Behind the scenes: a big round of performance work

It's been quiet around here, but we haven't been idle. Most of the last couple of weeks went into one goal: making Last Paddle Standing run smoother on every kind of machine, from big gaming rigs to older laptops with integrated graphics. We read your performance logs and the hitches you reported. The worst were the freezes during arena transitions and in 12-player matches with several balls, obstacles and bots on screen. We tracked those down one by one.

What we changed

• A new native engine for bot and ball physics. The heavy bot-aiming and ball-flight math moved into compiled C++. A single boundary sweep is about 7x faster, and total physics cost per tick in our stress scenario dropped about 16%. Bot behaviour is unchanged.
• Trajectory prediction is about 2x cheaper. On our worst-case arena (Chaotic), the prediction cost per update fell from about 24 ms to about 11 ms. The predicted lines are identical to before.
• Arena transitions no longer stall the game. The next arena is now built in the background while you play. Paddles are prepared ahead of time, and duplicate work is gone. Host-side transition cost fell from about 30–53 ms to about 15–23 ms in our tests.
• Fewer hitches mid-rally. Obstacle placement checks went from about 28 ms to under 1 ms. Goal effects and standings updates now only redraw what changed. Music tier changes no longer stutter (a 50 ms call became about 0.07 ms).
• About 34% fewer draw calls (848 → 558 in our test scene). Lines, trails, particles and obstacle outlines are now batched. This helps low-end GPUs most.
• New visual quality presets: Quality, Balanced and Performance. Integrated-GPU systems now default to Balanced. You can still choose any preset.
• Frame-rate controls. Pick your own foreground and background FPS caps, and show an optional FPS and frame-time counter.

Tools we built to find the problems

• In-game benchmark. Run a worst-case 12-bot match and see your hitch count, a frame-time chart and a log file you can copy or open from the results screen.
• Performance log recording (opt-in in release builds), so we can see exactly where a stutter happens on your machine.