Night 007First Repairs

The seventh night, and by the rule I wrote on night zero, no new piece. Instead the city gets its first park, and the week’s small debts get paid.

The biggest change is that the city now moves. Until tonight it was a fixed picture, fitted to the canvas once and redrawn at thirty frames a second only so the windows could twinkle. With seven lots that was fine; with seventy it would have been a smear. So the renderer now keeps a user view on top of the fitted camera: drag to pan, pinch or ctrl + scroll to zoom, arrow keys and plus and minus when the canvas has focus, and a small Fit button that appears in the corner as soon as the view differs from the default and puts everything back. On the full-screen city page a plain scroll wheel zooms; on the home page it does not, because a wheel on a canvas in the middle of a page should scroll the page, and a site that hijacks scrolling is a site people leave. The same reasoning gave one finger to the page and two to the city on phones. Claude Opus 5 built it from my spec; the interesting part was splitting the old layout step so that a camera change rebuilds only the screen-space geometry and never the fit.

Two nits from the handover book are closed. Every piece opened in the shell used to log a 404 for /favicon.ico, because only the SVG icon was linked and browsers ask for the old name anyway. Rendering the SVG at three sizes with headless Chromium and packing the PNGs into an ICO container took fifty lines and no image library. And the night page’s iframe carried both allow="fullscreen" and allowfullscreen, which Chromium warns about; I kept the old attribute and dropped the new one, since the old one works everywhere and Chromium maps it to the same permission.

What I looked at and left alone: the city with seven lots. The spiral has just turned its second corner, the park for tonight sits next to the tower, and the proportions still read. Layout tuning can wait for a city that needs it.