PlasmaZones 2.6.0

21 changes, released April 3, 2026.

GitHub release →

Added

  • Tumbleweed Drift shader: openSUSE Tumbleweed branded zone overlay with animated desert landscape, rolling pinwheel logos, dust devils, sand particles, erosion flow lines, and responsive audio reactivity.
  • Neon Venom and Chrome Protocol shaders.
  • Voxel-terrain improvements: Multipass with depth buffer, highlight visibility, pulse-flow label effects.
  • Shader engine: Depth buffer via MRT, per-channel filter/wrapping modes for multipass buffers, shader presets from registry.
  • Autotile JS API enrichment (#274): Per-window context, custom parameters, and lifecycle hooks for scripted algorithms.
  • Layout ordering settings (#281): Configure snapping and tiling cycle order in settings.
  • What’s New dialog (#282): Per-release highlights shown on first launch after update.
  • Settings .desktop file for application launchers.

Changed

  • Shared config backend (#276): Single QSettingsConfigBackend shared across daemon instead of per-component instances.
  • Stale config key purging (#280): Settings save removes obsolete keys to prevent config pollution.
  • ConfigDefaults reference constants (#278): Autotile defaults reference Defaults:: constants instead of duplicating values.

Fixed

  • Shader parameter defaults: customParams initialized to -1.0 sentinel so fallback checks work on first frame.
  • DOF focal depth stability: Multi-sample region averaging prevents jittery depth-of-field.
  • Vulkan surface lifecycle: Fixes for surface creation on rapid show/hide, teardown crashes, keep-alive window management, deferred QVulkanInstance creation, scissor state, and swapchain colorspace.
  • Rendering pipeline stability: RHI resource release on scene stop, multipass crash guards, SRB resets on label texture resize, texture upload ordering.
  • OSD improvements: Navigation self-destruct fix, masterCount wiring, autotile metadata in layout OSD, per-screen dismiss.
  • Focus-follows-mouse: No longer focuses through excluded or overlay windows.
  • Autotile shortcut sync: Master ratio and count changes from shortcuts now persist to config.
  • Settings stability: Single-instance enforcement, daemon toggle desync from broken QML bindings, RenderingBackend read from ungrouped config keys.
  • i18n: Correct plural form selection in i18np without .ts files.
  • Layout picker: No longer overwrites the global default layout when selecting per-screen.