## Changes
Follow-up to #596 from the owner's look: a parked transit vehicle turned with the camera. Moving vehicles project their world course into screen space on every camera change, but a vehicle that had never moved on screen could have no display course and was skipped by that pass, leaving its billboard at a screen-anchored angle; rotation invalidation also relied on camera events that a pose change without a revision could miss. Now every visible vehicle with any usable course (derived, held, or the feed's reported bearing) is re-projected at the existing 5 Hz cadence on camera pose changes. Moving playback and the 120°/s course limiter are unchanged.
## How it was verified
- `npm run format:check` (861 files), `npm run check:boundaries` (109 groups), `npm test` (4,068 passing), `npm run build` clean; tracking regression 109/109 in a real browser on Google 3D tiles.
- Node tests: a stationary vehicle with a held course, and one with only a reported bearing, under a camera at heading 0° then 90° yield screen rotations 90° apart.
- Browser harness (`scripts/qa-transit.mjs`, keyed on Google 3D tiles): a parked scripted vehicle orbited by 90° rotates 90.000° on screen; a moving vehicle's rotation still matches its rendered travel; both checks fail on main and pass here. Full keyed run: 201 pass; the nine failures are the per-frame allocation gate already recorded as a follow-up and threshold-edge readability lines on the Boston matrix, both unchanged from #596.
## Changes
Follow-up to #587 after the owner's first look at the merged transit layer on Google 3D tiles.
- **Sensor presets keep the real silhouettes.** Under NVG, thermal (white-hot, black-hot, Ironbow) and noir, vehicles are the same silhouettes as in normal view, filled opaque white with a 2 px dark halo, at the CRT display sizes (26 px fleet, 39 px selected). The solid rounded "signature" bodies are gone.
- **The selected vehicle's trail is visible.** The retained history is now draped onto 3D tiles and terrain (`GroundPolylinePrimitive`, `ClassificationType.BOTH`, the way the traffic heat-lines are drawn), 3 px core over a 5 px dark backing, per-segment age colour, a short draped head clipped to the sprite. Two defects kept it off screen before: Cesium's per-instance attribute getters return copies, so the renderer's show/colour edits were discarded, and a marker did not recover after the camera jumped to it, which hid the trail with it. Trail geometry is now prepared on selection independent of floor resolution and marker visibility; sparse long intervals (rail) keep a bounded marker corridor instead of dropping the interval; classification survives map-source changes.
- **Transit sits in the Movement panel group** between Street Traffic and Bike Share (the panel orders by `PANEL_GROUPS`, not by catalog order; the catalog is moved too).
## How it was verified
- `npm run format:check` (854 files), `npm run check:boundaries`, `npm test` (4,062 passing), `npm run build` clean; tracking regression 109/109 in a real browser on Google 3D tiles.
- Browser harness (`scripts/qa-transit.mjs`), keyed on Google 3D tiles and keyless: keyed 194 pass, with the trail pixel check passing at 300, 600 and 900 m; the remaining keyed failures are the per-frame allocation gate already recorded as a follow-up from #587 (CPU and frame time within budget), four readability lines at threshold edges, and the card-anchor check now counting frames where the selected marker is legitimately off screen; keyless 193 pass with the remaining misses being threshold edges on the thin tram silhouette (centre 0.83–0.88 against 0.85) and one bus ring 0.28 against 0.25 on a pure-white roof.
- New harness checks: `Google 3D selected trail visible at 6 of 8 projected samples` (repeated off/on framebuffer captures at 300/600/900 m, samples outside the sprite footprint, a background-change negative control; fails on main, passes here), a camera-arrival check (select a moving vehicle, `setView` onto it, marker shown and trail body drawn within 2 s), `PANEL_ORDER` pinned, raster tests comparing every sensor raster's mask and aspect ratio to the normal silhouette.
- Direct look on a keyed build: a live CapMetro bus at 30 m/s selected through the layer API draws its draped trail along the highway lane (harness capture `keyed-600m-trail-visible.jpg`).
- Adversarial review by Codex Astra before the last two fix passes (stack-switch classification, marker corridor under the vertex cap, pixel-gate loophole), all three fixed with regressions.
Docs: `docs/CURRENT-STATE.md` and `CHANGELOG.md` updated in this PR. No data-source changes.
Retain active-flight preloading while canceling hidden frames and pending Facebook sessions on stop, disable, and replacement. Add lifecycle and pointer-ownership regression coverage. Apply the runtime formatting adopted on main and keep the existing source-shape check insensitive to that formatting.
Supersedes #218 by @spcpza, ported onto the current component layout with fixes from review.
Verified before merge: format, package boundaries, unit suite, build, and the browser tracking suite; a browser harness for the change where one applies; adversarial review applied.
