Slot Theory 1.6.1 - Update Notes
A small release with one real idea in it: you can now see where your partner is about to aim.
Co-op shares a lane and a pool of lives, which makes failure joint but does nothing for success. A player put it better than we had:
shared lives makes the failure joint but not the success, and dual spawn only removes the safe seat, neither actually makes you need the other player. the operator aimed into their lane is the only real line between you, and it only turns into coordination if they have to know it's coming.
That was right, so this is the fix.
Co-op: the partner aim telegraph
Arm an operator active and every other player now sees a marker land on the spot you are aiming at, while you are still deciding. Cancel and it goes away. It shows where, not the whole gesture - enough to hold a placement or keep your own meter in your pocket for a wave someone else is already handling, which was impossible before because the first sign of a partner's cast was the wave of deaths it left behind.
AI-held boards arm properly too, so a player paired with a bot sees the same telegraph a human would give them.
Aim travels as held state on the snapshot, not as start/stop events. That distinction is the whole design: an aim can be held for as long as you like and cancelled for free, so an AimStart / AimEnd pair has a lost-AimEnd case, and its symptom is a marker stranded on your partner's screen for the rest of the run with nothing to clear it. State cannot strand - every snapshot restates the truth, a cancel is simply the next snapshot saying nobody is aiming, and a dropped packet costs one frame instead of the rest of the run. It is a sparse block, so the common case of nobody aiming costs one byte.
This moves the wire to snapshot v18 and protocol v11. Both machines must run the same build, as always.
Fixes
- Tower surge meters were invisible on the joined client, on both boards. Two separate cut-offs stacked. First, the client had no source for a surge visual at all: its presentation sim's shots and procs never reached the surge system, and the system was never pumped, so a tower could surge exactly once per run and then go quiet forever. Second, once that was fixed the meter filled correctly and still drew empty, because nothing copied the value from the system onto the tower node that renders it. Client towers now charge, ring, pulse and fire repeatedly, the way they always did solo.
- The next run's enemies could crawl. Operator-active cascades are scheduled on the scene tree, not on the run, so one could outlive the run that scheduled it. The visible symptom was a crash out of the Operators preview when you swapped operator mid-cast. The invisible one was worse: the cascade had already written a global slow-motion multiplier and then died before resetting it, so a later run could start with everything moving at a fraction of speed and nothing to explain why.
- The operator preview drew at half size, then froze into a sine wave. Under Reduced Motion the Operators panel fell through to a placeholder that rendered as a bare curve with five dots under a lone ring. Each active now gets a real still frame - the dots posed where the cast would have left them, with the cast drawn around them. Separately the preview was using its supersampled buffer as its design space, so every fixed-size element in it drew at half the intended scale.
- Attract mode parked on a scoreboard. The menu backdrop inherited the end-screen hold that auto-draft uses for screenshots, so it flashed a results screen every time its run died, and any hiccup left it sitting there permanently with no player to dismiss it. It now loops.
- Blast Core's detonation is edgeless. It was a hard, bright ring; it is now a soft bloom that reads as a shockwave instead of a decal.
Elsewhere
- The main menu may ask you for a Steam review. Once, quietly, in the column beside the menu, and only if you have finished at least three runs. It states the actual situation - Steam withholds a review score until a game has 10 reviews, and it says how many Slot Theory has - and then it gets out of the way. There is no "remind me later", because there is nothing to remind you about: the panel checks the count once a day and deletes itself for good the moment the game clears 10. If the check fails for any reason at all, it does not appear.
Found a bug?
Tell us. The Steam discussions and Discord both reach us, and Discord is usually faster.