Menu navigation should never be a scrollathon. Three courtesies, all about never being stranded:
RETURN TO MAIN MENU is pinned at the top of every sub-menu. The campaign board, the flight school syllabus, the pilot log — the button now leads the list and it is sticky: sixteen mission rows can scroll under it and the way home never leaves the glass. The bottom ESC row stays too, and ESC still steps back one menu.
BACK TO MISSION on the main menu. Bail out of a briefing with ESC — easy to do when the teletype is running — and the main menu now offers one button (or the M key) straight back to that brief, mission title chalked on the tag. Launching the sortie retires the button; quitting mid-flight still gets RESUME FLIGHT instead.
Consistent everywhere. Same button, same position, same key — school, campaign and log behave identically, so the map in your head is the map on the screen.
Product call from the boss: "Instead of waiting for the phone to rotate, just serve the game and fix for landscape. The user will figure it out." Correct. So the ROTATE YOUR DEVICE overlay is gone. A phone held upright now gets the game immediately — the whole thing laid out for landscape and spun 90 degrees, menu included (above). It looks sideways on an upright phone; the pilot turns the phone; done. The gyro, once permitted (one tap, asked on the first touch), simply flips which way the game spins if they turned the "wrong" way, and a viewport that genuinely rotates to landscape always wins natively. Rotation lock is now fully irrelevant either way.
Serving the menu inside a portrait viewport surfaced two fun bugs. One: engaging the spin at startup called the resize path before the HUD module existed — a TDZ crash that only fired in portrait, leaving the menu unbuilt (thank you, errbox). The re-layout is now deferred a frame. Two: the compact phone menu is gated on @media (max-height: 480px) — and a portrait viewport is 844 tall, so the full-size desktop menu rendered into a 390-tall game screen and the flex column crushed the button list to 33 pixels. The compact rules are now replicated under sideways mode, along with swapped vw/vh units throughout, and the suite checks the menu is genuinely tappable through the rotation: 51/51.
First feedback from a new pilot on a MacBook: "can't get off the ground." Fair — the sim never told you how. Three fixes. Every launch now opens a quick-start card with the handful of keys that get you airborne (W to firewall the throttles, B brakes off, pull back at 150 knots, G gear up, ? for the full manual) — it fades by itself, closes on a click, and has a don't-show-again tick for veterans. The DEMO menu item actually demos now: it hides the menu and plays the attract loop full-screen until any key brings you back (previously it did exactly nothing, since the demo jet was already flying behind the menu). And the mouse stick grows up: press Y, then click the screen to capture the cursor — pointer lock turns relative movement into stick deflection, which is how the Amiga original flew and, crucially, the only way a trackpad can.
