Skip to content

CHANGELOG.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
1277 lines (1159 loc) · 78.8 KB

CHANGELOG.md

File metadata and controls

1277 lines (1159 loc) · 78.8 KB
Raw

Changelog

All notable changes to the LBA2 Classic Community engine fork.

Format: Keep a Changelog. Versioning: Semantic Versioning.

Engine semver is independent from NUM_VERSION (save-file on-disk format, see SOURCES/COMMON.H). Save-format changes are tracked there, not here.

Unreleased

Added

  • --user-dir <dir> (or LBA2_USER_DIR) chooses the folder a run writes its saves, settings and log to, created if missing. Previously that folder was fixed per user, so every install on a machine shared one.

  • --profile <name> (or LBA2_PROFILE) keeps a run's saves and settings under a name of their own, in profiles/<name>/ inside the user folder. A profile remembers the install it was given, so naming it is enough after the first time. It binds once: naming another folder later runs against it and leaves the binding alone, and --bind-game-dir is what moves it, so trying a second install for one run cannot replace the setup the profile holds. Running without a profile writes where the game always did, so nothing existing moves.

  • An empty file called portable.txt beside the binary makes the whole tree self-contained: the user folder becomes User/<build>/ next to the binary, so a copy on a USB stick carries its saves with it. A profile: line in that file names the profile the tree uses by default. Anything passed on the command line still wins over it.

  • The boot banner says how the run chose where to write, and which release it believes it is: a Writes: line naming the profile and the mechanism, and a Release line stating the declared publisher and whether anything declared it.

  • The release line also says what the game data itself measures as, read off RESS.HQR at boot, so a config declaring one publisher over another's assets is reported instead of quietly drawing the wrong logo. An install that ships no config gets the answer from its data: European data runs exactly as it always has, and American data now gets the American sprites and disc label instead of the European ones.

  • ShowDistribLogo in lba2.cfg turns the publisher splash on or off. It defaults to on when a config declares a release and off when nothing does, because a release shipping no config ships no publisher branding either, and a value read off the data is not grounds for showing one.

  • distrib logo <on|off> in the console sets that key without changing which release the engine thinks it is running.

  • Session recording. --record <path> writes a play session to a file, and --replay <path> plays it back into the same simulation and reports the first tick where the two stop matching, so a bug found in play can be handed to someone else as a file that reproduces it. A recording carries the input, the console commands, the binding tables, a savegame at each end, and a per-tick digest of the simulation, which is what lets a replay check rather than merely re-press the keys. --record-telemetry adds every value behind that digest, so a divergence names the field that moved instead of only the tick. Requires --fixed-dt, and docs/RECORDING.md says why. Console verbs rec start|stop|play|info do the same from a point you choose.

Fixed

  • On Android a bar across the top of the screen read "LBA2 Classic Community" and the version number, taking a strip of the picture with it. The app named no theme, so Android picked one with a title bar, and SDL puts the game's window title into it. The app now names a theme with no title bar.

  • GOG installs started windowed where Steam installs started fullscreen, from the same build. An install shipping no settings file is given the game's built-in one, which asks for fullscreen. GOG ships a settings file that never mentions the setting, so it fell through to the engine default, which was windowed. Both start fullscreen now. An existing settings file is left alone, and the Display menu still moves it on desktop.

  • Android always runs fullscreen now. The Display menu has no fullscreen row there, so a player whose settings said windowed, which is what an original-disc or GOG install gave them, sat behind the system bars with no way back. The setting is still recorded, so carrying a profile to desktop keeps it.

  • Replaying a recorded session saved under a different name than the session had typed. Whether the save menu offers a text field or names the slot after the island and the date depends on which device the player last used, and that was in no recording: a replay took whichever branch the keyboard in front of it happened to select. A recording now carries the device, so a replay saves under the name the session typed. Recordings made before this do not carry it and replay as they did.

  • Replaying a recorded session stopped on the save-name screen and never went further, cursor blinking. That screen read its characters straight from the keyboard hardware instead of from the input the rest of the game reads, so nothing a replay handed back could reach it, and the recording carried nothing about what had been typed there either. It reads the same input as everything else now, so the keys reach it and the screen is in the recording. The cheat codes typed at the pause menu came off the same reader and were equally out of reach; they work in a replay too. Whether a replay reaches that screen at all is a separate matter still open: the save menu offers typing only when the last input came from a keyboard, and no recording carries that.

  • Linux and Windows played the same game differently. Every random number came from libc rand(), which is a different algorithm with a different range on each platform, and one shared stream feeds rain, ambient sound, animated textures, particle scatter and the random branches in scene scripts. The engine now carries the generator itself, so a scene plays out the same way on both. It reproduces the sequence Linux already had, so nothing there changes. A recorded session now replays on the other platform as well as its own.

  • The game clock ran at double speed while the F12 console was open under --fixed-dt. The console redraws every frame so typing is visible, and that redraw counted as a second presented frame, so animation, script waits and fades all advanced twice per tick for as long as the console was up.

  • Ambient sound could change what happened in the game. The ambience system picks a random stereo position only when a sample is not already playing, and it draws that from the same random stream actor behaviour draws from, so whether the audio device had finished a sound decided what an actor did next. Under --fixed-dt a sample's playing state is now answered from its own length on the game clock, which makes a run reproducible with sound on.

  • --resolution wrote the size it was given into lba2.cfg, so asking for one launch at a different resolution replaced the one you had picked, and any script that pinned a size for a screenshot rewrote your setting. It now renders the run at the size asked for and leaves the stored one alone. Choosing a resolution in the Display submenu or with the resolution console command still keeps it, and a resolution auto-detected from your display still re-derives each launch rather than freezing into the config.

  • --fixed-timestep and --language wrote themselves into lba2.cfg, so a flag documented as applying to one run changed the setting for every later launch: one --fixed-timestep 100 throttled the game from then on, and one --language Deutsch to check the German text made German the language. Both now apply to the run that asked and leave the stored preference alone, while a setting changed on purpose (the options menu, the fixedtimestep console verb) persists as before.

  • The console verbs that persist one setting (distrib, vsync, fixedtimestep) stored nothing on any install that ships its own lba2.cfg, which is every retail disc and GOG. Writing a single key went straight to the buffer, and writes are refused there while the game data's config is layered under the player's. vsync and fixedtimestep did not check, so they applied the setting and reported success while it lasted only until the game closed.

