Built in the open
145 posts of what shipped, what broke, and what got deleted on the way to 1.0. Numbered in order; start anywhere.
Every Lux binary now says exactly which commit it came from. Version numbers only change when a release ships, so 'v0.44.0' was previously true of the release, of my breakfast-time build, and of yours. Now it isn't.
Read the storyA shader that will not compile, a glTF file that is not there, a pipeline the driver refuses: all of it used to happen in a terminal you were not reading, while the patch just went quiet. Now the node that failed turns red and tells you why.
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The welcome card promised an animated star. It rendered a frozen one, in the corner, forever. Every patch in Lux was checked on the way in except the ones a new artist actually opens. Now they are checked too, and they do what their cards say.
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Lux always knew when a file did not open the way you wrote it. It just told the log instead of telling you. Now a strip across the top of the editor names the file, counts what went missing, and hands you the list.
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Open a patch on a machine that is missing one of its plugins, and the nodes it cannot run are now held, drawn, and written back out exactly as you left them. Ctrl+S on the wrong laptop used to quietly delete them.
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Open a patch, change nothing, save it, and the file stops moving under you. Saves are byte-stable, so version control shows the one value you moved instead of a few hundred lines of reshuffled noise. And an open-and-save no longer quietly deletes the title, author and description you wrote.
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Output now goes fullscreen on the display you choose, not the one it happens to be sitting on. Pick the projector once in Project Settings and Lux remembers it, so tomorrow night the same rig comes up pointing at the same screen.
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Leave Lux open on a patch that is not moving and it will now stop drawing it, instead of repainting the same picture 120 times a second until your battery gives up. The canvas grid stopped multiplying too: zoom all the way out and it spreads its dots instead of packing 203,000 of them into a frame you could not see anyway.
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Lux has been quietly writing a snapshot of your patch every time it dies. Now the next launch actually tells you, with a Restore button, instead of leaving the file in a cache folder for you to find on your own.
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Group nodes with Ctrl+G and they keep what they were holding. Save, reopen, and the group is still there. Ctrl+Z takes the grouping back, Ctrl+Shift+G opens the box. Until now the inner graph quietly evaporated on reload, taking every node inside it with it.
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Cues now do something. Press GO and the output crossfades from one look to the next over the fade time you set, on the curve you chose. Capture the look you have, name it a cue, and it becomes a thing you can hit on the night.
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Every node now wears its live output on its body. Numbers read out as they change, colours show the colour, shape nodes draw the shape they are emitting, and texture nodes preview their own pixels. The patch stops being a diagram of what should be happening and starts being a readout of what is.
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The 2D filter chain now carries floating-point precision from node to node instead of rounding to 8 bits at every hop, so deep filter stacks stop banding and highlights above white survive the trip. Photos and 3D renders get the same treatment, which is a polite way of saying they previously did not. And Export Image now saves the frame you are actually looking at.
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The 2D Blend and Composite nodes now follow the actual compositing spec, so a transparent layer stays out of the way, a Multiply looks like a Multiply, and half-opacity means half, not all. Group and Merge get a blend mode pin, and a blended group finally minds its own business.
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uselux.app gets a full redesign: stage black, one luminous gold, a serif that means it. Features and roadmap pages join the devlog, and every number on the homepage is computed from content, not promised.
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Eighteen nodes in the browser produced no pixels, no matter how you wired them. They are gone. Three more that cannot draw yet now say so out loud, in red, instead of failing politely. The Shadertoy node, which had quietly stopped compiling anything at all, works again.
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Bloom was arriving a frame late on real graphics cards, and on the standalone node it never arrived at all. Now the glow lands on the frame that earned it.
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WhiteBalance at its default now leaves your image untouched, instead of quietly tinting it green. And FXAA finally admits what it actually is.
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Drop any 2D filter onto a 3D render and the picture used to sink into the dark, one filter darker, then two. A blur set to zero, a soft glow at neutral, an occlusion pass turned all the way down: none of them should touch a single pixel, and all of them did. Now a neutral filter leaves the frame exactly as it found it.
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Push a 2D particle fountain hard enough and the whole frame used to blink out to a flat blank. No error, no warning, just gone. Now the fountain keeps spraying and tells you when you've asked for more than it can draw.
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Drop a .cube LUT onto your footage to grade it and the whole app used to fall over. A colorist's entire look library, every one a trap door to the desktop. Now the look loads and the grade lands.
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Point a camera at the corner of an instanced grid, away from where it's anchored, and the whole thing would vanish. Ten thousand cubes, gone, because the culler was asking about one cube that wasn't on screen. It stays on screen now.
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Depth of field, ambient occlusion, and any post-FX downstream of a still scene would quietly go black a few seconds after you stopped touching the patch. The engine mistook stillness for abandonment. It no longer does.
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Cone culling from Mind the Gaps was mathematically correct but ran on clusters shaped by whatever order triangles happened to load in. Lux now clusters meshes the way the industry actually does it, and the optimisation finally has something worth optimising.
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Curved meshes could develop see-through patches that wandered when the camera moved. The cluster culling maths was wrong in three separate ways, and hidden-surface skipping turned out to be off entirely. All four are fixed, and the chair is whole again.
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Brushed-metal and hair anisotropy now stretch along the surface's own grain instead of a fixed screen direction. Rotate the lamp, and the streak turns with it; before this, it didn't move at all.
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Imported textures now tile, rotate, and offset exactly as their author set them, and a second UV channel means occlusion maps stop stealing the wrong coordinates. The fine print from three releases ago is paid off.
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Imported glTF files now bring their whole material with them: clearcoat lacquer, velvet sheen, glass transmission, brushed-metal anisotropy, HDR emissives, and real refraction indices, textures included. If the artist authored it, Lux renders it.
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Characters now play the animation their file ships: keyframed walks, idles, and dances drive the skeleton instead of a hardcoded placeholder wiggle. SkeletonPose becomes a real clip player with time, speed, and loop controls.
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glTF scene-node transforms now apply on import: assets arrive in the pose and place their file declares. The battle-damaged helmet finally faces the camera, visor HUD glowing, and multi-part scenes assemble instead of collapsing onto the origin.
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