Tumblefire Update — August 9, 2026

Tumblefire Update — August 9, 2026

Hey everyone,

Big update! Lots of changes in this one — let's get into it:

Gameplay

• Add store localization pipeline + 30 Steam locale bundles
• Name the bound key on interact prompts, draw them on top, label the hotbar and vitals (#516)
• Dress the New Game confirm as paper, unhide the stamp, warn only on real progress (#515)
• Crosshair style selector + Kenney CC0 crosshair/splat/particle assets
• Dust veil — denser slipstream + mid-height haze layer + ground fog to shroud the wake despawn (#459)
• Trailer assembler (ffmpeg xfade) + capture-status README (#497)
• Adding updated godot bridgge
• Ui: MenuButtonJuice across pause, settings, training modal, skill-tree chips
• Ui: tween-driven UI polish from Godot-Tween-Controls-UI + headless regression harness
• Sweep corpses, loot and stains off the train instead of dragging them
• Prune the puppet entry when its NPC has been freed
• Make the HUD's optional-scene guards real, and gate the case that aborts
• Make the HUD readable — weight, size and a bench to judge it on
• Make the no-contract ride real and reachable
• Stop the unit tier waiting on the wall clock
• Stop a joining rider spawning under the train on Brimstone
• Delete the settings menu that wrote to the wrong store
• The deletion pass the July audit was waiting on
• Stop reinforcements dropping their loot into a Window
• Hold the camera for a beat when you arrive, then hand it back
• Kill both order-dependent failures at their source
• Make the map say which job you picked, and how hard each one is
• Give the travel train a whistle and a beat to leave on
• Spawn beside the train, and make LAN sessions findable
• Arrive on the train, and make it boardable to leave
• Say RODE OUT EARLY, and record measured loot density
• Replace the exit lock with an early-departure fare
• The Char theme now carries the body voice (#343)
• Bitter was rendering as Thin everywhere (#343)
• The train leaves before the world arrives
• The locker only hands you what you have earned
• Per-run orientation + cover-art placement, keep audio, HEVC in gameplay recorders
• Record audio, add random backing music, hide HUD clutter
• Bigger cars, doors that open, ladders that climb, and a fall that kills
• Give each faction a cast of roles, gear and action animations
• Add 10v10 battle and looting demo-recording modes
• Stop knockback launching NPCs into the sky; centre tumbleweed visual
• Rebuild the train heist: roof route, textured stock, blown safe
• Space hitched horses along their rails
• Restyle skill trees and settings onto Letterpress & Ember
• Rebuild main menu as a wanted poster with juice
• Hold the travel screen for 5s and smooth the train animation
• Add one-time review prompt after first successful mission
• HUD polish pass: palette-unified panels, styled vitals bars, hotbar refresh
• Add files yknow
• Give the airship its procedural envelope + gondola visuals
• Adding cactuses
• Map inertia, remembered difficulty, world difficulty scaling
• Replace mission list with drag-map mission select
• Add startup wishlist prompt for demo builds
• Rebuild menu, browse sessions and current session screens FFW-style
• Add wishlist button to demo upgrade prompt
• Upgrade summary, mission select, session and travel screens
• Add gunfight recording mode + Steam art rebuild prompts
• Rideable horses and boardable/pilotable airship
• Add portrait/landscape gameplay clip recorder + capture hook
• Drive embedded GLB animations from velocity
• Refine cactus cast: expressive brows, denser spines, candelabra arms
• Cactus cast: distinct per-faction silhouettes + higher detail
• Build own cactus cast in bpy; replace purchased cactus cowboy
• Re-vendor lrd_vehicle_system from FF e48a116; horse/wagon/airship prefabs
• Add cactus citizen pilot: rigged cactus_character with idle/walk/run/jump
• Add studio Steam monetization & cross-promotion strategy doc
• Add Letterpress & Ember visual identity system
• Record true upstreams in provenance stamps
• Vendor lrd_vehicle_system and lrd_character_system from FragileFrontier
• Migrate test suite from GUT to GdUnit4 and remove GUT
• Split skill_tree_ui.gd (999 lines) into 3 focused modules
• Update remaining 3 NPC specialists to use NPCSpecialistBase
• Slim mission_system.gd further by delegating to extracted modules
• Add world_events.gd and final mission_network_sync update
• Slim down pause_menu.gd and update remaining sync/component files
• Split game_ui.gd (1324 lines) into 4 focused HUD sub-components
• Add dopamine loop SFX assets (streaks, jackpot, near-miss, checkpoints)
• Adding new audio files
• Add RewardManager + JuiceManager dopamine loop systems
• Add Discord community link and post-mission feedback prompt

