Playtest Update — Your Shots Land Now (plus spawns, host settings, and a big per

The big one: shooting actually works

If you ever shot a hider dead-on and nothing happened, that was real and it is fixed. The hit check used a thin line, and when your aim was fractionally off it re-tested the body at a point far down the camera line — several metres from where you were actually looking. That guaranteed a miss, and on a bad angle it could tag a bystander instead of the person you shot.

• The check is now a rounded cast sized to the real player hitbox, so a hit reads as a hit.
• A genuine miss resolves as a clean miss instead of firing off into the distance.
• Players no longer glide after the server moves them, so releases and rescues land where you see them.

Hunters spawn on solid ground again

Four of the six hunter spawn points in the desert map were buried inside the rock. Of the two that appeared to work, one dropped hunters into a sealed crevice and the other released the host straight out of the world. All six have been moved to open desert and checked against the actual terrain.

The pre-match waiting area also only had six places in a fourteen-player lobby. Everyone fits now.

Host settings finally reach the players

Your match settings were sent out once, at the moment the match started. Every change you made after that only ever applied on your own machine as host. Everyone else played the whole round on the old copy — wrong round timers, wrong ammo, and the wrong abilities enabled or disabled.

That had a nasty knock-on too: a hunter could start a round holding stale rules that said building was switched off, get refused, and never be asked again — no gun for the entire round. Both are fixed.

Performance

• Nameplates were rebuilding their text from scratch every single frame, for every nameplate on screen. This was the single biggest frame cost in the game, and it got worse the more players you could see.
• Body paint could get stuck encoding at the highest quality even on lightly painted characters, causing a short freeze every few seconds.
• Several sources of log spam that were costing frames are now throttled.

Joining, leaving, and rejoining

• Reconnecting no longer risks losing your slot — a rejected hold used to delete it outright.
• Players who already left are no longer converted onto the hunting team in Tag and Infected, which used to invent a hunter nobody was playing.
• The Custom Match player slider went up to 20 while a session only accepts 14, so anyone past the 14th was turned away with nothing explaining why. It now stops where the game actually stops.
• The gun sits where it was authored to sit, rather than about 26 cm off.

Heads up

The network version did not change this time, so someone still on the previous build can join you. They will not have any of these fixes though, and a mixed session makes problems much harder for us to trace — please make sure everyone updates before you play.

Known issue

Names using non-Latin characters still show as boxes on nameplates. The performance problem that came with it is fixed, but the font work itself is still to come.

What we most want to know

• Shoot people. Do your shots land when they look like they should?
• Playing hunter — do you start on solid ground every time?
• Hosting — change the settings in the lobby, then check the round actually runs with them.
• Does the game feel smoother, especially in a busy lobby?

Thanks — last session's logs are what found most of this.