ORION

The ranked loop gets its payoff, the races get re-tuned for the expansion era, and every screen got a professional once-over.

Ladder

• LADDER on the multiplayer page: top 10 ranked players by Elo with game counts, your own row marked < YOU, fetched live from the relay.
• The matchmaker now remembers display names, and GET /leaderboard serves the top 25 (ranked games only).

Balance

The v0.3.0 bot upgrades (expansions, siege micro, storms, multi-side approach pathing) had quietly swung cross-race winrates to 68% Kyth. Measured at Hard across both maps (8 seeds per matchup per map) and re-tuned:

After tuning: 41/59 VC/Kyth overall, with clear map personalities — VC favors Meridian's single-base brawls, Kyth thrives in Caverns' long two-base games. Further evening will come from bot micro (VC tank defense), not more stat hammering.

Polish sweep

• Settings finally fits on one screen (compact rows; BACK was off the bottom edge at default HUD scale) and every label aligns with its row.
• R: PLAY AGAIN no longer appears (or fires) in multiplayer and replays — it silently abandoned MP sessions into a bot game.
• All Plasma Storm costs in the UI derive from the sim constant (two more stale "75 energy" strings were hiding in the card + tooltip).
• Requirement hints shorten to the building's last word — no more "NEEDS MUSTE" mid-word truncation.
• End-of-match stats spell out MINERALS / PLASMA; multiplayer copy sits inside its dialog panel; replay-load errors show on the Replays page; the main menu carries a version stamp.
• Selection + command audio acknowledgments (from v0.4.3) round out the feel: every click answers.

(v0.4.1 is the fixed build: the circuit-trace detailing on the first pass read as broken pixels at dialog scale and a long race label could overflow its plate — both patched, and the console got taller with a bigger portrait and larger type. Screenshots below show v0.4.1.)

The whole interface got the StarCraft: Remastered treatment: a proper command console instead of a flat bar, and menus that match it. Still 100% procedural — every panel texture, gold strip and beveled button is painted into the sprite atlas at startup; the game ships zero asset files.

The console

• Navy tech panels with brushed texture and animated-looking circuit traces, tiled at native scale across the deck.
• Gold piping along every edge with rounded corners, riveted seams, and angled shoulders where the raised minimap and command-card blocks step down to the center deck.
• Framed minimap and portrait — gold frames around dark insets.
• Beveled command-card buttons with distinct hover states and gold hotkey badges.
• MENU button in the console (opens the pause menu), SC-style.
• The resource readout sits on its own framed plate top-right.

Menus

• Gold-framed dialog panels behind every page, corner rivets included.
• Winged title plates with gold underlines.
• Rows are plated (gold end caps), glow gold on hover, and long labels auto-shrink to fit — no text ever overflows its plate.

Fixes & quality

• Box select takes buildings: units win a mixed box (the SC2 rule), but a drag over buildings alone now selects all of them — they were previously filtered out of box selection entirely. Regression-tested through the scripted human-input path.
• Overlap sweep: no HUD/menu text overlaps in any state — the queue label vs HP bar collision is gone, the subgroup hint clears the research bar, tooltips lift above the mode hint, and the multi-select strip caps its width before the MENU button on narrow windows.
• Update notice: the main menu checks GitHub once at startup and shows UPDATE vX.Y.Z AVAILABLE — DOWNLOAD when a newer release exists; one click opens the download page. (True in-place self-update is deliberately not done: replacing an ad-hoc-signed binary makes macOS Gatekeeper re-prompt, so notify-and-open is the better UX until the project has a signing identity or a store build.)
• The Plasma Storm cast hint reflects the v0.3.0 cost (100 energy).
• v0.4.3: selection and command audio acknowledgments — Vanguard radio blips (softer for workers), Kyth organic warbles, building thunks; move/attack/gather/build order acks with alternating variations. All synthesized, zero asset files.
• v0.4.2: the production queue panel shows the COMBINED queue across every selected building of the active type (per-building progress bars, separator gaps), so training into the least-queued building is visible — and click-cancel routes to the correct building's queue. Previously only the first building's queue was shown, which looked like a bug whenever several production buildings were selected or Tab-cycled.

The competitive release: press FIND MATCH and the matchmaker pairs you by skill and latency; every game becomes a rewatchable replay; and a second map brings expansions into the game.

Ranked matchmaking

• One button: pick your race, FIND MATCH. The matchmaker (a Durable Object on the relay) pairs players whose Elo gap and combined latency both fit — and both windows widen the longer you wait, so close matches happen fast and a match always happens.
• Latency is real, not guessed: the client probes its RTT to the relay edge, and cross-continent pairs get a penalty.
• Ratings are Elo (K=32, start 1200) keyed to an anonymous ID generated on first launch — no accounts. Your MMR shows on the button and on the end-of-match screen.
• Both players report the result; agreement updates ratings, a rage-quit resolves against the quitter on a timeout, and quitting a ranked game is a forfeit. No bots in the queue — every entry is a live human.
• Ranked games are played on a random map from the pool.

Replays

• Every game (vs AI or online) auto-saves to ~/.orion-replays/ — a replay is just the seed + command stream, a few hundred KB at most, and reproduces the game bit-exactly.
• The main menu gained REPLAYS: recent games listed by date, matchup and length. Watching gives pause (SPACE), speed (1/2/3 = 1×/2×/4×), fog perspective per player or reveal-all (TAB), free camera, and a neutral "NAME WINS" banner.
• Determinism is enforced by test: a recorded game re-simulated from its file must land on the identical checksum.