Fire & Destruction

• [fx/player] Splat decals, bullet marks, corpse sweep, and a step-up that actually fires (#522)
• Give the locomotive's stack plume a soft edge and smoke colour (#519)
• Stop scoring the hideout — the hub is not a graded ride (#518)
• Polish: transitions/readability/perf pass (Tumblefire)
• Measure the new 575-burnable scenario — WSLg-routed RTX 3050 run, 39.4 ms mean, still FAIL (#402)
• Migrate translation script from Gemini to OpenRouter/DeepSeek v4 flash 0731
• Explosion flash lights, weapon-scaled cactus deaths, tracer brighten (#421) (#487)
• Combined fire+destruction budget — debris pooling + measured loose-body ceiling (#406) (#483)
• Persistent rubble — settled debris becomes static piles that stay for the ride (#405) (#482)
• Shared LOD cost budget, distant-fire merging, and a town sky glow (#400) (#481)
• Stop a distant camera dragging the detail grid off a live fire (#399)
• Simulate a whole town, not a 16-metre box (#399)
• Stop a zero regeneration delay from re-fuelling burnt ground
• Stop the ignition-frame scan stall — 89 ms to 1.4 ms, and constant
• Cut the fire spread solver by 1.5-1.8x, and build the harness that proves it
• Measure fire and destruction together, in one harness (#406)
• Make fire, horses and other players able to kill you
• Measure fire LOD from the camera, not the world origin
• Make the heat haze a real refraction, and let the smoke be seen through
• Make buildings stand up because something holds them up
• The voxel fire cost was the solver, not the flames — measured, then halved
• Burn the station down, stand it on the ground, and orbit on the way in
• Give Stillwater a creek worth crossing and a bridge worth burning
• Let the player reach town before it burns down
• Give a joining player their own body back, and stop the smoke reading as paper
• A doused building no longer reports itself alight
• Fire the player's tracer from the barrel, and give it the gun's weight
• Make town-burn runs pinnable, and record that a single run is not evidence
• Seat the rider inside the coach, and let the station burn down
• Own the wind in one place, and make the burn cycle readable (#401)
• Measure the windowed town burn, and fix the sweep that was aborting on freed parts (#402)
• Rebalance chaos around buildings, and tell the player one came down (#432)
• Credit a burned building once, and stop losing consumed parts
• Report the chaos breakdown, and stop grading fire on reach
• Add the town-burn benchmark harness and measure Dust Creek (#402)
• Raise the voxel hop cap so spatial spread isn't capped at 6 m
• Correct stale spread-generation comment left by #398
• Remove the 3-generation spread cap so fire can cross a town (#398)
• HUD text you can read over a burning town (#343)
• The smoke bomb is a thing you throw, not a cloud that appears
• Smoke bombs actually hide you: real cloud, and sight lines that break
• Make a co-op client's fire actually burn, and settle the fire-arrow role
• Make gunfire audible: mix chain, near-field shots, voice pool
• Make gunfights read: tracers, gun smoke, and a gun that points forward
• Fix the town-burn clip framing itself out of the fire
• Make the cars shootable, burnable and big enough to fight in
• Synthesise whistle and chuff, and let chaos drive the throttle
• Decay chaos heat over time so towns settle down
• Wounded NPCs leave a juice trail; fire deaths char instead of spray
• Score demolition, drop what you shoot the supports out from under
• Add chaos-driven mid-raid events; revive faction reinforcements
• [npc] fix burning-mesh look, eternal fires, NPC shuffle, TNT hitch
• Rework voxel flame visuals and add 4.7 fire-front area lights
• Reset chaos on return to hideout so the chaos layer stops
• Add missing test_fire_spread_containment.gd.uid sidecar
• Contain runaway spread and rebuild the plume as flames + two smoke layers
• Fire from the muzzle, not the chase camera; [world] breakable window glass, rolling tumbleweed props; [player] make mantling deliberate; [ui] fix top-right HUD overlap
• Combat hit reg, collision, sheriff law, NPC spacing, burn pace, dialog contrast
• Switch demo clip to real Dust Creek town on fire
• Add fire-showcase demo driver for hands-free clips
• Gate idle FireComponents, jitter monitor timers, trim fog
• Dusk/fog atmosphere, scattered clutter, campfire, more airships
• Add barrel/crate/tumbleweed clutter kit + campfire prop
• Add modular saloon pilot: kit-part GLB, per-part fire + physics collapse
• Fix dynamite freeze, hideout campfire ground fire, shatter compile cascade
• Document P2P smoke scope in a README
• Fix ENet dying without GodotSteam + add real-socket P2P smoke tests
• Fix dead fire path, loadout desync, reload soft-lock, hotbar mismatch
• Revendor LRD fire system with emitter throttling and AABB regions
• Add headless two-process ENet P2P smoke
• Implement Hammer (#326) and stop non-fire weapons starting fires
• Implement Fire Arrows (#322): guaranteed spreading ignition
• Reconcile faction/weapon test suites to real API; add fire perf scene
• Integrate LRD voxel fire as the spatial sim via a hybrid bridge
• Vendor LRD Fire System addon and decouple shared fire components
• Add narrated demo-recording pipeline (Tumblefire)
• Delegate fire visuals/audio to child modules, update NPCs to use NPCSpecialistBase
• Merge anticheat systems and split fire_component visuals/audio
• Add combat juice, NPC barks, and chaos meter polish

