Build 25131478

The tower got deeper, brighter, and considerably less broken.

The tower has a bottom now

Everything outside a room used to be pure black — on a widescreen monitor
that was roughly a fifth of every frame, ending in a hard straight edge
where the level simply stopped. The shaft around you is now actually
there: a parallax lattice that slides as you move, drifting motes,
strata plates receding into the dark, all tinted to the biome you are in.

You can see the floor you are standing on

Measured on a real capture, the ground in the TOWER campaign was sitting at
about 4% brightness — on anything but a pitch-dark room it was
indistinguishable from the void around it. Floors, walls and their edges
have been lifted and re-balanced so the play space reads as a space.

Fixed: the game could get stuck in slow motion forever

This is the big one. Killing an enemy triggered a short freeze for impact —
but the code that restored normal speed lived on the enemy, and the enemy
deleted itself on the same frame. The restore never ran. From that kill on,
the entire session ran at a twentieth speed until you restarted.

Time is now owned by a single system that can't lose track of it:

• a kill freeze can no longer strand the clock, whatever dies
• a kill during Focus no longer cancels Focus (and vice versa)
• closing the weapon wheel no longer kills an active TEMPORAL DILATION
• pausing runs menus at full speed instead of in slow motion
• the clock is re-asserted every frame — a stray write costs one frame,
  not your run

Also fixed

• Quitting to the menu during an enemy turn in tactics mode no longer
  resumes the turn on a dead board
• An enemy attack can no longer land on a board you already left
• Boss spread-fire is guarded against a NaN direction edge case
• Cloud save probing degrades gracefully instead of raising a script error

For bug reports

Press ` (or ~ / F1) to open the console. New command:
time tells you exactly what is holding the game clock, and
time reset releases it. If the game ever feels wrong-speed again,
that command will say why — please paste it into a report.

Thanks for playing. The tower is still flooding.