New map: Caverns

• An homage to SC2's Xel'Naga Caverns: NE/SW high-ground mains, a natural expansion below each ramp with its own mineral line and geyser (first map with expansions), and cavern rock formations that split the center into a tight middle lane and two wide edge routes.
• Bots understand expansions: they take their natural at ~13 workers.
• Map select on both the vs-AI and multiplayer pages; the host's choice travels in the match handshake.

Bots got teeth

• Siege micro: Breakers deploy inside working range and pack up when the field clears.
• Storm micro: casters storm the biggest visible enemy clump (3+ units), avoid friendly fire, and never stack storms. Fog-honest — the bot only reacts to what its player can actually see.
• Scouting: a worker pokes the enemy main around 1:20.
• Decisive endgames: maps mine out around minute 15 and the bots go permanently aggressive at 13, all-in at 16 — turtle stalemates ended.

Balance & fairness

• Plasma Storm nerfed: 100 energy (was 75), 48 total damage over 8 pulses (was 72 over 9), and overlapping storms no longer stack — the stacked version deleted whole armies with no counterplay.
• Spawn fairness overhaul: a mirror-covariance probe proved the two spawns weren't playing the same game — fixed-point multiply rounded toward the northwest, flow-field tie-breaks preferred the northwest, the starting worker arc wasn't point-symmetric, and building-spiral mirroring was off by a footprint. All fixed; the Kyth mirror went from 0–7 for the SE spawn to even, verified by swapping spawns.
• Gather traffic robustness: approach fields now seed from every open tile around a destination, so a walled-in base can't strand its workers (found by the soak harness as a full economy freeze).

Under the hood

• Meridian mineral patches: 1500 → 1000 (mines out by ~15:00 by design).
• The QA soak alternates both maps; map symmetry is audited by a dedicated example across terrain, elevation, resources, expansions and starts.

Multiplayer stopped feeling like 1998: no IP addresses anywhere, and the release artifacts became genuinely double-clickable on every platform.

New

• Lobby browser — CREATE LOBBY lists your game publicly (player name
  • race); anyone clicks to join. A Directory Durable Object on the relay tracks open lobbies and unlists them the moment someone joins.
• Private lobbies — CREATE PRIVATE LOBBY gives a 5-letter code that doubles as the password. The code is the only thing players ever see; the old direct-TCP/IP path was deleted outright.
• Double-click releases — macOS gets a real Orion.app (universal arm64+x86_64 binary, app icon, ad-hoc signed so Apple Silicon launches it); Windows a zipped orion.exe; Linux a tarball. The install table in the README covers all three.

Improved

• Multi-worker build queueing — placing several buildings with several workers selected spreads the jobs: 5 workers + 3 placements = 3 peel off, 2 keep mining. Previously one worker got the whole list.

• Worker visual feedback — order-queue lines show each selected worker's plan (amber to build sites, blue to gather targets), mining shows chip sparks and a pick beam, construction shows weld arcs, carried cargo bobs visibly, and saturation labels over bases and extractors read workers/cap.
• Rally on constructing buildings — worked in the sim, was never drawn; the rally line now shows immediately.
• Relay hardening: rate limits, directory caps, per-connection frame budgets.

The foundation: a complete StarCraft-style 1v1 RTS in Rust with no game engine, no asset files, and a bit-deterministic simulation.

Features

• Deterministic lockstep sim — Q16.16 fixed-point math, input-only mutation, FNV checksums every 24 ticks. Two peers stepping the same commands are bit-identical, which is what online play stands on.
• Two asymmetric races, authored entirely in data (units.ron):
  • Vanguard Combine (industrial): Fabricator, Trooper, Vanguard, Breaker (siege tank with deploy mode + splash), Skywing (flyer), Stormcaller (Plasma Storm caster); HQ, Supply Pylon, Muster Hall, Plasma Condenser, Forge, Aerie, Archive (Weapons/Armor research).
  • Kyth Assembly (swarm): Drone, Skitter, Spitter, Ravager, Wisp, Weaver; Hive, Spire, Sap Well, Warren, Incubator, Roost, Cortex.
• Full macro loop — minerals + plasma (gas), tech requirements, research, supply, production queues with cancel/refund.
• One map ("Meridian") — two high-ground mains, ramps, chokepoints, fog of war with the high-ground vision rule (you can't see up cliffs).
• Skirmish AI at three difficulties — no cheating, difficulty is macro tightness and aggression timing.
• Online multiplayer through a Cloudflare Worker relay with 5-letter lobby codes; WebSocket lockstep with desync detection.
• SC-style control: control groups, shift-queueing, ctrl+click type-select, rally points with auto-gather, attack-move, siege toggle, spellcasting, rebindable hotkeys, DPI-scaled HUD.
• Procedural everything — every sprite (units at 8 facings × 2 walk frames × 2 teams), building, cliff face, effect, the 5×7 font, and all audio (music loop + SFX) are generated at startup. Zero asset files.

Platforms

First release with CI-built binaries for macOS (universal), Windows and Linux, attached to the GitHub release.