Road to 1.0: A New Squad Steps In

Meet the Squad

Washoi beta 9 is out, and the arena finally looks like ours. Five new player bodies are in: Police, Female Police, Robot, Cartel and RiotKitty. The Mixamo placeholder that stood in for every player until now is retired, and the tooling that rebuilt it is gone with it.

Every body shares one animation set, retargeted at load time and packaged on its own in washoi_player_animations.pk3. Each is scaled to the standing player height with its feet on the ground, then made 10% larger for readability. The player hull they stand in stays the same.

Each body has a voice to match. Police and Cartel use the male sounds; Female Police and RiotKitty use the female sounds; Robot speaks as Bobot.

Who's who in Gameplay settings is now two side-by-side team cards, with a live preview of each model and the colour controls below. One lazy render surface draws both previews and pauses when it's hidden.

Moving Like People

The new bodies brought a round of animation work with them.

• ▸Running without aiming or recent fire plays each model's own full-body run. Ready to fire, the upper spine bends with your view pitch, carrying the gun and muzzle, while the legs keep running.
• ▸Running backwards plays a real backwards run clip, instead of the forward run in reverse.
• ▸cl_player_run_legs (0.75) and cl_player_run_upper (0.5) tune each half's playback rate separately.
• ▸Guns rest on the supporting hand. Each gun used to follow the gripping fingers alone and floated above the other hand, most visibly when looking up or down.
• ▸The blade gets its own stance, held upright with the edge forward, instead of borrowing the two-handed rifle pose. Legs stay on their movement clip through a swing, jumps included.

Thin outlines stay on by default, now with smoothed normals, while the bodies keep their authored lighting.

Who Wears What

In free-for-all, the server now hands each player a body and a colour of their own. It picks the least-worn colour, so up to eight players never share one, and the least-worn of the five bodies. Every viewer and the match demo see the same thing. Before, each client picked colours at random, and every opponent wore your enemy model.

You also sound like the body you're drawn with. Your own pain, death, jump and drowning cries use its voice, and your water reflection shows it too.

The defaults changed too:

• ▸Enemies start White, on a Random body drawn from the ones your side doesn't wear.
• ▸Your side stays Pink.
• ▸Brighter players has a new Off setting and starts there. Bodies keep their own colours inside a team-coloured outline. Tint, Some and Lots are still there.

Demos move to format v7 to carry each player's look. Older demos still play, with colours picked locally as before.

Going Down With Style

Some deaths now play an animation before the ragdoll takes over. A kill from behind plays death_from_back, a headshot from the front or side plays death_headshot, and a riotgun blast or a non-gibbing explosion throws the body back with death_flying_back. The ragdoll takes over the moment the body touches a surface or the clip ends.

Ragdolls stop falling out of the map. When plain map surfaces were merged into texture-array meshes, their collision went with them, and dead bodies dropped through floors and walls. The ragdoll system now builds its collision from the final meshes, on every map load.

Every Pickup Gets a Real Model

No item draws a generated sculpture any more. Every pickup now comes from packaged models in washoi_models.pk3:

• ▸Armour shard, green, yellow and red armour.
• ▸Megahealth, its blue core glowing and slowly breathing.
• ▸Ultra health: the megahealth with a purple core.
• ▸+5, +25 and +50 health: one health bubble, sized and coloured by tier, with a fullbright cross that shows its colour in any light.
• ▸Ammo: one ammo box, with its weapon's symbol on all four sides.
• ▸Quad Damage: a spiked ring around a Q, with its energy disc turning on its own once every three seconds.

They float, bob and turn like classic arena items. All of them turn together once every 4.096 seconds, and each bobs on its own phase.

Small white sparkles rise from the armour, the bigger health, the ammo boxes and the power-ups, more from the bigger prizes. They're all instances of one dot in a single draw call, and only the eight nearest items within 900 units sparkle.

Items also respect each map's gametype keys now. Before, every item spawned in every mode, so a Duel on washoi_dm1 had both the duel megahealth and the ultra health meant for other modes on the same spot.

Timeouts and Rejoins

Duel, Amphi and Search & Destroy have timeouts. Each player gets one per match: type /timeout in chat to pause for up to two minutes, and anyone playing ends it early with /timein after a three-second count.

A paused server runs no ticks at all. Players, projectiles, item timers and the clock stand still, mid-fall included, then carry on exactly where they were. Chat keeps working. In Duel and Amphi, a dropped connection pauses the match without using anyone's timeout. If the pause runs out and the player is still away, they forfeit.

Rejoin match now works for a seat you've already played. Reload mid-match and you get your seat back, with your score and deaths. A dropped seat is held for 60 seconds instead of 20, so a reload gets back in before a Duel or Amphi is forfeited. An interrupted match stays unrated, as before.

Smaller Things

• ▸Gun size in Gameplay → View & info: Normal, Small or Smallest. The gun returns to full size while aiming down sights.
• ▸Spectator freefly follows `cl_fov`, and changes show at once. Handy for map shots.
• ▸Bots learned routes on washoi_dm1 and washoi_dm3 from the owner's training demos: 26 routes on DM1 and 31 on DM3, made of jumps, climbs and drops. Neither map had learned routes before.
• ▸func_static brush models now draw. washoi_dm1's tower in the sky was missing, leaving its spotlights' halos floating in the air.
• ▸Water no longer floats in mid-air in WebGPU snapshot replays.
• ▸The new app icon is the game's logo everywhere it's installed or shown, and the web manifest now names the game instead of the engine.

The full notes are in the engine's v1.0.0-beta.9.md changelog.