v0.12.2 — Steadier Story frames and the fire-escape fix

A small release. The Story-mode Power Plant free-for-all now paces like Battle Mode,
because the renderer's push-buffer executor does less work per frame. The black
rectangle in the title-to-main-menu fire-escape pan is gone. Four pull requests
were combined on one branch (release/v0.12.2), and the full regression ran once
per platform on that combination.

What changed

• Executor performance: Story Power Plant paces like Battle Mode
  (#129, issue
  #109, probably also
  #101). In the Story
  Power Plant free-for-all the executor that replays the game's graphics commands
  was busy 15.5 ms of every 16.7 ms frame, so close to half the frames missed the
  60 Hz deadline. The GPU was not the cause. The executor now applies shader
  constants on a fast path, gathers vertex attributes from a per-batch plan,
  computes texture and combiner signatures faster, compiles each combiner pixel
  shader once per HLSL text, no longer reads a trapped display register on every
  pass of its loop, and (Windows) paces frames with a high-resolution timer. On
  Windows the measured executor time fell from 15.5 ms to 9.6 ms a frame and
  frames over 18 ms from 6.2% to 0.2%. Every change has an opt-out switch
  (see workflows); the new [EXECTIME] line
  (RECOMP_PRESENT_PACING=1) reports where the time goes.
• No black rectangle in the fire-escape pan
  (#131). The
  title-to-main-menu pan briefly showed a black rectangle, with or without mods,
  because the game's scenery object leaves its first tile empty. The first tile is
  now repaired before upload, only for the exact retail object, at every aspect
  ratio. RECOMP_MENU_TRANSITION_REPAIR=0 turns the repair off.
• Cancelled setup handoff no longer leaves an engine running
  (#134). When ps
  was refused, a cancelled handoff could leave the engine process behind. Setup
  and its test now stop it.
• HD Widescreen Menus 1.1 and 1.2 records
  (#135, with #131).
  Documentation and pins only. The mod pack itself is a separate download from the
  mod catalogue and works on v0.12.1 without reinstalling; the fire-escape
  repair above is the one game change it relies on.

Installing

Download the setup for your platform from this release:

• Windows x64: DefJamSetup-0.12.2-windows-x64.exe
• macOS Apple Silicon: DefJamSetup-0.12.2-macos-arm64.dmg (unsigned)
• Linux x64 / Steam Deck: DefJamSetup-0.12.2-linux-x64.tar.gz

For an existing installation choose Clean Update: the toolkit changed, so
setup analyses and builds again. Saves, settings, mods and texture packs are kept.

Building from source: git submodule update --init --recursive, then analyze,
recomp and build again.

Testing

Each row is the release candidate (release/v0.12.2), not the individual PRs.

On Windows, setup could not create its temporary folder on the test PC that day; the published v0.12.1 setup failed the same way there, so it is not a change in this release. The only setup change here is #134's cancelled-handoff cleanup, which CI tests.

On macOS, visual could not run: this Mac has no approved baselines. Story Power Plant
pacing was not measured on the Mac.

Before the candidate was cut, #129 was measured on Windows only (Story Power Plant
with a created fighter, render scale 3, 16:9; --quick 5/5, fight and ffa 2/2,
visual 4/4). macOS and the Steam Deck use the same executor; the pacing timer is
Windows only.

Known issues

• Story shops still pause briefly while a chosen item loads
  (#119).
• A host stall at start-up can leave the title's frame clock far behind and make
  a boot crawl for a while. It is old behaviour, not caused by #129, and was
  reproduced on main; making the catch-up robust is a separate change.
• The v0.12.0 known issues (Steam Deck repeat check #98, VRR slowdown #101) and
  the v0.11.0 ones (three uncovered menu backgrounds) still apply.

See known issues for the full list.