Ferrath's Global map drew no rivers at native resolution: 375 courses arrived
and 0 were drawn. The report suspected the D-261 length cull or the water
truncation. Both were innocent, and so was the renderer.
The client served the canvas from its own disk cache (T-1183). Every payload
for GJ820Bc predated T-1237 (4e503c356), which replaced one-course-per-D8-hop
with one-course-per-river -- so the map was drawing 375 hop fragments whose
longest run was 106 km, all of them under D-261's read-as-a-line floor. Same
build, same scenario, same 3440x1440, cache the only difference:
stale courses=375 runs=180 longest=6.0px (~106 km) drawn=0
cold courses=73 runs=23 longest=93.2px (~1,644 km) drawn=18
It looked resolution-dependent because it wasn't a resolution at all: 960x540
resolves to an 814x407 canvas, a key never cached, so it missed and re-derived
correctly. 3440x1440 resolves to 1080x540, which had an entry from 2026-08-06.
During the stale capture the server logged no course production whatsoever --
the canvas never came from it.
The cache's only invalidation signal is project.yaml's version, and 4e503c356
changed how canvases are generated without touching it, so hop-shaped entries
stayed valid. All 13 stale entries are stamped 0.4.5. 0.4.6 forces them to miss;
that, not clearing a local directory, is what repairs a player's Atlas.
The harness let this hide for eight days, in two ways now fixed. It ran against
the developer's persistent user:// cache, so a capture could render a canvas
built by a build that no longer existed -- and any golden shot in that window
silently inherited it; user:// is now isolated per run. And it sent server
stderr to /dev/null via an already-unlinked mktemp file, so no tracing from a
capture was ever reachable; the log now lives at .cache/visual-server.log.
The capture readout gained runs= and longest= between courses= and drawn=,
because "375 arrived, 0 drawn" is not one fact but three stages, and telling
them apart is what turned a guess between two suspects into a measurement.
Follow-ups filed: T-1241 (current_schema_version() returns its ?.?.? fallback in
an exported build, so a shipped game never invalidates on version at all) and
T-1242 (nothing enforces the generation-change/version-bump pairing -- this is
the fourth bump forced after the fact).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 5
07ed2a47ab