The shard's catalogue can now answer for 73 bodies it used to report absent —
they have no art at action 0 and real art at a later one, and their key says
which (`body/820/a23` is a horse). This side stores that action and stops
assuming `a0` anywhere.
The atlas join is the part that mattered. It read
a.asset_key = CONCAT('body/', b.body, '/a0')
which would have silently dropped exactly the creatures this phase adds. It now
reads the row's own action, with COALESCE for rows written before the column
existed — a NULL inside CONCAT makes the whole comparison NULL, which would have
taken every portrait off the site on upgrade with the database perfectly correct
and nothing in any log. It still matches at most one row per slug: a deeper key
(`body/820/a23/f4`) does not equal the catalogue key.
Verified against a real MariaDB with the live shard's own 1,095-row manifest: the
ALTER applies to an installed-shape table and is idempotent, the horse joins to
its a23 picture, a pre-phase-6 NULL-action row keeps its portrait, and a stored
frame key does not become a second candidate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Until now the only way a creature got a picture on this site was for an
operator to open UOFiddler on a desktop, export sprites by hand, copy them to
the web host and write a spawnAtlas.art.json naming each one. Almost nobody
did, so shard_spawn_creatures.art was NULL on every install.
The shard has had those files the whole time. Admin -> Shard -> Import now
walks its asset manifest, fetches only the sprites whose hash changed, writes
them under uploads/atlas/, asks the shard for a body id per atlas creature
(§8: it CONSTRUCTS the creature and reads Body.BodyID, which is the only thing
that is right for a shard's own custom creatures) and points each creature at
its picture. On a stock client that is 787 portraits, about a megabyte.
**The one thing v8.md §12 got wrong, and it is not cosmetic.** It says
`shard_spawn_creatures.art` "starts being filled by the import". That table is
emptied and refilled by replaceAtlas on EVERY atlas refresh, and a refresh runs
on every boot -- so a filename stored there would be destroyed by an ordinary
re-parse of the ServUO tree, with the next Update finding the client files
unchanged, reporting "nothing to do", and never restoring it. Nothing would
report a fault; the pictures would just be gone.
So the assets and the body map live in their own tables outside that blast
radius, and applyAtlas re-derives `art` on the way past as
`{ ...derived, ...operatorMap }` -- which is also the one place "the operator's
own artwork wins" is enforced, on every rebuild rather than only at import.
Smaller decisions worth not rediscovering:
- The derivation joins on the catalogue KEY, not on the body id. The simpler
join is correct today and stops being correct the moment phase 6 adds
body/400/a2/f0, at which point one slug matches dozens of rows.
- Filenames are content-addressed. A stable name overwritten in place leaves
every browser and CDN serving the previous client's sprite, with the database
row perfectly correct.
- An unchanged key whose FILE is missing is fetched again. The row and the disk
can disagree (a wiped uploads volume, a restore from a dump), and a broken
image on a creature page is worse than one re-fetched sprite.
- A key the shard cannot render is not a failure. Two thirds of the playable
ghost and gargoyle bodies have no art on a stock client, and an import that
reported eight failures every time would teach an operator to ignore the panel.
- A key that VANISHED from the manifest needs review before anything changes:
an unmounted client volume and a deliberate downgrade look identical here.
23 new tests; 674 server and 42 client tests pass. The SQL was also run against
a real MariaDB, which is what proved the CONCAT join and the singleton CHECK.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