  • Saves shipped with an install are handed to a profile the first time it is used. The 1997 demo ships the three sections its fixed save slots load, in SAVE/ beside the game data, and nothing looked there, so those slots pointed at files that did not exist and the sections were unreachable.

  • The config shipped beside the game data is read as a layer under the one a run owns, instead of being copied into it once. A profile seeded from one release and later pointed at another kept reporting the first, so the distributor splash, the new-game panel sprite and the CD voice folder disagreed with the medium.

  • scripts/dev/verify-release.sh keeps checking --version against the filename on a host with no container runtime, by running same-arch artifacts directly instead of skipping them. Only the clean-system claim needs a container, so only that is lost, and the run still exits 2 to say so. Previously both metadata checks were advertised as surviving while one of them silently did not.

  • Booting a different install than the one you launched from now says so. When the folder you run from holds no usable data, discovery scans the parent directory and takes whatever install turns up next door. That is what makes a clone beside a retail copy work, and it also meant a demo folder sitting beside a retail one silently loaded the retail data: right-looking launch, wrong distribution, exit 0, and the only tell was the Assets: line. It still falls back, and now warns and names the install it settled on.

  • Running the game from inside an install whose data sits in Common/ now finds it without --game-dir. Auto-discovery joined Common/ only for paths you named explicitly, so an unflagged run depended on the sibling scan reaching that same folder from the parent directory. The scan stops after 24 entries in filesystem order, so on a Steam library with more games than that, the install the player was standing in could be dropped and discovery gave up after 138 candidates. Reported from a Steam Deck.

  • Rolling latest AppImages no longer replace themselves with the newest stable release on first run. The latest keyword in the bundled self-updater's update information means "newest non-prerelease", not the rolling release's tag of the same name, so a rolling download overwrote its own payload with the stable build while keeping its rolling filename. The result was a 0.13.0-dev AppImage whose banner read 0.12.0 and reported itself up to date from then on. Rolling builds now carry latest-pre and track the rolling channel; tagged AppImages are unaffected and still update to the newest stable tag. Existing rolling downloads need replacing once by hand.

  • scripts/dev/verify-release.sh now checks that each artifact's --version matches the version in its filename, and that each AppImage carries the self-update channel belonging to the release it hangs off.

  • scripts/dev/verify-release.sh no longer aborts with no results at all when it cannot register qemu binfmt for the aarch64 legs. It reports the aarch64 failures and checks the rest.

0.12.0 - 2026-07-16

Display & resolution

v0.11.0 went wide. This one goes high: the render-height ceiling lifts from the original 480 lines to 1080p, and the rest of the renderer follows it up there.

  • Resolution picker in the Display submenu, computed per monitor, lifting the render-height ceiling to 1080p. The list is derived from your display aspect (the 640x480 classic anchor plus a ladder of aspect-matched modes at 480/720/1080 heights), so every non-anchor entry fills the panel with no letterbox or pillarbox: a 16:9 panel offers 640x480, 848x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080, an odd-aspect laptop its own widths. Picking one applies live and persists to lba2.cfg; the active mode carries a green plasma marker distinct from the cursor highlight (#341). See docs/RUNTIME_RESOLUTION.md.
  • First-launch widescreen auto-detect: with no --resolution and no saved resolution in lba2.cfg, the engine boots a widescreen size at the original 480 height matched to the display aspect (for example 848x480 on 16:9); a 4:3 display keeps 640x480. The auto value is never persisted, so it follows a monitor swap or a dock/undock, and any explicit choice (menu, console, --resolution) takes over (#323).
  • Full-screen videos scale to fit the window instead of floating small in a wide black frame. The 320x200 cinematics take the largest uniform scale that fills the frame, centred and boxed. At 640x480 that factor is exactly 2.0, so both settings are byte-identical there and the difference only shows at widescreen. A previously dead option in the options menu now drives it, reading "Movies fit to screen" (the new default) or "Movies at original size" (the classic 2x letterbox). One tradeoff worth knowing: engine cinema mode draws 40px top and bottom bars, which the original setting matches and fit does not, so bar geometry changes going from a cutscene into an FMV and back (#430).
  • Actor shadows draw below line 480 at HD vertical resolutions. Hero and NPC ground shadows vanished in a band at the bottom of the screen exactly ModeResY - 480 tall: 240 lines at 720p, 600 at 1080p. The shadow span table was sized to 480 (#443).
  • Sliding doors no longer leave a ghost of themselves behind in the doorway at widescreen resolutions. The on-screen test for background-baked objects used hardcoded 640x480 bounds, so an object outside that rect never registered as drawn and the redraw that un-bakes it never fired. The dead zone grew with width: nothing at 640x480, the right ~20% at 848x480, the right ~47% and bottom ~19% at 1280x720 (#432).
  • VSync toggle in the Display submenu and a vsync [on|off|toggle] console verb, persisted via a VSync key in lba2.cfg and surviving a runtime resolution switch. The on-screen FPS counter is now responsive and guarded against a freeze (#307).
  • The 2D UI re-anchors on the Y axis as well: the authored 480-tall canvas now floats into a taller framebuffer (centre, bottom, or corner per surface) instead of pinning to the top, completing the vertical half of the widescreen re-anchor (#328). The FPS counter pins to the bottom corner at any resolution (#310). See docs/WIDESCREEN.md.
  • The framebuffer now presents through SDL's logical presentation (LETTERBOX) instead of a hand-computed destination rect, so SDL owns both the on-screen present rect and the window-to-framebuffer cursor mapping. The forward and inverse transforms can no longer drift apart, and the path is DPI-correct groundwork for high-density HD rendering. The present geometry was first extracted into a small SDL-free, host-tested module (#325, #326).

Movement & timing

Movement in the engine was never speed times time. Animation keyframes advanced once per rendered frame, so how far Twinsen actually walked depended on your frame rate. This cycle decouples the simulation from rendering and pins it to a fixed step.

