- #### Shared Systems
- **PlayerManager.FillSkillHolders** - Skill holders are resolved from the player index instead of scanning every controller each tick, replacing the per-skill full player loop used by ten skills.
- **PlayerManager.GetControllerByPawn** - Tick-cached pawn to controller map, replacing the linear observer-target scan.
- **PlayerManager.IsServerIdle** - Tick-cached idle check shared by the debug and perf writers.
- **SkillUtils.IsFriendlyFireBlocked** - Now takes the skill, so the new per-skill `FriendlyFire` key and the server convars are resolved in one place. The convar-only overload remains for victim-side skills.
- **SkillUtils.TerminateRound** - Accepts the player who ended the round and pays out the round-end money that the engine skips on plugin-terminated rounds.
- #### Performance
- **OnTick(hud)** - Average cost down 17% against the previous build.
- **CheckTransmit** - Average cost down 25%, peak down 39%.
- **OnTick(skills)** - Peak cost down 62%.
- **Host stalls** - Real freezes measured with players connected dropped from six to two across 785 rounds.
- **DecoyRing** - Beam creation is spread across four frames instead of spawning the whole ring in one tick.
- **Fourteen skills** - `OnTick` now returns immediately when the skill holds no state.
- **Berserker, BladeMaster, BunnyHop, DemonEye, Flash, PawelJumper, Pilot, Poison, QuickShot, RadarHack, Regeneration** - Switched to the shared skill-holder list; config reads hoisted out of per-player loops.
- #### Fixes
- **GravityDecoy** - Restored a hardcoded gravity of 1.0 when leaving the field, permanently breaking Astronaut. Each pawn's own scale is now captured and restored.
- **PsychicDefusing** - The bomb location stayed unset when the skill was assigned after the plant, the stored position pointed into the entity and dangled once the bomb was killed, and setup was silently skipped when the pawn was not ready.
- **PsychicDefusing, FragileBomb** - Winning teams were paid nothing when the plugin ended the round. Winners are now paid from the matching `cash_*` convars, with the defuser bonus on top.
- **ToxicSmoke, HealingSmoke** - Smoke kept damaging and healing after its owner lost the skill, and expiry left behind smokes whose owner had already lost it. HealingSmoke never tracked an owner at all.
- **EmpGrenade** - Crosshair and radar stayed jammed forever, because `OnTick` stops being dispatched once nobody holds the skill and the jam timer never expired.
- **ThrowingKnife** - Losing the skill while the knife was thrown destroyed it without giving one back.
- **OnlyHead, ReactiveArmor** - Both ignored fall and world damage, which has no player attacker.
- **Gambler** - Refreshing consumed the one-shot instead of rolling two new skills, and the refresh row lost its colour prefix to the text-direction wrapper.
- **Berserker, Flash** - The falling-speed clamp fired while noclipping.
- **ExplodingBarrel** - The prop spawned without a model and received it a frame later; the model is now passed through `CEntityKeyValues` at spawn.
- **FastReload** - Now has a cooldown, five seconds by default, with a HUD countdown. The cooldown only starts when a magazine is actually refilled.
- **Config** - Missing-key migration now descends into nested sections, so keys under `HtmlHudCustomisation` are detected.
- #### Damage Hook
- **OnEntityTakeDamagePre / OnEntityTakeDamagePost** - Replaced the deprecated `CBaseEntity_TakeDamageOldFunc` hook across 27 files.
- **Teammate damage** - The new hook runs before the engine zeroes friendly fire, so attacker-side modifiers need explicit guards. Added to OneShot, Cutter, Assassin, Soldier, Berserker, Nemesis and Punisher.
- **FriendlyFire** - New per-skill key on twelve skills, defaulting to `true`. Setting it to `false` stops teammates being affected, the way LongKnife and KillerFlash already allow. Covers both the damage amplifiers and the explosives that previously only reduced teammate damage.
- #### Menu
- **WSADMenuVisibleItems** - New setting replacing the hardcoded three visible menu rows, clamped between one and ten.
- **WSAD menu** - The final menu row keeps its `#RRGGBB` colour prefix instead of losing it to the text-direction wrapper.
- #### Config Migration
- **skillsInfo.json** - Missing keys are written back to the file on load instead of only being defaulted in memory. Existing values are preserved.
- **playersLanguage.json** - Now grouped by language instead of one row per player, which cuts a ten thousand player file by 20%. Old files are converted on load and invalid SteamIDs are dropped.
- #### Debug
- **Perf samples** - Report `p50`, `p95` and `p99` alongside the average and maximum.
- **Per-skill sampling** - Every skill is now sampled, instead of only logging the calls that exceeded two milliseconds. The measurement was already running; only the reporting threshold discarded it.
- **Load context** - Aggregate lines carry the player, alive, bot, active-skill and round counts, so sessions can be compared under different loads.
- **ENTITIES** - Tracked entities are broken down by type.
- **STALL** - Lines carry the tick, tracked entity count and load context, which separates map-load pauses from genuine freezes.
- **DMGHOOK** - Reports how often the attacker and ability resolve on the damage hook.
- **Idle server** - Nothing is written while the server sits empty, apart from lifecycle lines and player connects and disconnects.
- #### Cleanup
- **Compiler warnings** - All twelve resolved; the build is clean.
- **SkillUtils.SetPlayerCollisions** - Removed, its body started with an unconditional `return`.
- **Damage hook aliases** - Dropped the `param` and `param2` locals the migration left behind across 27 files.
## GENERAL
- The HUD loop now runs on the shared 16 Hz frame gate (SkillUtils.IsHudFrame) instead of keeping its own every-other-tick schedule, and fifteen skills that were refreshing their HUD on every single tick were moved onto that same gate.
- Added SkillData.GetSnapshot(), a cached array of the registered skills, so the HUD no longer copies the whole skill bag every frame. The cache is invalidated together with the existing lookup map, so a reload still picks up new skills.
- Added SkillUtils.ForceFullUpdateToAllChunked(), which spreads a full network update across frames (two clients per frame) instead of pushing one for every connected client in a single tick. The original ForceFullUpdateToAll is untouched, so the six skills that already call it keep their current behaviour.
- BlastShot, Cypher and Iana now clear their HUD line in DisableSkill, so a stale line can no longer survive the skill being taken away.
## FIXES
- SoundMaker threw a divide-by-zero on every tick when its cooldown was configured as 0, because the tick gate divides by that value. The cooldown is now clamped to at least 1.
- Regeneration and RadarHack were calling the wrong SkillsInfo.DefaultSkillInfo overload, which silently dropped disableOnFreezeTime, requiredPermission, hudDuration, descriptionHudDuration, maxPerServer and rarity. Every configured field now reaches the base class, so those two skills finally honour their own config.
- Falcon Eye blocked the trigger on the wrong side of the check: picking up a weapon while back in the normal view locked primary and secondary fire, because the pickup handler tested for the player being in their own view instead of in the skill camera.
- Spectator locked primary and secondary fire when its camera could not be created at all, which happens when no enemy is alive to spectate. The player stayed in the normal view with a weapon that would not fire until the round ended.
## SKILL IMPROVEMENTS
- Wallhack:
-- The glow build and the full network update now start when freeze time ends and are spread across frames, instead of running in a single tick the moment the skill is handed out. On a busy server this used to cost roughly 13 ms in one frame, close to a dropped tick at 64 tick; across four grants in an eight-hour session it no longer reaches the 2 ms profiler threshold at all.
- Jackal:
-- CheckTransmit resolves the trail relays once per frame rather than once per viewer, so the same entity lookups are no longer repeated for every client on the server.
-- Removed an opponent list that was gathered in EnableSkill and never used.
- ThrowingKnife:
-- CheckTransmit builds the knife glow list once per frame, and the viewer index is resolved once per client instead of once per knife.
- Glaz:
-- The observer target is only resolved for players who do not own the skill themselves, and the lookup now bails out early when there is no observer target at all.
- RadarHack and QuickShot:
-- The skill check runs before the validity check, so players without the skill are skipped immediately instead of being fully validated first.
- Distancer, HealingChicken and SoundMaker:
-- These now return straight away while nobody holds the skill, rather than walking the player list every tick.
## DEBUG
- Removed the [HITGROUP] mismatch check. Every recorded case was accounted for: ten were Aimbot rewriting the hit group as designed, and thirteen were non-bullet skill damage, which reports a generic hit group by nature. Dropping the check also removes a dictionary write from every damage event.
- Removed the identity-split tag from the damage log. It was dead by construction, because the victim controller had already been routed before the comparison ran, so it could never report a difference.
- Removed the player-shoot handler, which produced no output on this build.
- [DMG] lines now print the routing fields only when the routed index actually differs from the original one, so the check remains as a tripwire without adding noise to every line.
## TRANSLATIONS
- Turkish: reworded sixty-two entries that padded their sentences with second-person verb endings, dropped the English glosses left in parentheses, and settled every [css_useSkill] line into one shape. Also fixed genuine typos in Dracula, Giant, Thorns and Impostor.
- All eight languages received the strings for the four new skills. (AI)
## NEW SKILLS:
- Chameleon: The first player you kill gives you their skill.
- Grapple Hook: Press [css_useSkill] to fire a hook at the point you are aiming at and pull yourself there.
- Inheritance: When a teammate dies you can take over their skill.
