Scene · ACTIVITY 9 validated

ACTIVITY 9 — Rain dance, boat with couple passes, costume drops, naked

Validated on 2026-05-05 under the current visual + audible signoff bar.

ACTIVITY 9 running on PS1 at night: Johnny in costume on the island as a wide boat carrying a couple passes by the moonlit ocean.
ACTIVITY 9 on PS1 hardware. Costumed Johnny mid-rain-dance as the wide boat with passengers passes the night-palette island.

Pack identifiers

  • ADS dispatch: ACTIVITY.ADS scene 9
  • Slug: activity9

What this scene is

Johnny puts on a costume and starts a rain dance. A boat carrying a couple passes by — Johnny drops his costume and is left naked in the surf, and the embarrassed couple keeps sailing past. Confirmed by direct on-PS1 playback observation while capturing the chapter-select thumbnail; the earlier “bathes with a brush” caption-mapping guess was wrong. The boat is real — that’s why this scene needed the Activity9-specific wide stitch and patch-activity9-boat-foreground.py.

Validation notes

ACTIVITY 9 is the edge case that proved a source sprite can be wider than the legacy scene clip while still being valid scene-relative content. The high/low packs were rebuilt through an Activity9-specific wide stitch using host capture/test island positions x=-500,y=54, x=-154,y=54, and x=500,y=54; production playback remains variable-position safe.

patch-activity9-boat-foreground.py fills missing BOAT.PSB bow/stern pixels from the decoded source sprite at the legacy clip edges, only into keyed foreground holes. It also overlaps the clip edge narrowly to remove the vertical seam and carries the last boat draw across metadata-held frames so the late bow does not flicker.

See the live ledger and the method for the full validation workflow.

Notable runtime history

ACTIVITY 9 is one of the structurally important scenes in the project. Two distinct retrospectives have it as their case study:

  • The last validated scene of the 63-scene grind. It closed the visual-signoff sweep on 2026-05-05. The end of the 63-scene grind is what cleared the path for the post-validation performance work; the grind retrospective walks through how the foreground-only multi-view stitch family cleared the last cluster.
  • An “optimized validated outlier” in v0.8.0-ps1. The wide boat extends past the legacy 640px scene clip, which made the scene a poor fit for global stream-window settings. The Activity9-specific scoped low-tide read group
    • padded residual packs let it stay green on the matrix instead of being a known exception. The perf retrospective names this as the canonical example of “the technique generalized even though the win was specific.”

Production playback stays random-position-safe — the host capture positions in the validation notes were evidence-gathering, not runtime pins.