Goal Celebrations, Visual Overhaul, Performance and QOL

Puck B1153 is here! This one is a big visual and quality-of-life pass. Goals now get the cinematic treatment with slow-motion replays and a celebration cam, the goalie crease is finally a protected zone, and the whole arena has been rebuilt under a unified shader for a cleaner, more consistent look. On top of that there's a mountain of HUD, menu, server and backend improvements.Here's the full changelog:

Gameplay

• Goalie crease protection - the crease is now a protected zone. Body-to-body collisions inside it are filtered, and an intruding player shows as a transparent ghost. (Can be disabled per-server in public_game_mode_config.json.)

• Casual votekicks are now decided by a whole-lobby majority.

• Removed votekick from competitive mode due to abuse. I understand this is not a perfect solution; further iterations/solutions will come in the future.

• The game clock now runs through 0:00 before a phase ends (the missing second is back!).

• Trimmed the faceoff, replay, and goal scored phases by 1s so their total length stays the same after the clock change.

• Match players are now notified of an auto-forfeit when every player on the opposing team leaves.

• Raised the player spawn delay to 10 seconds.

Goal Celebrations

• Goals now trigger a slow-motion replay as the puck crosses the line, with beat-blended timing.

• The camera zooms in on the slow-mo beats, and a celebration cam follows the scorer after a goal.

• The goal flash is now tinted to the scoring team's color.

• Goal audio is muffled during the slow motion, though the goal horn still rings out.

Visuals & Cosmetics

Cosmetics

• New Polymer line of stick skins.

• Re-added missing country flags.

• Removed the "toothbrush" mustache.

Rendering

• Added a Shadow Quality option to video settings, defaulting to High (mostly affects VRAM usage).

• Reworked every stick skin under a single unified shader for a cleaner, more consistent look.

• New depth-only shader pass applied to sticks.

• Added a clear-coat mask to the carbon line and tuned the clear coat across all stick lines.

• Smooth shading across the whole arena - rink, goals, puck, players, leg pads, helmets, scoreboard, hangar and spectator booth.

• Rebuilt the rink model so the barrier glass is generated dynamically.

• Restructured all helmets and fixed unnatural materials, missing flag textures and visor placement.

• Reworked scene lighting - disabled HDR, removed screen-space shadows, improved ambient occlusion and rebaked all lightmaps.

• The crowd now wears team jerseys sometimes.

HUD & Interface

In-Game HUD

• Added a team and position indicator. Current movement speed was relocated to the right of stamina to accommodate. (Can be disabled in settings.)

• The minimap now shows player sticks, puck elevation, and a fallen indicator. (Can be disabled in settings.)

• The minimap puck now renders as a proper circle instead of sometimes appearing oval.

• The minimap now shows during replays and while spectating.

• Minimap refresh rate raised to 120 Hz.

Voice Chat

• Added a voice transmit indicator to the HUD so you can see when you're talking.

• Added a mic test meter to the audio settings.

HUD & Interface

Menus & UI

• The pause menu now shows server details - voice chat status and tick rate.

• UI icons are now imported as textures instead of sprites to reduce pixelation.

• The build label got a background and an F5 hint; the net stats monitor was moved up and given a background.

• Competitive 3v3 and 5v5 cards are now labelled COMPETITIVE under the mode name.

• The pause menu, chat and scoreboard now work during team and position select.

• Esc now backs out one menu level instead of toggling the pause menu, and closes chat or cancels quick-chat.

• Added a Vote to Forfeit button to the pause menu (shares logic with the /ff command), plus a Return to Game button.

• Overlay menus now dim the screen behind them.

• Team player counts are now shown on the team select buttons.

• The menu footer shows your Puck username instead of your Steam name.

• Dropdowns now mark the selected item with a check and show a dropdown arrow.

• Scrollbars now sit beside content instead of overlapping it.

• Increased the contrast of all input-field backgrounds.

• A connected controller no longer hijacks the mouse cursor.

Chat

• Added a /help command that lists the available chat commands.

• /help is now split across multiple messages so it fits the chat length limit.

• Chat now opens on key press and respects your chat key binding.

• Fixed the chat box re-opening after quick inputs or when the chat button was Enter.

• A [TEAM] indicator now appears on the chat box when typing in team chat.

• Fixed long chat messages overlapping and mis-scrolling.