Contributor: @spcpza. His original commit is the base of this branch, and his own re-port onto main (2026-09-15, `5b69011`) was consulted while finishing the height work. That port reads every vehicle's surface from the app's shared ground-floor system (`cachedGroundFloor` / `warmGroundFloor` / `GROUND_FLOOR_LIFT_M`) rather than sampling the scene per layer, keeps a vehicle hidden until its cell answers, warms a bounded batch per poll on a timer instead of per frame, and renders at the ellipsoid above the altitude gate. That is the sounder primitive — one floor system for the app, with the rooftop-versus-street question already settled against a datum-correct DEM prior — and this branch's height work was rebuilt on it, replacing a bespoke cell cache, ground prior and rooftop rule written here. Credit for that direction is his.
Future work (not in this PR), both written up in docs/CURRENT-STATE.md:
- Readable route names. The realtime feeds carry only `route_id`; `route_short_name` / `route_long_name` live in each operator's static GTFS `routes.txt`, and headsigns in `trips.txt`. Doing it properly wants a server-side metadata loader beside the transit proxy with fixed registered static sources, bounded indexes built once and persisted, a slow conditional refresh, and a versioned route dictionary the browser caches. Shipped here: ids are never rewritten, and a cut one carries an ellipsis instead of reading as a typo.
- Below-ground rendering. Subway vehicles are drawn on the surface directly above themselves, because the feeds carry no depth and a train nobody can see is not worth drawing; the card says so plainly. Real treatment wants OSM tunnel geometry per city and a ghosted sprite tethered to the surface. The owner recorded it and left it.
Round four and after (2026-09-15). The owner tested round three under FLIR and NVG, and then asked for the design to be taken further: elegant in performance, beautiful on camera, trails with a cache for public transport, Cesium-native, and a core other moving layers can adopt. Codex Astra reviewed the plan (it confirmed the speed fault: a glide started from the drawn position at receipt time but spanned the gap between report times, so with MBTA reporting every ~10 s against a 15 s poll every second glide ran at 1.5x; it rejected a queued-segment patch), then wrote the design, then implemented it in commit-sized passes with adversarial review between them and real-browser harness runs by the integrator.
What this PR now contains beyond the contributor's original port:
- Delayed playback in a contact-agnostic core (`src/data/contactPlayback.js`): each vehicle keeps a typed, bounded fix history and a display clock that runs at one second per second through it, a feed-derived lag behind real time, holding at its newest fix rather than extrapolating and never sprinting to catch up. Marker, course, motion word, card and trail all read the same displayed sample. The clock has an explicit time-offset and seek API so a rewind is a later feature, not a rewrite; flights and vessels are untouched.
- A selected-vehicle trail (`src/data/contactTrailRenderer.js`, `src/layers/transit/trails.js`): the retained history drawn with batched Cesium primitives, clipped at display time so the head is exactly the sprite, faded by age, in the mode colour (white under sensor presets), on the same surface path as the marker.
- Bounded proxy-side history (`server/providers/transitHistory.js`): fifteen minutes and at most 128 fixes per vehicle with hard byte ceilings, MBTA only for now (opt-in per feed), served by a small endpoint that never fetches upstream, so a selected trail survives a browser reload while the server keeps running.
- Scene work bounded to what is visible and moving, an occluder, cached DETECT candidates, holds on the render loop only while something visible moves.
- Sensor presets: white-hot haloed sprites under NVG/FLIR/noir (black-hot inverts), saturated mode colours under CRT, per-mode bracket tiers in every theme, the selected card keeping its mode colour.
- A discriminating browser harness (`scripts/qa-transit.mjs`) that samples postRender frames, reads the real card anchor, and measures fleet budgets at 800 and 3,000 vehicles.
Not built, recorded as follow-ups: curated route display names (lowest priority per the owner), fleet-wide tails, route snapping, a rewind UI, adoption of the playback core by flights and vessels.
Verified at merge (2026-09-15 morning): unit suite 3,896 passing, build clean, format and boundary gates clean, tracking regression 109/109, browser harness keyless 200 pass / 0 fail (13 sensor checks unexercised because the live view offered fewer than six isolated sprites; every judged sprite passed), keyed on Google 3D tiles 198 pass with the per-frame allocation gate as the only failure. Follow-ups recorded: the keyed build's playback sampler still allocates per frame (CPU and frame time stay within budget; the 3,000-vehicle metro view sits at a 27.6 ms frame interval against a 25 ms budget), the shared detection overlay's per-paint allocation, friendlier route names, fleet-wide tails, a rewind UI, and adopting the playback core for vessels and flights.
Co-authored-by: spcpza <[email protected]>
Sameh Khamis