  • Frame-rate-independent movement, on by default at a 16 ms step (a 60 Hz simulation). Above roughly 60 fps (a high-refresh panel, vsync off, a fast machine, even at the classic 640x480) hero walk, sneak and jump and NPC patrols ran too slowly or inconsistently, and slow movers could stop outright; below 60 fps the simulation lost game time and movement came up short. It now advances in whole fixed steps with the remainder carried, sub-stepping to catch up after a slow frame and clamping at 8 steps so it stops trying below about 8 fps. At 60 fps every part of this is a deliberate no-op, so a display already in the sweet spot sees no change in feel. Turn it off or retune it live with the fixedtimestep console command, persisted to lba2.cfg (#388, #389). See docs/MOVEMENT_FRAMERATE.md.
  • Quest-item gives, scene flips and weapon input land reliably under the throttle. A one-frame event (an inventory item-use, a full-scene flip, a hero action or fire edge) promotes a frame that would have been skipped into a single simulation step, so the event cannot fall into the gap between steps. Held movement is deliberately excluded: that is state the throttle is right to skip (#392, #411, #413).
  • The holomap globe rotates at a constant rate rather than one proportional to frame rate, so holding a direction no longer spins it away on a high-refresh display (#390).
  • The end-credits walkers travel at a constant rate and stay staggered instead of bunching, in both the attract-reel credits and the ending (#421).

Transitions & fades

Scene changes and full-screen videos are bracketed by a fade through black. Under SDL most of that had stopped working, in five separate ways.

  • Scene and FMV fades ramp again instead of cutting straight through, with actors no longer popping in at full brightness. The palette ramp was timed off the audio sample-fade countdown, which runs on wall-clock time and keeps advancing across the synchronous scene load, so the fade finished in a single step. It now runs on the managed clock (#374).
  • Actors, NPCs, doors and item drops fade with the scene instead of snapping. On the way out they vanished the instant the fade began, before the scene darkened; on the way in the terrain faded up without them and they appeared at full brightness a frame after the fade finished. Only the terrain was fading. One fix covers scene loads, FMV reveals, menu fades and white flashes (#417).
  • Lit-to-lit palette crossfades ramp instead of snapping to the target palette. About ten scenes fire one on entry, mostly island arrivals (Citadel harbor, White Leaf Desert city center, Otringal harbor, Francos), so it shows in the title-screen attract reel (#418).
  • The next scene no longer flashes at full brightness for a frame before fading in at the end of an FMV, and the video fades out at its tail again. Both were worse the higher your frame rate (#415).
  • The letterbox slides out at the end of a cutscene instead of sticking on screen, sometimes indefinitely if you stood still, and then popping (#375).

See docs/TRANSITIONS.md.

Music

  • A scene's music plays out and then hands over, instead of being deferred forever or cut mid-phrase. Entering an area while a different track was still looping left the new area silent until a menu toggle nudged it; the queued track now takes over once the current one finishes, and the chain keeps working across successive areas. Scripted music, cutscenes, FMVs and menus still switch immediately, as before (#376, #420). See docs/MUSIC.md.

Camera

The Auto camera (the opt-in FollowCamera third-person follow, off by default, exterior scenes only) filled out further this cycle.

  • Hold-angle, on by default: the camera keeps whatever angle you set with the stick or mouse instead of drifting back behind the hero once the grace window expires, which is how a free third-person camera behaves. It re-centres only on a scene change or an explicit Center camera. cam_hold_angle 0 restores the classic drift-back; the lba2.cfg key is FollowCamHoldAngle (#348).
  • Manual camera control with a mouse: right-drag orbits and tilts the follow camera, the wheel zooms, and middle-click recenters behind the hero. All three axes run through one shared ApplyManualCameraNudge routine that clamps each axis and re-engages the follow grace period, so the source (mouse now, stick next) doesn't matter. Supersedes the earlier mouse-camera work (#337). See docs/CAMERA.md.
  • The gamepad right stick drives that same orbit and tilt through the shared routine, so the feel (clamps, tight orbit lerp, follow re-engage) matches the mouse. Per-axis deadzone and sensitivity, with the analog path suppressing the digital RSTICK_* scancodes so it never double-drives the camera (#338). See docs/CONTROLLER.md.
  • Auto-camera world awareness, so the follow camera reads the scene the way the classic camera and a human at the stick do. An HD vertical-FOV recompose pulls the boom in and steepens pitch in proportion to render height, so a taller framebuffer no longer fills the frame with sky; a smooth port of the classic SearchCameraPos lifts the eye over terrain between the camera and the hero; and a manual-override fade hands control back gradually after a manual pan. Scoped to the auto-cam exterior path (the classic camera, the 480 path, and isometric interiors are byte-identical); the 1080p recompose is flagged experimental (#343).
  • Live camera tuning from the console: cam_* cvars expose the follow feel constants (stick speed, re-center, distance, pitch) at runtime and persist to lba2.cfg, so the camera can be tuned without a recompile (#339).
  • FollowCamera fixes: it no longer re-renders the full terrain on every idle frame, and a rotation dead-zone gap that kept an idle exterior from settling is closed (#308).
  • The exterior near-clip plane now scales with render height, so HD modes no longer clip scene geometry early (#342).

Render

  • Character eyes and other small round body features are the right size in interior and isometric scenes. They rendered a pixel too big, which read as oversized square billboards on Grobo and firefly-tart models indoors while outdoors was correct. The isometric branch of Sphere() had mistranslated the original assembly's negate as a bitwise NOT, dropping the +1. The exterior path was already correct and is byte-for-byte unchanged (#380).

Input & controller

  • The gamepad is a first-class input source instead of a pass bolted on after the fact. It was OR'd into Input after GetInput() had already rebuilt the state and applied the repeat filter, which broke two things: holding camera recenter (pad B) stopped Twinsen dead, fatal in the continuous protopack sections where he then drowns, and a held menu, inventory or behaviour button re-opened the overlay instead of closing it. Bindings now fold into the same key and mask table the keyboard builds. Keyboard behaviour is unchanged (#346).
  • The end credits can be skipped and exited with a controller. It was the last screen still blind to the pad. Sticks and triggers are deliberately excluded, since a resting stick drifts past the deadzone and would end the credits by accident (#367).
  • The D-pad is no longer aliased to the left stick and can be bound independently. It no longer turns Twinsen; by default it casts the four spells (Protection, Jetpack, Pingouin, Foudre). Movement stays on the left stick and the triggers, and every action is rebindable to the D-pad in the controls menu (#373). See docs/CONTROLLER.md.

