After I removed the blur near the camera, the sky started to look wrong: blobs and dots where it should be smooth.

I had added a flat limit of 20 metres on how large a splat can be, to stop huge smears near the ground. It worked. But every splat over 20 metres in these captures turned out to be the sky itself, sitting 150 to 1,400 metres away. The limit was cutting between a quarter and a third of each sky down to dots. Turning the limit off in a side-by-side gave a smooth sky with the town pixel-identical.

So the limit now grows with distance: 20 metres or 0.3 times the distance from the centre of the scene, whichever is larger. Inside about 67 metres, where a smear would really hurt, nothing changed. I also undid a data edit from a few days earlier that had made the same mistake permanently.

There was a second bug under it. In the streamed town, sorting stopped at the camera’s far limit, so all the sky beyond it shared one sort value and blended in random order. Deep blue landed on top of white cloud as blotches. The sort now reaches the far edge of the whole scene.

A fix that is only tested where the problem was is half a fix.