Road to 1.0: Four New Arenas, a Native Lobby and Bots That Play to Win

Four New Arenas

Beta 12 brings four new maps: Washoi DM16 for FFA, Washoi DM17 for Duel and FFA, Washoi DM18 for FFA and Washoi Amphi3 for Amphi.

They're compiled fresh from the Warfork map sources rather than taken from Warfork's own builds, which date from 2015, before its 2026 model updates.

Bringing them in taught the engine a few new tricks:

• ▸Fog volumes are drawn. What lies inside fog fades into its colour with distance, so DM17's green pits and fog wall show as fog instead of black holes. That works on WebGL2 and on WebGPU.
• ▸Map particles are drawn: the smoke behind Amphi3's glass and the bubbles over DM17's slime. Amphi2's five emitters, which never drew anything, now show too.
• ▸Buttons work as in Warsow. A shootable button opens its doors when it's shot or caught in a blast, not when someone walks up to it, and it presses in.
• ▸Textures are the right size. Warfork replaced some images with larger ones, so the teleporter signs now show the whole sign instead of a magnified corner.

Smaller fixes keep the maps fair: DM16's handrails no longer leave an invisible ledge beside them, and the teleporter frames on DM16 and DM17 stand on the floor.

The Native Client Gets Its Own Lobby

The native client has moved fast since beta 10: five releases in two days, up to 0.5.0. The biggest change is one you'll see the moment it starts. The lobby is now native. Until 0.5.0 it was the browser's lobby page in an embedded web view; now every screen is drawn by the client itself:

• ▸Play, rooms and room chat.
• ▸Settings, in the lobby and over a match.
• ▸The Leaderboard: the podium and the Top 100.
• ▸Demos: featured and latest, yours, and download and play.
• ▸Your Profile: your key, Change name, Use another key and Delete account.
• ▸The Welcome for a new player, the welcome guide with the terms and your keys, the credits and the update notice.
• ▸Lobby music, with a key to mute it.
• ▸A notice when the servers are full or the lobby is offline, with a countdown and Try now.
• ▸The console, over the lobby.

Dropping the web view made the client simpler to run, too:

• ▸Linux no longer needs WebKitGTK, and Wayland desktops run the game on Wayland.
• ▸Invite links open in the client: washoi --join takes a lobby link, an invite link or a room id, and joins once you're logged in.
• ▸macOS keeps one window for every screen, and hides the cursor in a match.

The releases since beta 10 also draw the rotating fans and lifts, and show the new Overall rating (more on that below). The next native release catches up with beta 12: fog volumes, map particles, buttons, kill taunts and victory clips. The new maps themselves need nothing new from the native client.

Grab the newest build from the Download page, under Downloads on washoi.net. On Windows the installed game updates itself. Every machine you try it on helps, so tell us on Discord how it runs.

Bots That Play to Win

Beta 10 taught the bots to move. Beta 12 teaches them to think. Bots now keep a read of the match from what they saw, heard and did: their own health and armour over time, an estimate of each enemy's, who took the major items, how each fight ended and the score. Fresh estimates land within 25 points of the truth 82–89% of the time.

Hard and Insane bots act on it and change plan:

• ▸Outstacked, they stop taking even fights and collect instead.
• ▸Losing the major items, they time and deny them, the Red Armor before the Mega.
• ▸With the enemy weak, or behind late on, they press. With at least 150 health and armour and a clear edge, they hunt instead of shopping for more.
• ▸Ahead late on, they protect the lead.
• ▸Set on by several enemies, they get out. A bot retreating from an enemy in sight first breaks line of sight, then heads for health, instead of running past them to the best health item.

Within a match a bot also learns which strategy works against you, contests the item you keep taking, and switches to the gun that will finish you when it knows a hit would kill. Medium bots only recover and protect a lead; Easy bots play as before.

A hit now holds a bot's attention on its attacker for 1.5 seconds, so a bot shot in the back turns round and fights instead of running on to its item. And outside a fight, a bot with an enemy to hunt now hunts. In 4-bot Deathmatch on washoi_dm2, item runs fell from 86% to 55–74% of roaming time, and chasing nearly doubled.

