The default face

A generic CPU renderer in mrlyui::face: any app's view - state, actions, canvas - becomes pixels, then a PNG. Terminal-esque, uniform, deliberately plain. It is the agent's eyes: a screenshot of any app on any tick, no browser in the loop.

The two shot kinds

• Canvas shot (Os::snapshot, sys.shot, cli shot) - the app's own

frame fact rendered raw. Apps define availability: no frame fact, no shot. Frameless apps fail with "nothing to shoot here". Unchanged.

• Face shot (mrlynet::face::face_png, cli face) - works for every

app. Renders the whole view and embeds the canvas raster in its body when one exists.

Geometry

320x452 fixed - the sheet. 452/320 tracks the square root of 2 within 0.2%, so a sheet halves into two sheets of the same shape: 320x452 -> 226x320 -> 160x226 -> 113x160. Body fills from the top, the action bar anchors to the bottom, slack in between stays board-colored. Rendered at scale 3 - PNGs are 960x1356. Pure function of the input: no clock, no RNG, byte-identical across runs.

Layout

• Title bar (20px): 8x8 accent chip (emoji stand-in), title at scale 2,

beat verb right-aligned muted, hairline rule.

• Body: route params, then the canvas embed (integer scale fitting

308x192; undecodable, oversized, or empty facts degrade to a muted frame WxH row), then state rows in map order (frame, shade, md skipped): scalars as key/value rows, all-scalar arrays inline, number grids as key 16x16 summaries, object arrays listed capped at 12 with + n more, nested objects one indent level then brief summaries, data: strings as [png Nb] tokens. A md string renders text-only: H1 scale 2, H2 accent, paragraphs pixel-wrapped, lists with hanging indent, code lines on a faint backdrop; emphasis and links strip to plain text.

• Action bar (pinned bottom): accent verb names with muted arg hints,

capped at 8 plus + n more; zero actions reads no actions.

Theme

Board and ink follow darkmode; muted and faint are mixes between them. The accent is ROLLABLE[hash(route) % 13] - deterministic per app. Text uses the bitmap font; unsupported glyphs (emoji included) draw a hollow box, never blank. No emoji atlas yet - the sprite atlas is a later phase.

Totality

The face never fails: null state renders no state, hostile or oversized state truncates with .. and + n more against the height budget, and every string passes through the same per-char engine. face_png is total over anything peek returns.

Surfaces

• Rust: mrlyui::face::{face, face_png, decode} over a plain FaceInput;

glue in mrlynet::face::{face_frame, face_rgba, face_png, canvas_rgba}.

• CLI: mrlycli face --out f.png (replay script, focused app), repl

:face [path]. shot is the canvas kind and is untouched.

• Python: mrlypy.peek/capture/capture_png/face/face_png; ndarrays via

np.frombuffer(buf, np.uint8).reshape(h, w, 4).

• Example: cargo run -p mrlynet --example face writes every route plus

six lived-in gauntlet shots to data/face/.

One pixel pin guards the whole stack (face_pixels_are_pinned in mrlyui); re-record it on deliberate layout changes.