v0.7.2 — OptiRoute Rework

A significant rework of the OptiRoute system and a round of stability fixes. Nothing new on the player-facing side, but overdrive should feel a lot more dynamic, and a handful of crashes and physics errors are gone.

OptiRoute Combo System

Overdrive was previously a flat 5-second window at a fixed speed cap. We replaced it with a combo system — chaining activations builds a counter, and the counter changes how overdrive behaves:

• Duration scales with combo: base 2.5s, +1.2s per level, up to 8.5s at combo 5
• Speed cap rises from 80 m/s at combo 0 to 150 m/s at combo 5
• Drag collapses toward zero as combo climbs
• Cooldown between activations dropped from 2.5s to 1.0s
• 0.8s grace window keeps the combo alive if overdrive is still active when it would otherwise expire

The HUD and hologram shift from cyan toward warm cyan as combo rises. VHS distortion now starts at 90 m/s — stronger tear and chromatic aberration, but not kicking in as early. The camera red filter no longer ties to raw speed; it only fires during active overdrive.

On audio, the music lowpass descends as combo rises, giving a pressure-building underwater feel at high chains. Speed stress SFX now only play above 70 m/s and use an A/B crossfade.

PASS Surface Rework

The old jump OptiRoute surface was a 2D plane you had to launch from at exactly the right moment. Players consistently reported it as impossible to hit — and in hundreds of hours of testing, not one of us managed to trigger it reliably either. That’s a design problem, not a skill issue.

We replaced it with a volumetric Area3D inside the module. Instead of hitting a precise point on a flat surface, you just need to pass through a volume of space — overdrive fires when your body enters it. It actually gets triggered now.

Grapple Tuning

The initial boost on hook was too aggressive. We dropped force from 50 to 25 m/s² and added a 50 m/s speed cap — once you hit it, the boost cuts off early instead of running its full duration. Stops the grapple from launching you through the level on a clean swing.

Stability Fixes

Fixed a crash in SquadCommand where killing an enemy while it was on the attack waitlist caused a null instance access — dead bots are now removed before role reassignment runs. Jolt !isfinite errors on spike frames are gone; delta is now clamped to 0.05 in GrappleState before it reaches the spring integration. Ragdoll bone angular velocity was diverging after the handover phase — fixed. Boot-time import warning from a rifle texture UID mismatch in the rifleman scene is also gone.

Floor Manager

Background prebuild is now limited to one room at a time, and a new flag blocks a fresh prebuild from starting while the previous floor is still being freed. On lower-end hardware, a paced yield inserts an extra idle frame when FPS drops below display refresh — should cut down on hitching during transitions.