This work is local. The live game is still 6.66.42 with the hand changes from earlier in the week, and everything below is a draft nobody has played.
What it does
When the finisher catches a boss, the Keeper leaps and cuts it from the top down, or lunges and cuts across the waist. The halves fall apart, a cut face shows on each, and blood flies from the split. The five classes without a blade (Wizard, Witch, Archer, Bounty Hunter and Monk) cut with an energy edge. Which cut is used comes from a seed, so an online player's character will make the same cut on every screen. That seam is written down, not built.
Measured
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Forced cuts on 55 boss bodies, all ten classes | 116 of 116 passed, 0 errors |
| Real kills by hits | 6 of 6 passed |
| Final-code cuts | 6 of 6 ok, 88 to 182 ms each |
The 55 bodies are the 7 original mini bosses, 36 roster bosses of Levels 2 to 10, 3 creature guardians, the 10 Mega Bosses and two further bosses. The real kills include a Wizard and a Ninja in the Abyss, a Barbarian against Chiselgod, Survival waves 5 and 10, and one more late fight.
A real bug found on the way
A Mega Boss that died while adds were still alive never cleared its chamber or opened the portal. One shared kill event was being reused by the nested kills of the adds. It is fixed in the combat code.
Making it fast
The cut-face shading moved to a background worker. The median blow cost on Mega Bosses fell from 312 ms to about 120 ms.
What the reviews found
Six independent read-only reviews, three on the look and three on the code, went through about 200 stills and a fresh production build. Each fault below was fixed.
- Blood that read as something else. First it looked like red petals, then like black flecks. The first second of spray is now red under any light.
- Cut faces. They looked like maroon boards with fried-egg bone discs. There are now fewer, darker bones, a lip round the edge, and a page-stack face for the paper bosses.
- Halves that wandered. Some stood back up or walked 23 to 29 m away. They now settle in a bounded, frame-rate independent way.
- A film camera that jumped up to 74 m. The cause was a clean-up loop that bypassed the speed cap on the camera.
- A freeze of several seconds in normal play. A shader warm-up ran all at once. It is now spread over frames.
One of these fixes touches every fight. Blood droplets had never been drawn in headless runs because of a face-culling bug, so the earlier checks never showed them. They are drawn now, which means ordinary kills look different, and those are the ones to look at next.
Still open
On one boss the lower half stands for about four seconds before it falls. Cut faces on the Index and Marginalia read as a barcode from above. The Knight's cape shows a wedge at the start of the leap, and dark rooms are hard to read in real lighting. The first cut of a real session may also hitch.