Saves

  • Saves are portable across 32-bit and 64-bit builds and byte-compatible with retail. A 64-bit build wrote its own native struct layout, so its saves did not match retail's on disk; writes now go through a fixed 32-bit wire layout. Nothing you already have is invalidated: retail 32-bit saves load directly, and existing 64-bit saves from a community build load through a native-first read and migrate on the next save. The on-disk format version is unchanged (#386). See docs/SAVEGAME.md.
  • The per-scene autosave is back. Every genuine scene transition writes a fresh autosave.lba checkpoint again, closing the gap where a crash or a hard quit after crossing several scenes without opening the pause menu dropped you back at your last menu visit. Console cube warps and menu loads do not set it, so they cannot clobber your autosave (#349).
  • The in-game quick save shows the "Game saved" confirmation and plays the chime. It was writing the save correctly and saying nothing about it, which looked like it had done nothing (#347).

Disc image support

  • The engine can read retail assets straight from a raw ISO/BIN disc image, so a GOG DRM-free Original Edition install (LBA2.GOG) plays with no extraction step: VIDEO.HQR, the music WAVs, and the .VOX voices that live only inside the BIN are resolved through the mounted image, including the external cue audio track. The image is detected by its ISO9660 content (the CD001 volume descriptor), not by name, so a .gog, a raw .bin/.iso, or a .cue/.dat pair all work, and the reader is asset-source-agnostic for later LBA1 reuse (#322). See docs/DISC_IMAGE_SOURCE.md.

Console & harness

  • F12 console keyboard overhaul: command history on Up/Down, Page Up/Down and the wheel for scrollback, mid-line editing (Left/Right/Home/End/ Delete with a blinking cursor), Tab completion over commands, cvars and built-ins, clipboard shortcuts, a two-stage Esc, and character entry routed through SDL text input (#331).
  • Text selection with copy: Shift+arrows and Ctrl+A in the input line, mouse drag and double-click across the scrollback, the OS cursor shown while the console is open, right-click to copy, and a click in the game area closes the console (#332).
  • Hardening from an architecture review: a single CP437/Unicode table replacing two hand-synced switch tables, a loud table-overflow, and an input test seam. The mouse-selection, input-line, and render-overlay statics were then grouped into structs with centralized teardown (#333, #334, #335, #336).
  • Intentional blank lines are preserved in the console output (#330).
  • The control harness can drive and observe a playthrough headlessly, which is contributor-facing tooling with no gameplay effect. It gained state control (teleport, varcube, vargame, and cube vars in --dump-state), observability (lifetrace for what a Life script checks and does, cubetrace for scene-to-scene flow), input (useitem, and input for held hero input, metered in simulation ticks so a hold survives the throttle), a way past blocking dialogue modals (skipmodals), and zone geometry (zonelist), so a script can drive to a trigger rather than guess at it (#393, #395, #396, #397, #398, #399, #400, #401, #438).
  • The engine refuses a command line it would otherwise misread. A typo'd flag used to fall through, boot at defaults and exit 0, handing back a confident wrong answer; unknown flags and missing values now exit 2. One arity-aware table drives both validation and the usage text, which is split into --help (a short player-facing subset) and --help-all (the full grouped list including automation and self-test flags). lba2cc --help used to open a window and sit there (#435).
  • Harness runs are reproducible and no longer overwrite your saves. The engine pauses on focus loss, which is right for a player and silently wrong for automation: six identical parallel runs produced five distinct simulation states. --headless pins the SDL dummy drivers, --no-autosave suppresses the implicit save writers, and --exec-at <tick> schedules console commands on a given tick. A --load that resolves to nothing now fails the run instead of quietly booting a fresh game (#436). See docs/CONSOLE.md and docs/CONTROL.md.

Config & stability

  • A corrupt lba2.cfg no longer costs you your saved resolution. On Windows a garbage run at the head of the file printed three DefFileBufferInit: buffer too small lines at boot and dropped the display back to auto-detect despite a saved ResolutionX/ResolutionY. No setting was ever lost, only unread. Over-long separator-less lines are now excised in place and the boot read buffer grows from 8 KB to 64 KB. The underlying cause, that the config buffer aliases the shared graphics scratch buffer so an interrupted write can stamp graphics bytes into the file, is tracked separately (#441).
  • An explicit --game-dir that doesn't hold the game data is refused with a message naming what it wanted, instead of being silently discarded so the engine boots a different install and mentions it only in the banner. An explicit path now also probes a Common/ inside it, matching how auto-discovery already probes data/ and game/. Separately, a batch or headless run can no longer hang forever on the folder picker, and the recovery message points at the README.txt a release ships rather than a file that only exists in the source tree (#437).
  • First-launch data-discovery dialogs are shorter and correct per platform. The "couldn't open folder picker" box used to dump a per-distro Linux install matrix into a modal on every platform, including macOS and Windows, and Android had no path through the flow at all (SDL's file dialog hands back a content:// URI, not a path). Each box is now one statement plus the action, and Android gets a self-contained copy-your-data message (#345). See docs/GAME_DATA.md.
  • A global log level, defaulting to INFO, gates the log file, the terminal and the F12 console together, set with --log-level, the LBA2_LOG_LEVEL environment variable, or the loglevel console command. Debug output used to be hardwired on. The stderr sink always emits, plain and severity-tagged when redirected, so a headless or CI run is legible without opening adeline.log (#385).
  • Atomic, crash-safe config writes. Every save funnelled through an O_TRUNC open on the live lba2.cfg and re-spliced the in-memory buffer back out across several writes, leaving a corruption window open about 30 times per settings change. Writes now go to a temp file with fsync and an atomic rename, batched into a single fsync and rename per save, so a crash or power loss can no longer truncate the config (#340).
  • HQR caches are sized in bytes rather than MiB. AvailableMem() returns MiB but AdjustHQRMem() treated it as bytes, so every cache clamped to its minimum regardless of installed RAM. At its minimum the island-object cache held about one decor body, reloading a body per visible object in object-dense exterior islands (#321).
  • VOC detection now gates on the 19-byte signature instead of the first byte, which is not a reliable discriminator (standard VOC starts with C, LBA voice banks with 0x00, some LBA1 entries with 0x01). The parser was extracted into a pure, SDL-free module pinned by a host test (#320).
  • The Windows console is set to UTF-8 so the boot banner renders (#309), and the boot-log banner and section lines are bold cyan (#329).
  • Harness screenshots capture Log (the presented buffer) rather than Screen (#313).

