Mitts 0.1.2272

Headlined by a full rebuild of the player attribute system, bots throwing real body checks again, a deep goalie AI upgrade, and a smarter 5v5 breakout.

⚠️ New: player build is now Height + three tiers, not six sliders

The old six-attribute, 18-point-budget slider system is gone, replaced with something simpler and more intuitive.

• Pick your actual height — a continuous slider from 5'8" to 6'7", instead of a discrete Size stat.
• Then set Skating, Skill, and Checking — click each to cycle Neutral → Strength → Weakness → Neutral. You get exactly one Strength and one Weakness; the third stays Neutral.
• Your height changes what each strength actually buys you — Strong Skating on a small build tunes toward elite agility and tight turns, while the same Strong Skating on a big build tunes toward top-end speed instead. Same pick, different payoff depending on your size.
• Skating covers top speed, acceleration, and turning/braking. Skill covers stickhandling (favors smaller builds) and shot power (favors bigger builds, retuned to realistic shot speeds). Checking covers hit delivery (favors bigger builds) and how hard you are to knock down.
• Height alone also sets your reach/stick length, hitbox, weight, and stamina profile — smaller players get a shallower stamina pool but recover faster.
• Sprint speed is now tuned to realistic NHL skating speeds, and carrying the puck slows you down less than before — the real cost of sprinting while carrying is faster stamina drain, not a speed penalty.
• Existing saved builds and bot rosters convert automatically — nothing to redo.

Bots actually body-check again

• Fixed bots almost never committing to a body check — a leftover bug from the last physics rewrite had their hit-commitment math using numbers roughly 5x too strict, so even hard collisions rarely registered as a real check. Bots now hit at the aggressiveness their difficulty setting intends.
• Full-strength checks no longer require a sprint — landing a real hit used to take ~11 m/s of closing speed (basically a full sprint); a squared-up hit at normal skating speed now lands as a genuine check (~6 m/s for an average build, ~4 m/s for a bigger hitter). Sprinting or lining someone up head-on still produces the biggest hits, up to a knockdown.
• Slightly eased how much turning ability you lose while committing to a check.

Goalies: a real upgrade

• Goalies now read slapshots, not just wristers. Ripping a slapshot from the slot used to beat the goalie almost every time because his "lean toward the aimed corner" read only ever triggered on wrist shots — slappers now get the same treatment.
• Goalies subtly shade their angle during a slow wind-up toward wherever the shot is being aimed, the way a real goalie cheats his angle on a long telegraphed shot — a slow, fully-wound shot to the corner is more likely to get stopped, while a quick release or a shot fake still beats him.
• Fixed goalies freezing on quick, in-close shots — a shot released fast and close used to arrive before the goalie's normal reaction time even kicked in, so he wouldn't move at all. Now just having a shooter in close (~6 m) with a set goalie is enough to prime a faster reaction — still beatable with good corner placement, just no longer a statue.
• The net's "open" areas now read the goalie's real body pose instead of an idealized stance — a goalie mid-butterfly, caught leaning the wrong way, or still sliding will realistically have a high-glove or five-hole gap open, while a fully set goalie reads as properly covered. Rewards shooting at a goalie who hasn't settled yet.
• Fixed goalies not reacting to slow, trickling pucks heading toward the net — anything under a speed threshold used to get ignored outright, letting a dribbler slide past a frozen goalie.

Fewer weird own goals

• Bots now cradle the puck tight to their body near their own net too (previously only near the opponent's net), fixing cases where a bot could knock the puck loose off its own goalie or get stuck unable to skate/pass out from behind its own net.
• Widened the no-pass danger zone in front of your own net to also cover cross-slot feeds near the posts, cutting down bot giveaways right in front of their own goalie.

5v5: smarter breakouts

• The whole team now sets up breakout support while the puck is still loose, not just after it's retrieved — the player racing to a loose puck used to face the forecheck alone while teammates set up late.
• New breakout plays: the wheel (skating behind your own net to escape pressure and find a new outlet), real rim passes along the boards to a teammate racing to meet it, and a D-to-D pass across the top of the zone.
• Points at the blue line now step up to contain a rimmed puck instead of always letting it clear the zone.
• 3v3 is untouched — this is 5v5-only.
• The scoreboard's position badges now correctly show LW/RW instead of the generic L/R used in 3v3, and the pre-game matchup screen labels each player's position with a DEFENSE header over the pairing.

Fixes

• "Quick Shot" renamed to Quick Pass — it was always a fixed-power pass, not a shot, and was mislabeled everywhere. Also fixed it aiming from your body toward the blade (pulling passes off-target); it now aims from the puck straight to your cursor. Custom keybinds carry over automatically.
• Fixed one-timer aiming UI occasionally not appearing during network lag, and fixed a puck-attach glitch when a pass arrives at the exact instant a one-timer wind-up starts (could snap visually online, or cancel into a normal carry offline).
• Bot AI now factors in a player's actual sprint speed and stamina when deciding who wins a race to a loose puck, a breakaway, or a rush — previously every player was treated as roughly the same speed.

Online security

• Closed two exploits available to a modified client: manipulating your own reported network latency to win contested 50/50 puck battles, and snapping your stick to an impossible position to always win pickups, poke-checks, and stick-lifts. The host now measures your real ping itself rather than trusting a self-reported number. No impact on legitimate play.

Compatibility

• Network protocol updated (anti-cheat ping exchange, new attribute-build format) — everyone needs this build to play together.