- Ricochet: Your bullets bounce off walls and can still hit enemies.
Revive skills (Second Chance / Phoenix / Re-Zombie) — unified "on death" logic:
- Intercept the lethal hit before it is applied. Previously they reacted after the death was already committed, so one-shots, fall damage and skill-based kills were missed (Phoenix and Re-Zombie were rewritten from a post-death handler to pre-damage interception).
Killer Flash:
- Kills through real damage instead of forcing a suicide, so revive skills can intercept.
Baseball:
- Fixed a rare server crash from decoy grenades: a freed decoy's entity index could be reused by another entity and written to (use-after-free). Decoy tracking is now validated per tick (DesignerName gate) and cleared every round.
Native crash hardening:
- Aimbot: guard the hit-group native pointer before writing (avoids writing to freed/null memory).
- Wallhack: detach the glow when the target dies or disconnects (stale FollowEntity on a freed pawn).
- Spectator / Cypher / FalconEye / ThirdEye: null-guard the camera SceneNode walk and re-validate the target before teleport/parent (cross-frame freed-entity deref).
- CServerSideClient.ForceFullUpdate now bails on a null client handle.
Performance:
- Added a per-tick player/bomb cache (PlayerManager.GetTickPlayers / GetTickBomb).
- Migrated 82 skills from per-skill Utilities.GetPlayers() to the one shared per-tick scan, and the HUD loop reuses it. Much lower per-tick cost at high player counts (verified 10v10).
RayTrace:
- Prints a single notice when the module is not installed; dependent skills (Long Zeus, Long Knife, Iana, Cypher, Noclip, Shade + the skill-use aim check) no-op instead of failing silently (#43).
General:
- Jester's no-damage state no longer applies to players who do not hold the
skill. The shared health helper checked Jester's internal table without
verifying the current assignment, so a single stale entry silently cancelled
damage across every skill that deals damage through it.
- Jester's per-round reset no longer aborts when the holder is dead, which
previously left the table populated for the following rounds.
- The per-round reset now covers every skill used on the current map instead of
only the ones held in the round that just ended, so a skill nobody drew still
clears state left over from an earlier round.
- Skills that track another player as a target are now notified when that player
disconnects. Controller indexes are reused, so a leftover entry applied to
whoever connected into that index next. Affects Poison, Deaf, Darkness,
Glitch, Magnifier, Legless, No Rifles, Jammer and Jester.
- Aimbot no longer retains raw native pointers after a hit is handled. They were
never cleared and were written back to later, which could corrupt memory the
engine had already freed.
- An exception inside a skill's OnTick no longer cancels the tick of every skill
after it in the same frame.
- Cooldowns configured low enough to truncate to zero no longer throw (Poison,
Regeneration, Hot Bomb, Healing Smoke, Toxic Smoke).
- Round changes are cheaper: Long Knife no longer detaches a detour it never
attached, and Wild Throw skips its player sweep when it has nothing to unwind.
Skill improvements:
- Second Chance: now survives several lethal hits landing in the same tick
(shotgun, two attackers) and restores health inside the damage hook instead of
a frame later. It also runs after skills that modify damage, so One-Shot and
Soldier are seen at their final value instead of the raw one.
- Spectator: returning to your own view no longer leaves the camera handle set,
which made the tick handler reset the weapon cooldown every frame and play as
rapid fire. The manual toggle is unchanged.
- Radar Hack: players hidden behind a replacement model (Chicken) are shown on
the radar again. Only Ghost, Ninja and C4 Camouflage hide the pawn itself, so
render alpha alone no longer decides.
- Focus: weapon_accuracy_nospread is reference counted, so one holder losing the
skill no longer removes the effect from the others still holding it.
- Friendly Fire: mp_autokick is restored at the end of the round instead of
staying disabled for the rest of the map, and is no longer executed on every
friendly hit.
- Reactive Armor / Iana: no longer restore health for a player who no longer
holds the skill.
- Free Planter / Short Fuse: each restores mp_c4timer only when it actually
changed it, so overlapping rounds cannot write back the wrong value.
- Illusionist: the replica movement timer now stops on map change.
- Ghost / Ninja / C4 Camouflage: the bomb is located once per transmit instead of
once per receiver and hidden player, and the pass is skipped when nobody is
hidden.
Introduce optional `HudDuration` and `DescriptionHudDuration` fields in skill config metadata and propagate them through all skill config constructors and `skillsInfo.json`.
Refactored command handling to improve player and skill lookup logic, replaced some list operations with direct queries, and updated method signatures for clarity and null safety. The vote system was reworked to support more robust vote tracking, cooldowns, and localized chat messages. Language files were updated to add new vote-related translations. Various code style and nullability improvements were made throughout the plugin.
