[kitlangton]

What it does

Stops runaway browser proof/capture scripts and closes their Chromium processes on success, errors, or deadline expiry. Outbreak's first-night simulation runs in Bun by default; GPU stills require --capture.

How it works

• Adopts a shared await using budget across 229 existing launcher files, including root, game, Lab, sky and production-smoke scripts.
• Defaults to 180 seconds, prints the budget, and permits an explicit ARCADE_BROWSER_BUDGET_S override up to 300 seconds. Tracks concurrent launches and persistent contexts; early exits close browsers first.
• A separate watchdog thread handles blocked host JavaScript. Normal deadline expiry exits 124; an unresponsive host gets SIGKILL after three seconds of shutdown grace, along with its own descendants.
• Long showcase/epic/ship renders build before the browser scope and close Chromium before final encoding/mastering. budget.finish() is idempotent and permanently prevents new launches.
• Preserves the first-night station's pacing-10m-proof.json filename and Blackout's exported executable lookup.

Risk

Script tooling only. Historical multi-shot captures may need narrower shot selections to fit the browser deadline. Streaming encoders count toward the deadline while Chromium is open. Long showcase renders were typechecked, not rerendered end-to-end.

The release check is not fully green: Getaway/Blackout/Outbreak have wall-clock performance/test-timeout failures in untouched tests, and the Lot readiness smoke timed out under concurrent load. An isolated follow-up on the same production build passed with both main's smoke script and this branch's budgeted script. All typechecks, production builds, deployment dry-runs, and the other nine game smoke checks passed in the release run. The first-night sweep also retains an existing co-op first-contact assertion failure; both baseline and branch fail identically before reaching GPU work.

Proof

All checks ran through HiveMind:

• bunx tsc --noEmit -p games/blackout/tsconfig.scripts.json and the Getaway equivalent: passed after fixing the reviewed executable-lookup blocker.
• bun scripts/check-browser-budgets.ts: 230 launcher files passed, including the new lifecycle fixture.
• bun scripts/browser-budget-proof.ts: success, exception, persistent context, hung page, hung host promise, and blocked host all cleaned up their observed Chromium PIDs. A targeted phases run passed in 21.950 s: 10.5-second preparation and encoding phases each outlast a ten-second browser budget; relaunch after finishing is rejected.
• bun run verify:release: 72 steps, 473.4 s; all typechecks/builds/dry-runs passed, with the unrelated test and Lot smoke failures described above.
• Lot isolated smoke comparison on Studio's same production build: main ready in ~25 s; budgeted script ready in ~18 s, both with two validated frames and zero browser errors. This resolves the release-run smoke failure without changing its thresholds.
• Independent review completed; executable lookup, phase boundaries and report filename findings addressed.

Script	Before	After	Result
Sky GPU occultation	6.25 s	1.94 s	Same metrics, zero browser errors
First-night native simulation	72.04 s	54.68 s	Same existing assertion failure
Deliberately hung page, 3 s budget	No shared script deadline	3.656 s	Exit 124; Chromium stopped

Times exclude HiveMind admission. Cache/load differences mean the first two rows do not establish an attributable speedup.