The Last Spike Online / 21 July 2026

One geometry system instead of three separate maps

Country-specific board coordinates were demanding more and more special-case code. We moved to a shared geometry model with validated coordinate data for each variant.

2 min read
The Last Spike Online
geometryrenderingtestingarchitecture

Situation

The USA, Canada and other board variants had evolved separately, so the same rendering rule existed in several forms. Fixing a rotation or tile position could easily affect only one map. That divergence stayed tolerable until the artwork layer and tests started exercising several countries at the same time.

Approach

I introduced a unified board-coordinate model in which country-specific differences are data. Dedicated tests validated every country's coordinates and rotation rules. The renderer used the same pipeline for every edition and received only a different geometry dataset as input.

Outcome

Board code became simpler and drift between variants became test-detectable. A shared rendering fix automatically applied to every country as long as its geometry data satisfied the same contract.