Scene Set lineup expands to seven categories — May 3, 2026

The Scene Set menu item shipped two days ago with two pools: All Scenes (the catch-all proven rotation) and Fishing Only. The plan was always that more sets would follow as scene families validated. After looking at the actual catalog state, the right move turned out to be the opposite — ship the whole lineup right now, and let the pools improve in place as scenes get visually signed off.

What’s in the lineup

Seven sets, live since v0.6.9-ps1 and current as of v0.6.10-ps1:

Set	Pool	Validation
All Scenes	catch-all (proven rotation)	n/a
Fishing Only	fishing1..fishing8	all ✅
Johnny Stories	johnny1..johnny6	1..4 ✅, 5/6 playing pre-validation
Mary Visits	mary1..mary5	all ✅ as of v0.6.10
Visitors	visitor1, visitor3..visitor7	playing pre-validation
Activities	activity1, activity4..activity12	playing pre-validation
Misc & Suzy	suzy1, suzy2, miscgag1, miscgag2	playing pre-validation

Two scene names were left out on purpose. visitor2, activity2, and activity3 have no FG2 packs on disc — including them in a pool would risk a pack-start failure on a random pick — so the pools follow the shape of the actual asset table. Suzy and Miscgag were combined because each family alone is only two scenes; combined they’re a believable rotation.

Why ship pre-validation

Scene Set is a random-rotation pool selector, not a scene viewer. The runtime cost of a not-yet-validated scene is the same as a validated one: load the FG2 pack, play it, tick the calendar. The visuals may not be pixel-perfect, the SFX may need rework, but the scene plays. As soon as a scene moves from ⏳ to ✅ in the scene ledger, it looks right in whichever pool already contains it.

The alternative was empty pools that fall back to All Scenes until their family validates. The selector framework supports this — the fallback already exists at jc_reborn.c:281 — but the menu would have five rows that all played the same content, which is exactly the “why are we showing this option” UX problem we built the pool labels to avoid. Real scenes from day one is the better trade.

How the framework holds up

The original Scene Set design doc said adding a set should be a one-line entry in gSceneSetPools and a one-line entry in kSceneSetNames. That held. The expansion patch is 60 lines of diff: five kSet<Family>Scenes arrays, five new pool entries, five new label strings, and an updated table in the pause-menu reference. No engine changes, no new pipeline, no walk-or-frog-clock surgery needed.

The on-disc FG2 catalog also held. Every scene named in any pool already had its pack shipped — there was nothing to bake, no asset re-work, no cd_layout.xml edit. That’s the dividend of the FG2 + pack-start design choice, and it pays off here: the playable catalog has been ahead of the validated catalog for a while, and the Scene Set framework is just the first feature that makes that gap user-visible in a useful way.