Web loading: screens wait until painted; failed fetches retry

Each of those screens used to reveal the moment the browser started fetching art, so on slow or flaky connections you'd watch the screen fill in after it appeared. They now wait until every image has actually finished loading before revealing, so what you see at reveal is the finished screen. Cold load on a slow connection: title 22s, fight 8s, walking 21s — walking was around 52s on the previous build.

A failed image fetch used to be permanent for the session — one dropped request and the screen kept missing that art for as long as you stayed on it. A fetch that fails now retries three times with growing delays (~0.5s, 1s, 2s, capped at 8s) before being treated as final, which catches the common transient slow-network drop. If everything still fails the screen surfaces the incomplete state instead of silently revealing broken.

Walking heroes used to hold the screen back until their sprite sheets finished downloading; they now appear immediately as a still pose, with the animation streaming in the background and swapping in once it's ready. Dialogue portraits also preload every emotion per speaker up front, so a later or branching line never pops in with an un-preloaded portrait. 5.0.5 cuts to staging web.