The Rail · Reference & analysis

RC.2 Ghost Dojo headless-bout integration audit

Ghost Dojo stays unshipped and its Rail channel stays unregistered.

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Date: 2026-07-22

Decision#

Ghost Dojo stays unshipped and its Rail channel stays unregistered. V2 has a real deterministic rollback simulation core, but this checkout does not have an autonomous, authoritative headless bout path that can turn two ghost tendency profiles into inputs, collisions, rounds, and a winner. Building the league on the existing test-bot arithmetic or on a second TypeScript fight simulator would produce canned results and violate RC.2's explicit gate.

This gate does not block the Rail or the already-shipped channels.

What the Shakti bridge actually owns#

libs/shakti/fighting-ruleset-bridge is an authoring transform. It maps Shakti biomechanics into deterministic frame-data records for the seven V2 launch rulesets. apps/v2/shakti-ruleset-bridge adapts those records into CSV rows and reference-card metadata for V2 balance authoring. Both packages deliberately keep Shakti RPCs outside rollback frames.

The production direction is therefore:

text
Shakti biomechanics
  -> @shakti/fighting-ruleset-bridge profiles and pure transform
  -> @v2/shakti-ruleset-bridge CSV/reference-card adapter
  -> V2 authored/cooked frame data
  -> V2 runtime collision and rollback systems

The bridge is not a bout simulator and is not a runtime policy interface. A Ghost Dojo implementation must consume the same cooked V2 combat data and authoritative V2 match loop as the game; it must not call Shakti during a bout.

What can run headlessly today#

FV2SimWorld in V2Netcode is real, deterministic simulation code. It can:

  • reset and snapshot fighter state, step explicit per-player FV2RollbackFrameInput records, restore snapshots, and produce state hashes;
  • apply deterministic movement and a substantial set of ruleset mechanics;
  • resolve explicitly supplied FV2CombatCollisionEvent records through the shared deterministic hit authority; and
  • replay the 200 checked-in golden-corpus manifests and detect a hash divergence at the first sampled frame.

The corpus is valuable regression evidence, but it is not autonomous combat. GoldenReplayCorpus.spec.cpp generates or loads each input stream itself. Its hit-exchange and juggle scenarios also inject their collision events on fixed frames before calling ResolveRollbackHits.

What cannot simulate a Ghost Dojo bout today#

No inspected path supplies all of the following:

  1. a ghost/tendency policy that observes FV2SimWorld and emits legal FV2RollbackFrameInput for both fighters;
  2. runtime move selection and collision generation from the cooked frame data;
  3. an authoritative round/match loop that detects KO, time-out, draw, and a final winner; and
  4. a runnable fighter roster/stage from which a league bout can be instantiated.

The similarly named V2 playtesting harnesses do not fill that gap:

  • UV2BotHarnessLibrary::RunBotHarnessScript validates scripted actions, marks supported ones executed, and hashes their metadata. It does not boot a game world, load the declared script/model paths, or call FV2SimWorld.
  • UV2CombatBotLibrary::RunCombatBot derives each result by subtracting an authored combo damage total (minus authored armor) from authored enemy health. It does not simulate attacks, defenses, collisions, or opponent decisions.
  • the default harness map /Game/Maps/L_BotHarness, default pawn /Game/V2/Blueprints/BP_V2BotTestPawn, .v2botscript, .onnx, and .v2input files referenced by those abstractions are absent from V2/ue/Content.

The content gate is also concrete: V2/ue/Content currently contains eight regional .uasset data assets, zero .umap files, and no checked-in cooked .pak, .utoc, .ucas, or AssetRegistry.bin output. There is no fighter or stage content to instantiate for the league.

Verification performed#

The source audit covered the two Shakti bridge implementations and tests, the V2 combat/determinism and build/cook architecture notes, FV2SimWorld, the golden replay corpus and its regression test, and the BotHarness/CombatBot implementations and automation specs.

A focused Unreal command was attempted with the required local UE 5.5 editor:

text
Automation RunTests V2.Netcode.GoldenReplayCorpus.Regression

Automation could not start because the local engine installation is internally build-ID mismatched: the editor reports build ID 9729efc9-d09a-46a2-bf07-036739f64d68, while the installed OnlineServicesEOS module reports 0825d548-3e61-4aa3-bcb0-2e87affafb30. The plugin's shared object exists, but Unreal rejects the module before test discovery. A second command-line attempt to disable the optional EOS plugins was ignored by plugin mounting and failed at the same module check. This is an environment verification blocker, not evidence that an autonomous bout path exists.

Reopen criteria#

RC.2 league and channel implementation can begin only when all of these are true:

  • a headless V2 target can load at least two real cooked fighters and a legal bout environment;
  • a deterministic ghost policy converts persisted tendencies into both fighters' frame inputs;
  • the normal V2 move/collision/round authorities run to a reproducible match outcome without injected or preselected results;
  • changing a tendency produces a tested behavioral delta while identical seed, content version, and tendencies reproduce the same result; and
  • the headless target passes on a build-compatible Unreal installation.

Only then should the persistent ladder consume those result events, and only after that should rail-channel-ghost-dojo expose tiles, drips, predictions, or video-lane bouts. Until then the tendencies mobile micro-act also has no honest write authority and remains unavailable.