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Lumon — Macrodata Refine

A windowed recreation of the Lumon macrodata-refinement game: a vast field of glowing, breathing numbers. Box them in with the mouse, merge regions that touch, then grab your selections and file them as refinement output.

Run

cargo run --release

Built with macroquad — a real window (1280×800, resizable, hi-dpi), so mouse input is polled directly by the game every frame.

Controls

| Input | Action | |------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | Left-click drag | Draw a rectangular box around characters | | Right-click drag | Pan the view (free, not grid-snapped) | | Scroll wheel | Zoom (anchored at the cursor) | | Space | Grab the selection -> refinement output | | , (comma) | Settings panel (font, glow, scanlines, sound) | | b | Box-cursor mode (keyboard drawing fallback) | | Arrows / WASD | Pan (Shift = faster); move cursor in box mode | | z | Undo the last box | | c | Clear every box | | Home | Reset the view to the origin | | q / Esc | Quit (Esc first exits box-cursor mode / settings) |

Settings

Press , for the settings panel. Click a row or use arrows to change; settings save automatically to lumongame.cfg.

• FONT — built-in pixel bitmap, or four embedded SIL-OFL monos: JetBrains Mono, Space Mono, IBM Plex Mono, Fira Mono.
• GLOW — halo intensity behind glyphs: off / subtle / normal / bright.
• SCANLINES — CRT overlay on/off.
• SOUND — synthesized tones on/off (see below).

Text is rasterized at integer pixel sizes (with only a sub-pixel scale residual) so it stays crisp at any font or zoom level.

The refinement loop

1. Draw a box around numbers — left-drag from any corner to any other. The release position always defines the far corner, so selection is exact.
2. Boxes that touch or overlap merge into one region. Two exceptions carve instead: an exact re-drag of a box's rectangle toggles that box off, and a selection lying entirely inside existing boxes removes only those selected cells — the rest of the box stays, split into separate boxes if the cut disconnects it.
3. The last-drawn box is the selection: it stays highlighted in white, its border pulses between single and double lines, and the numbers inside glow hardest and grow largest.
4. Press Space to grab it. The selection's data is extracted — digit sum, digit/letter counts, the dominant character — and its hidden temper is read from an invisible cluster map seeded into the sheet. Enough tagged cells in the box and the output reports that temper (WOE / DREAD / MALICE / FROCLIC); otherwise a fallback signature is filed. Either way you get a calibration score and a cryptic line.
5. The result is filed in the REFINEMENT OUTPUT panel with a sigil — an 8×8 silhouette of the exact region you refined. Newest on top, hue accent from the source box. The box is stamped R, dims, and goes quiet — refined data is spent data.
6. The quota bar fills. Filed mass feeds it; each shift's target grows (400, 550, 700, …). Meet quota and the sheet settles — every number freezes mid-breath, the screen dims, SHIFT COMPLETE — then a fresh sheet loads with a new hidden temper map. The output log persists.

The trail: refine a box that hit a temper cluster and its hidden siblings elsewhere on the sheet pulse faintly for a few seconds — a map to follow, never a translation. Nothing in the game ever spells out what the numbers mean; the meaning only ever emerges from what the output says about what you boxed.

Suspect numbers (the flickering yellow digits) keep their yellow hue even inside a box — boxing one never repaints it. They cluster toward temper interiors, so the yellows are where the meaning lives.

Everything is deterministic: the same selection on the same sheet always yields the same temper, score, sigil, and line.

Feel

• Numbers glow (one tight halo layer under a bright core that pushes toward white as luminance rises — adjustable in settings) and grow/shrink on independent per-cell phases; boxed data pulses bigger and brighter than the open field.
• Suspect digits flicker yellow like failing bulbs; the open field only breathes subtly, so boxed regions pop.
• Committing a box triggers a quick bright grow-pop across the selection.
• Subtle CRT scanlines over a dark blue-charcoal background (toggleable).

Sound

Tones, not music — every effect is synthesized in code at startup (no asset files) and played through quad-snd's low-latency mixer:

| Event | Tone | |--------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | Box drawn | soft blip | | Boxes merged | rising two-note chime | | Carve / remove | descending tone / low pop | | Refine (Space) | C-major arpeggio over a sustained fifth — the chime | | Quota met | warm detuned C-major chord swell | | New sheet | airy gliss with a sub thump | | Temper trail started | high bell ping | | Undo / clear / settings | descending blip / low thud / tiny tick |

If no audio device is available the game runs silently instead of crashing (the vendored ALSA backend soft-fails; a warning prints to stderr).

Implementation notes

• macroquad immediate-mode rendering at 60 fps; glyph metrics are cached per character and font, and every visible cell is animated from a hash phase and a sine — no per-cell state.
• Fonts are embedded with include_bytes! and loaded via load_ttf_font_from_bytes, so the binary is self-contained.
• The hidden temper map is generated per sheet: 26 seeded clusters with distance falloff, suspects biased toward cluster interiors. Mood classification counts tags in the selection (≥4 tagged, ≥⅔ dominant); anything else falls back to the hash.
• Quota mass = refined area; targets grow per shift; shift reloads derive sheet seeds from the base seed (xorshift64* — non-zero-state only, so distinct seeds stay distinct).
• Box outlines are derived per cell from exposed edges, so any union of cells (L-shapes, jags) renders as one correct shape, with a double-line echo border on the selection.
• Merged regions are HashSet<(row, col)> cell sets; touching = 4-adjacency or overlap; carves split remainders via 4-connected components.
• Input is polled every frame — no dependence on terminal mouse protocols. The drag preview exists only while the left button is physically held, so WM focus quirks can never leave a phantom selection on screen.
• Headless logic tests (cargo test) cover the temper map, carve/split, reselect toggle, refinement classification, quota/shift cycle, sigils, and the WAV synthesis.
• Audio: macroquad's audio feature with quad-snd 0.2.8 vendored at third_party/quad-snd/ (MIT/Apache-2.0, (c) quad-snd contributors) and patched so the ALSA backend returns silence instead of panicking when no device exists. Sound effects are synthesized PCM16 WAVs (src/sfx.rs).
• Set LUMON_DEBUG=1 to trace commits, carves, and refines to stderr. LUMON_SMOKE=1 runs a few seconds of frames then exits.