home-server/services/observer-effect

Observer Effect — doomsday clock

A period-styled (1964) clock for running Delta Green: Observer Effect online.

• Player screen — observer.ellie.town/ (clock.html): an Olympian Holobeam Array master chronometer. Nixie tubes counting toward 22:03:37, warning lamps that flash on each pulse, a red wash and dissonant flutes/drums as communion nears. Read-only; safe to share with the players.
• Handler panel — observer.ellie.town/control (control.html): run/hold, scrub the clock, jump to any scenario beat, set the iteration (which resets reality to its wake point), and fire pulse / communion / text effects on the players' screen.

How it syncs

A tiny Rust WebSocket relay (relay/) holds the one authoritative clock. The panel sends authenticated commands; every connected screen gets the new state and free-runs the digits locally between actions. Late joiners get the current state immediately. Served behind nginx with TLS; the relay only listens on loopback.

Deploy

1. DNS: point observer.ellie.town at the VPS (A/AAAA). ACME does the cert.
2. It's already wired into flake.nix (vps modules) as ./services/observer-effect.nix. Rebuild the VPS: nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#vps (however you normally deploy).

The control key

Commands are authenticated with a shared token in services/secrets/observer_vps.yaml (sops). Enter it once in the panel's CONTROL KEY field (saved in that browser). Rotate any time with sops services/secrets/observer_vps.yaml then rebuild.

Running a session

The clock starts paused at iteration I, 17:00:00 (the Agents' arrival). Drive it by hand to match table pacing — JUMP TO BEAT for the scripted moments, or RATE ×N + RUN to let it tick. Fire PULSE on the live shudders and COMMUNION at 22:03:37; then hit ITERATION II/III/IV to reset reality nearer the end as the loop tightens. SHOW broadcasts a line of text over the players' screen (e.g. "I see the throne of God.").

Sound effects

The player screen's pulse / communion / broadcast-text sounds are pre-rendered mp3s in site/sfx/, synthesized from pure ffmpeg lavfi filtergraphs (no samples). Regenerate with:

cd site/sfx && nix-shell -p ffmpeg --run ./generate.sh

If a file fails to load the screen falls back to an equivalent WebAudio synth. The ambient dread drone is always synth (it's driven by the tension level).

Local dev (no Nix)

cd relay
OBSERVER_TOKEN=test cargo run            # relay on 127.0.0.1:8770
# serve ./site on :8080 and proxy /ws -> 127.0.0.1:8770, or just open
# site/clock.html and append ?, then point common.js' WS at ws://localhost:8770/ws

The pages connect to wss?://<host>/ws, so behind nginx everything is same-origin.