Controls & HUD
Chrome that rents, it doesn't own: one system, three states, and a single accent sampled from the world.
Keyboard & mouse
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| W A S D + mouse | Fly / look (Explore locks the pointer — full 360°, straight up and down) |
| Space / Shift | Fly up / down (Explore) |
| Scroll | Fly speed (Explore) |
| F / click tabs | Toggle Explore / Drift camera (Drift frees the cursor) |
| E | Send a pulse |
| N | Next track |
| Tab | Open / close the queue |
| L | Open / close the library (pick a world) |
| Esc | Pause (world time-dilates) · resume · close the top overlay |
| H | Hide the HUD now |
| P | Photo mode — hide the chrome and save a shot to verse-photos/ |
| ← / → | Adjust world intensity (while paused) |
The HUD's three states
The HUD follows the design spec's "one system, three states":
- Visible while you're active — now-playing cluster, beat-reactive progress with section notches, control hints, and the Explore/Drift toggle.
- Minimized to a hairline after four seconds idle.
- Hidden entirely when you stay away — or instantly, with H.
Any input wakes it. The one variable across the whole chrome is the accent, sampled from the current world's palette — the same rule verse.localgpt.app follows.
Overlays & panels
- Pause (Esc) — freezes into a time-dilated world and offers resume, settings, photo mode, and the world intensity slider (←/→).
- Queue (Tab) — a slide-in, now-playing-first view with ↑/↓ reorder buttons. Tracks carry a content-hash id, so imports dedupe and reordering never restarts the playing track.
- Library (L) — the world moods as selectable cards; pick one to jump worlds.
- Settings — the Comfort group works today; the remaining groups are display-only placeholders for now.
- Credits & Licenses — renders the asset manifest: every model's name, author, and license.
- Onboarding — the three-step first run (photosensitivity → controls → import); Esc closes the top overlay first, always.
Comfort
Comfort is a cross-cutting gate, checked at the effect sites rather than in the UI — so every new effect inherits the discipline. Both options apply instantly:
- Reduce flashing — holds the world glow steady (no beat pulse) and caps UI pulses.
- Gentler world motion — damps the sway.
verse.localgpt.app follows the same rule: palette cycling and reveal animations switch off entirely under your system's prefers-reduced-motion setting.
Photo mode
Press P (or the pause menu's button) to clear the chrome and save a clean screenshot of the world to verse-photos/. If a capture reads back black — a known GPU readback flake on some machines — LocalGPT Verse retries automatically before writing the file.