Scale Space Synthesist v1.1

This release is mostly about color, light, and control — the renderer now shows particles the way they actually are (no more fog dimming the far field, no more uniform-size particles), the color modes finally behave the way their names imply, and a handful of long-standing "why is this off-screen / blown out / reset?" annoyances are gone. There's also a new power-user Unbound mode and a live value readout so you can keep your eyes on the simulation while you tweak.

WebGPU-capable browser required (Chrome / Edge / Brave / Safari 17.4+). Just open dist/index.html — no install.

✨ New

• Unbound mode — a new Numeric Bounds toggle (System pane) with Bound (default) and Unbound. Bound keeps every slider clamped to its declared range; Unbound lets typed entry and drag-scrub push values past the slider edges so you can explore out-of-range regimes (e.g. negative inversion → galactic spirals). A broken chain icon will appear next to slider values that have been unbounded. Sensible guardrails: tempo, free energy, resolution, and opacity are floored at 0 even when Unbound, and UI-chrome controls (backdrop, sky grid, scanlines, UI zoom, etc.) stay clamped because nothing interesting lives past their edges.
• Live parameter readout — scrubbing a slider or rotating a radial now pops a center-screen toast showing Label: value, so you can dial in a parameter without looking away from the simulation. Fades on idle; reused across drags so it doesn't churn the DOM.
• Sky Grid (the reference grid, reborn) — the old reference grid silently rendered nothing under the WebGPU renderer. It's been rebuilt as a proper skybox: a large wireframe sphere anchored to the camera each frame so it always reads as a distant horizon rather than an object in the scene. New slider range is 0–0.25 (the genuinely useful range), and it's white in both themes.
• Fly-mode FOV zoom — in Fly mode, the scroll wheel now zooms the lens (FOV, 10°–120°) by default for a sense of optical depth, à la Causmonaut. Hold W or S while scrolling to adjust fly speed instead. FOV snaps back to 60° when you return to Orbit.
• Boot loading curtain + photosensitivity advisory — startup now shows a static loading… screen over solid black while the engine spins up (WebGPU device, shaders, buffers), then crossfades into the ASCII type-in on the first real rendered frame, hiding the init stutter. The flashing-visuals caution is now a 5-second amber toast on entry (using the shared toast system) rather than a one-off bespoke element.

🎨 Color & rendering

• "White" color mode is now "Mono" — and it's genuinely neutral. Mono renders pure white and is fully decoupled from the spectrum/hue slider, so only Saturation affects it. (Before, Mono drifted through the spectrum as you moved the spectrum slider.)
• Perceptual gamma curves added to Color Spectrum Range, Color Saturation, and Velocity color mapping. Linear mapping made the lower half of these sliders feel dead; a sqrt remap spreads the response evenly across the full travel (50% slider now looks ~half-saturated instead of nearly white).
• Saturation now goes to 1.5 (was 1.0), for extra color boost.
• Backdrop glow matches the cloud — the backdrop now samples the same spectral palette the particles use, centered on your current spectrum index, instead of inventing its own wide gradient. (The old logic could put red on screen while particles were blue.) Mono's backdrop is now a neutral dark gray rather than a blue-tinted cast.
• Fog removed — the fixed-density fog faded distant particles dark and monochrome when you zoomed out, fighting the whole point of viewing a system's real shape from a distance. Gone, along with its slider.
• Mono mode no longer follows the spectrum slider — if you had setups relying on "White" tinting with the hue slider, they'll now read as pure white.

🐛 Fixes

• Per-particle size variation now persists. The physics step was overwriting each particle's spawn-time size every frame, so everything rendered at one uniform size. It's now carried through — which also means the Size color mode actually works for the first time (particles have distinct sizes, so the spectrum can map them).
• Size and Density color modes fixed. Size mode now reads true per-particle size (instead of mapping into an unreachable mid-spectrum band), and Density mode's inverted scaling — which squashed everything into the blue end — is corrected so typical densities land mid-spectrum.
• Trails / strings / lattice no longer blow out to white. Their alpha is now capped at 10% of System Opacity (they used to inherit it 1:1 and go pure white even at low opacity), they're thinner and stay visually subordinate to the particle cloud, and they now honor Mono mode and match the particles' color curves.
• Zoomed-out view is no longer reset on reload. Saved camera distance used to be clamped to 500 units on load, silently snapping you back if you'd deliberately zoomed out to inspect large-scale structure. Now only genuinely broken values (NaN / ≤ 0) are repaired.
• Panels and the logo stay on-screen. Panel clamping keeps a grabbable 80px visible (was a 28px sliver), rescues fully off-screen panels, and re-clamps on load and on fullscreen toggle (not just resize). The logo re-anchors on fullscreen change too.
• Pause now stops an active tour. Hitting Pause during a tour halts the camera instead of leaving you "paused" while it keeps warping between waypoints.
• Sky Grid is hidden in screenshots so it doesn't end up baked into saved waypoint thumbnails or full-res captures.

⚙️ Tweaks & polish

• "Particle Opacity" → "System Opacity" — it controls particles and trails and lattice, so the name now matches its scope. Slider step is finer (0.01).
• Backdrop Blur max raised 100 → 300.
• Section layout fix — panel section headers/subheads now wrap cleanly in narrow panes instead of hanging into the margin.
• Removed the logo's mouse-distance fade — it dimmed during normal navigation and made the logo feel unstable; it now sits at a steady opacity. Click-to-toggle and drag still work.
• cfg tabs no longer show a stray focus outline, and the dock speed slider moved off Chrome's deprecated slider-vertical styling.
• Toast system now supports custom color and duration, and all advisories share one positioning/animation path.
• Screenshot auto-save now defaults ON. New waypoints and thumbnails save a full-res screenshot by default (with background and CRT scanlines baked in), so you get a usable artifact for your atlas without opting in. Turn these off in the System pane if you don't want the downloads.

Pick up Scale Space on itch to get early access to new features: https://setzstone.itch.io/scale-space

Part of the Scale Space project. Share waypoints and feedback at /r/ScaleSpace.

Thank you for supporting Scale Space and I hope to see you in the subreddit!

All the best,

setz