1 or below is listed EMPTIED <preset> late=<value> in the notes under the family’s tables. The flag is advisory: it never changes the exit code, and the tenth is a choice rather than a derivation. It marks a world that has kept a tenth or less of the light it had at half a second, which is what dying out looks like in this domain.

Two things it cannot see.

• A collapse that keeps its cover. A world can fall into one bright blob, or freeze into a static residue, and hold its cover while it does. late answers “did it empty”, not “is it alive”. The horizon’s concentration (peak/mean) reading sees the collapse, and anim and rate see a residue that has stopped moving.
• A fade by design. A world that is meant to dim reads low here without being broken. Look at the preset before retuning it.

It is the report’s longest capture. A whole-library report on the Arch box’s integrated GPU (RADV Renoir, release profile, 101 presets) took 234 s before the column and 442 s with it, about 2 s a preset. family= narrows the run; a shorter stimulus would give back the half-second blind spot the column exists to close.