Build & packaging

  • patchelf added to the AppImage build (#318 by @Samueru-sama).
  • clang-format is pinned to major 18 from a single source of truth. It was pinned to 17 in four places, each silently falling back to an unversioned clang-format (18 or newer on a current toolchain), so the fallback was the common path and contributors formatted with one major, passed the local hook, then failed CI. No reformatting churn: the tree was already clean under 18 (#444).
  • CI pins SDL3 in the test image to release-3.2.16 after a stale-image drift (#324).

Documentation

  • New subsystem references, several written off the back of the bugs they explain: the movement and frame-rate model (docs/MOVEMENT_FRAMERATE.md), the music state machine (docs/MUSIC.md), the scene and FMV fade-in reveal system (docs/TRANSITIONS.md), and the text engine (docs/TEXT.md), whose format claims are verified by decoding the retail TEXT.HQR and which pins why that file is frozen: voice lines are keyed positionally, so reordering a bank desyncs every line after it across 39 voice files (#388, #379, #416, #431).
  • A shared definition of "bit exact" (docs/BIT_EXACTNESS.md). The phrase appeared across some twenty docs with no agreed meaning, which let it both block and justify changes by assumption; it now splits into three jobs with different rules (format contract, ASM-parity oracle, regression tripwire) (#414).
  • Plans of record: the portable save format (docs/plan/SAVE_WIRE_PLAN.md), harness input simulation (docs/plan/INPUT_SIM_PLAN.md), and render interpolation (docs/plan/RENDER_INTERP_PLAN.md), the last parked on merge because the fixed-timestep work already fixed the problem it targeted (#386, #438, #439, #440).
  • An index of the 39 tracked build, CI and packaging scripts, each row naming what runs it (scripts/README.md) (#446).
  • The widescreen docs are reconciled against the code after drifting behind it: HD-height render correctness is closed, and the remaining Phase 7 work is legibility rather than correctness (#445).
  • New references and plans from earlier in the cycle: an isometric-renderer hardcoded-pixel audit (docs/ISO_SPACE_AUDIT.md), an in-place Platform Abstraction Layer audit and extraction plan (docs/plan/PLATFORM_PAL_PLAN.md), a plan for hosting LBA1 on the lba2cc engine (docs/plan/LBA1_PORT_PLAN.md), the gamepad camera controls (docs/CONTROLLER.md), and a note on the video seam's two halves (#312, #317, #319, #327).

Contributors

A huge thank you to EPmager, whose playtesting shaped most of this release. Thirteen of the bugs fixed here started as his reports and feedback on Discord, across nearly every area the release touches: frame-rate-dependent movement (#358) and the held-input weapon bugs that came with the fix (#407), the end-credits walkers (#403), the mistimed scene and FMV fades (#404), the cutscene letterbox (#354), a scene's music going silent (#355) and then hard-cutting (#406), oversized billboards (#357), ghost doors (#424), culled actor shadows (#408), FMVs not scaling to widescreen (#428), the D-pad mappings (#360), and Mr. Bazoo ignoring a Meca-Penguin set off in his shop (#409). He field-tested the fixes too, on Windows with an Xbox controller and on Android arm64. That setup is most of the point: a high frame rate with vsync off, a gamepad, and an arm64 handheld are exactly the conditions a Linux dev box and a headless CI run never reach, and most of these bugs are invisible without them. The follow-up regressions the fixed-timestep work introduced were caught the same way.

Thanks to @xesf for play-testing on the Steam Deck.

Welcome to a new contributor since v0.11.0: @Samueru-sama for the patchelf addition to the AppImage build (#318).

0.11.0 - 2026-06-05

Widescreen & runtime resolution (opt-in)

  • Widescreen support, selectable from the new Display options submenu in the game menu. Alongside the classic 4:3 mode, the menu offers a Widescreen mode derived from your monitor's aspect ratio (for example 16:9 at 848×480). It keeps the game's native 480-line vertical resolution and simply reveals more of the scene to the sides, so it reads as a natural fit on a modern display without changing gameplay, art, or the HUD. The choice persists to lba2.cfg, and the same submenu now also holds the Windowed/Fullscreen toggle (#237, #238, #240, #241, #244, #259, #290). See docs/RUNTIME_RESOLUTION.md.
  • Arbitrary render sizes are available but experimental: --resolution WxH at launch or the console resolution verb (320×200 to 1920×1024, width a multiple of 8), with a 15-second keep/revert safety dialog on a live switch. Taller, HD-height modes in particular still have unfinished surfaces (terrain and a few HD-only paths), so the curated Display-menu modes are the recommended path for now (#212, #239).
  • Under the hood, every 2D surface re-anchored to the live framebuffer size instead of a hardcoded 320/240 centre, so menus and overlays stay put at any width: the main menu, save/load, config, inventory, in-game messages and dialogs, the holomap and holo-globe, the behaviour-selector and found-object modals, and the ambient-sound pan. PCX cinematic dialogs are letterboxed inside the picture; Smacker cutscenes, the Adeline/EA bumper slides, and quest images centre with sampled-edge sidebars instead of stretch or garbage (#213, #214, #216, #217, #218, #219, #221, #223, #224, #226, #228, #246, #247, #248, #260, #289).
  • The 3D render pipeline routes through the framebuffer dimensions rather than literal 640/480: iso projection setup, brick bounding boxes and clip scans, the iso grid origin, Z-buffer allocation, and the vertical render extent (previously pinned to 480). Several row-stride and thumbnail bugs the hardcoded-dimensions audit surfaced were fixed along the way, including garbage rows in 16:9 save thumbnails (#199, #200, #201, #203, #204, #205, #206, #209, #210, #211, #215, #220, #222, #258, #262, #291). See docs/WIDESCREEN.md.

Android & Android TV (new platform)

  • Android and Android TV builds (arm64-v8a and armeabi-v7a). Because the engine already runs on SDL3, this was primarily a new build target (an NDK + SDL3 Android toolchain and APK packaging), plus a thin Android platform layer for what desktop doesn't need: touch input, storage-permission handling, the TV leanback launcher path, and 16 KB memory-page support for the newer Android page-size requirement. The Android specifics sit behind a LIB386/SYSTEM/ANDROID seam (external-files dir, permission prompt, TV detection, present-path staging buffer), so the rest of the engine stays ifdef-free (#261 by @Link4Electronics; #282, #283, #284, #285, #287). See docs/ANDROID.md.