Combat & Weapons

• Toon-ify PSX desert pack textures — posterize + ink outlines to match the cel/flat-toon direction (#457)
• Ui: MenuButtonJuice on weapon locker — pointer-less mode for small buttons
• Give the guns their reach back, and say when they run out
• Shoot at the town from the airship, not at the airship
• Clear test_mission_system — a bypassed condition and a wrong matcher
• Put the damage numbers back over the target and the objective back on the HUD
• Make the throw preview predict the throw
• Point the barrel forward, and stop silently refusing shots
• Price the fare off each job, and fix the null bullet-pool host
• Apply locker loadout changes to the live hotbar immediately
• The helm can aim, and a scene to prove it (#341)
• The host holds the rope: co-op lasso, and 38 weapon tests that never ran
• A partner's arrows should be visible: co-op projectile replication
• A shotgun should land heavier than a pistol: per-weapon firing feel
• The hammer swings: an arc, and a way through a wall
• Lasso: a restrained state on the rope's end, plus the rope itself
• Throwing knives: a real blade that sticks, and an ammo economy
• Give the bow a real arrow: physics projectile, drop, and its own model
• Finish the rifle: aimed-only precision, scope zoom, own model and crack
• Finish the shotgun: damage falloff, its own model, pellet tracers and bang
• Convert combat one-shots to trimmed WAV, fix a 406 ms shot delay
• Material impacts, shell casings, hit flinch and tracer light
• Fix camera shake and framing, and slow the look while aiming
• Make hits, kills and deaths read — cactus juice, crits, real damage
• Scale hostiles to player count; settle WeaponUpgrades scope; refresh store copy
• Rebuild title settings + weapon locker, and let every weapon break buildings
• Make the thrown match a real lit projectile with throw animations
• Fix NPCs never firing, rework weapon visuals, fix inverted roofs
• Fix riding — animated model, seating, handling and mounted aim
• Soften horse handling, add jump + mounted shooting; [npcs] anim quality pass, ground snap, idle + walk dust; [world] modelled rolling tumbleweeds
• Repaint decor prop textures in flat toon style to match cactus characters
• Complete hideout weapon locker (#327)
• Implement remaining expanded weapons (#319-#321, #323-#325)
• Add weapon test bench + WeaponLoadout backbone for hideout locker
• Bring the expanded weapon arsenal back in scope
• Split weapon_component into 3 files, merge MissionCoordinator into MissionSystem

