Changelog

Recent technical changes, by date. For the long-form version of how the project got here — the V1 prototype, the V2 breadth push, the V3 physics rewrite, and the V4 UI rebuild — see the Milestones page.

5.0.0 - Game IQ + a continuous protection engine (July 2026)

The biggest protection-engine release since v4. v5 rebuilds how protection appears on screen: a new continuous presentation engine replaces the old overlay stack, Game IQ learns your game HUDs, the desktop responds faster, and bright scenes release more cleanly. A new Dark Mode adds a steady, uniform dim, and a Responsiveness control lets you set the pace. Shipping to Pro (Microsoft Store), Free (Microsoft Store), and Steam.

• A new continuous presentation engine - protection is now drawn from one continuous field instead of a stack of separate overlay passes, so dimming is smoother, more even, and easier to reason about. The risk engine still tracks physical panel exposure; v5 separates that from how protection is shown on screen.
• Game IQ learns your game HUDs - in fullscreen Gaming sessions, OLED Guard learns the persistent HUD regions in each game, locally on your PC, and brings protection back to them faster the next time they appear. Game IQ only ever adds a one-way protection floor, and the base engine keeps protecting everything else. Renamed from the earlier "HUD IQ" to reflect its gaming scope.
• Faster desktop response - bright static content reaches full protection sooner, with smoother transitions between capture updates.
• Cleaner release when the scene changes - scrolling, scene cuts, fullscreen exits, and window switches leave fewer trails, because moving content releases stale dimming without wiping the underlying exposure history.
• Less ghosting on bright backgrounds and bright text - presentation-side fill, heal, and leveling smooth bright UI without baking artifacts into panel history.
• Dark Mode - a new preset that holds one uniform, even dim across the whole screen at a darkness you choose, and keeps it until you switch out. It stays put across restarts and composes your overlay tint, pattern, and vignette. The simple, predictable choice for dark-first setups. (This is a protection preset, not the app's light/dark UI theme.)
• A new Responsiveness control - choose how quickly protection ramps up after the screen changes and how quickly it eases back off: Auto, Relaxed, Balanced, or Responsive. Auto follows the active preset.
• Better game-versus-video detection - slow, mostly-still games like builders and strategy titles are protected as games instead of being dimmed like video, with an idle safeguard so an away-from-keyboard game is not misread as video.
• Gaming-only gates reduce false positives - Game IQ is gated to Gaming preset plus fullscreen, so desktop, media, and menus never pick up a game-HUD floor by mistake.
• New resource-use reporting - a Resource use card reports the engine's footprint honestly.
• Start with Windows now works on every build - the start-at-login option finally takes effect on the Microsoft Store version, which used to ignore it. The Store build uses the packaged StartupTask, so the setting survives across updates.
• A simpler, better-tested engine - legacy region-fill and scene-reset code paths were removed, and the release adds expanded GPU golden tests, overlay benchmarks, and regression coverage.

As always, OLED Guard Pro reduces the statistical risk of burn-in; it cannot guarantee a burn-in-free panel.

4.9.0 - uniform overlay fill + a clearer dashboard (June 2026)

A focused follow-up to 4.8: bright static screens get a cleaner, more even dim, the dashboard explains itself in plain language, and the overlay now covers every pixel of the screen width. Shipping to Pro (Microsoft Store), Free (Microsoft Store), and Steam.

• Even protection on bright static screens - large bright pages and documents now dim as one smooth, uniform sheet instead of a patchy, blotchy overlay. The change is display-only; the underlying burn-in tracking is unchanged.
• The dashboard explains itself in plain language - the classifier's reasoning now shows as simple tags like Media, Idle, Fullscreen, Video, or Controller, instead of a dense technical line.
• Full-width overlay coverage - the thin uncovered line at the screen edge is gone; the overlay now covers the entire width while still avoiding Windows' fullscreen mode, so Focus Assist and the taskbar behave normally.

4.8.0 - now in 10 languages + smarter, stickier protection (June 2026)

Our biggest update yet: the whole app speaks your language, your settings stay exactly where you put them, and the protection engine got noticeably smarter. Shipping to Pro (Microsoft Store), Free (Microsoft Store), and Steam.

• OLED Guard now speaks 10 languages - the entire interface is localized into English, German, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, and Japanese, plus full right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Persian. Pick a language in Settings, or let it follow Windows automatically.
• Your display choices finally stick - turning protection off for a second monitor now persists across restarts. Set it once and forget it.
• Presets stop fighting your choices - a new Auto control lets you pin the "Ignore active window" and "Mouse track" options so Auto Mode's preset switching can no longer override them.
• Faster, more even protection - static areas left behind by a moving window or HUD now fill in and protect much sooner, and Away mode dims a little deeper for stronger overnight coverage.
• Work is no longer mistaken for video - a bright, centered desktop app on an ultrawide kept full protection instead of being treated as a movie.
• A welcome after every update - the app now greets you after each update with a short summary of what changed, a link to the full changelog, and a few tips you might have missed.
• Cleaner, faster bug reporting - the Report page is simpler (send your log, or don't), no longer slows down on very large logs, and oversized reports no longer fail to send.
• A tidier, more consistent interface - unified help tooltips and a batch of small polish across Settings and the dashboard.

