0.7.0

What's Changed

130 commits since 0.6.5. This is a feature release (players can now carry real torches and flashlights, ropes and chains hang and sway, scenes can save their whole look as a preset) with a long loading-and-performance pass underneath it. Highlights by area:

• Player-carried lights (new): the GM chooses, per scene, which carried-light modes players may use (Torch, Flashlight, Night Vision, Low-light Vision, Infravision, Active Infravision), whether players pick their own, and how dark night really is for them. The Flashlight is a true beam that follows its bearer's cursor (everyone at the table sees it), and its length matches how far the cursor is. The Torch is held out toward the cursor with a real flame and drifting embers, trembles in the hand, reddens to a coal as it dies, gutters out if reached more than 6 squares from its bearer, and relights when brought back to touch them. The four vision modes now render real per-viewer screen grades (green night-vision, gentle low-light amplification, thermal false-colour, and an active-infravision scan sweep) instead of being selectable-but-invisible.
• Rope & Chain (new): GM-placed two-point spans that sag under gravity, sway in the wind with GPU spring physics (held exactly still at both tether points), and cast a sun-matched shadow that sways in lockstep.
• Scene Presets (new): save a scene's whole authored look under a name and apply it again later. Presets are stored per world and have their own card in the Studio Scene department.
• Prism & Iridescence (new): two new mask-driven surface finishes. _Prism gives crystal/glass facets with a moving glint and real chromatic dispersion; _Iridescence gives a light-reactive rainbow sheen that reads the scene's own illumination buffer. Prism is gated to the Extreme profile.
• Weather & sky: new Storm Fog, a reduced-visibility mist that builds as rain and snow intensify. A hand-painted _Drip mask places drip points anywhere you like (cave ceilings, leaking pipes) and can drip only in rain or constantly. Atmospheric haze thickens as you zoom out, whiter under cloud and weaker at night. Clouds gain a Cloud size dial, water gets its own gentler cloud-shadow strength, and cloud tops and drift were retuned.
• Wind: the ambient wind now reaches every client (previously only the GM saw a dial change). Changing wind from calm no longer freezes the module for 10+ seconds, and indoor spaces no longer feel the gale.
• Candles: flames rebuilt as smooth 3D teardrops with a real colour ramp (white-hot core to authored colour), tilt and drift in still air indoors, and are brighter with a larger, stronger light.
• Water: a Current on/off switch beside the compass that parks the surface without losing your authored speed and angle, the Opacity control now actually shows up, shore foam tweaks, and no more per-frame material rebuilding on floors with no water.
• Lens: a new overlay/grime texture catalog (13 bundled images, extreme profile, off by default), with film grain and colour fringing toned down.
• Tokens: dragging a token now shows a ghost at the drop destination, like Foundry does. Hex-grid token footprints use Foundry's real width/height/axis-scale math.
• Loading & performance:
  • Mask decoding moved off the main thread into a worker pool, and masks are VRAM-capped by bytes. Texture compression is encoded across a worker pool: in a same-session A/B, Church's cold load went from 176.7 s to 118.0 s.
  • Effect shaders now compile behind the loading curtain once their masks land, which fixes the freeze-then-pop-in some effects caused right after reveal, and the first load frames render at half internal scale while the curtain is up. The module now checks itself for that regression on every load and warns if a shader compiles after reveal.
  • Scene-load freezes from mask derivation are gone: a benchmark of 120 mask arrivals went from about 231 s of cumulative stall to about 1 s, with the worst single freeze falling from 3.2 s to 65 ms. Output is byte-identical to before.
  • GPU frame cost: one shared half-resolution cloud-shadow field replaces a per-effect copy (23.7 to 14.1 ms under cloud, 9.0 to 4.5 ms clear on a 2560x1215 test scene), the illumination fill has a cloud-free twin for clear skies (2.9 to 0.16 ms, whole frame -29% on Church), window light evaluates clouds only where there is light (9.1 to 4.2 ms), and water's caustics are evaluated only where needed (51.4 to 28.7 ms on the heaviest water scene tested).
  • Smaller wins: door leaves ride the world draw, the lens skips idle blur taps, and a pile of per-frame allocations and forced layout reflows were removed.
• Remote & Studio: a full two-client test pass fixed timed weather fades that never ran (only Fade Time = Now worked), saved cues that could not fire, Strike and Gust only firing on the GM's client (they now reach every client), the speed menu closing itself, toolbar buttons stuck "on", and Studio's "Darkness at max" only affecting the GM's own view. Vertical faders in Remote Channels were redrawn.
• Rain & snow: precipitation's scene-bounds check had been silently failing closed since it shipped, so the rain impression curtain and the ground snow/wet layer never appeared on real scenes and rain was not clipped to the scene edge. Fixed, along with a faint grid of blobs that the now-working ground layer exposed on empty ground.
• Defaults: retuned from live sessions across Clouds, Window, Bloom, Lens, Stylize and Grade.

Notes on this release

Prism and the Lens overlay catalog are gated to the Extreme profile, and Rope & Chain, the _Drip mask and the Prism/Iridescence masks only appear where you place or paint them. Player-carried lights change nothing until a player picks a mode: on an unconfigured scene all six modes are allowed and players can choose their own, so a GM who does not want that can turn modes off in the Remote's player-light board. Several shipped defaults were retuned this release (Clouds, Window, Bloom, Lens, Stylize, Grade), so expect scenes that rely on defaults to look a little different from 0.6.5.

Full Changelog: 0.6.5...0.7.0