v1.2.1a

game 1.2.1a

• Twenty-four more languages, and the twenty already there finished. The
  interface shipped in twenty languages at 1.2.0a. It now ships in forty-four --
  Albanian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian,
  Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Armenian, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Latin, Latvian,
  Lithuanian, Mongolian, Norwegian Bokmal, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian,
  Swedish and Vietnamese are new.

  The twenty that were already there did not stay where they were: between them
  they gained 5,980 strings, going from 83.6% to 99.1% of the interface measured
  against today's string list, which itself grew by 74. Across all forty-four,
  83,980 of 84,964 strings are present.

  Every string that passes through the translation layer is now translated in
  all forty-four. What is left cannot be reached from a language file at all:
  the advisor's refusal phrases, which are matched against the model's English
  output and would stop working if they were translated; four mangled escape
  sequences; and a handful of literals drawn straight to the screen without a
  lookup.

  Arabic and Urdu mean right-to-left layout was done properly rather than
  skipped, and Armenian, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Mongolian and Latin each bring their
  own script.

• Ethnic migration conserves people. A province's minority shares partition
  its population, and migration was capped against the province rather than
  against the group actually leaving. Move more people than a group has and its
  head count went negative, the group was dropped as empty, and its share left
  the numerator while the denominator kept the hole — inflating everyone who
  stayed, compounding every turn.

  Replayed over the 116 turns of a conquer-the-world save, one province's shares
  reached 6,111,403% and the Ethnic Management panel multiplied an ordinary
  population by them: 9.4e20 Belarusians, with the titular Poles — the group that
  had been emigrating all game — listed smaller than their own minorities.

• A country can no longer hold both sides of a research fork. The
  per-country availability check saw only what was already researched, so an
  extra research group could start off_tactics while the main slot was still on
  def_tactics, and the country finished with both. Measured at 41, 71 and 52
  fork nodes held beside their sibling per 400-turn world. On by default after
  128 seeds per arm found no harm on any statistic and a land gain for France in
  1914; OD_RESEARCH_MUTEX_FIX=0 restores the old rule.

• The release gate stops reading a crash as a skipped step. The check that
  asks whether the game can actually start looked at the log before the exit
  code, so any death on a machine that had also printed an OpenGL message was
  excused — including a real one. A macOS runner took SIGSEGV and the run
  reported "built, tested, and played a game". The window opening is now what
  separates the two cases, and the decision has its own tests.

• Development instrumentation. Counters for why the AI declines to declare
  war, scoped to one country; a bench that fingerprints its binary at both ends
  of a run so a rebuild mid-run cannot be mistaken for a result; and hooks for an
  external benchmark to time turns. All off by default and read by no decision.

• The map as a globe. Press F7 and the world wraps onto a sphere you can
  turn: drag to spin it, wheel to zoom, click a province exactly as before. The
  ground you were looking at stays in front of you across the switch, both ways.

  It costs less than it sounds because of two things the map already was. The
  political layer is an equirectangular raster, which is the projection a
  sphere wants — so the globe needs no new art and no second copy of the map.
  And a province is identified by its pixel colour, so picking is ray→sphere,
  sphere→latitude and longitude, then the same lookup the flat map already does.
  There is no second pick path to keep in step with the first.

  Every overlay comes across for the same reason: both views composite the same
  stack of full-map textures, so claims, population, resources, districts,
  borders and the editor's own layers all arrive without a line of globe-specific
  code. The one thing the flat projection never had to say is this point is
  behind the planet — that is answered once, where map positions become screen
  positions, rather than at each of the places that draw a marker.

• Day and night, and the season. A terminator you can tune: how dark the
  unlit half goes, how bright the lit half is, how wide dawn is, and what colour
  the sun is. night_floor defaults well above black on purpose — a fully dark
  night side makes half an empire invisible, and the map is a working document
  before it is a picture.

  The month moves the sun's declination, not its longitude: longitude is time
  of day, declination is the season. In June the northern hemisphere leans into
  the light; in December the reverse.

