Add a place for friends

Start with the places design, which describes the registry, capabilities, floor geometry and weather behind window panes. A place shares the app's friends and activities; its artwork and capabilities describe where they are standing.

1. Add one entry to src/content/worlds.json. Choose a stable id; changing it later sends saved choices back to the hillside garden. Add its label and about activity-note keys to all four page string tables.
2. Set geometry.fieldTop to the back edge of the walkable floor, as a fraction of the image height. Keep enough open foreground for the full cast and the tools. A fishing place also needs geometry.lake with from, to, center and radius; those fractions describe the same raster water that people click. Add geometry.fishingSpot with normalized x and y for the separate standing position on the floor; it follows the same image transform as the water.
3. Set each capability deliberately: sky, weather, wildlife, fishing, seasonalEffects and ambient. An indoor place normally disables outdoor activities. To show weather through its windows, enable weather and define windowPanes as normalized x, y, width and height rectangles over the glass. Rain, snow and overcast shading share the background crop and stay inside those panes. Do not enable fishing to make an activity button work when the image has no usable water.
4. Put generated or illustrated images in src/art/environments/ and name them in art.morning, art.day, art.evening and art.night when they have authored lighting, and set "authoredLighting": true so environmentLook does not tint the painted light again; without it, environmentLook lights each time of day with its own gentle filter and tint for places with pictures. Preserve prior source assets. Use fit: "cover-floor" (or "cover-bottom", which aligns the image's bottom edge instead of its floor line) to keep the image's proportions and anchor its floor to geometry.fieldTop as the window changes shape. environmentFrame shares this transform with pond geometry, window weather and seasonal lights. Review visible water and automatic fishing endpoints after cropping before enabling fishing.
5. Add lighting to environmentLook when the new material or lamp light needs it. Review the actual image in every time of day: a warm night room needs readable walls and floor, with a genuinely nighttime view through its window.
6. Give the new place's atmosphere its own chatter string-table key containing casual idle lines in all four languages. Indoor places need their own lines so friends do not talk about outdoor stars or studio lamps in another room. A café or city sound palette needs a distinct implementation and tests; enabling ambient currently selects the woodland mix.
7. Add capability, geometry, asset and translation checks to tests/worlds.test.mjs, changing tests before changing their rules. Add real visual fixtures through scripts/visual-audit.mjs, including day, night, full size, 500×350, 320×240 and a wide mini strip. Verify that changing worlds ends fishing and games and retains friends and collections.

The existing modules consume registry data without extra entry-point wiring. loadContent() loads the registry; setupSky() builds the Place select from its entries, saves the chosen id and applies the new scene. Unknown saved ids return to the hillside garden.

Run the repository's normal checks before integrating a place: Node and Rust tests, lint, the site build for documentation changes and real-app E2E for the selector flow. Isolated fixtures make the result reviewable, but they do not replace native interaction checks.

Portable backgrounds

The background studio creates a local JSON package (format: "playpets-background", version: 1). The app imports it from the scene menu, stores it in this webview profile's IndexedDB and restores it at startup. Keep the downloaded package as a backup; it is not part of the native pet data file.

Each package declares its own normalized floor, water ellipse, optional fishing stance and window rectangles. Positions are not fixed across backgrounds. The studio lets a creator click the picture to place water or the fishing stance and edit the numbers; its PNG guide and prompt reflect those values. The stance is on the walkable floor. Water is entirely above that floor. Window masks are optional for indoor weather. Coordinates and the image share environmentFrame, including narrow-window cropping. A cropped-out stance falls back to the visible shore.

Images are embedded PNG data URLs, each 1536 × 1024, up to 6 MB, within a 32 MB JSON package. The validator rejects external addresses, unsupported versions and invalid geometry. The importer also decodes every image before saving. The base image is required; individual season images are optional. Missing seasons use the base image. All four seasons enable seasonal particles; custom backgrounds do not inherit the built-in festival light locations. Outdoor live sky requires actual alpha in the sky. A solid painted sky hides the dynamic one. The current format has no obstacle map: keep the entire floor clear, including the margins reached by wandering friends.

The built-in hillside retains the woodland id for saved selections. seasonArt maps the shared seasonal names (spring, green, autumn, winter) to each place's artwork. The studio retains studio, using its authored time-of-day variants.

What changes with the scene

The built-in courtyard, hillside garden and lakeside each have four seasonal images. The renderer adds time-of-day lighting, dynamic sky and weather. Snow selects winter artwork even when another season is selected. The cozy living room (studio) has four authored time-of-day images. Its windowArt adds spring, autumn and winter scenery inside the window masks; summer keeps the authored room view. These seasonal views receive time-of-day lighting before window weather is drawn. Snow selects the winter window view regardless of the selected season. Indoor places suppress outdoor creatures, fishing and seasonal particles, while keeping friends and collections.

A version 1 imported package accepts seasonal images, but not separate morning, day, evening and night images. It uses runtime time tinting. Use daytime source images without painted rain or snow particles so the app can add weather once. The package can disable weather and woodland sound. It does not contain custom flower, fish, insect, sound or prop assets: these remain shared app content.

The art and the configured floor have different jobs. The visible floor can include furniture behind its walkable boundary, but every point below the boundary must be safe for a friend to stand. Check tall sprites and accessories, not only the feet. Mini mode crops more of the room and the lake; review the transformed water and standing position rather than assuming they remain visible.

Built-in outdoor places can define lightAnchors for festival strands. Each {from, to, y, sag} uses normalized source-image coordinates; the renderer shares the image crop and omits bulbs outside the viewport. Place anchors on visible branches instead of reusing another scene's positions. Custom version 1 packages do not expose this field and do not inherit built-in strands.