Voidrunner v1.5.0

Voidrunner v1.5.0 is a visual overhaul, "through the canopy" (#30, #31). Every screen is now the cockpit console on tinted glass, in front of a picture of where the ship is. Nothing about how the game plays has changed.

What's new

• The canopy.
  • Docked, you see the system's world and its station, with running lights in its trade's color.
  • In a fight, the enemy ship sits under a red lock, and the console turns red with it.
  • Between systems, you see the lane.
  • The sky's light follows the system's danger, from calm indigo to red.
  • On a wide terminal the picture fills a window beside the console. At 80x24 it's a band below it.
• The star map is a chart. Explored space glows in its trades' colors, with lanes, the plotted route, and rings for your ship and objective. It reveals nothing the old grid didn't.
• Combat at 80x24: every option is on the first page (#28).
• Instruments: slim gauge lines replace solid block bars, and the ship is the scenes' own pixel-art hull, with scorch marks for damage.
• Title screen: after two seconds it comes alive for up to a minute.
• Node calendar (#27): career dates follow the node's timezone, and are shown in the date part of its datetime_format (NetBBS 7.41.0 or later). They're still stored in ISO format.
• Fixes: long rows in list pickers stay on the console glass (#33), and the new-pilot page states the same starting terms the career is created with (#34).

NetBBS: saved data unchanged; runs on NetBBS 7.31.0 or later.

Fallbacks and switches

• Truecolor (auto, fast): the full experience.
• 256 colors: the same pictures on a black sky.
• basic, mono, plain: no background picture, but the new header, gauges and layouts.
• CP437, and fonts without quarter blocks: half-block pixels (NetBBS's quadrants: false).
• SysOp switches: DOOR_CANOPY=0 turns the pictures off, and DOOR_PIXELS=half forces half blocks.
• Bandwidth:
  • a full canopy page is about 15 KB at 80x24 and 30 KB at 120x36, against about 2 KB for a plain page;
  • a page turn under the same sky is about 5 KB.

New: a NetBBS door profile (#29)

The release now carries netbbs.json, covered by SHA256SUMS. A SysOp running this release before NetBBS bundles it can import the file with [J] Import JSON and then correct its paths. It:

• follows the caller's terminal and handles resizes;
• admits several pilots at once (the game still allows one session per pilot);
• leaves VOIDRUNNER_SAVE_DIR to NetBBS.

Upgrading

Replace voidrunner.py. Nothing else changes.

Validation

• Tests: 2,999.
• CI: Python 3.11 and 3.13 on Linux and Windows.
• Code review: Claude reviewed each PR and every commit in #31. The findings were fixed or triaged on the PRs.
• Release files: both assets match SHA256SUMS and are byte-identical to the tag.

Full changelog: v1.4.0...v1.5.0