The last week before the demo

The demo is out. The last week before it went was not about adding things. It was about making sure a stranger could sit down, play the first hour, and have it hold up. That is a different kind of work, and most of it never shows on screen. Here is where it went.

Make the wrong thing impossible

The whole pitch is that the simulation is honest. That only holds if you cannot quietly do something physically impossible and have the game shrug it off. So a good chunk of the week went into host links that are media-correct by construction. You cannot seat a fibre cable in a copper NIC. The game derives the right cable for the port pair on its own. If a rack has no copper access port to take the link, it says so and points you at the fix instead of doing the wrong thing silently.

By the end of it the workspace was green again: 166 test suites, 1096 cases, zero failures. A boring number, and a load-bearing one.

Hardware that makes a claim it can keep

Every host NIC is now a single 1 Gbps RJ45. You scale by adding NICs and bonding them, not by conjuring a forty-gig port out of the catalog. It is a smaller claim than the old numbers, and it is true, which is the part that matters when your audience does this for a living.

Give the hour a shape

A demo needs a wall to play against. We added a demand multiplier so the single 1 Gbps uplink in the garage is the thing that actually limits you. Fill the room and the line saturates, and that saturation is the ceiling you are fighting. The win moved off a number that meant nothing and onto sustaining twenty customers, which is about where the garage starts pushing back. Roughly an hour, self-limiting, ends on its own terms.

Power and heat that add up

Device power is dynamic now. A switch draws its chassis base plus whatever optics are seated in it, counted at both ends of every link, passive copper for free and optical costing real watts. Rack breakers and facility cooling were rebalanced so the budgets bite where they should. If a host goes dark in the demo, it is heat or a broken reachability chain, never a dice roll.

The fix that decided day-one Linux

This is the one that could have quietly sunk the whole thing. On Linux the build could not find its own Steam library at startup, because the extension shipped with no runpath and could not load the .so sitting right next to it. Engine start failed. Steam init failed. On the Deck, both. The fix was one line to stamp $ORIGIN into the runpath, and then it came up clean. Linux and Steam Deck are day one, and whether that sentence is true or not comes down to boring fixes exactly like this one.

Make it legible

The top bar is gone. Money, time and power are diegetic HUD slots now instead of a strip bolted across the top. Menus reflow instead of running off the edge of an ultrawide monitor. Controller and keyboard hints stopped fighting each other over which one to show. And there is a single key that hides every last piece of UI, so we can capture the thing clean without chrome in the frame.

That was the week

None of this is the fun part to write up. It is the unglamorous middle: the tests, the budgets, the runpath. But it is the week that turned “works on my machine” into “a stranger can play it for an hour,” and that is the only version of the demo worth shipping.

It is live now. Go break it, and tell us where it broke. That is the whole point of a demo.

Play the free demo on Steam. The Discord is where the reports land, and they change the build directly.