v1.6.5 — Visual & Play Parity Arc

v1.6.5 — Visual & Play Parity Arc

Tagged 2026-09-24.

Summary

Bundles everything that landed on main since v1.6.0: the visual-polish milestone (v1.6.1,
#137/#140/#110) and the full four-theme visual/play parity arc Jerod scoped on 2026-09-23 --
one theme per release in name (v1.6.2 man, v1.6.3 tank, v1.6.4 boat, v1.6.5 sound) but
none tagged individually as they landed, so all four ship together here -- plus #139, a real
host-engine crash fix found via a live crash-log audit, not a parity item.

Fixed / added since v1.6.0

Visual polish (v1.6.1, milestone 21):

• #137 -- black seam lines in the live Metal terrain overlay, fixed at the geometry level
  (quad padding in MetalTileRenderer.swift).
• #140 -- a joined guest's connectionAge(for:) had no data for other players, so lag-tint
  staleness coloring silently disappeared on the client's own HUD; host/guest panels now match.
• #110 -- all 7 procedural terrain families (sea, grass, swamp, forest, river, boat, crater,
  road) now have distinct autotiled textures instead of flat fills; still 100% procedural, no
  imported art (hard constraint).

Man parity (v1.6.2, milestone 23):

• #146 -- the builder ("little green man") had no visual identity at all, a placeholder growing
  square for every frame; now a walking-figure silhouette (BUILD0/BUILD1) and a parachute-canopy
  silhouette (BUILD2).
• #145 -- tank-crush-builder, a disclosed new mechanic (real memory of the original, not shown
  in the Reference/c oracle): a tank overlapping an enemy builder's tile now kills it, reusing
  the existing killBuilder respawn-as-parachute path.

Tank parity (v1.6.3, milestone 24):

• #147 -- a boated tank rendered pixel-identical to a land tank; GlyphRole.tank had no boat
  parameter, so the already-correct sprite-row selection never actually changed anything on
  screen. Added a distinct hull silhouette.

Boat parity (v1.6.4, milestone 25):

• #148 -- boarding a boat never set player.boat = true on the host's authoritative state,
  under any connection topology -- the root cause of a live "boats don't look like boats"
  report, and the reason #147's new hull sprite had no live trigger until this fixed it.

Sound parity (v1.6.5, milestone 26):

• #149 -- a real networked host and a joined guest played zero gameplay sound; SoundPlayer
  was only ever reachable from the single-process/solo tick loop. Added
  HostGameEngine.onShouldPlaySound, wired the same way the existing render/message callbacks
  are, plus the join path's local-prediction call sites.
• #150 -- sound played "near" unconditionally regardless of distance. Fixed for the host path
  whenever Hidden Mines is on, reusing the existing FogState/isFog machinery. The larger,
  always-on vision-system extension needed for full parity on every mode/path is a real, known
  gap but was explicitly ruled out of scope for solo play (this port's primary mode has no
  second listener for a far-sound distinction to matter to) -- parked in the Decide: Oracle parking lot milestone, not silently dropped.

Host-engine crash fix (#139, not a parity item, milestone 20):

• A hosted session left running for hours crashed with SIGABRT -- corrupted Array refcounts
  on GameState.local. Root cause: GameSession's adminState/liveState read
  HostGameEngine.state directly, a plain stored property mutated off-main by the engine's own
  tick-loop Task, racing that mutation from the @MainActor HUD/admin-panel read path. Fixed
  by caching the already-safe value-type snapshot HostGameEngine hands to onTickRendered
  (the one sanctioned way to get state off the tick loop) instead of reading the live property.

Testing

Every fix above has its own regression test. Full swift test (956 SwiftPM tests) and
xcodebuild test -scheme "Bolo 2026" -destination "platform=macOS" (146 tests) both green at
merge, modulo the documented pre-existing real-clock/port-contention flakes under full parallel
runs (hostGameEngineSubmitPauseResumeServerTogglesPauseState,
hostGameEngineBroadcastsExactlyAtTheTimeLimitBoundaryTickThenNeverAgain,
aSimulatedGuestDrivingOntoAMineDetonatesItAndLosesArmour), each individually confirmed
unrelated and passing in isolation.

See docs/STATUS.md for the full milestone-by-milestone detail this summary condenses.