Changelog

All notable changes to MetroForge Desktop (metroforge-native). Format follows Keep a Changelog; versions are git tags of the form vX.Y.Z-alpha, each published with smoke-gated artifacts for Linux, Windows, and macOS (arm64). Sidecar/data changes land in the sibling metroforge repo and reach releases via the pinned sidecar SHA in release.yml.

[Unreleased]#

Added#

• Photo / cinematic mode: P toggles free-fly camera (HUD hidden, local time-of-day scrubber, FOV, optional letterbox), F12 saves a PNG to the Pictures folder, and 2-4 keyframe Catmull-Rom paths for trailer shots
• Bulletproof sidecar crash recovery for 1.0: detect process exit vs websocket silence (>5s), auto-restart with re-handshake + autosave restore under a "Reconnecting to simulation" overlay (no MainMenu bounce), friendly diagnostics screen with log tail + copy button after 3 failed restarts, process-group / PDEATHSIG (Unix) and Job Object kill-on-close (Windows) orphan prevention, stale-sidecar reap on startup, and MF_TEST_KILL_SIDECAR recovery harness (optional CI job).
• Crash handling: local panic reports (message, backtrace, OS/GPU, version, last 200 log lines) under the OS data dir; next-launch dismissible notice with Open report location / Continue / Safe mode; --safe-mode forces Potato and disables weather (bloom/outlines follow Potato); sidecar stderr captured to a rotating log
• Windows desktop polish wave 2 (#72): DPI-aware scaling, F11/Alt+Enter borderless fullscreen (persisted), window size/position recall, rendering pause on minimize/alt-tab, single-instance focus guard, native icon in .exe header + VERSIONINFO block, OS-native crash reports.

Changed#

• Performance measurement harness (MF_PERF): Bevy diagnostics, render-pass spans, visibility LOD truth (#77). Measurement-first pass on hot paths.

[0.5.0-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

The "night and detail" release. City-scale night lighting, building windows, stylized water, the minimap, tutorial for new players, save hardening, and sim-depth economy transparency.

Added#

• Night lighting systems: bloom-mapped street lamps + headlights, city glow overlay, per-building window emission (#68).
• Procedural building facade detail: night-lit windows, rooftop geometry, LOD transitions from prism outline to detailed mass (#64).
• Stylized water shader with quality-tier gating: Mirror's Edge-clean with mesh waves, Sobel edge detection at the shoreline, foam trail on vehicle wake (#65).
• Collapsible HUD minimap: N toggle, click-to-pan, cached quad-tree layers for district/route dimming (#70).
• Sim-depth economy UI fields in the native client, bridging the sidecar's demand/utilization/supply fields into building panels and diagnostics (#74).
• Hardened save/load: versioned wrapper schema with migration registry, atomic writes + backup recovery, autosave ring of 3 (Settings-controlled interval), and title-screen Load Game browser with per-slot metadata (#67).

Changed#

• CI workflow: parallelize release builds across Linux/Windows/macOS, reducing full-release runtime from ~22 min to ~10-12 min (#69).

Fixed#

• Potato/Low tier title-screen horizon: paper-map terrain rendering now includes per-tier fog to mask draw-distance pop-in; frame city in viewport with orthographic scale (#76).

[0.4.2-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

The "streets actually render" release. v0.4.1 shipped with no visible roads in real cities (three stacked rendering bugs); this supersedes it.

Fixed#

• Roads rebuilt when the sim's fields version changes; previously they baked once against first-version terrain heights and ended up buried under the relief that arrived a version later (#38).
• Road surface lift raised 0.5m → 2m: at overview zoom on near-flat terrain the ribbons lost the depth fight against the terrain mesh and the whole street grid vanished from skyline framings (#41).
• Water-crossing road segments ride an 8m bridge deck instead of hugging water level, where only a black sliver of the ribbon surfaced (#41).
• Terrain graded flat in corridors under roads and around stations, ending the stripe-through-building artifact on slopes (#37, closes #33).
• CI workflow had been failing at 0s since the v0.4 integration commit — a duplicate with: key made ci.yml unparseable (#36).
• Sidecar (metroforge #24): procedural relief for real cities damped ~70% and faded to sea level near shorelines — flat urban islands (Roosevelt Island) no longer render as sand dunes.
• Sidecar (metroforge #25): city imports expand their bbox to a true square in meters, so the world square fills edge to edge (nyc road coverage 359→519 of 576 grid cells — Brooklyn and New Jersey now have streets); road polylines are clipped at the map edge instead of running off-world.

Added#

• Theme system (#39, closes #32): Light (unchanged default), Dark (standing-night city with glowing routes and dark HUD), and Purple (vaporwave). Selectable in menu/pause, persisted in config.toml, MF_THEME env override.
• Cleveland as the second real-buildings city (metroforge #26): 33,553 OSM vector footprints, regenerated square-fill bundle.

[0.4.1-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Fixed#

• World polish wave (#31): roads-vs-terrain load race, flowing route lines, park trees, blue water, Penn Station footprint cap.

[0.4.0-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• "It's a campaign" (#30): campaign structure, save/load with sidecar hydration, diorama attract mode, promo screenshot harness (MF_PROMO_DIR, MF_HIDE_HUD).

Fixed#

• Buried-streets geometry: densified road polylines (24m), 90m terrain relief cap, footprint-min building bases (#30).

[0.3.0-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• "It's a puzzle" (#28): gravity demand arcs, station and finance panels, map mode, load-fat route stripes, overlay network-dimming doctrine.

[0.2.0-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• "It's a game" (#26): build tools, command bus with undo, build toolbar, route panel, egui design system.

[0.1.5-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• Transit color pop (#22): touching route bundles, wide bands, network demo harness.

Fixed#

• Night lighting on routes (#22); soft high-key lighting and map-style road widths (#23).

[0.1.4-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• building:part rendering via wire v2 (#21): tiered and elevated building masses (77k+ stacked masses in NYC).

Fixed#

• Verify harness determinism: real-road street framing, deterministic reveal, midday capture window (#20).

[0.1.3-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• Cursor + zoom reveal (#19): dithered building dissolve around the pointer and at close camera range.

[0.1.2-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Added#

• Real building footprint prisms with cel shading (#12, #15): NYC renders 67k+ real OSM footprints.
• Pause screen, menu redesign, procedural chiptune SFX, camera smoothing, stable monospace top bar (#11).

Fixed#

• Perf wave 2 (#14): backface culling, winding fixes, matte materials — cumulative −37.6% median frame time on the software rasterizer.
• Release workflow: sidecar checkout pinned to a full 40-char SHA (#13, #17).

[0.1.1-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Fixed#

• v0.1.0 blue screen: pre-game UI never rendered because no camera existed before the in-game state (#1).
• Release smoke gate installs winit X11 runtime libs on the runner (#10).

Added#

• Artifact cold-run smoke gate in the release pipeline — every published artifact boots headless and screenshots before upload (#8).
• Perf wave 1 (#9): quality auto-detect, steady-state churn elimination, 4ms command latency (−13% median frame).

[0.1.0-alpha] - 2026-07-10#

Known issue: does not start (blue-black screen at launch) — use v0.1.1-alpha. Kept for history.

Added#

• First public build: Bevy 0.16 native client driving the TypeScript sim sidecar over the binary wire protocol; Mirror's Edge white art direction; procedural + real-city (NYC) maps; transit building, routes, subway view.