Boot diagnostics & logging

  • Structured boot log with file and terminal sinks and an asset-preflight check, so a missing or incomplete game-data folder reports what's wrong instead of failing opaquely. Fatal boot errors now raise a native dialog and exit non-zero. The boot log also feeds an in-engine console buffer, starts before game-data discovery, colours its bookends and the console, and carries accurate config-bootstrap and gamepad-connect messages (#269, #270, #272, #297, #298, #299, #300).
  • Logging unified behind a single fan-out in LIB386/SYSTEM: LogPrintf/LogPuts route through it, display and SDL errors carry real severity, format-string risks are closed, and the log core moved into LIB386 so the game and engine share one path (#274, #276, #277, #278, #279).
  • A lba2.cfg left with embedded NUL bytes (for example a process killed mid-rewrite) is now treated as empty on load, so the next write regenerates a clean file from defaults instead of propagating the corruption on every save (#296).

New features

  • GOD and SENDELL cheats, run from the console: god makes Twinsen ignore combat damage, and sendell lets him one-shot anything he hits. Run either again to toggle it off. A short, glorious turn as an invincible, omnipotent Twinsen (#288).
  • Exit-screen easter egg on a clean shutdown (#264).

Audio

  • Gameplay music now resumes at its previous position when you return from the menu instead of restarting, and the resume path no longer destroys the SDL stream in the CD-ROM build. Music and samples pause while the window is unfocused, and cutscenes freeze on focus loss rather than desyncing their audio. Console audio music pause/resume verbs and an audio global log trace toggle were added for diagnosis (#303). See docs/AUDIO.md.
  • The engine no longer exits when the sample-sound driver fails to initialise; it continues without sample audio (#233).

Stability & fixes

  • Installed voice files are guarded from accidental deletion, with a warning when a voice (.vox) pack is incomplete (#295).
  • Save-name text entry switches to the keyboard path only on a physical keyboard, so gamepad-only sessions stay on the auto-named-save path (#286).
  • The SDL window is created fullscreen up front when configured that way, instead of starting windowed and toggling (#271).
  • Timer fix: LastTime is held across the TimerLock window so a render-plus-vsync interval isn't dropped. That regression surfaced in the SDL port, now pinned by a unit test (#252).

Developer tooling & automation

  • A headless CLI control harness for automation and regression: scripted runs, deterministic --fixed-dt mode, a --demo attract mode with a pinned RNG seed, plus --dump-state, --language, --no-audio, --verbose, save-corpus baselines, and harness speedups (skip the CD splash, disable vsync, parallel --jobs) (#162, #163, #164, #166, #167, #169, #171, #172, #173, #175, #178, #230, #234, #249, #251, #254). See docs/CONTROL.md.
  • Projection-regression tooling (projrec): captures every screen coordinate the projection pipeline produces and hashes it into a committed baseline, catching projection drift across platforms and the widescreen refactor (#193, #194, #195, #197).
  • UI-capture console verbs (ui inventory|holomap|dialog|menu-options) that render a UI surface headless to a byte-identical PNG golden, including a wide-width differential mode and a --black-bg cleanroom variant (#182, #183, #184, #185, #186, #256, #257).
  • perftrace: per-frame timing capture as a permanent dev tool (#253).

Documentation

  • New architecture references: engine foundations and the LBA1 porting surface, an engine file-format reference (HQR / XCF / CD-image tooling), and a CODESTYLE.md (#263, #292, #293, #294).
  • docs/RUNTIME_RESOLUTION.md, a hardcoded-dimensions audit, and extensive widescreen-campaign notes (#207, #227, #229).
  • Plus control-harness, logging, scenes, initialisation, and release-process doc updates across the cycle.

Contributors

Thanks to @Link4Electronics for bringing up the initial Android and Android TV build (#261).

0.10.0 - 2026-05-17

New features (opt-in)

  • Cross-platform first-launch folder picker: when no retail game data is found via the usual discovery paths (./data, ../LBA2, LBA2_GAME_DIR, --game-dir), the engine now prompts for the install folder via the native system file dialog instead of exiting with an error. Picked path is persisted to a user-config file for next run; pass --pick-game-dir to force the picker again. Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux (zenity / xdg-desktop-portal-* on Linux, with explanatory fallback text when no backend is installed) (#107, #111).
  • Save/load list now navigable with gamepad D-pad (#79).
  • Auto-named saves for gamepad users: gamepad input on the save-name prompt skips text entry and writes a scene-aware default name in the form <scene> - YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS (e.g. Citadel Island - 2026-05-17 14-30-00). The scene portion is localised across the six menu languages (sourced from the retail TEXT.HQR file 2); the date/time portion is fixed %Y-%m-%d %H-%M-%S. Long names clip with a marquee in the save list; post-save success chime + "Game saved" overlay (#151).
  • Console give command now actually grants inventory items instead of only playing the found-object cinematic. It takes an item name (give conch), with the numeric index still accepted as a fallback; run give with no arguments to list every item name. Countable items accept an optional count (give gem 5, give money 5000, give clover 3) (#143) — see docs/CONSOLE.md.
  • Console slide command jumps directly to a distributor/bumper slide (Adeline, EA, etc.); companion distrib command lists the available slide IDs (#116).

Stability & fixes

  • ScaleSprite scaled path restored. A 2024 ASM→CPP port had stripped the scaled-output branches, leaving the function effectively unscaled for months. The most visible symptom in-game: world-space sprites that should shrink with distance no longer did — the magic ball, for example, stayed the same size as it flew away from Twinsen in exterior scenes instead of receding with distance. The regression went unnoticed because the existing test only varied numerator/x/y, not the scale factor. Mirrored back from SCALESPT ASM, and the test matrix extended to cover factor sweeps (#148).
  • TempoRealAngle extern conflict in savegame load: DEBUG_TOOLS=ON builds failed to compile because PR #62's stride-retry refactor introduced a wrong-typed extern S32 TempoRealAngle next to the existing file-scope T_REAL_VALUE_HR definition. Default builds were unaffected (the block is #if-gated out). Fix removes the redundant extern (#146).
  • GereExtras no longer reads uninitialised old-position memory (#142).
  • Undefined-behaviour hardening pass from the static-analysis sweep: shift-by-32 UB in the POLYGOUR dither rotate, signed-overflow in I_WEAPON_7 / A_FLIP bit masks, and TheEndCheckFile marked noreturn to close null-deref paths flagged downstream (#140).
  • deffile config parser: signed-char EOL desync and self-aliasing strcpy cleaned up. Bug A was user-reported: a lba2.cfg containing Language: Français (or any other Latin-1 high-bit byte) corrupted on successive rewrites — 21 stray çais lines spliced in and all 144 keyboard + gamepad bindings reset to zero. Bug B was an overlapping strcpy(FileName, file) caught by ASan against the GOG TLBA2 Classic package on shutdown. Both were old, both UB. Host-only regression test added under host_quick (#115, #132).
  • Terrain vertex projection: dropped the no-op / off-by-one +0.5 rounding bias that desynced terrain vertex positions from the rest of the scene (#145).

