Cascade Visualization

Cascade Visualization

The cascade viewer shows event cascades as interactive tree structures, so you can see the chain of effects produced by a single event. Each time an event fires in the scoring engine, the console captures the resulting cascade of rule evaluations, variable changes, and child events.

Viewing Cascades

Toggle the cascade panel with F7 (or Ctrl+E). After triggering an event, the cascade is captured automatically:

cade:debug> trigger device.Bumper1.activated
Event cascade captured. Press F7 to view.

The cascade panel replaces the main content area when active. Press F7 again to return to the main panel.

The cascade command provides additional subcommands:

cade:debug> cascade show          # Show current cascade details
cade:debug> cascade show abc123   # Show cascade by ID
cade:debug> cascade list          # List recent cascades
cade:debug> cascade clear         # Clear cascade history
cade:debug> cascade stats         # Show cascade statistics

Panel Layout

A captured cascade looks like this in the panel:

🏆 switch_hit:left_orbit
Trigger: switch_hit:left_orbit | Depth: 3 | Queue: 2

switch_hit:left_orbit Total: 3750μs | Events: 5 | Score: +5000 | Mult: x3
└─▼ switch_hit:left_orbit [5000 → 5000] +5000
  ├─  → award_bonus [bonus:1000]
  ├─  play_sound:orbit_hit
  └─▼ → update_multiplier [x1 → x3]
    └─  → flash_lights:orbit

Score Breakdown:
  switch_hit:left_orbit: 5000
Total: 5000
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Node: switch_hit:left_orbit | Type: scoring | Duration: 2500μs | Score: +5000 | Calc: 5000 | Children: 3 (expanded) | Changes: score
[↑↓] Navigate | [←→] Collapse/Expand | [Space] Toggle | [P] Performance | [/] Search | [1-9] Expand level | [Alt+E] Toggle emojis

For simpler cascades (single event, no children), the header shows device context instead of depth:

Trigger: device.Bumper1.activated | Device: switch | Key: Bumper1

device.Bumper1.activated Total: 4μs | Events: 1 | Score: +1000
└─  device.Bumper1.activated [1000 → 1000] +1000

Score Breakdown:
  device.Bumper1.activated: 1000
Total: 1000
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Node: device.Bumper1.activated | Type: scoring | Duration: 4μs | Score: +1000 | Calc: 1000 | Changes: category, device_category, device_key, score

Header Line

Summary Line

Tree Glyphs

Detail Bar

The line below the divider describes the currently selected node:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Replay Mode

Press Ctrl+R to step through a cascade event by event. Replay mode adds a playback bar and remaps a few keys:

Filtering and Search

Press / to open the search bar. The search UI supports several modes:

Active filters appear in the filter bar and can be removed individually. The search bar shows the current match position (for example, (3/12)) while navigating results.

Timing and Performance

Every node records its execution duration. The panel surfaces these metrics:

• Total cascade duration — wall-clock time for the whole cascade
• Per-node duration — time spent in each rule, event, or effect
• Critical path — the longest chain of sequential operations

Press P to overlay bottleneck analysis on the tree:

• Bottleneck detection — nodes that exceed a duration threshold, ranked low / medium / high / critical
• Impact score — each bottleneck’s share of total cascade time
• Optimization suggestions — practical recommendations for slow cascades
• Duration histogram — distribution of node execution times

The cascade buffer stores the 100 most recent cascades.

Cascade Comparison

Use the comparator to diff two cascades — useful for before/after checks when you change scoring rules.

The comparison output shows added, removed, modified, and unchanged nodes with a similarity percentage.

Export Formats

Cascades can be exported for external analysis:

Export options:

• Include metrics — timing and performance data
• Include metadata — source file, tags, and configuration context
• Include timings — per-node duration information
• Include patterns — detected scoring patterns
• Max depth — limit tree depth in the export
• Event type filter — export only hardware, signal, game, or system events
• Node selection — export specific node IDs or exclude specific node IDs