v4.4.0

LOG #256–#267: "Author's Desk", the release an outside reading of 4.3 asked for: making a whole game simpler to make
and to check. A playable example of choosing the hero in two languages, games/heroes, with its browser test (building
it found three bugs, fixed below). The Studio's hero × language matrix (the Voices tab). Before/after captures of the
rooms the semantic diff names (a local Studio). The hosted preview measured phase by phase and made about three times
faster on the reference deployment: from a write to a ready preview, median 17.8 s → 5.6 s, max 26.0 s → 11.7 s over
ten revisions each (QUALIF-4.2.3-REFERENCE §6). From Horacio (LostInBrittany), thank you: a hotspot that acts on a
single tap (#221), one map pin for several places (#223), the phone's column on a short landscape screen (#227). The
137 mutation exemptions due at 4.4.0 read again, then read a second time: four bugs fixed with tests. Two new people's
passes (heroes-two-languages, studio-hero-matrix); none of the twenty-one has passed yet. Nothing to change in a
game (UPGRADING §41; strict SemVer: the new fields are optional). The tag is signed with the maintainer's SSH key on
their yes of 22 October for v4.4.0.

Fixed

• The phone layout's column fits a short landscape screen (4.4.0, #227): on a phone in landscape under its
  browser's bars (e.g. 844 × 320), the right-hand column was 300 px wide, each bag slot a square 87 px tall, the verbs
  44 to 56 px, and the tools row (map, pause, music) went out at the bottom of the screen; six items or more (the bag's
  page buttons) cut it on a 568 × 320 phone too. The column now fits its height: the slots stop being square first,
  then the verbs come down to 44 px, and only when 44 px no longer fits do verbs and slots share the room; the tools
  row never shrinks, and past a floor the column scrolls instead of cutting. The layout also reads the room inside the
  safe areas (notch, home indicator) instead of the whole screen. Nothing to change in a game.

• The Studio checks a translation's verb keys too (4.4.0): a translation that gives two verbs the same key
  (fr: verbs.take.key › "F" is already the key of "close") was refused by npm run validate only; the Studio's
  guard, its processing worker and its in-browser demo said nothing. validate now runs that check whenever it is
  given the translations, so every caller says the same.

• A translation's voice clips ship with the game (4.4.0): npm run assets encoded only audio.voices, so the
  clips of audio.voicesByLang (a French recording) never reached public/assets/audio/voices/ and a French page
  played nothing. They are now prepared like the others (keyed <lang>:<id> in assets.gen.json).

• npm run voices -- check reads each language's own text (4.4.0): 4.3.1 taught status that a clip keyed on a
  switch only the translation has (Reviens sain{form?gull=e|*=} et sau{form?gull=ve|*=f} !) belongs to that line;
  check still read the source text and warned "a clip no line claims".

• npm run e2e in two languages in one run (4.4.0): the e2e harness kept the verb labels of the first page it
  read, so a game script that reloaded the page in another language (?lang=fr) tapped the English labels. It reads
  them again after each load.

• A Reality page that polls no longer piles up listeners (4.4.0): the HTTP port's wait between two polls (or two
  reconnections of the stream) added an abort listener to the port's signal and removed it only on an abort, never
  when the wait ended on time. A page polling once a second held some 86 000 more closures a day, for as long as it
  stayed open. Each wait now removes its listener when it ends, either way.

• An email's HTML read with a Turkish capital İ hides its scripts and comments again (4.4.0): the email
  connector's htmlToText looked for tags in the message's lower case at the original's positions, and a character
  whose lower case is longer (İ is two characters in lower case) shifted them: after an İ, a <script>'s or a
  comment's content leaked into the text an answer is read from, and visible text after a <style> could vanish.
  Tags are now matched in ASCII lower case, as HTML names them, which keeps every position.

• The Studio's simulated Bridge no longer leaks a listener per wait (4.4.0): each wait for a signal left an
  abort listener on the connection, as the Reality port's sleep did (fixed in the same release); a long Studio
  session gathered thousands.

