GAOS tick protocol v1

The stable protocol coordinates ticks without imposing a particular game's state, observation, or command shape. Values crossing the wire must be JSON serializable.

Resolved ticks

A resolved envelope contains:

• protocol: "gaos.ticks"
• protocolVersion: "1.0"
• kind: "tick"
• sessionId, tickId, and monotonic revision
• a game-owned tick observation

Only resolved envelopes advance a renderer or agent.

Pending ticks

A simultaneous host can accept one participant's committed intent before the other participants have submitted. It returns kind: "pending" with:

• the same unresolved cursor;
• the last resolved observation;
• submitted and awaited participant lists; and
• the accepted participant when applicable.

A pending envelope acknowledges an intent but does not advance the world.

Commands and retries

Every command submission binds the command to the current sessionId, tickId, and revision. It also includes:

• a portable participant ID matching [A-Za-z0-9_.:@-]{1,128};
• a caller-generated submissionId; and
• a game-owned command value.

Reuse the same submissionId for an exact retry. Use a new ID for a new logical command step. A host rejects stale cursors and conflicting retries.

With RFC-020, the product's authoritative classifier maps a command to either an interaction or an intent. An interaction updates deterministic state and observations without occupying an intent slot or advancing the cursor. An intent freezes its canonical action in the current simultaneous window. A client-provided effect label is never authoritative.

A session using RFC-010 may also carry clientTime, prevChainHash, and sig. These fields authenticate the canonical command plus the existing session/seat/id/cursor/tick fields; they do not change collection or reducer semantics. A chained submission carries both clientTime and prevChainHash; sig is present for direct tier-1 or periodic-policy attestation. Exact retries reuse the identical signed bytes. Trust and verification defines the scheme and threat boundary.

Simultaneous resolution

The protocol collector stores one intent per participant without mutating its input window. Once complete, it returns intents in canonical ASCII participant order rather than network arrival order. The game resolves that complete batch once; the collector never approximates simultaneous play by applying commands serially.

The host is responsible for atomically committing the resolution, its retry receipt, and the next intent window.

createParticipationIntentWindow maps the engine participation descriptor to the protocol collector: sequential participation creates a one-seat eligible set, while simultaneous participation includes every declared seat. This is the same intent-collection model used by response windows and multi-agent episodes.

Game definitions

GameDefinition is an optional host-side seam for deterministic games. A game owns its configuration, state, observation, command, and legal-command types. It supplies state creation, participant enumeration, observation, legality, and complete-batch resolveTick resolution.

GameRegistry is instance-local and permits multiple explicit versions of a game to coexist in one host process.

Host responsibilities

Participant IDs identify seats, not credentials. Authentication, authorization, persistence, timeout policy, reconnect behavior, rate limits, scoring, and replay retention belong to the host.

This hosted HTTP-style envelope is not a high-frequency lockstep transport. Realtime products bring their own WebRTC, relay, or socket layer and use the engine's canonical tick inputs, rollback re-simulation, and state digests directly.

Compatibility promise

The v1 compatibility boundary covers:

• envelope metadata and cursor semantics;
• resolved versus pending behavior;
• command idempotency and conflict behavior; and
• deterministic complete-batch intent collection.

Additive metadata may appear under extensions. Game-specific observations, commands, endpoints, and policies are not frozen by protocol v1. A breaking change to the generic fields or behavior requires a new protocol version.