Pre-Release 0.804

Pre-release v0804

Changes since v0803 (October 16, 2026).

This update adds optional twin-stick angel shooting, improves environmental lighting and scenery, and reduces rendering and frame-preparation overhead.

Controls and town menus

• Add optional twin-stick shooting for the angel in towns. Bind Shoot up/right/down/left to the right stick or keys while keeping movement on the left stick or D-pad. The new bindings start unassigned.
• Add System Settings under Other in the modern town menu. Closing settings returns to the same menu position.
• Make touch controls rebindable under Controls → Gamepad, with matching button labels and reliable quick taps. MENU remains available during rebinding. See the Android guide.
• Release touch inputs when the app loses focus or a physical controller takes over, and correctly restore default controls when resetting binding rows.

Presentation and environments

Classic means the flat action renderer, including widescreen. Both modes means classic and diorama; optional effects and HUD features are noted below.

• Both modes, with environmental effects: Expand Kasandora's desert and temple atmosphere with rolling sand, haze, torch motes and moving shadows. Improve the shared light and dimming response on scenery, the player and enemies.
• Both modes, with extended views: Preserve visible pickups and bosses when later enemy waves load. Hide the Pharaoh's stray startup placeholder before its entrance, including the Death Heim rematch.
• Diorama: Polish painted scenery and framing in Bloodpool, Kasandora, Aitos and Marahna, including Marahna's Act 2 and boss-room scenery.
• Diorama: Restore scrolling in Aitos's cave skybox.
• Diorama: Stabilize cameras in rooms that nearly fit the screen, preventing tiny horizontal drift and background flicker. Align game and editor camera limits with the available scenery.
• Diorama: Correct captured background and sprite priority, complete layer padding during room transitions, and remove bright boxes beside sprites at extended capture edges.
• Diorama: Keep projected sprite lighting aligned with scenery during frame interpolation, keep castle skylight behind foreground walls, and add Kasandora background heat shimmer.
• 3D church: Fix visitors appearing through menu panels or masking offering icons. This is an optional town feature, independent of action rendering mode.
• Enhanced town HUD, in either action mode: Correct population, SP and magic/hourglass alignment.

Room-by-room widescreen and diorama presentation touch-ups remain ongoing.

Performance and startup

• Diorama: Reduce CPU work for background capture, palette checks and frame preparation, and move eligible additive-background capture work to the GPU.
• Diorama: Optimize optional GPU frame generation with direct layer output and fewer intermediate copies. Enable validated motion-search and effect-submission shortcuts by default on Metal and Vulkan; D3D12 retains the reference paths for these shortcuts.
• Both modes, on macOS: Reduce the Metal presentation queue under VSync to limit presentation delay.
• Both modes: Prepare more graphics pipelines during startup, including diorama and frame-generation resources, to reduce first-use pauses when enabling those features later. Improve scheduling around software frame limits and add more detailed timing diagnostics.

Action editor and content updates

• Expand effect authoring with editable source regions, particle paths, rolling ground dust, background heat shimmer and moving torch shadows. Raise the per-room authored-emitter limit from 16 to 96, retaining geometry-budget checks.
• Add placeable player and receiver previews to the editor's shared diorama renderer, and use the game's diorama camera and framing rules for coverage guides. Preview custom monitor shapes as well as standard aspect ratios.
• Ship editable environmental recipes in action-effects.ini and include them when importing an installation. When bundled recipes change, preserve local edits in numbered .pre-update-N backups before installing the new defaults.

For desktop installations, rebuild your game with the updated Builder. See Updating an installation.