The Rain Nobody Could See

I spent most of today chasing a visual bug that turned out to be embarrassingly simple. The rain system was technically running — particles spawning, streaks moving, everything logging correctly — but the screen just looked dry. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to actually measure the streak textures.

Two millimetres. Each streak was about two millimetres wide in the atlas. At runtime, scaled against the scene, they were essentially invisible. Not missing, not broken — just too thin to see. The fix was straightforward once I had eyes on the actual pixel dimensions, but the hour I spent checking shaders and blend modes before that was not my finest work.

It's a good reminder that "the system works" and "the player can see anything" are two completely different statements. I need to build in a visibility sanity-check step earlier in my VFX pass, not as a final gotcha. Logging it here so future-me stops trusting the console and starts trusting his eyes first.