World & Environment

• Preview cameras, specialist idle gestures, facings, and rewritten dialogue (#521)
• Restore the dead first-run flow, orient the hideout spawn, fix solo travel tips (#512)
• Fix the town intro never playing, and make capture settings reachable (#489)
• Revive the dead capture overlays, make them findable, and open every town on a birds-eye shot (#488)
• Split hideout.gd three ways, and give the hub a harness at last
• Dress every kit building, and fix three things that were silently broken
• A collapsing building takes its own clutter down with it
• Let a building own its dressing, and fix the way onto the train roof
• Put a name on the paper — assassinate jobs in all four towns
• Let a town post more than one job, and let the board turn over
• Give each specialist a prop that says what they do
• Unfreeze the specialists — stop the Mixamo idle eating their clips
• Ride the train out of every town
• Give residents work to do, and the locomotive a voice
• Add the locomotive station and a cactus-theme pass
• Pull labelled props off the walls and re-author the prop layout
• Per-town palettes, working glow, faction read
• Replace NPC arrival toasts with world-space info panels
• Fix contracts never starting in three of four towns
• Fix modular kit UVs, rebuild atlases, close gambrel roof
• Fix silent levels: 3D listener, level music, ambience
• Add TNT barrels that explode with fiery debris when shot
• Hideout polish: night sky exterior, sealed shell, faded prompts
• Real window cutouts + walk-to-open swinging doors on modular buildings
• Fix ledge mantle on modular buildings (forward-down scan)
• Rebuild Stillwater layout + stylized ground dressing for towns
• Polish props, placement, texturing and lighting in The Warren
• Hideout cactus NPCs + interactables, clutter layout, NPC telegraph audio, HUD wanted indicator
• Cactus cohesion pass: Mission Mary + dressing
• Walk-in interiors: put door panels on a passable layer
• Moor an airship over dust creek; within-faction cactus variety
• Add framed glass windows to modular building kit
• Fully modular buildings; orient streets; two-horse wagon team
• Add modular dentist office + blacksmith (chimney); retire last PSX
• Swap barn/houses to modular kit; hitching posts; fix bank facing
• Add barn + two house types to modular kit; town-facing schematic
• Dust_creek: swap modular buildings + hitch horses and wagon
• Swap PSX saloon/bank/sheriff/store/church for modular kit prefabs
• Wire cactus cast into all four teardown towns
• Expand modular kit: bank, sheriff office, general store, church

Co-Op & Multiplayer

• Instant replay + collapse slow-motion, co-op-safe (closes #408) (#484)
• Make test_npc_info_panel establish its own multiplayer state
• Drive clients' own NPCs instead of stacking capsules on them (#418, #419)
• Consolidate the two co-op UIs into one CoopScreen, Steam or not
• Fix dead telegraph post and repair the multiplayer/session UI surface
• Expose achievements, records, co-op and a live practice range
• Add --auto-host/--auto-join dev flags for local multiplayer testing
• Add run_multiplayer_test.bat for local two-instance visual multiplayer testing
• Finalize player_multiplayer_sync NetworkSyncBase integration
• Update interest_management and player_multiplayer_sync to use NetworkSyncBase
• Complete remaining modularization — NPC base, marker merge, pause multiplayer panel, more sync files

Bug Fixes

• Update localization pipeline: use_existing_capsules + BH store_shots + render_label overflow fix
• Stale 'SoundEffects' bus name — SFX sounds bypassed the SFX slider (#494)
• Wrap two over-length lines in ui_ports_test.gd (unblock CI lint) (#486)
• Pin the regeneration queue with tests, and fix a one-tick deadline drift
• Fix the detection warning, and delete the HUD nodes nothing ever showed
• Give a joining client a spawner path it can actually resolve
• Make the unit job blocking, and fix the command that never ran
• Clear test_faction_ai, and fix two real defects it was hiding
• Fix the AI/mission cluster, and a sentinel patrol that never circled
• Clear the signal cluster — same lambda bug, plus one wrong assert_signal
• Fix the money cluster: two root causes, thirteen failing cases
• A scene for actually riding the horse (#340)
• Fix player death: fall over, fail the ride, stop the audio leak
• Fill out the ride summary and fix the HUD drawing over it
• Hide HUD on the travel screen, fix notifications, always summarise a ride out
• Fix horse grey-screen on mount; [core] silence Steam getAppID error
• Fix vehicle console errors, add mission skyboxes, solid western session browser
• Fix Godot binary detection when GODOT is a full path
• Soften travel/mission-select vignettes, animate loading-screen train; [world] fix airship grey-camera
• Fix cross-references left stale by the PM/docs/store-art reorg
• Fix end-card CTA text stacking one letter per line
• Fix portrait crop, fit CTA end card, open clips on store art
• Guard null steam_api in cloud saves; drop removed tap_back_pos
• Fix cactus NPCs not animating while walking
• Harden dopamine loop: fix broken APIs, add pity timer, wire dead code
• Add rabbit_developer_console plugin and enable it
• Rewrite commands to use rabbit_developer_console_plugin API
• Add in-game debug console with command system

Performance

• Make the HUD survive an ultrawide frame and a lit backdrop
• Guarantee the train is off frame when depart() returns
• Pin the benchmark camera so a frame time can be attributed (#402)
• Encode gameplay clips as 30fps H.265 CRF 28 and delete raw AVIs after transcode

Thanks for playing Tumblefire and for all the feedback — it genuinely shapes where this game goes next. If you run into anything weird, drop us a line in the community hub or on Discord. We read everything.

— David McHale (HeartCoded) & the Lost Rabbit Digital team

Build f96048c · Full changelog on GitHub