Hunt lifecycle and locale rollout, 2026-10-17

Activated during authorized maintenance: four live game hosts have a checked patch under staging/hunt-patch-20261017. Main EU is a deployed folder, not a Git checkout. The patch preserves each host’s existing deploy code, adding readiness timestamps and a 15-second non-overlapping watchdog, plus the tested hunt-lifetime module.

Ready hunts require 120 seconds of continuously observed zero connections before closing (normally 120–135 seconds with polling). Positive counts, missing/stale telemetry or long observation gaps reset the timer. Connections still joining count as occupied. Ramsgate and Training are exempt. Age alone no longer kills occupied hunts. Existing child-exit cleanup releases crashed server allocations.

Set HUNT_EMPTY_MINUTES=2 and removed extra startup grace during activation. Prior NA/EU overflow settings used ten minutes. Applied caps: NA 26→32 and EU overflow 30→36. Both retain CPU limit 80/resume 65 and memory admission. Read-only preflight found NA at 26 hunts, ~61% CPU, 14.6 GiB free; EU overflow at 30 hunts, ~50% CPU, 41.4 GiB free. A higher cap does not override resource admission.

Final native build: source commit 9245d3f plus the two-minute HuntIdlePolicy change. No experimental combat changes. DLL SHA-256: 467303165F05FF37D51C58CEE3C2E9D35B00BB2A3F52743591648FEB74C02893. Both idle timers must agree: the older native timer used 30 seconds after a player had connected, or 180 seconds before anyone joined. It now requires 120 continuous empty seconds in both cases and resets on pending/open connections. Native tests cover both cases, reconnect resets and occupied intervals. French/German/Italian decimal parsing regression tests passed for current and new threads. The command-line hook returns -CULTURE=en-US; CRT locale is set to C before server hooks. An actual hunt part-break check remains necessary.

Observed live disk DLLs: main EU, NA and Germany used BEB17A8F…, containing the culture argument; EU overflow used 87AECD7B…, lacking it. Absence of the locale diagnostic text in a binary string scan is not evidence that its code is absent: the tested Release compiler splits that literal. Verify new process runtime logs.

DeployServer suite: 99 tests passed. Per-host staged JavaScript syntax checks pass. Live files/config hashes are recorded in staged manifests to detect concurrent edits. All four hosts were backed up and restarted. The first NA attempt missed game processes because CIM executable paths contained repeated backslashes, leaving the DLL locked. Original files and the task were restored; normalized matching and an exclusive DLL-open check fixed deployment. Rollback attempts service restart even if a restore copy fails. Main deployment does not require a Git checkout.

EU overflow logged seven deploy watchdog closures with reason=empty at process ages 2.17–2.32 minutes, while 27 other hunts were occupied. CPU/memory admission remains enforced even below the increased caps. After the first locale rollout, runtime locale markers were verified on all observed game processes on all hosts; the final native timeout alignment was then applied with scoped hunt restarts.

The historical zero-health/no-down report remains unresolved. TFBTA and Laila were named, but no currently stuck character was identified. Display health and server health are separate; do not force healing or death without identifying which state is wrong. No speculative combat changes are included in this patch.