• The CLI's login says why the provider refused it (4.4.0): studio-server login ended on a bare
  ResponseBodyError when the OpenID provider refused the device login; it now names the provider's code and reason,
  e.g. not_allowed (Offline tokens not allowed for the user or client). STUDIO-SERVER says what that one needs: the
  client scope offline_access on the CLI client and the realm role offline_access for each member.

Changes

• A hotspot can act on a single tap, as an exit can (4.4.0, #221): a hotspot that says onTap: 'go' answers a
  single tap with no verb picked as an exit with input.exitOnTap does (#188): the hero walks there and acts on
  arrival with the double tap's verb (defaultVerb). E.g. an endless aisle that says why one does not walk down it,
  the LucasArts "Walk to" that gives a comment. Without it a tap on a hotspot only walks there, as before;
  input.exitOnTap stays about exits. Input only: rules, solver and saves do not see it. Nothing to change in a game.

• One map pin for a city with several places (4.4.0, #223): a place's portrait can be a list, its faces side by
  side on the pin, and a place that says joins: '<place>' sits on that place's pin instead of having its own: once
  it is unlocked its face is added there, a tap on a face travels to that face's place, from any of them the pin is
  "here" (only the current face ringed), and moving between two places of one pin draws no journey. E.g. a city whose
  reception and office upstairs are both destinations. A pin with one place renders as before; the validator wants
  the joined place to exist, in the same region, and not to join another itself. Nothing to change in a game.

• The Studio's hero × language matrix (4.4.0): the Voices tab has a second view, "Heroes × languages", read-only
  and in the in-browser demo too. For each line with an id whose text (in any language) has a text switch or
  {hero}, a column per hero (each value the switched flags take, headed by the variant's portrait and name) and per
  language; each cell shows the text that hero reads, the clip that plays, and the keyed clip that is missing (the
  plain id named when it plays instead). A row flags an untranslated language, a translation that drops a choice the
  source makes, and a hero's value no switch of the line lists without *=; "Lines with a problem" keeps only those.
  The same data as GET hero-matrix on the Studio API, and as heroMatrix(game, locales) in
  src/engine/tools/hero-matrix.ts.

• The semantic diff draws the rooms it names, before and after (4.4.0): in the Check tab, under "Changes between
  revisions", Capture the rooms (before / after) shows each room the changes name (its layout, its source, its
  texts in a language; the first room when only shared files changed, such as the cast or site.json; six at most)
  at both revisions, side by side, with the rectangle where they differ outlined, or "no visible change". A moved
  prop, a font or a text that overflows is seen at once. Each revision is built as a preview and drawn in headless
  Chromium at a fixed 960 × 600; the PNGs are kept under .cache/studio/. New route GET diff/<from>..<to>/captures.
  A local Studio only (npm run studio, with Playwright): a hosted Studio answers that the captures need one, its
  worker having no browser (docs/en/STUDIO.md "Check" lists the other limits).

• A hosted preview's time, phase by phase (4.4.0): a preview's log line ("event":"preview") now says where its
  time goes: queuedMs (from the write to the build's start: the coalescing, a build before it, the retries),
  snapMs, jobMs (the worker's job as the Studio waits for it, its queue on the worker included), storeMs and the
  whole wait, sinceWriteMs. Each job the Studio asks of the worker logs a worker-call line (putMs, postMs,
  getMs, delMs), and the worker's own worker-job line says queueMs, fetchMs, unpackMs, childMs and
  putMs. Two histograms read them, studio_preview_phase_seconds{phase} and
  studio_worker_job_phase_seconds{kind,phase}; studio_preview_build_seconds is said to start after the snapshot,
  as it always did.