• Weather, in the air rather than on the ground. Cloud sits inside the
  atmosphere at a settable height and casts shadows on the ground beneath it —
  which is what puts it above the map instead of on it. It thickens as you zoom
  in, because from orbit you want the ground through the pattern and close in you
  are looking along a much longer path of air.

  The field is built from cellular noise organised by cyclonic rotation.
  Summed smooth noise gives torn wool however many octaves you add: real weather
  turns around lows, and a cumulus field is discrete cells with clear air between
  them. Both are generated, not shipped, and both are baked on a worker thread —
  on a browser, where there are no threads to bake on, at a quarter the size.

• A sky each map carries. Stars, a moon that takes the same light as the
  planet and therefore shows a phase, and a sun you can turn towards. Eclipses
  fall out of the same term asked from two places: the moon shadowing the ground
  is a solar eclipse, the planet shadowing the moon is a lunar one.

  All of it is authored per map in the editor's Metadata panel and stored as
  sky.json inside the .odmap. Every field is optional, so a map written
  before any of this existed loads with Earth-like defaults rather than being
  refused — which matters in a format that already carries 118 files.

• Bots can be asked to act like the countries they are. A map may carry a
  history.json saying, for dated windows, which neighbours a power pushed into
  and which it left alone. Off by default, under Settings - Experimental, and
  inert unless both the switch is on and the map says something.

  It does not tell the AI what to do. It scales the resolver's own winnability
  score, and the ordinary bar is applied to the result: a historical target gets
  more tempting, a country that power did not attack gets less, and nothing is
  added that the rules refuse or masked off that they allow.

• The world unrolls into the globe instead of cutting to it. F7 no longer
  swaps one picture for another: the map lifts off the flat, curls, and closes
  into a sphere over about seven tenths of a second, with the camera swinging
  round to the longitude you end up looking at. The same vertex knows both of
  its homes — where it sits on the sphere, and where it sits on a flat sheet cut
  from the same texture coordinates — so the whole move is one blend between
  them and costs nothing but the blend. Daylight comes back as it flattens,
  because a flat map has no night side, and the cloud and atmosphere shells hold
  off until the planet is round enough to wear them. Counters, labels and clicks
  sit the animation out: mid-unroll a place is at neither of the two positions
  those paths know how to compute, and half a second of nothing reads as part of
  the move where half a second of markers in the wrong place reads as a fault.

• A button for the globe, not just a function key. Under Settings in the
  right-hand column, labelled with where it will take you rather than where you
  are. F7 still works; a function key is a thing you have to be told about.

• The unroll starts from where you were looking. The animation used to open
  on a whole-world shot no matter how far in you were zoomed, so its first frame
  was itself a jump. The sheet is now framed on a camera that reproduces the 2D
  view exactly -- same centre, same zoom -- and the same is done in reverse, with
  the flat camera settled on the globe's position and zoom before the sphere
  starts to unroll. Asserted rather than eyeballed: the map pixels the 2D view
  puts on each screen edge land on those same edges here.

• The night side is darker. The floor it sits at went from 0.34 of full
  brightness to 0.18, so the terminator reads as a real edge and a planet at
  night looks like one. It is not zero and should not be: the political colours
  underneath still have to be readable, because the map is a working document
  before it is a picture.

  The note explaining why it sat so high claimed a dark night side would take
  unit markers with it. That was never true -- markers, counters, arrows and
  country names are screen-space overlays drawn after the sphere and are not
  touched by the terminator at all. Only the map dims, which is a smaller price
  than the note had been charging for.

• And the dark side is still a map you can govern from. One multiplier over
  the whole night side is a choice nobody wants: dark enough to look like night,
  or bright enough to work in. It is a false choice, because the two halves of
  the picture are not the same kind of thing. Sea, ice and empty ground are
  scenery and can go as dark as looks right; a country's colour is information,
  and dimming that is the only part that costs the player anything.