Refactoring

  • Framebuffer dimensions extracted to RESOLUTION_X / RESOLUTION_Y in a new LIB386/H/SYSTEM/RESOLUTION.H. Cinema bars and sort-tree preclip now route through ModeDesiredX/Y instead of hardcoded 640/480. Foundation for the widescreen / higher-resolution rendering work (#134).

Game data, config, and UX

  • lba2.cfg defaults modernised for the open-source era: fullscreen on by default (DisplayFullScreen=1), Version row defaults tightened to match the shipping engine (#117).

Tools

  • scripts/dev/extract_lba2_gog_media.py extracts the retail media tree from the GOG Original Edition LBA2.GOG bin/cue image (ISO9660 reader with no external mount/isoinfo dependency). Lets users with the GOG install seed ./data without owning the original CDs (#119, #123).

Cross-platform & build

  • macOS native release artifact: a portable DMG with the .app bundle inside, drag-to-Applications layout, native multi-resolution .icns icon, and an Info.plist populated from the same LBA2_* cache vars that drive the runtime window title, .desktop entry, AppImage labels, and Windows resource. Built for arm64 (Apple Silicon) on tag push; static-linked SDL3, no .dylib dependencies, ad-hoc codesigned to satisfy Apple Silicon's mandatory bundle integrity check. First launch still needs the right-click → Open Gatekeeper bypass (Developer ID + notarization deferred); documented in the README inside the DMG, and the Sequoia (15+) xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine recovery flow is spelled out in docs/RELEASING.md. Intel-Mac users can produce a local DMG via scripts/dev/build-macos-release.sh --preset macos_x86_64 while hosted Intel runners are unreliable (#102, #103, #105, #106, #149).
  • Linux binary tarball release artifact alongside the AppImage: same static-linked single-binary layout, drop-in for distros where AppImage FUSE is a hassle. libxtst-dev added to the tarball build deps after the first CI run surfaced the missing X11 link (#124, #125).
  • Post-release smoke-test script (scripts/dev/verify-release.sh) downloads each published Linux artifact, runs the discovery self-tests, and reports per-asset pass/fail. Pointers added to the releasing recipe and announcement steps (#126, #127).
  • Rolling latest pre-release: every push to main triggers a CI build of all three platforms (Linux AppImages, Windows ZIP, macOS DMG) and force-updates a latest-tagged GitHub Release. Marked pre-release; the most recent stable tag keeps GitHub's "Latest" promotion. Lets community testers grab bleeding-edge main builds without cloning + building (#108) — see docs/RELEASING.md "Rolling latest pre-release".
  • Release workflow hardening: low-friction release-target additions, CI path filters so doc-only pushes skip the heavy matrix, pinned setup-sdl SHA + per-arch cache discriminator after a stale-cache drift incident (#129, #130).

CI & developer workflow

  • clang-tidy static-analysis pass wired into CI, with a tuned check-list that silences bulk-noise categories (Watcom-era idioms, C-style casts in ported code) while keeping the high-signal UB / memory-safety / portability checks. The first analysis pass produced the UB-hardening fixes listed above (#139, #141).
  • Docs-only gate for the required build/test checks so README/CHANGELOG edits don't block on the full matrix (#136).
  • Optional pre-commit hook running check-format.sh for contributors who'd rather catch clang-format mismatches locally than in CI (#133).

Documentation

  • docs/WIDESCREEN.md — phased plan (A–E) for the widescreen / higher-resolution work, with the framebuffer-extraction refactor above as its first landed phase (#135).
  • docs/CI.md — map of the CI workflow surface (matrix builds, gates, release flow) so contributors can reason about a failing job without spelunking the YAML (#137).
  • docs/SPRITES.md — sprite/blit pipeline reference, including the ScaleSprite path layout and the test gap that hid the scaled-path regression for months.
  • docs/AUDIO.md extended with the retail audio asset inventory: what's ADPCM-WAV, what's MIDI, and which backend owns which path.

Contributors

Welcome to a new contributor since v0.9.0: @b-tuma — gamepad D-pad navigation for the save/load list (#79).

0.9.0 - 2026-05-09

First tagged release. Cross-platform builds (Linux AppImage, Windows ZIP) published at v0.9.0.

The list below is hand-curated from merged PRs and tells the story of the fork's evolution.

Highlights since the fork

The biggest architectural shift is portability. The playable game now builds as pure C/C++ against SDL3 and libsmacker, with no ASM toolchain on the build path. The original 16/32-bit x86 assembly is still in the tree as the source of truth and powers the ASM↔C++ equivalence tests, but it no longer runs in the playable binary. Native builds for Linux x86_64, macOS arm64/x86_64, and Windows (MSYS2 UCRT64). Community members are already running it on handheld devices in the wild.

Stability & 64-bit hardening

  • Magic-school grand-wizard crash on 64-bit hosts — fixed (#78, #84). U32+pointer-wraparound trap in CopyMask, pinned by a host-only regression test.
  • Renderer-side U32+pointer-wrap class named, documented, and swept across ~80 files in SVGA, pol_work, 3D, 3DEXT, GRILLE, INTEXT — one bug fixed (above), six "safe by convention" latent traps recorded (#85, #86, #87, #88, #89, #90)
  • Endgame credits segfault on 64-bit hosts — fixed (#65, #66)
  • Legacy 32-bit .lba saves load safely on 64-bit builds, with a corpus harness to prevent regressions (#62, #63)
  • 32-bit on-disk ABI rule and credits HQR layout codified in docs (#67)
  • Linux exterior draw-order bug — SinTab/CosTab arrays merged into a single contiguous block to match the original ASM layout (#55)
  • Compiler warnings cleaned up across GCC, Clang, and MinGW (#52)
  • Bezier C++ memory corruption — fixed (#8)

New features (opt-in)

All new features default-off or default-to-original-behavior, in line with AGENTS.md Principle 3.