4.5.0 - capture overhaul + smarter game/video detection (June 2026)

The capture-and-detection overhaul, shipping to Pro (Microsoft Store), Free (Microsoft Store), and Steam. Covers everything since 4.3.

• New Windows Graphics Capture backend - a new "Capture method" setting in Settings picks between Auto, WGC, and Desktop Duplication; Auto selects WGC on Windows 11. WGC keeps capturing at full rate in fullscreen games where Desktop Duplication could starve.
• Games and videos are finally told apart - Windows media sessions are now the authoritative video signal, GPU video-decode activity catches fullscreen video that has no media session, and active gamepad input routes interactive content to Gaming. Fullscreen video is no longer treated like a game, and games are never dimmed as "media".
• Alt-tab no longer resets protection - switching windows used to wipe the engine's accumulated protection state. The engine now compares a fingerprint of the screen content before and after the switch and only resets when the content really changed.
• Honest exclusive-fullscreen status - when a game runs in true exclusive fullscreen and the overlay physically cannot display, the app now says so instead of pretending protection is active.
• Calmer, cleaner overlay - the comfort layer was rewritten: protection zones merge smoothly instead of showing scattered dots, and grain/speckle is suppressed roughly 34x. The Noise Gap Filter setting was retired; the new merge does its job better.
• Lower idle cost - capture and GPU work now suspend while the PC is locked or the display is off, and metrics work is skipped while the app sits in the tray.
• Self-healing capture - if the graphics driver resets or capture dies, the engine now restarts itself cleanly instead of silently stopping.
• HDR fixes and a live HDR badge - fixed an app hang when toggling HDR and a stale HDR readout after display changes; the Monitors page now shows a live per-monitor HDR badge driven by real capture state (Pro).
• Protection engine hardening - after a reset the engine starts from the protective state rather than the permissive one, a risk-ceiling stall was fixed, the intensity anchor table is honored end to end (including on restore), and Gaming presets build protection about 11 percent faster.
• Hotkeys no longer go silent - global hotkeys re-register themselves when the main window is recreated, so they keep working (Pro).
• "Reset everything" actually resets everything - settings no longer resurrect from a stale cache, and the app restarts itself so the reset fully takes effect.
• A batch of UI fixes - pinned dim behavior, slider dead zones, a UI freeze, intensity handling, and diagnostics readouts now reflect real engine state.
• Better bug reports - reports now include a structured snapshot of the game/video classifier and deduplicated, change-triggered classification logs.

4.3.0 - in-app reporting + feedback board (June 2026)

• Report a problem, from inside the app - a new Report page in both Pro and Free sends a bug or feature report straight from OLED Guard. It auto-attaches a diagnostics snapshot (version, edition, GPU, monitor layout) and a PII-scrubbed tail of engine.log, behind a preview-before-send: you see and can edit exactly what is transmitted, remove any log line, or send text-only. Nothing leaves your machine until you press Send.
• Public feedback board - reports and feature requests now post to a public board at board.oledguard.com where you can follow, comment, and upvote them; the most-requested ideas rise to the top. New submissions are reviewed before they appear publicly.
• Privacy-first log scrubbing - the attached log strips foreground app/exe names, user-folder paths, emails, and IP addresses automatically. Monitor model strings are deliberately kept, because panel-specific data is exactly what helps diagnose an OLED issue.
• Vignette decoupled from Away mode - edge dimming is now its own global, persistent setting that no longer resets between sessions, with a new "Always dim edges" toggle.
• Active Vignette is now obvious - a status-strip toggle plus a boundary line in the heatmap make it clear when edge dimming is on (fixes the "vignette looks invisible" reports).
• Away mode steps aside for fullscreen - Away no longer activates over fullscreen games, and readback cadence is throttled to cut in-game stutter.
• Vignette stability fixes - the edge-drag handles no longer jitter (a hydration race plus a per-move disk write), and the Always-dim toggle no longer flip-flops on the first click.
• Noise-gap filter now defaults to Off (was Morphological), trimming GPU cost in the out-of-the-box configuration.
• Roomier default window - the dashboard opens a little wider on first launch.

4.2.1 - Free edition + fullscreen auto-pause (May 2026)

• OLED Guard Free on the Microsoft Store - a free edition that gives automatic, single-display burn-in protection for the desktop at Balanced strength, with the heatmap overlay, Away mode, and Snooze. It deliberately does not protect fullscreen apps; that stays a Pro capability.
• Fullscreen auto-pause (Free) - when a fullscreen game or video covers the primary display, Free stops the engine so it never overlays your content or costs you performance, then resumes automatically when you return to the desktop.
• Desktop no longer mistaken for a fullscreen app - the engine's fullscreen detector now excludes the Windows desktop shell (Progman / WorkerW). This also fixes a Pro Auto Mode case where sitting on the bare desktop could route to a fullscreen game/video preset instead of the static-content Work preset.
• Unified versioning - Pro and Free now share a single 4.2.1 version line.