• A faster hosted preview (4.4.0): the worker runs one job at a time per lane, a preview's build in a lane of its
  own, so it no longer waits behind the health's validator and solver (up to 45 s) or a load; each lane holds 8 jobs
  at most. The Studio packs one snapshot per revision, shared by the preview, the health, the published builds and the
  engine's upgrade (the lock, the repair and the walk once, not three times); stores a build's files 8 at a time; does
  not write again a blob it stored less than an hour ago; and answers once it has read the worker's result, the
  staging deleted after (a delete that fails is logged, worker-staging-left). Nothing changes for a game.

• A playable example of choosing the hero (4.4.0): games/heroes, "Who Am I Today?", one garden and one puzzle
  for every 4.3 hero-choice feature at once. Three heroes on portrait cards at New Game (Pixel, Biscuit, Gaby the
  gull), their names in the lines ({hero}), Grandma's words switched for each ({form?…}), one rule only the gull
  gets, English and French (the French table adds its own agreements: Prête for the gull), Grandma's lines voiced
  per hero in both languages (garden.dust~form=gull in audio.voices and audio.voicesByLang.fr), and a save that
  keeps the hero. The sample game's art. GAME=heroes npm run dev plays it, GAME=heroes npm run solve -- --prove
  proves it for every hero, npm run e2e -- <url> --game heroes --prod picks each hero on its card in English and in
  French, saves, reloads, continues and finishes (in CI's reference job). CONTENT_GUIDE's hero section points to it.

• The 137 mutation exemptions read again (4.4.0): each entry of docs/dev/mutants.json came due at 4.4.0 and was
  checked against the code. Four were not what they said and are now killed by a test (a delivery with an empty
  player id bound the save to it, the Bridge's re-sign cache hits were never counted, a badge fetch's own request
  timeout, a logout token whose events is null); reading them found the two fixes above. The other 133 keep their
  place, 16 with a reason rewritten, and are read again at 4.5.0.

Manual passes (D12: reported, not blocking)

0 of 21 done.

Pass	Status	Who, when	Device, OS, browser, versions	What failed
A multi-instance Bridge behind HTTPS on Postgres, a worker killed mid-verification (bridge-postgres-https)	not-run
Story, Remix and Daily runs submitted by real people (runs-real-players)	not-run
A run resumed after the machine was stopped and started again (run-resume-power-cycle)	not-run
The code wheel printed and used at the table; the text alternative by a screen-reader user (code-wheel-human)	not-run
A Mystery world played from the Remix menu against a deployed Bridge (mystery-deployed)	not-run
Safari offline on an iPhone, and its update (safari-ios-offline-update)	not-run
Firefox offline on a real machine (firefox-real-offline)	not-run
A real phone on both painters (phone-both-renderers)	not-run
A real LiveSplit and OBS session (livesplit-obs)	not-run
Real connectors and a person's security pass (connectors-real-security)	not-run
Playtesters who do not know the puzzles (blind-playtesters)	not-run
The voices listened to (voices-listening)	not-run
The published archive installed by a person (archive-human-install)	not-run
The Studio Server deployed on Clever Cloud (Node, PostgreSQL, Cellar, Keycloak, a TLS domain), from its archive, by its guide; a real Safari on macOS and iOS (studio-hosted)	not-run
Three people on one hosted Studio, a network cut and a redeploy while they edit (studio-collab)	not-run
On a hosted Studio, people play the shared revision without a dev server, a save carried across revisions, the health chip, their own undo, a published build (studio-preview)	not-run
A hosted Studio's prepare on the worker (Python, ffmpeg), its prepared set played in the Play tab (studio-assets-hosted)	not-run
An AI agent on a hosted Studio through its remote MCP (/mcp): a real MCP client, a member's token, a write in the journal as the member, a span another holds refused (studio-mcp-remote)	not-run
The Studio Server behind a second OpenID Connect provider (GitLab, D44): login, roles, a revoked member refused, verified by a person (studio-oidc-generic)	not-run
The heroes example (games/heroes) on a real phone, in English and French: each hero's card, name, lines and voice, a save resumed (heroes-two-languages)	not-run
The Studio's hero × language matrix read by an author on their own game: what it shows, what is missing, what it should say (studio-hero-matrix)	not-run