A performance release. Two large rendering and simulation reworks land together, roughly
doubling the frame rate under heavy load, plus a run of visual-polish fixes.
Performance
The two biggest costs at high enemy counts - drawing the enemies and running the combat
simulation - were both reworked.
Enemies now render in a single pass. Each enemy used to be five stacked layers (body, wear, cracks, glow, bloom), and the status rings (marked / slowed / burning) were drawn one at a time on the CPU. All of that now composites in one GPU pass per enemy type. At peak density the draw-call count roughly halves.
The combat simulation runs on its own thread. On desktop the wave simulation now overlaps the rendering of the previous frame instead of running back-to-back with it. The win is largest exactly where it hurt most - the surge-storm frames that used to cause brief stutters no longer land inside the render frame. Gameplay, draft outcomes, and scoring are unchanged; only *when* the sim runs moved, not *how*.
At the internal stress benchmark (wave 90, 5x speed, 300 enemies on screen) the frame rate roughly doubles versus 1.4.2, with the worst single frame improving by a similar margin. Normal play was already smooth; this is headroom for the heaviest boards and deepest endless runs.
Settings has a new Graphics Focus toggle (Quality / Performance), defaulting to Quality - full visual detail, which already carries the bulk of the speed-up (the enemy and simulation reworks above are always on and cost nothing in quality). Performance is an optional mode that trades some visual detail at very high enemy density for extra frames on top.
Visual fixes
Surge rings sit on their towers again. Several tower-surge and modifier-proc ring effects were drawing offset from the tower - most visibly a small ring floating above a tower once a run got busy, and oversized rings that read as loose halos on the battlefield. The rings are now tight and centred: an inner/outer pair no longer collapses into two big duplicates, a redundant extra ring per surge is gone, the retired flying surge pip no longer leaves a displaced dot, and a stray "meter" ring that appeared 32 pixels above towers deep into dense waves is removed.
Projectiles leave the centre of the tower. On any window wider than 1280 pixels, tower shots were spawning to the upper-right of the tower before flying to their target. They now originate from the tower itself.
The HUD build label stops clipping long loadout names while the top bar still has room, and its readout chrome is drawn more efficiently.
Stability
No more frame hitches from the new sim thread. Two edge cases found in real play - a race on the enemy motion-trail data and the wave-20 boss bar being built off the main thread - are fixed, and a stale visual effect can no longer carry a spurious extra life into the following run on restart.