Repeat speed and soft drop speed

Players using a low repeat speed are already punished by pieces being locked as soon as the piece is touched by a rising field. This happens much more rarely when using an infinite repeat speed and I can accept that this is part of the game. However, what is more alarming is that the soft drop speed is linked to the repeat speed. The only way to have the max soft drop speed is to use an infinite repeat speed. This is ridiculous.

Soft drop speed should be independent of the repeat speed. Not every player uses infinite repeat speed. Should everyone be forced to change their controls just to to increase the speed of soft drops, an important part of the game? Should not all players have access to the max soft drop speed regardless of how they move their pieces sideways?

The soft drop speed should be the same for all players, or it should be adjustable.

I only discovered that soft drop speed was linked to the repeat speed after switching between 9.5 and infinite repeat speed. It was noticeable even at these two close settings.

Video of different soft drop speeds

Magnifying effect on an opponent's field

During a game, any player's field can be popped out and magnified by having the mouse hover over it.

This "feature" is annoying because it seems to occur randomly, almost always when not intended. Not only does it lag the game, it also covers the field of other players. It happens all the time during the game, when players move in/out and when fields are being switched. It even happens when the mouse is outside the Cultris window.

Could this feature be changed to only activate upon a mouse click?

The only downside would be the loss of the novelty wave effect when passing the mouse through multiple fields. The upside is that nobody will be bothered by random behaviour that causes lag or covers the field.

Background effect

I know this has been mentioned several times before. Many players have been asking for an option to disable the effect to reduce lag. Even if it does not cause lag, it would be beneficial for recording videos and for streaming.

Streaming Cultris at a decent quality is difficult because of the animated background. The animation makes videos harder to compress and encode, and this leads to more bandwidth required to stream. I imagine many players do not stream precisely because of the lag generated by the CPU during the encoding and/or by their connection being affected by the upload.

Many players already cannot handle a large FFA room because of the lag. Having an option to disable the animated background would not hurt and could only help. Alternatively, there could be a simpler background effect if having none is too plain.

Thanks for reading.

I am in complete agreement with morphling. Also the background really does cause some lag, it may not be much but i noticed the game running better during Christmas, and enough better that it was definitely noticeable.

• Video encoding in general is mostly independent of the image contents.
• You say that the magnifying effect causes lag. Care to explain? I couldn't measure any effects.
• The click-to-zoom idea is great. Just implemented it. Will be in the next release.
• Why don't you just play at infinite repeat speed?

Cheerio

Also the background really does cause some lag, it may not be much but i noticed the game running better during Christmas, and enough better that it was definitely noticeable.

i agree with jes and morph. for any reason the game is much more smoother when the "fireworks" background is active. can't you just add some more checkboxes to the settings so that we can disable/activate the backgroundanimations?

Can there be "show line clear effect" in advanced settings beneath "show swooshes"?

I think i will play better or faster without line clear effect.

For example: My PB for 40L in nullpomino has no line clear effect: