Resident birds never show their other plates

[erendrake]

A bird keeps its plate for as long as it stays in the window (picks.py). A bird heard every few hours never leaves a 24 hour window, so its other variants never appear - despite docs/adding-artwork.md saying variants "show up over days".

Proposal: re-roll each bird's plate once a day, like the empty page's perch (collage.perch_day). No setting, no churn within a day. It does change the default, so I'd like your take first.

Alternative: a checkbox that re-rolls on every redraw (branch). It works, but it's another setting and does nothing while the page holds still.

[arnegiacomo]

Hmm yeah this is actually a problem I myself have encountered.

Rn it will only shuffle variants if they go out of the set. I'm thinking we could do a nightly redraw, and do some kind of modulo operation or something so each day will have a deterministic asset.

Would that work? We should drop the asset name from the cache as well in that case (and only have species, just so it dooesng go fully blank if the detector is unreachable)

Wyt?

[erendrake]

Yep, that works. I put up #304 as a straw man so there's something concrete to poke at.

How I got there:

• Day + modulo, as you suggested - close, but stepping every bird by the day locks the pairings: two birds with 3 variants each would only ever show 3 of their 9 combinations, and the whole page repeats on a cycle.
• A shuffled cycle per bird - guarantees every variant once per cycle, but it's more code and hauling around a random seemed like it would lead to bugs in the future
• Hash of name + day - what feat: #302 pick each bird's variant by day, so residents show their other plates #304 does. Deterministic, nothing stored, so picks.py and artwork.json go entirely and the panel, kiosk and restarts all agree. The day is in state_key, so you get the nightly redraw.

Trade-offs: one e-ink refresh a night, and no strict rotation (a bird can repeat yesterday's plate).

One thing I didn't follow: which cache did you mean for dropping the asset name? I'm guessing artwork.json, which #304 removes since the pick no longer needs storing.

[arnegiacomo]

This should be solved now in #304 - Closing discussion