Measured Against People

For the first time, bots are measured against people instead of guesses. A new tool, bot:demo-motion, reads recorded matches and measures people and bots with the same code: speed, airtime, distance from walls, view turning, flicks and pitch. Then the bots were tuned toward people:

• ▸A calmer view. Out of a fight, bots turned their view at 110–145°/s where people turn at 35, and ran looking dead level where people look 11° down. Now they ease where they look, at 96–102°/s and 9° down, with about a third fewer view reversals.
• ▸Strafe-jumping along the route. Bots now hop round bends instead of waiting for a long straight. Time in the air while running rose from 18–22% to 28–32%; people spend about 42%.
• ▸Hearing as you hear. Bots hear footsteps when your client plays them, from 70 u/s instead of 250, so walking slowly no longer makes you silent to bots while they're never silent to you.
• ▸Reactions like a hand. Now and then a bot is slow to notice, as a person is, and some big turns overshoot a little and come back.
• ▸Tricks learned from people's matches. The dm2 and dm5 route libraries grow from 77 and 46 routes to 161 and 121, including the wall jump up to the dm2 Red Armor. Bots run straight into tricks instead of stopping on a mark first, and in headless matches stand still 4–6% of the time instead of 8–10%.

A new bot:ab tool plays many headless matches of one bot against another and says whether either is really stronger, because a single Duel can't tell a change from luck.

One fix mattered more than it looks: bots never knew who took an item, not even themselves. The server named the taker in a form the bots didn't recognise. Now they know who took the armour and the Mega, and time items they took themselves properly.

Search & Destroy Teams Attack Together

Bot teams in Search & Destroy now play as teams.

• ▸Attackers split into two groups, each taking its own way into the target site, and go in together.
• ▸Defenders hold each site from set spots: high ground that sees the site and its ways in. On snd6 that took the defence from winning 15% of its rounds to 28% against the same attack.
• ▸A dropped bomb is fetched and covered, and the two nearest defenders guard it.
• ▸Carriers plant. Spawn waypoints that floated up to 136 units above the floor had bots circling their spawn. In 5-vs-5 Hard matches, plants went from none on snd1 to 1 in 7 rounds, and on snd4 from 2 in 5 to 5 in 6.
• ▸Bots call what they see in team chat by the map's place names, such as "Bomb carrier at Warehouse B", and act on each other's calls. Type a or b in team chat and your bot teammates head for that site.
• ▸At range, bots fight from cover, stepping out to shoot and back while the weapon reloads.

At the end of each match, bots hand in a report, with no names, of their fights and how each strategy paid. The bot server keeps them for 90 days, and they become a per-map baseline the bots start from.

Taunts and Victory Dances

Winners celebrate now. The post-game screen plays a victory clip on the winner's model: one of three dances and three taunts, picked at random. And after about three kills in ten, the killer's model taunts over its upper body while its legs keep running. Bots taunt too.

Full Matches on Video

Video export can now record a whole match with the game's HUD. Under Advanced, choose Full match with game HUD: the entire recording at normal speed, through the eyes of the player you follow, with vitals, weapons, timer, kill feed, chat and crosshair in every frame and stereo game audio. It makes a 1080p60 MP4 from recordings of 10 seconds to 20 minutes. Highlight reels are still there.

Demos play better too:

• ▸The frag count shows the followed player's score, instead of 0 all match.
• ▸Hold Tab for the scoreboard, as in a match. Moving to the previous or next player's eyes is now Q and E.
• ▸Names open the demo, and an end card closes it, with the winner, the frags and the length, and Replay and Exit keys.

Smaller Things

• ▸Add bot has an arrow beside it that opens a skill menu: Easy, Medium, Hard or Insane. Add bot on its own still lets the server choose.
• ▸Picking up a weapon you already hold plays its pickup sound and shows its name.
• ▸The blade's outline is as thick as every other weapon's, and its charge outline grows smoothly to four times that at full charge.
• ▸The engine allocates less each frame, and the lobby no longer re-reads every demo on the server each minute, only new or changed ones.
• ▸Rain started again during its fade-out is no longer silent.

Meanwhile, Behind the Arena Doors

Before you load into DM16, a word from the squad.

The full notes are in the engine's v1.0.0-beta.12.md changelog.