Design settled with the creator. Two findings drove it:
- **Resolution is not a bandwidth lever.** 1080p30 and 720p60 are both 6 Mbps in the shipped table,
so "step down to 720p" relieves nothing against congestion; and 60→30 at the same bitrate relieves
nothing either. Congestion therefore steps **bitrate only** (8.0 → 6.4 → 5.1 → 4.1, ~20%), which is
what OBS Dynamic Bitrate does — cited, adopted, with its climb-back discarded for v1.
- **The other half has no OBS equivalent**: machine starvation (the game and the app on one PC) steps
fps, then resolution, and sheds LlamaCasty's own capture cost *first*. That is the app taking
responsibility for a stream it is helping to starve.
Budgets as ruled: 3 steps for a 1080 start, 1 for 720 and vertical, hard floors at 720p30 /
Vertical 1080p30, hold-and-warn at the floor, never disconnect. Trigger ≥5% drops over 15 s twice,
30 s cooldown, ambiguous evidence does nothing.
New rule in `ui-surface.md`: a toast names the cause, the culprit and the remedy. Mechanism strings
("All pipe instances are busy", HTTP codes, exit codes) are log findings, never user-facing copy.
gramps
ed32151136