4.2.0 - release polish (May 2026)

The ship-readiness pass for 4.2.0 on Steam and the Microsoft Store.

• Steam release — OLED Guard Pro is now live on Steam (Steam App ID 4558060) alongside the existing Microsoft Store editions.
• Single-instance enforcement — launching a second copy now raises the existing window instead of spawning a duplicate engine that fights for D3D capture resources.
• Window placement persistence — the dashboard remembers its size, position, and maximised state across launches, validated against the current monitor layout so an unplugged display doesn't strand the window off-screen.
• Morphological noise-gap filter is now the default in Auto Mode (was Off). Every factory preset ships with it on.
• Per-profile Intensity override — App Profiles can now scale just the Intensity slider for one application without editing the preset itself.
• Exe-claim collision UI — the App Profiles page surfaces the conflict inline if two profiles try to own the same executable, and rejects the save until resolved.
• Browse... — native file dialog for picking an executable when the running-apps list and Steam library browser don't have what you want.
• Occlusion-aware capture exclusion — registered app windows now contribute only their visible region to the exclusion mask, closing the app-gap behind a covering window.
• Visibility-aware WDA exclude — the screen-capture-protection flag now toggles based on how much of the OLED Guard window is visible, eliminating the residual app-gap on fully-visible windows.
• Overlay visibility floor (gamma 0.6) so detected HUDs land at a visible protection level instead of a near-invisible green-heatmap floor.
• Settings.json .bak recovery — an unreadable settings file is now quarantined to settings.json.bak and logged, instead of silently resetting to defaults with no trail.
• Tray balloon on close — first-of-session "still running in the tray" notification so users don't think the app quit when they hit the X.
• app.manifest version bump - added longPathAware, added the Windows 11 supportedOS GUID, opted into UTF-8 active code page.
• engine.log from Log.Warn/Error — the bridge and engine's catch blocks now write structured entries to %LOCALAPPDATA%\OLEDGuard\engine.log instead of relying on Debug.WriteLine (which is stripped in Release).
• CA2014 stackalloc-in-loop fix in the render hot path.
• In-game tuning HUD (Ctrl+Shift+G) — an optional always-on-top compact overlay that exposes the live Auto-Mode reasoning, hot-bindable from the Hotkeys page.

V4 - the UI rebuild (April 27 onwards)

• Hot-plug awareness across the whole monitor list. Plug a USB-C OLED in, the engine picks it up; unplug it, the protection stops cleanly without disturbing other displays.
• Per-monitor DDC/CI re-probe when capabilities change at runtime.
• 24h threat-history ring persisted for the Statistics timeline.
• Per-app screen-time persistence across restarts.
• Classifier confidence score on the metrics stream so the Auto controller surfaces uncertainty.
• DDC startup probe extended from 150 ms to 1.2 s — removes a class of "No DDC" false reports on monitors that take a moment to wake.
• External-link routing — clicks inside the WebView2 shell now open in your default browser instead of disappearing into the embedded view.
• v4 visual system across every page: dashboard, monitors, overlay, vignette, settings, advanced, profiles, hotkeys, and about, each rebuilt to match the v4 design source.
• New shield logo replaces the OG monogram in the desktop app and on the website.

V3 — physics engine (April 18 – April 26)

• Per-pixel exposure shader (ExposureAccumulatePS_v3) replaces the v2 heuristic accumulator.
• Motion envelope + stability gate as separate GPU passes.
• Auto Mode V3 controller with explicit UI sync and a pause-banner that follows manual edits.
• Live classifier readout on the Advanced page, streaming controller knob history at 60 Hz.
• Per-pixel motion envelope replaces the cell-based intelligence layer (which produced staircase artefacts at content boundaries and is now retired for good).
• L4 per-preset tuning suites — 24/24 green before every release.
• Window Border Protection retired (it was a v2-era heuristic that the V3 engine subsumes).
• Phase 8 of the V3 redesign closed with the v2 preset fields, engine properties, and legacy UI sliders deleted.

V2 — the complete app (Feb 13 – Apr 17)

• Multi-monitor architecture with independent capture and render pipelines per display.
• DDC/CI brightness & contrast through VESA MCCS commands.
• Per-app profiles with foreground-window watcher and debounced switching.
• Auto Mode v1/v2 controller predates the V3 redesign.
• Noise / Vignette / Mosaic protection-mode set with separate shaders.
• Gaming presets with edge-weighted protection and proportional brightness gate.
• Hierarchical test harness (L1 unit / L2 physics / L3 scenarios / L4 per-preset) with 81 tagged assertions.
• Quality presets (Low / Medium / High / Ultra at 432p) trade detection accuracy against capture cost.
• Microsoft Store trial flow plus Free / Pro entitlement split.

V1 — proof of concept (2024)

The first version. Hardware-accelerated screen capture, single-monitor overlay composition through DWM, the kernel of the engine that everything since has built on. Predates this public repository.