fix(engine): headless step() is a full simulation frame; --exec can no longer hang

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step() advanced animations and timers only. It never called updatePythonScenes(),
which lives solely in doFrame() -- so headless Scene.update(dt) overrides never
fired. That was the filed bug, but it was one of twelve omissions: the C++ scene
update never ran, scene transitions never progressed or COMPLETED, and
current_frame never advanced. Headless behaved measurably differently from a real
frame, and any game with per-frame logic in update() was untestable.

step() is now a full simulation frame: scene update, timers, Python scene update,
animations, transitions (including completion), frame-time metrics, currentFrame++.
Render and input stay out, deliberately -- rendering is orthogonal to the clock and
costs zero simulation time (see renderScene(); a screenshot draws arbitrary state
without time passing). Timers remain on simulation_time: explicit, deterministic
time is the entire point of driving a headless test with step().

This exposed the deeper bug. testTimers() reads simulation_time when headless, and
simulation_time is advanced ONLY by step() -- the doFrame run loop never touched it.
So the headless run loop spun forever on a frozen clock: any headless script that
registered a timer and did not call step() hung until killed. And a script that died
during setup registered no timers, hit the auto-exit-when-no-timers path, exited 0,
and was scored as a PASSING test.

So headless --exec now exits when its scripts finish, nonzero if a script fell off
the end without calling sys.exit(). step() is the clock; the engine cannot advance
time on its own, and pretending otherwise is what produced the hang. A genuinely
long-lived headless process (server, REPL host) opts in with the new --run-forever.

run_tests.py additionally refuses to pass any test whose output contains a
Traceback. Between the two, 82 tests that were being scored green while asserting
nothing are now correctly red; they are repaired in the following commits.

closes #350

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This commit is contained in:

John McCardle 2026-07-14 06:37:52 -04:00

parent c72ab22999

commit 30abb0b7ec

8 changed files with 142 additions and 4 deletions

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