  So they are dimmed separately -- scenery to 0.18, political colouring to 0.62.
  Telling them apart by colour cannot work, because this map's ocean is as
  saturated as any province, so the composite records it instead: the base map
  and the layers drawn over it are composited with different alpha blending, and
  the alpha channel -- which carried nothing, the sphere being opaque -- comes
  out holding how much of each texel is something a player put there.

  Both numbers, and the width of dawn, are carried in a map's sky.json.

• The globe is sharp when you zoom in. Its surface was composited at half
  the map's resolution, on the reasoning that the whole planet is never more
  than a screen wide -- true looking at the whole planet, and false the moment
  you go close, which is exactly when anyone would notice. Close in you were
  looking at a small patch of a half-size texture stretched over the screen, and
  it read as a low-resolution map because it was one.

  Zoomed in it now composites only the ground actually on screen, at the full
  resolution of the raster, and the shader samples that patch instead of the
  whole map. The far view is unchanged -- there a window would cost the wrap
  handling and buy nothing. The patch is bounded by the VIEWPORT rather than by
  the horizon, which at the nearest zoom is the difference between 21 degrees of
  planet and 42, and it goes in as two pieces when it straddles the
  antimeridian, where the map wraps and a patch cannot. Close in this costs
  about 16 MB against the 134 MB a full-resolution copy of the whole map would
  need, and resolves coastlines and islands that neither of the earlier sizes
  could.

• Shells arc. Artillery and naval bombardment no longer draw as a straight
  line from gun to target: the flight leaves the ground, rises and comes down on
  what it is hitting, and the barbed head is aimed along the descent rather than
  along the line between the two ends. An army march stays straight, because a
  march is something you could meet on the road.

  The path is the great circle between gun and target -- the way a shell
  actually goes -- lifted off the surface in between, so a flight fired from
  beyond the horizon can be watched climbing into view before its target is
  visible. Seen from directly overhead the climb alone shows almost nothing, as
  a real trajectory would not, so the flight is also bowed on screen away from
  the middle of the disc: the direction comes from the planet's own outward and
  only the amount is a drawing convention.

• Ship routes stay on the planet. Route tracks and army arrows were still
  projected with the flat map's tile-wrapping, which on a globe drew lines
  straight off the edge of the screen. They go through the projection now, a leg
  with an end round the back is dropped rather than drawn to a sentinel, and long
  legs are subdivided so a track from the Channel to the Cape follows the ocean
  instead of chording through the planet. The flat map draws exactly the line it
  drew before.

• Country names follow the surface of the globe. Each letter is placed
  through the same projection as everything else, so a name bends with the ground
  it sits on and a country past the horizon takes its name with it. Two things
  the flat map never needed: names shrink and fade toward the limb, where a
  continent's worth of ground is seen edge-on and occupies a few pixels; and
  where names would overprint — thirty countries in a hand's breadth of Europe,
  with no zooming in to escape it — the larger country keeps its name and the
  smaller ones yield. The flat map's labelling is untouched.

  Every name is written ON the globe -- none of them turn to face the camera.
  Where a country is too small on screen to hold its name at a readable size,
  the run is widened along the surface until the letters fit, which is ordinary
  cartography: the name reaches past its own borders rather than being crushed
  inside them. The width is found by iteration, because the map-to-screen
  relation along an arc is not linear and one division undershoots it. Where
  even that cannot work -- ground seen almost edge-on near the limb, which would
  need a name wrapped a fifth of the way round the world -- the country simply
  goes unnamed, as it would in an atlas.

  Names are also decluttered against the run they actually occupy, sampled
  through the projection, rather than against a box guessed from their letter
  count: a country's name is set along its own axis and usually bowed, so the
  box claimed room the name did not use and missed room it did.

• The Admin screen says how many accounts exist. Counted by walking the keys
  rather than kept as a running total: the store has no atomic increment, so two
  sign-ups landing together would both read the same number and write the same
  number back, losing one permanently with nothing able to notice afterwards. A
  count that drifts quietly downward is worse than no count, because it still
  looks like a fact.