This is a stable maintenance release. It features some bugfixes, optimizations, and other improvements backported from the v1.5 development tree.

• Reworked gamepad input handling and configuration:
  • The free/restricted axis distinction is gone; the joystick always operates in "free" mode.
  • Added direction snapping functionality to help aid exact movement in cardinal and/or diagonal directions. The snapping angle can be adjusted from 0% (disabled) to 100% (similar to the old "restricted" mode). The snapping angle can also be biased towards cardinals or diagonals.
  • When the maximum zone is less than or equals dead zone, moving the character will always move at maximum speed (as in the old "restricted" mode).
  • Most of these settings are now visualized in the options menu and can be tested there.
• Changed the default Spell Card (Bomb) and Power Surage gamepad bindings to Left Trigger and Right Trigger respectively.
• If autorestart is enabled for spell practice, it will now try to load a quicksave if one exists.
• Added a "load quicksave" option to the pause menu in practice modes.
• Cutscenes that have been seen before can now be completely skipped.
• Added an option to reset the config to last saved values.
• Reduced some sprite batching CPU overhead.
• Optimized rendering of scenes with many lasers.
• Optimized loading of webp files.
• Optimized various math routines.
• Improved performance of some shaders.
• Due to bad OpenGL drivers, macOS releases now use ANGLE for rendering by default. This fixes serious performance issues on some Apple systems.
• Worked around broken rendering in WebGL on Apple systems with certain versions of ANGLE (see #386). The ANGLE bug has been fixed upstream, but certain systems are known to still be affected, such as iOS 18.
• Fixed crashes related to opening the pause menu.
• Fixed the cutscene text spontaneously disappearing on some systems.
• Fixed laser rendering errors during screen-shake effects.
• Fixed some minor general rendering errors.
• Fixed rendering errors specific to WebGL and ANGLE on Windows.
• Fixed ongoing asynchronous tasks (e.g. screenshot encoding) sometimes failing to finish when exiting the game.
• Fixed some erroneous build warnings when building with Clang 18+.
• Fixed pseudo-random lookup order when a resource exists in multiple locations. This allows files placed in sub-packages to override those from 00-taisei.zip reliably.
• Removed the defunct gles20 renderer backend.
• Screenshots now use asynchronous GPU downloads.
• Added --width and --height command line parameters.
• The default config can now be customized by adding a config.default file to the game's resources.
• Added documentation for previously undocumented environment variables to ENVIRON.rst.
• Added an experimental "framedump" mode that can be used to render videos; see ENVIRON.rst for details.
• Added a watchdog in kiosk mode that resets the game to the main menu and default settings after a period of inactivity.
• Added the TAISEI_KIOSK_PREVENT_QUIT environment variable to control whether Quit is available in kiosk mode.
• Added a some basic test programs for the renderer API.