Status report 2026.06.16: economy, main menu and VFX

A Stripe fiat on-ramp and Boost page, a brand-new hero-mech main menu, a Subsystem Factory storefront, and the first public marketing site.

Added

Payments & Boost

New Boost page (formerly Subscription): buy NXR directly and manage Membership in one place.
Stripe fiat on-ramp: buy NXR with real money, minted via a signed webhook.
NXR pack pricing + a full checkout flow.
Repair Bay: spend to restore your mechs between fights.
Membership perks wired up end-to-end, with a Stripe billing portal to manage your subscription.
Purchase- and Boost-success toasts so you get clear confirmation when a payment lands.
Stripe lifecycle notifications surfaced through the in-app toaster.

Free-to-Play Floor

New daily challenge that lets free players earn and contribute without spending.

Main Menu

Brand-new hero-mech main menu: a live 3D mech rendered behind the menu, with a different mech showing up on each refresh.
Full futuristic FX suite: fresnel rim glow, holo screen pass, grid, dissolve, and FUI overlays.
Animated dissolve sweep (looping / one-shot / scan modes) for a proper power-on reveal.

Subsystem Factory

New Subsystem Factory storefront: buy and open subsystem crates straight from the Workshop.
Crate-type and status filters, a list/compact view toggle, and cleaner crate thumbnails.

Workshop

Mech battle stats with a stat radar and a resolved-stat panel so you can read a build at a glance.
Passive turntable preview that slowly rotates the mech.
Subsystem descriptions in the catalog.
Favourite subsystems + filter-by-favourites.
Search / tier / sort filters on the subsystem equip picker.
Stock loadout rules for fresh mechs.

Battle & Arena

Pilot dossier + full weapon loadout now shown in the battle panels and carried on the roster.
Reworked Airstrike / Nuke VFX, health bars, and mech object rendering.
Click a mech in the battle bar to focus the camera on it.
Intro tour camera now snaps cleanly per mech instead of drifting.

Faction Support

House-funded win-rate fixed-odds floor when you back a faction, so backing always pays out fairly.

Lore / Codex

Lore fragments now render as proper markdown, with per-source-type styling in crate reveals and larger body text.

Public Site

New public marketing site (https://nexusrift.gg) with an embedded live spectator feed.

Tug of War now fires on attrition milestones instead of a fixed opener: cadence follows the fight.
Spoils house seed now scales with participation; deploy payouts are a conserved pool-split with a bounded seed (no money printing).
Queue payouts are now self-funded from the fee pool, with rescaled deploy stakes.
Pilots are now mech-bound: no more detach/reattach.
Airstrike damage raised to 1500.
BC now carries a plasma rifle on its left arm.
Muzzle flashes and tracers now originate from actual weapon hardpoints.
AI closes to melee range when a melee weapon is equipped.
New, dramatic death blast that’s distinct from splash explosions.
Beefier hit / splash / airstrike / nuke booms, spark trails behind every projectile, per-archetype muzzle spark spray, and shield deflect sparks.
Crate sparkle, a green ion-cannon heal effect, and storm zone crackle.
All four mech abilities (OVERCHARGE, OVERCLOCK, AFTERBURN, FIREWORKS) migrated onto the new VFX system: OVERCHARGE now converges inward then detonates into bullet streaks.
Deploy cost is now correctly labelled in NXR (was showing stale SUPS).
Storefront quick-bid now bumps live, with streamed recent bids.

Mid-battle joiners no longer break: mechs self-heal if they spawn before their roster entry, and targeting / Repair state resets correctly.
Spoils collect: handles a missing NXR account gracefully and no longer leaks raw backend errors; accrual reads clearly even when nothing is claimable yet.
Renderer now recovers from WebGL context loss and guards against zero-size resizes; context is properly released on teardown.
Skins now read true per chassis (neutralized the GLB base colour on apply).
Targeting exits properly after placing an ability.
Chat only auto-scrolls when you’re pinned to the bottom, and shows an empty state when there’s no real chat.
Audio only plays once the audio context is actually running.
Battle History, Deploy Queue, and other panels now scroll properly.
Skin Remove button now actually unassigns the skin.
Claimed genesis mech faction now derives from the owner’s team.
Battle settlement no longer holds the Tug of War lock across the DB write, and recovers from sim panics.