Seasons Start Fresh

A season is a fresh start for the boards, the lobby is tidier, and the game does a little less work for every frame it draws.

Added

• Seasons. A season is a date when the boards start again. Your best score, best wave, Rep and rating begin from zero, so everyone races from the same line. Your history, Marks and gear stay exactly as they are. A season is announced in the game and by a note to your inbox before it begins, never less than three days ahead.
• Pick where the Gauntlet begins in a popup. Press Gauntlet and, if you have gone deeper than wave 1, a card opens in the middle of the screen: − and + step the start one wave at a time, Start at wave N begins, and From the beginning goes back to wave 1. The lobby itself stays clear.
• A way to see what a frame costs. A new benchmark plays a seeded fight, on a desktop or a throttled phone, and reports frame times, the 99th-percentile spike, sim and draw cost, and any audio stutter. It is how the fixes below were measured.

Changed

• The Story log is an ink chip with a book, sitting in one column with the music player, so the two never overlap.
• The lobby’s right column is wider on desktop: 38% of the screen, between 472 and 560 px, so the cards read without squeezing.
• A new season’s Rep reset is not a loss. The inbox no longer shows it as a ranked loss.
• Frames cost less. The print buffer is now uploaded to the graphics card without being flipped first, and the score is formatted by hand instead of through the browser’s number formatter on every frame. On a throttled phone the worst frames got shorter in our tests; on a desktop the game was already far above 120 frames a second.

Fixed

• The Home page matches the game. Storylines, the Gauntlet’s start one wave behind your best, the roof, gear, both boards and seasons are described as they are now.