Engine v5.2.1

A patch to Lume.

• Growing black patches are gone. On some machines, dark blotches could appear on screen (worst at night) and spread until they swallowed the whole view — reloading didn't help. Fixed at the source, for good.
• The realistic night sky no longer shows irregular black patches after dark — stars and the Milky Way shine everywhere they should.
• Walls, floors, and objects with realistic (PBR) textures stopped showing up after the 5.2 update — they render again, textures and all.
• Scripts that do heavy work in bursts (every few ticks) used to slip past the safety net and could grind your game to a halt until the tab crashed. The engine now catches them within seconds and pauses them with advice that actually fixes the problem.
• If the game picture ever freezes while the game itself keeps running underneath, you now get a clear "reload" prompt within seconds — no more silently stuck screens you have to diagnose yourself.
• The volume slider works every time now — it applies immediately to all game sound, including sounds already playing and music or videos inside game menus.
• Two looks that quietly changed in 5.2 are back to how you authored them: glowing objects (suns, halos) can shine through fog again when you told them to, and see-through cutout surfaces once again hide what's behind them.
• Models no longer get stuck as placeholder rings after a room hiccup — when the connection comes back, everything finishes loading on its own.
• Ask Savi for a "free cursor plus hold right-click to look around" camera and she gets it right now.
• Right-click selection works on every object again, whatever material it wears — objects with custom scripted looks had stopped being selectable in build mode.
• Savi can now convert a world you've already built to a different starter kind (like 2D ↔ 3D) — you see exactly what would change before agreeing, your creations survive, and any starter scripts you'd edited are parked for reference instead of deleted.
• "Fires once" effects — fire-pit coal beds, one-shot bursts — no longer vanish permanently for players who joined while the world was still warming up.
• Built-in rain, sparks, and fireworks read as real motion streaks now instead of a wall of tilted cards.
• Converting a 2D tile place back to heightmap terrain no longer flattens the ground to zero wherever tiles had been painted.
• Pressing interact no longer triggers an action twice when a key and a controller or touch gesture share the same binding.
• Cliffs and steep terrain show their real rock strata again instead of vertically stretched streaks.
• The blur effect works again — death flashes, dash juice, and scripted blur looks that went quietly sharp in 5.2 are back.
• Big lakes no longer draw over nearby bushes and shore objects at certain camera angles.
• Scripted looks on model parts and decoration layers now survive save and reload instead of silently reverting.
• Slash and shockwave effects no longer flash a black wedge from certain angles.
• Objects anchored to terrain stop visibly bouncing on other players' screens while terrain is edited live.
• Name tags and floating text stay crisp while whatever they're attached to runs around — no more smeared, doubled-up labels on moving players.
• Savi no longer gets falsely told a texture script "was not found" after you switch objects off it — retired paint scripts step aside quietly, keeping whatever they last drew on screen.
• Switching between games in the same tab no longer wedges the world when the previous session was a live/play session — the engine cleanly resets to the new game instead of refusing its updates.
• Camera scripts that set their own yaw/pitch every tick — locking the camera on your killer during a death animation, cinematic snaps, forced framing — now actually control the screen again in mouse-look games. The engine used to keep following the mouse and silently ignore what the script wrote; now the script wins the moment it disagrees, and normal mouse look stays as smooth as before.
• When your game's renderer dies mid-session — including the "GPU error storm" way, where the screen silently freezes while everything else looks alive — you now get an honest reload prompt within about a minute instead of never, and Savi is told your screen is frozen so she stops narrating changes you can't see and suggests a refresh instead.
• Worlds heavy on foliage, fences, grates, and other see-through-cutout surfaces render faster — especially on phones and tablets — with zero visual change.
• Fixed a family of silent failures when addressing objects by the wrong name: deleting or editing an object that doesn't exist now says so (and if you used a list position like "5", the message names the object actually sitting there); reading the spec by list position tells you the object's real id; and objects attached to the camera (HUD elements, music emitters) now show up when you list objects by tag.
• Fixed a bug where a player whose tab sat hidden while players came and went (or who was mid-session when the room restarted) could get permanently out of sync — ghost objects only they could see, builds half-applied — until they manually reloaded. The server now detects the stuck session and quietly re-syncs it within seconds; nobody has to leave and rejoin.
• Rewriting painted fields through spec edits (or cancelling a brush stroke) now updates everything that reads them at once: the terrain mesh, NPC pathing, terrain-anchored props, scatter beds and their footprint ribbon, instanced scatter, and painted foliage density all pick up the new paint immediately instead of keeping the old state until something else changed.
• Some iPads and phones were being drawn blurry and sparse for no reason: when the browser itself limits how fast frames arrive, the engine kept cutting visual quality trying to fix a slowdown the graphics weren't causing. It now recognizes that situation, gives the quality back, and keeps the game exactly as smooth as the browser allows.
• When a device limits its own frame rate (Low Power Mode, battery saver, browser throttling), the player now sees one small note saying so, and Savi gets told it's the device's environment — not the game — so neither of you burns an evening debugging content that was never the problem.
• Fixed a shimmer where nested see-through objects (like layered translucent shells around one center) rapidly flickered over each other once they split into multiple materials — the draw order between such layers is now steady frame to frame.
• Fixed a bug where a mod's on-screen HUD (buttons, sliders) stopped working after installing the mod into another game, even though it worked fine in the mod's own dev game — HUD button presses now reach the mod's scripts in fresh installs.
• NPCs now see the hills you sculpt: units path over (and get blocked by) god-mode-raised terrain instead of walking through it at ground level, and re-route as soon as you keep sculpting.
• Fixed a bug where a look pushed by a script (fog, murk, color grades via pushLook) could permanently fail to appear — with a wrong "script not found" error — even though the script file existed. Look edits now show up, and the error only appears when the script really doesn't exist.
• Games whose scripts persist changes every tick — spawning crops, saving building edits, updating persistent object properties — no longer freeze for seconds when their world re-syncs.
• Pixel-art sprites no longer shimmer or crawl at fractional camera zooms — texels stay crisp and stable while the camera pans, at every zoom level instead of only exact integer scales.
• A leftover broken terrain-mark entry in your game's data can no longer crash the whole server over and over (it used to force restarts and spam error DMs). The engine now skips the broken entry, keeps your rivers, ponds, and roads working, and logs which entry to delete — and the way it used to sneak into your game (deleting a terrain mark that didn't exist) is fixed at the source.
• Savi now finds out when one of your game's textures fails to load or draw on players' screens — before, those failures only appeared in the player's browser console, so she could confidently ship a broken visual without knowing. She also stops promising that a script interrupted by a hidden game tab will run by itself later: she'll tell you plainly the change hasn't happened and ask you to keep the game on screen so she can retry.
• Tiles your game's scripts dig, sow, or paint now stick in multiplayer: they reach the server and every other player, survive rejoins and players coming and going, and save with the world — no more garden beds wiped back to grass mid-session.
• 2D tilemaps no longer show faint vertical or horizontal seam lines at certain zoom levels — tile edges stay clean at every camera zoom instead of occasionally sampling a sliver of the neighboring tile in the tileset.
• Fixed a bug where leaving a testing/monitoring client alone in a multiplayer room could freeze the game world and make Savi's script runs time out — rooms now keep running, and recover the moment a real player walks in.
• Fixed props with custom-shaped colliders sometimes losing their real collision shape for a whole session (players could clip into trees, rocks, and vehicles that looked solid). The engine now recovers the real shape instead of getting stuck retrying a dead-end fetch.
• Physics objects that end up turned exactly halfway around (180°) no longer read back facing the wrong way.

