🔥 2.2 Drops a Full Visual Rework: Color Grading, Fog of War Revamp & Glow Effects!

🚀 🔥 2.2 Drops a Full Visual Rework: Color Grading, Fog of War Revamp & Glow Effects!

✨ Massive rendering pipeline overhaul and lighting rewrite.

This is one of the biggest visual updates Kaipa Bots has ever received :

your game will look and feel different the moment you load your save.

This patch revamps the entire lighting and rendering pipeline.

You’re getting optimized shadows, a high-resolution Fog of War system, light-reactive projectiles, and full per-asteroid color grading.

On the engine side, render overhead is way down, canvas buildup is finally solved, and multi-asteroid saves run noticeably smoother.

Plus a mountain of fixes, crash guards, and visual polish across the board.

🌈 New Visual Effects

A ton of small-but-eye-catching details were added:

• Projectiles now have bloom glows (teal for you, red for enemies).
• Laser Tower beams and sparks now use a shader-driven glow.
• Smelters and Furnaces pulse based on recipe progress.
• The Pyramid now has a soft pulsing glow (but no longer acts as a Light Source).
• All item icons now have a clean, uniform black outline for readability.
• Space background no longer gets shadowed.
• Various item icons updated to match the new visual style.

🌀 Fog of War (Big Upgrade)

Fog of War is now real-time, pixel-perfect, and smoothly fading in both directions.

Laser rays and projectiles reveal Fog of War along their path — super helpful during fights and navigation.

❄️ More Atmosphere

• Added a frost-grain shader for subtle ambience.
• Added asteroid-type–specific color grading.
• Added a “breathing” blue vignette + red pulsing vignette on damage.
• Added a debug-only color grading tool with 60 presets (Num5/Num6).
• 🖥️ User Interface Improvements
• Added a Light Range Preview (press L, or auto-shown on placement).
• Added a **Laser Tower Range Preview** (press *U*, or auto-shown on placement).
• Both previews make layout planning and defense placement much easier.

👾 Mob Spawning Adjustments

Enemies no longer spawn close to Machines or Conveyors, even if the tiles are dark.

  This removes those cheap, “why are you inside my base!?” surprise spawns.

⚡ Performance Improvements

The lighting and rendering engine received major optimization passes:

• Smoother overall framerates and fewer lag spikes.
• Big boost from skipping unnecessary canvas updates.
• Light & shadow calculations are now heavily optimized.

The gains are most noticeable when the screen is packed with effects — beams, projectiles, particles, and shadows.

🛠️ Fixes

Crashes & Stability

• Fixed a projectile offset issue that could turn into NaN and crash the game.
• No more crashes when removing a battery from a firing Laser Tower.
• Fixed a huge lag spike caused by inserting batteries into Laser Towers.

Visual & Shadow Fixes

• Fixed the “wiggling light-ray” bug.
• Fixed multiple shadow-related graphical glitches.

Enemy & Behavior Fixes

• Fixed a rare nil target-offset in enemies.
• Advanced and High-Tech Laser Towers now correctly use batteries when off-grid.
• Shift-moving batteries no longer pulls the wrong battery.

🧊 Closing Thoughts

This update gets Kaipa Bots much closer to the visual clarity and responsiveness I always imagined for it.

There’s still a lot coming, but 2.2 is a major step forward in atmosphere, performance, and polish.

As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable.

If you notice anything odd, broken, or glowing too much/not enough, please keep the reports coming.

Note: For this version, the debug console stays open on purpose.

A recent issue made it pop up during autosaves (minimizing the game window), so keeping it open avoids that.

You can ignore it — it doesn't do anything and won’t affect gameplay.

Thanks for playing and helping shape the game!

Kai