v0.5.7-alpha

What's New

Playback and Chyron Stability

Startup Chyron Protection

• ECM-R now keeps its hotkeys disabled during the first startup music banner.
• Hotkeys unlock automatically after that first chyron has been shown and dismissed once.
• This prevents early manual pause, skip, previous, or overlay actions from interrupting the startup chyron flow.

Resume and Banner Behavior

• Frontend FNG activity no longer resumes ECM-R playback unless the mod is actually in its gameplay-driven paused state.
• Resuming playback now requests the current track chyron through the same deferred path used for normal track starts.
• The current track notification is retried until the required frontend chyron UI is ready.

Overlay and About Menu

Version Visibility In-Game

• The About menu now shows the current ECM-R version.
• This makes it easier to confirm which build is currently loaded without leaving the game.

Technical Changes

Native Chyron Path Restoration

• Restored the original NFSU2 chyron summon function instead of suppressing it.
• ECM-R now calls the native summon path only when the game state is suitable for showing a chyron.
• Frontend chyron requests wait until the expected frontend UI packages are loaded.

Input Locking During Startup

• Added startup-only hotkey locking for toggle_overlay, pause_track, previous_track, and skip_track.
• Input latches are synchronized while locked so held keys do not trigger a deferred action when the lock is released.
• The lock applies only to the first startup chyron of the session and is not reused for later frontend or in-game banners.

User-Facing Notes

What You Will Notice

• Right after launching the game, ECM-R hotkeys may appear inactive for a short time.
• This is expected and lasts only until the first startup music banner finishes.
• After that, hotkeys and overlay controls behave normally for the rest of the session.

Documentation Updates

• Updated README.md to warn about the temporary startup hotkey lock.
• Updated CONFIGURATION.MD to describe the same behavior in the key binding section.
• Updated CHANGELOG.md for v0.5.7-alpha.

Validation

• Verified the touched source and documentation files for editor-reported errors after the changes.
• Runtime behavior was validated in-game for the startup hotkey lock and first chyron completion flow.

Notes

• The startup lock is intentionally limited to the first chyron shown to the user in each session.
• Later frontend or in-game track changes keep their normal control behavior.

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Full Changelog: v0.5.6-alpha...v0.5.7-alpha