• Fixed chat scroll jumping to the top when old messages are trimmed at the max.

• The scrollbar now shows while chat is active.

Server Browser

• Filters now live in a left sidebar.

• The Direct Connect button is now native, with no need to switch on debug tools (F5).

• The Direct Connect view now stays up after a failed connection instead of stranding you.

• The server list now defaults to sorting by player count, with a cleaner sort icon.

• The New Server tabs now have icons, active-tab tints, and descriptions.

• "DEDICATED SERVERS" have been renamed to "CLOUD SERVERS" for clarity.

• Cloud servers are now Patreon-gated, to reduce the extra cost of providing free cloud servers.

• New servers now default to your Puck name.

• Failed server starts now show feedback and let you retry.

Scoreboard

• Late joiners now correctly see cached player positions on the scoreboard.

Mods Menu

• Restyled the mods menu rows and labelled the enable toggle.

• A subscribed mod with no local files now shows a warning.

Settings

• The debug overlay toggle is now rebindable from F5.

• The settings menu no longer resets double-press keybinds back to single press.

Servers, Backend & Connectivity

Server Management

• Server admins can no longer be votekicked, and can join servers that are full.

• Added banning and unbanning by SteamID64 via chat commands (/ban and /unban).

• A server now reports itself ready only after the backend authenticates and the initial scene loads.

• Players are held out with a "Server is still starting…" message until the server's mods finish downloading.

• The unlisted-server warning no longer fires when a host stops the server intentionally.

• Backend reconnection (client-side and server-side) was refactored using exponential backoff with a ping-timeout watchdog; the server keeps retrying after a network outage and logs when it falls off the public browser.

• On a config parse failure the server keeps its last-good ban/whitelist lists and default game-mode config; it refuses to start on an invalid server config and reports malformed JSON with the file, line, and path.

• uPnP forwarding no longer binds a local socket on the mapped port.

• Dedicated servers skip workshop preview downloads and defer plugin loading until the socket is open.

• Standardized server startup logs, announce the ready public address, and added terminal color detection with forced UTF-8 console output.

Admin Commands

• Restored the admin /start and /warmup commands.

• Pause, resume, and phase skips are now announced in chat, naming the admin who did it.

• Pause and resume are now rejected when the game is already in that state.

Matchmaking & Backend

• Reworked how the pool forms games - groups are now paired by their overall MMR spread rather than the spread between the two teams, producing fairer, more consistent matchups.

• Groups are now matched at a steady interval instead of debouncing, so match formation is more predictable.

• A group's ping is now derived from the latency of all members, so server selection accounts for everyone in the party.

• Repeat offenders now receive progressively longer matchmaking cooldowns.

• No cooldown is issued when all players fail to join a match server - a bad server is no longer held against the players.

• The client now responds to ping requests using the maximum RTT set in its own client settings.

• Migrated matchmaking from Edgegap's Locations and Beacons to Probes.

• Widened the list of locations to which a cloud server can be deployed.

• Created and implemented Puck's own deployment management service, which will let us deploy servers to locations not supported by the current provider.

• Raised all deployment limits, allowing a theoretical maximum of 100 concurrent matches across all regions (previously 25).

Steam

• A helpful message now shows when Steam keeps failing to initialize.

• The client now recovers from and surfaces a hung Steam web API auth ticket.

Performance

• Large pass to cut per-tick allocations across object sync, collisions, snapshot interpolation and events, reducing the frequency of client- and server-induced hitches from garbage collection.

• Network metrics, jersey text, elevation indicators and info-log stack traces are now skipped on dedicated servers.

• The server browser no longer drops your frames while playing - pings run on dedicated threads and the list sort is debounced.

Bug Fixes

• Restored the puck mesh to the Puck layer so its outline and silhouette render again.

• Equipped cosmetics are now validated by category and ownership, so players can't join with unowned or empty gear.

• Unclaiming a position you were spawned into returns you to position select.

• Late joiners now see the correct player position on the scoreboard (re-resolved on session sync).

• The settings-reset event now only fires when settings are actually reset.

• Players now join with a full chat allowance so you can chat right away.

• Guarded against NaN values in stick actions.

• Skating, stick and puck sounds are now silenced while a body is frozen.

• Fixed a crash during connection approval when connection data was missing.

• Connections missing a Steam ID or mod list are now rejected.

Good luck and have fun out on the ice!