v0.28.0 — the room outlives its host

The room outlives its host

A host who quit, crashed or blinked used to take the match down with everyone in it. Now the relay hands the room to the longest-standing member who can take it, and the match carries on.

Almost nothing has to move, because every guest was already mirroring the world the host was authoritative over — where each trainer stands, what has spilled, which of Kanto's own the fog took, where the ring is. The one thing nobody could work out for themselves was the fog clock, so it now rides every shrink; the round's phase length rides the start message, so an heir carries the ring on at the pace the match began with rather than its own.

Promotion is opt-in, so the relay and the mod can be updated in either order.

Everything else

• A closed room actually leaves the match world. Losing the room used to strand you in a throwaway Kanto with SAVE re-enabled over your real save slot. It returns you to the title now. (POK-115)
• The whole room watches the ending. The champion sends their parade, so everyone still in the room sees the same Hall of Fame instead of a one-line banner. (POK-107)
• The Safari zone rotates. Each match draws twelve species from the match seed, so the draft that decides your run is different every time — and identical for everyone in the room. (POK-118)
• Everyone drops with a fishing rod, and the fog upgrades it. Old, Good, Super, on the same clock as the levels: the sea gets better to fish exactly as the land gets smaller. Not in the Safari, where a cast would beat the step budget. (POK-119)
• A trainer standing in a doorway no longer plugs it. A peer idling in a one-exit house used to seal whoever was inside. (POK-108)

Relay

The flood ceiling is a token bucket rather than a fixed one-second window, so a fog sweep passes and a real flood still dies. The first ring shrink retires every stranded map's trainers on one beat — a few hundred messages in a single frame from a client averaging four — and that was disconnecting hosts and ending matches. Already live.

BR_LINES_PER_SEC and BR_BURST_LINES make both limits tunable without a deploy. (POK-114)

Updating

PROTOCOL 7 — everyone in a room needs this version. A v6 client cannot read the match clock and would restart the fog at phase 1 if it inherited a room.