The Show Must Go On
Adding a node can no longer blank your output, the patch output is now chosen deterministically, and a new selector in the menu bar lets you pin any sink as the show while the driving node wears a little on-air lamp.
Here is a party trick no VJ asked for: mid-set, you drop a fresh TextureToLayer onto the canvas, intending to wire it up in a moment. The screen goes black. Not your screen, the output screen, the one the audience is looking at. The node you have not even connected yet has hijacked the show and is proudly displaying its current contents, which are nothing.
This release retires the trick.
How an empty node stole the stage
Lux decides what to display by finding the patch’s output, and the old rule was simple to the point of menace: take the last layer-producing node in evaluation order. A brand-new node tends to land last in that order, and an unwired sink produces a perfectly valid, perfectly empty layer. Valid plus last equals shown, and empty equals black. The rule was even nondeterministic as a bonus: with two disconnected chains in one patch, evaluation order between them depends on hash seeding, so two runs of the same file could disagree about which chain was the show.
The new rule has three layers of common sense. An empty layer is never eligible, full stop, so an unwired sink is invisible to output selection until it actually produces something. Among the eligible, the most recently wired sink wins, because the wire you just connected is a fairly strong hint about your intentions. And ends of chains beat middles of chains, so re-routing an upstream wire does not yank the display away from your finished look. Ties break by node age, which never changes between runs. Same patch, same answer, every time.
Pick your output like you mean it
Sometimes the right output is not the most recent one, and for that there is now a selector at the top of the window, next to the project title. It shows which node is driving the display right now. Click it and you get the full cast list: every layer-producing node in the patch, with the empty ones honestly labelled, plus an Auto entry to hand control back to the most-recently-wired rule.
Pinning a node there makes it the show until you say otherwise. If it stops producing, the display falls back to the automatic choice rather than going dark, and your pin survives in the project file, through saves and loads, until the node itself is deleted. Pinning a mid-chain node works too, which turns out to be a pleasant way to monitor an intermediate stage of a long effect chain without rewiring anything.
On the canvas, the node currently on screen wears a small green lamp in its header. It is the same answer the selector shows, drawn where your eyes already are. When the output moves, the lamp moves.
What it buys you
You can add nodes during a performance with the confidence that the worst possible outcome is a node you have not used yet, rather than a blackout. The same patch picks the same output on every machine, every run, which matters more than it sounds once a patch travels. And when something does look wrong, one glance at the lamp answers the first debugging question, which has historically been the hardest one: what am I actually looking at? It joins the two keys and the windowed display fix in this run of making the instrument behave the way you already assumed it did.