  • Quake-style debug console: built-in, always available, configurable toggle key, host-tested (#23, #24, #60) — see docs/CONSOLE.md
  • SDL3 gamepad support (#38, #58)
  • Optional exterior auto-camera centering (FollowCamera) (#37, #50) — see docs/CAMERA.md
  • Menu mouse QoL: hover, selection, marquee for long text, keyboard takes priority over mouse hover (#41, #53, #56)
  • Original Adeline debug tools re-enabled behind DEBUG_TOOLS=ON (#17, #22) — see docs/DEBUG.md

Game data, config, and UX

  • Auto-discovery of retail game data (./data, ../LBA2, LBA2_GAME_DIR, --game-dir); embedded default config; clearer startup errors (#54) — see docs/GAME_DATA.md
  • Menus reorganized to match LBA2 Original from GOG (#42)
  • Menu language selection (#42)
  • Menu music and jingle handling — fixed (#43)
  • Case-sensitive music paths on Linux — fixed (#12)

Audio/video backends

  • SDL audio backend with Miles parity gap tracking (#27, #28, #9)
  • SDL renderer presentation path with LTO and inline rotates (#11, #51)
  • Early SDL bring-up for renderer/audio in the fork's first cross-platform phase, plus follow-up SDL3 AIL-linking fixes (#6, #9, #11, e9ba7d8)
  • Smacker FMV via libsmacker; video audio routed through the AIL backend (#10, #29, #35)

Ported (ASM → C++)

  • Object display, rendering helpers, and supporting math via the ASM-validation framework, with byte-for-byte equivalence tests (#31, #32)
  • Early renderer/SVGA/object-display ASM→CPP ports (polygon fillers, blitters/sprites, and object rendering), which established the base for later validation-driven porting work (#6)
  • See docs/ASM_TO_CPP_REFERENCE.md for the full port-status table.

Cross-platform & build

  • First Linux release artifact: AppImage built in CI from an any-linux base, packaged as a single portable binary (#74)
  • First Windows release artifact: a portable ZIP (lba2cc-<version>-windows-x64.zip) built in CI under MSYS2 UCRT64 with SDL3 and the GCC C++ runtime static-linked. Drop the single lba2cc.exe into your existing LBA2 install folder — no DLLs, no installer, no registry entries. Follows the same release-workflow conventions as the AppImage flow (matrix build → idempotent gh-release attach), see docs/RELEASING.md.
  • Product metadata (executable name, display name, description, desktop ID) centralized into CMake cache variables so the runtime window title, .desktop entry, and AppImage script all consume one source (#83). Window title now shows the version (e.g. LBA2 Classic Community 0.9.0-dev) — previously just LBA2.
  • Default binary renamed lba2 → lba2cc to avoid colliding with the retail executables (lba2.exe, tlba2.exe, tlba2c.exe). Path is now build/SOURCES/lba2cc[.exe]. Override-able via -DLBA2_EXECUTABLE_NAME=... for anyone shipping a custom branded build.
  • Windows .exe now ships with an embedded application icon and populated File Properties → Details (Product Name, File Description, Product Version, Original Filename). Strings flow from the same LBA2_* cache vars that feed the runtime window title, .desktop entry, and AppImage labels. Pre-release versions (anything carrying -dev/-dirty/-rc suffix) are flagged with VS_FF_PRERELEASE in VERSIONINFO.
  • macOS CI build (arm64); macOS x86_64 preset (#52)
  • Portable Windows build via MSYS2 UCRT64 (#14) — see docs/WINDOWS.md
  • CMake presets for Linux, macOS arm64/x86_64, Windows UCRT64, and cross-compile Linux→Windows (#21)
  • SDL3 throughout (audio, video, renderer)
  • Default Windows preset switched to Release
  • clang-format with checked-in config; ASM and LIB386/libsmacker/ excluded (#36)
  • Host-only discovery tests run on Linux/macOS/Windows in CI without Docker or retail files (#54)

Tests

  • ASM↔CPP equivalence test framework with byte-for-byte assertions and randomized stress rounds (#31) — see docs/TESTING.md
  • Polyrec replay with --bisect for finding the first divergent draw call between ASM and CPP renderers
  • Tightened assertions across POLYFLAT, POLYGOUR, POLYDISC, POLYTEXT, POLYGTEX, AFF_OBJ, FPU precision, and the resampler (#44)

Documentation

Pre-PR foundations

Most of what made this fork buildable and cross-platform predates the PR workflow. The themes from that direct-commit era — CMake build system and MinGW cross-compile to Windows (@leokolln), macOS M1 build, the bulk of the LIB386 ASM→C++ port, and the ASM↔CPP equivalence test infrastructure (@sergiou87), early renderer/SVGA/object-display ASM→CPP ports (@xesf), all building on @yaz0r's original buildable prototype — are credited under Contributors below.

The earliest PR-tracked entries that sit alongside that work:

  • File encoding preservation (#1)
  • Preservation docs and build configuration clarity (#13)

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who's worked on this fork to date: @gwen-gg, @innerbytes, @leokolln, @Link4Electronics, @noctonca, @sergiou87, @xesf, @yaz0r.

Special thanks to the contributors whose foundational work this fork stands on:

  • @sergiou87 — macOS M1 build, the bulk of the LIB386 ASM→C++ port, and the ASM↔CPP equivalence test infrastructure that makes the cross-platform port verifiable.
  • @leokolln — the cross-platform build foundation: CMake build system and presets, MinGW cross-compile to Windows, UASM ASM modernisation, 64-bit Linux preset, AIL sound backend structure, and Linux CI.
  • @xesf — implementation work across SVGA, 3D object rendering, brick handling, and AffString, plus the CopyMask Tavern crash fix and widescreen Steam Deck work.
  • @yaz0r — the original buildable prototype that the cross-platform fork was built on.

A big thank you to Gwen Gourevich (@gwen-gg) and 2.21 for open-sourcing the original code, and to the original Adeline Software team whose code this builds on.