Known issues (being worked on staging right now — this version stays in testing until the first one is fixed):

• Houses and other multi-part builds can visibly wobble between two positions. This one blocks the release: the version won't go out while it's happening.
• Fast-moving flat sprites (2.5D characters and props) can look blurry or ghosted in motion — a top-priority fix is underway in its own thread.
• Some floating text can still smear while moving (name tags over players are already fixed in this version; the rest is in progress).
• On flat worlds you can sometimes see where the ground stops being drawn at the far horizon — a known design limit being redesigned.
• Worlds with lots of sounds recover automatically instead of going silent.
• Grass and ground cover now reach the horizon on desktop.
• Distant grass fills the horizon better on flat worlds: blades near the edge of the grass field stand a little taller, so the field covers the bare ground beyond it instead of stopping in a visible line.
• World labels stay sharper and steadier while the camera or their parent moves, and tiny distant text fades away cleanly instead of turning into shimmer.
• In 2D worlds, text can use sortingLayer and sortingOrder to sit between sprite layers, while ordinary signs and unlayered labels still obey walls and other foreground geometry.
• Reverted a camera change from this release that caused a stutter/jump-back while rotating in games with custom camera scripts. Custom camera scripts that write yaw/pitch every tick return in a later release.
• Layered flat effects (cracks, decals, panels) now stack in the right order from every camera angle.
• Fixed brand-new worlds crashing on their first load when dense ground decoration was enabled.