The horizon is not a shelf: naval mobile, decluttered for real
A captain sent a screenshot from their phone and one line of review: “too cluttered — unplayable, since you can’t see the game.” They were right, and the embarrassing part is we’d already shipped a naval mobile declutter once. This time we measured it.
Turning a feeling into a number
The house method here is to convert the complaint into a metric before touching a line of CSS. So the probe joined the naval server as an emulated phone, conned a warship for half a minute of real fighting, and rasterised every visible HUD element against the screen: how much of the glass is chrome? The answer: 33% of the whole screen, and 25% of the central battle band — the middle stripe of sea and sky where the enemy line, your fall of shot, and your own bow all live. A quarter of the fight was behind furniture.
And most of it was one element. The conning panel — shell selector, repair party, boost, damage control — had grown into a 358×76 pixel slab wrapped over two rows, parked at mid-left on the horizon itself. On a 393-pixel-tall phone it sat exactly where a distant destroyer is a six-pixel silhouette. The gun crosshair literally disappeared behind it.
The left rail was already chrome
The fix isn’t shrinking the game — it’s conceding that a phone screen has lanes, and the fight owns the middle one. The left edge already read as machinery in the player’s mind: speed readout on top, engine telegraph lever at the bottom. So the conning chips now stack as a slim column between them, about 70 pixels wide, completing the rail: SPD → chips → telegraph. Labels compress to ship’s shorthand on touch — SMK, REP, BST, DC ⊕ — because every saved character is horizon glass. Desktop keeps its full words and its old layout; nothing there moved a pixel.
Two chips didn’t survive at all. The TORP chip only ever displayed readiness — the BOMB button is what actually fires the spread — so the readiness now rides the button itself, which dims while the tubes reload. Same for the ATGM chip in the land theater, which shares this whole panel and got the rail for free. And a warship was still being shown an aircraft’s TRIM gauge and a THR bar that duplicated the telegraph’s own live readout: both gone at sea, leaving one honest SPD pill.
The small-phone ambush
Re-testing on a 667-pixel phone caught a bug that had been lying in
ambush the whole time: the score bar is centred with
left:50% plus a transform, and an absolutely-positioned box
sized that way only gets the space to the right of centre
before it wraps. On narrow phones the score folded into a two-line tower
and crushed the DETECTED banner under it. One
width: max-content later the bar stays a bar at any
width — and the long warning banners got the same vaccine. That
find alone paid for the re-measure pass.
The after-numbers: HUD coverage down from 33% to 24% of the screen, and the central battle band from 25% to under 5% — what’s left there is the crosshair and the off-screen enemy markers, which are the fight, not furniture. The conning panel also joined the e2e suite’s pairwise overlap guard, so if it ever creeps back toward another control — or the middle of the sea — the build goes red before a captain has to send us another screenshot.