Game update

Playtest Update — Big Networking Fixes (Please Break It!)

Peekablock Playtest · published 30 Jul 2026, 10:38 UTC

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What this build is

This is a networking-focused test build. Last session with ~10 players fell apart: people turned invisible to each other, guns stopped working, and the connection quietly corrupted itself. We found the cause and this build is the fix. Please play it in as big a group as you can and tell us what happens.

The big one: painting no longer floods the connection

Body paint, disguise blocks and forged guns are now sent under a strict bandwidth budget, measured in real bytes on the wire. Before, a heavily painted player could dump over a megabyte at everyone at once and jam the connection until the session broke.
Paint history is streamed properly instead of being crammed into the join message. This fixes a nasty one: in a full lobby, the third or fourth painted player's disguise could arrive permanently unpainted for whoever joined — invisible work, no error, forever.
Reconnecting no longer inherits a half-finished transfer from your previous connection, which is what turned one overload into a whole broken session.

Joining and staying joined

If your game ever ends up connected but stranded — no match, stuck waiting — it now detects that and recovers instead of leaving you stuck.
When the server does have to drop you, it now tells you why instead of disconnecting silently.
Rejoining is fixed in two ways: the gate no longer refuses a returning player it can't identify, and your held slot correctly shows as empty while you're away.
Password-protected joins and simultaneous joins are handled in order, so two people connecting at once can't trip over each other.

Also in here

Host ping now shows in the server browser, colour-coded — green under 100ms through red above 200ms — updating live without the list jumping around.
Seeker gun diagnostics report the gun's real position, and there's new behind-the-scenes telemetry that warns us BEFORE the connection gets overloaded rather than after.

Heads up

The network protocol changed, so everyone needs this update to play together — you won't see each other's lobbies otherwise.

What we most want to know

Get 6+ people in and paint heavily. Does anyone go invisible, lose their paint, or lose their gun?
Join a lobby that already has several painted players — does everyone look right to you?
Leave and rejoin mid-session. Does it work, and does your slot behave?

Thanks — this one needs numbers to prove out, so a big session helps more than anything.

Other announcements

All events

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