Seeing where you are — a readable Area name, "You are here" on the world map, pinch zoom, and the identity chip off the title screen

done priority 2 estimate S

world-map-and-portals/011 · created 2026-08-16 · updated 2026-08-18

What prompted it

Kris, playing v3 on the phone: the Area name in the top bar was there but effectively invisible, and the world map showed the whole world without ever saying which part of it you were standing in. Small asks — and worth recording that they paid for themselves within the hour: 012 was only diagnosable because of them. “It’s still William 3rd’s Home” is a sentence you can only say if the screen tells you where you are.

What landed

The Area name is readable. It was 12px TAB_INACTIVE plum-grey over the world’s own ground — present, unreadable, in the one place it has to be readable. Now 17px Pixelify white with a hard black outline and a soft drop shadow.
“You are here” on the world map. A speech bubble over whichever ball you are standing in, its point at your approximate spot inside the circle — your grid cell as a fraction of the Area, capped at 0.62r so the marker never sits on the ring. Tapping the bubble collapses it to just that dot; tapping the dot brings it back.

The ball is matched by name. The map speaks slugs, hello_ack speaks world ids, and neither knows the other — but both carry the same display name, and a fogged area carries no name at all, so it can never be matched by accident. That choice is what kept this a client-only change with no director deploy.
Pinch zoom, in the world and on the map. In-game it multiplies the camera offset (0.55–2.4); on the map it is screen = world * zoom + pan, zoomed about the pinch midpoint so what is under your fingers stays there (0.4–4.0). Mouse wheel does the same on desktop; “Re-centre” resets zoom as well as pan.

Kris asked for this only if it was near-zero risk. It is, because of how it is gated: every line of new input handling requires two fingers down, so the one-finger path is byte-for-byte what it was. That mattered — tap-to-move has broken on Android before.
The “Signed in as …” chip stopped appearing on the title screen. It showed after a cold start but not after returning from a world, which is the tell: it was never hidden anywhere. It just happened to be covered by whatever was added to ui_layer last, and on boot the chip is built after the title. Draw order is not a visibility rule. The top row and its Retry button are now explicitly shown only while a world is live.

Verified

Rendered every screen through _shots.gd (both bubble states, and the label over a grass-green ground). Godot 116 tests. Shipped as APK v4 to Kris’s phone, which is where 012 was then found.

View source in repository · also available as raw markdown.