Playtest Update — A Second Map, One Shared Lobby, and Different Gunshot Sounds

⚠️ Everyone must update — this one breaks compatibility

The network version changed (20 → 22). Unlike the last few updates, an out-of-date client cannot join you — it will not even see your lobby in the server list. That is deliberate: it is far better than two builds quietly disagreeing about what map you are playing. Please make sure every single person restarts Steam and updates before you organise a session. Any reconnect ticket from a previous build is also retired.

There is a second map: Candy

The map picker used to be a picture. Now it picks the map you actually play.

• Everyone gathers in one shared lobby — the same waiting room, whatever map is selected.
• The host picks the map from MATCH SETTINGS, and the card updates on everyone's screen.
• When the host presses START, the whole session moves into that map together, behind a loading screen, and nobody is left behind.
• At the end of the match everyone comes back to the shared lobby, with the pick preserved.

The shared lobby lives in Cactus Courtyard, so picking that map means there is nothing to move into and START stays instant — no loading screen. Only Candy shows one. That is by design, not a missing screen.
Candy is a functional first pass — the level designer's final layout, camera and spawn placement are still to come. Tell us how it plays, not how it looks.

The map row in MATCH SETTINGS was dead — the host can now change the map

For the entire life of a session, picking a different map in the Custom Match panel did nothing at all: the choice was silently reverted on the same frame. A host who started on Candy could never get back to Cactus Courtyard. Both directions work now, and a pick that is refused (mid-match, or after the game has started) visibly snaps back instead of leaving you wondering.
The map list also showed two identical "Cactus Courtyard" rows — a leftover test copy. It is gone.

Every shot in the game sounded like hitting metal

The hunter's hit sound was a placeholder from a plugin sample pack: one clip, 2.4 seconds of metallic ring, played loud enough that it drowned out the actual surface underneath it. So sand, wood, cactus and everything else all sounded the same. It is now a short, dry hit-confirm at half the volume of the surface layer — meaning the sound you hear is what you actually hit. This is the single most audible change in the build.

Candy has its own voice

Soft gummy footsteps with a sugar sparkle, a sugar-shell crack when you shoot it, dust falling — and the giant candy cane bumps when you walk into it. Walking on the candy cane also used to play grass footsteps, because its stripes are green. Fixed.

Building: things can no longer float

"Everything stays attached" was enforced when you placed a block and when you erased one — and nowhere in between. So shrinking a supporting block with the SCALE gizmo could shed the layers behind it and leave a stack hanging in mid-air. All three Modify gizmos (Move / Scale / Rotate) now check attachment when you release, and a move that would strand a piece steps back instead of committing. Cancelling a drag by typing in chat, or by leaving the tool mid-gesture, used to skip that check entirely — it does not any more.

Wide bodies stop mangling your cubes

On the fat body type, cubes placed on arms and legs were drawn up to 1.5× too long and skewed by about 20°, because width on that body is carried as bone scale and the old compensation was wrong for anything rotated. Cubes now hang off a clean anchor and are driven onto the bone every frame.
This also explains the long-standing report that cubes placed on your head showed up at your feet on other people's screens — a cache gave up looking for the head bone before the body had finished building itself, and then never tried again. It retries now.

Build mode: the two loops that got people stuck

• "Can't place blocks after scaling" was two problems wearing one coat: releasing a drag on an invalid (red) preview left an invisible draw alive that owned every subsequent click, and the panel kept SCALE lit after the game had already gone back to Place — so you pressed the lit button and went straight back into Modify. Both fixed.
• "Stuck in Paint Mode" — closing the paint panel by pausing, getting caught, or changing HUD mode never raised the close event, so the game stayed in build mode with your movement frozen and no way out. Deactivating an open panel is now a real close.
• Walking backward with the Build panel open silently switched you into the Modify tool, because S was bound as its scale hotkey. That bind is removed.

The colour picker takes the colour you are pointing at

The panel eyedropper never actually traced anything — it just read a pixel off the screen, so it returned whatever the light and fog had done to a surface rather than its real colour. It now picks the exact stored colour off your own cubes and painted skin, and it will no longer be blocked by your own body, pick the wrong side of a bevelled cube, or leave a stray paint stroke behind when you click.

Lying down actually makes you shorter now

No code ever resized your collision shape for a pose, so lying flat still left a full-height invisible column — you could not fit under anything. A held pose now genuinely lowers your collision height. (Note: C for CROUCH does nothing — see the known issues below. Poses are the working way to get under a low gap.)
The invisible shape that grows to cover the blocks you build also used to shove you out of your hiding spot when you left build mode. It now refuses a fit that would eject you, and retries once you move.

Hunters: B hides your body while hunting

The "hide my own body" toggle was only ever read inside the gun forge — dead for the whole Seek phase, dead with the panel closed, and cleared on the way out. It now works whenever you can aim, and can never leave your body stranded invisible.

Spectating from inside the map, not from a box in the sky

Eliminated players were being placed in the sealed hunter waiting room, 37 metres above the play area. Spectators now spawn with the hiders, in the map. The free-fly camera is also tethered to your body until you actually fly — so being caught, or falling out of the world, leaves you watching the round instead of staring into nothing. Free-fly no longer goes dead after joining mid-match, either.

People have names again

Everyone outside a Steam session was "Player 1", "Player 2" — on nameplates, in the roster, the kill feed, voice, and the results screen. The Display Name field in the Create Server popup was being collected and thrown away; it now saves and is used, falling back to your Steam name or your Windows user name.
The "X joined." chat line also used to print before the name arrived, so it announced "Player 4 joined." — it now waits briefly for the real name.

The lobby now looks the same for everyone

If your map finished loading after the lobby had already told you it was waiting, you got the hunter HUD in the lobby: crosshair on screen, no player roster, wrong prompts along the bottom. One race, four symptoms, all fixed. The player count on the left ("N/10") also now reads the host's actual setting instead of your own local default.

Known issues — please don't file these

• C (CROUCH) does nothing. The prompt strip advertises it, but it was never wired up. Use a held pose to fit under low gaps — that now genuinely lowers your height.
• H (crosshair toggle) does nothing, and A/D while spectating does not follow another player. Both are half-built features, not regressions.
• A colour picked off a distant surface still reads washed out up close — fog is being applied twice in the picker pipeline. Diagnosed, fix in progress.
• The fat body's own skin still deforms in some poses. That is the character rig itself and needs an art pass.

What we most want to know

• Play Candy end to end. Pick it, press START — does everyone arrive together? Does everyone get home to the lobby afterwards?
• Change the map while waiting, in both directions, more than once. Does the card update on every screen?
• Build on the fat body — arms, legs, head, feet — then have somebody else describe what they see on you. That is where the old bugs were invisible to the builder.
• Scale a block that other blocks are resting on. Anything left floating? Tell us immediately.
• Shoot several different surfaces. Do they sound different from each other now?
• Get caught, and separately fall out of the map. Where does the camera put you?

If something looks wrong, press F12 the moment it happens — it marks that exact instant in your log — then run Collect-Logs.bat and send us the folder.