Period: December 16, 2025 Total Commits: 26

Hey, here’s what we worked on today. The focus was eight-player FFA polish, cleaning up UI clarity, and tightening up performance. A lot of this is about making big matches readable and fair without adding noise.

What’s New

• Eight-team scoreboard

  • Tab now shows up to 8 teams in two columns with distinct team colors and clear income headers.
  • Easier to scan who’s ahead at a glance.

  [screenshot: updated Tab scoreboard with 8 teams at 845a88a]

• FFA spawn randomization option

  • For multi-team maps, lobbies can choose Fixed or Random spawn positions.
  • Random uses the lobby seed so everyone sees the same shuffle.
  • The camera now centers on your castle at match start to help you orient quickly.

  [screenshot: FFA start with randomized castle positions at db5bb99]

• Team elimination system

  • In 3+ team games, eliminated teams are tracked and shown as a short on-screen notice.
  • Eliminated players can’t place or upgrade; bots stop acting immediately.
  • Bottom bar clarifies your state if you’re out.

• Clearer speed and aura info

  • InfoPanel now shows speed bonuses from heroic charge and nearby speed auras.
  • Boosted values highlight in green; it also accounts for slows and stuns.

  [screenshot: InfoPanel showing speed aura and heroic charge bonuses at a710c1f]

What Got Fixed

• Fair FFA combat buffs

  • Minion health buffs after a castle falls now apply to all surviving teams (not just two-team logic). In short: if Team C dies, everyone except C gets the +10% buff.

• InfoPanel correctness

  • Speed display now reflects the multiplier actually applied when a minion spawned (no more retroactive skill bonus).
  • Bounty display uses the minion’s live level-scaled bounty, not the base config.

• Better bot behavior in edge cases

  • Eliminated bots stop immediately; the elimination check happens before any decisions.
  • Spiral maze building fixed to preserve 1-tile corridors and avoid invalid placements.
  • Free-for-all goldflow initialization now runs for all teams, so bot placement logic gets complete board data.

• UI/UX cleanup

  • Enemy tower range indicators now show correctly in single-board mode.
  • Transparent parts of the bottom bar no longer eat clicks; right-click context menus are disabled on HUD.
  • Waiting on other players? Unit buttons clearly gray out to show they’re locked.
  • Back navigation no longer loops you between lobby and an active game.

  [screenshot: enemy tower range indicator visible in single-board mode at 85a463f]

• Gameplay feel

  • Castle hits shake more and a bit longer (intensity 0.6, duration 400ms) so it’s easier to notice your base is under fire.

• Placement rules

  • Path-only towers (like spikes, wind) won’t place on grass if a map actually has roads. This closes some confusing edge cases.

• Replays and resync

  • The resync loading screen now waits for both map data and history replay, so you don’t see the game start before it’s ready.
  • Replay data sticks around longer: game state and action history now persist for 30 days.

Under the Hood

• Rendering performance on large maps

  • Water, doodads, and explicit grass tiles now use instanced meshes instead of individual meshes.
  • On 50x50 maps, draw calls dropped from roughly 875 to about 4, which removed 30–40 FPS dips on our test scenes.
  • Depth ordering tightened up: towers, castles, doodads, and health bars layer consistently, with health bars always on top.

• Smoother camera and input

  • Switched to Three.js setAnimationLoop for better vsync timing.
  • Snapped camera pixels to reduce sprite shimmer.
  • Input update order adjusted to remove a 1-frame delay when panning.

• Bots and tooling

  • All bots now use a spiral mazing pattern for predictable, expandable mazes.
  • Added an internal mazing test view to iterate on tower placement logic faster (helps us catch adjacency and obstacle issues before they hit matches).

• Systems sanity

  • Gold flow visualization now serializes all teams in FFA, not just A/B, and accounts for water tiles to avoid silly paths.
  • Test Arena unlocking no longer gets reset by a state update.

Thanks for the bug reports and replays—those pointed us straight at the FFA issues and a few UI mismatches. If you notice anything off with multi-team visibility or placement rules, send a screenshot and steps to repro. It helps a lot.