We are thrilled to announce that ChipWits Worlds v0.1.5-demo is now live on Steam!
This update delivers a major quality-of-life upgrade across the entire engine, introducing fast unit cycling hotkeys, authentic vintage computer reboot sounds and visor animations, 8-directional resizing for the in-game manual, and critical stability and performance enhancements across the save system and simulation loop.
🎥 Camera & Navigation Ergonomics
Unit Cycling Hotkeys: Quickly cycle focus between all active robots in your colony using , (Previous) and . (Next) (or < / >).
Seamless Windowed Multitasking: Mouse cursor capture and edge-screen panning are now disabled by default in windowed mode, preventing accidental camera drifting while working across multiple displays.
Protected Ambient Controls: Made the day/night celestial slider raycast-transparent so clicking near the skybox will never accidentally alter environmental time.
🔧 Simulation, Audio & Hardware Reboot
Authentic Robot Startup Chime: Rebooting a ChipWit now triggers an authentic vintage computer hardware chime.
9-Frame Visor LED Animation: Reboots now pause the 65C02 CPU for 0.25 seconds while an animated iris sequence flares across the 8-segment visor display ($F010), commencing clean program execution at $0200.
Save System Reliability: Resolved a loading screen hang caused by a concurrency race in save reloads, fixed manual saves unintentionally disabling recurring autosaves, and added user-friendly error alerts for corrupted save archives.
Optimized Sector Loading & Grounding: Accelerated sector baseline synchronization during mission initialization and enhanced intra-tile bilinear terrain height sampling.
Atomic Simulation Speed Controls: Enforced atomic mutual exclusion on time controls buttons and preserved active simulation speed idempotently when dismissing Professor Chip dialogues.
💻 Code Editor Quality of Life
Active File Duplication: Added a dedicated Duplicate button to the Code Editor toolbar to quickly clone source files directly into SRC/.
Smart Search Toolbar: The Find & Replace widget now automatically closes when the code editor window is minimized or closed, and the search toolbar button disables cleanly on empty files.
Active Window Glow Styling: Converted the Code Editor toggle button to a GlowButton matching Settings and Manual button conventions.
💡 HUD, Manual & UI Ergonomics
8-Directional Manual Resizing: The in-game Programmer's Reference Guide window can now be freely resized from any edge or corner handle.
High-Contrast Action Click Feedback: Robot action buttons now provide immediate punch scale and cyan flash click feedback on interaction.
Adaptive Layouts & Portrait Scaling: Added robust support for 9:16 portrait viewports in CanvasScaler without excessive downscaling or clipped modals.
Snug Tutorial Highlighting: Refined tutorial highlight frames to tightly bound the robot chassis and top hatch without stretching into overhead status meters.
Settings Dropdown Fixes: Resolved dropdown menu layering and clipping in Settings and Load Game modals.
🛠️ Assembler & Toolchain
VFS Program Root Protection: Enforced clean project structure by preventing .S source file creation in root CHIPWIT/, automatically routing newly authored files to SRC/.
Programmer's Reference Guide 0.1.5 Edition: Synchronized both the offline PDF and embedded in-game manual with all 0.1.5 reboot synchronization, visor display, and persistence specifications.
Thank you to all our players and community testers for your incredible feedback and bug reports. Jump into the demo and start coding!