RELEASE
NOTES

The controller drives from the first second, and the flat platforms catch up with the headset

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• On Vision Pro, a game controller now drives the tank from the moment a mission begins. Until now the pad could do nothing at the start until you reached out and took the cockpit lever by hand, after which it worked at once. The battlefield takes the controller by taking focus, and it was doing so while the launch window was still open; when that window closed a moment later it took focus with it, and the two retries meant to catch exactly that were skipped because the same pad had already moved through the menu. The battlefield now takes focus again the moment the launch window is gone, whatever the pad did before, and the log records every time it gains or loses focus.
• iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac get the headset's settings: Sound, How You Play, Controls, Comfort, Advanced and Game Access, the same rows in the same order, and the Game Controller screen on iPhone, iPad and Mac — the live diagram of your pad, rebinding by pressing or by moving a stick, the Standard, Southpaw and D-pad drive layouts, dead zones and sensitivities. Apple TV gets a Game Controller page of its own that explains the layouts and steps the sensitivities.
• The main menu on the flat platforms carries the headset's rows — BATTLEFIELD (War-Torn Town or Classic Arena), MY TANK and ENEMY with their flags, TUTORIAL, START MISSION, MULTIPLAYER, SETTINGS, VEHICLE HALL, STANDINGS — and the eight-lesson tutorial from Apple Vision Pro, worded for what you are holding. The mission is built on the map you chose and the enemy flies the flag you chose.
• A game controller drives every flat menu with an orange ring: the main menu, pause, wave-complete and hull-destroyed menus, Settings, the multiplayer panel, the Vehicle Hall and the Standings. The pad uses the headset's layout on every platform: right trigger fires, left trigger steadies, right bumper is the autocannon, B brakes, X hands the wheel to the autopilot and Menu pauses. Apple TV keeps its own focus engine for menus.
• The radar on the flat platforms shows the buildings, walls, fences and ground contours around you, at the headset's 170-metre range. A friend's Game Center invitation that arrives mid-mission appears over the battlefield with Join now and Not now instead of throwing the multiplayer sheet over the live game. A duel can be paused and left from the pause menu. The Mac has its Play Friend button, and accepting a friend's invitation there opens the match rather than the statistics sheet. Settings › About opens the same page as on the headset.
• The frame-rate and network readouts are off by default and live under Settings › Advanced, next to a new Input debug HUD and Prepare Diagnostics Report, which opens a readable report in the share sheet (on screen on Apple TV).

What to test

• Vision Pro with an Xbox controller: launch the app, move through the launch menu with the stick, start a mission with A and push the left stick straight away. The tank must move without you touching the lever. Then leave the battlefield and start a second mission and the tutorial the same way.
• iPhone, iPad and Mac: open Settings › Controls › Game Controller, rebind a button by pressing it, and check the new binding works in a mission and on your headset.
• Flat platforms: pick Classic Arena and a different enemy flag from the main menu, then start a mission and confirm the map and the flags. Run the tutorial to the end.
• Apple TV: play a mission with the Siri Remote and a controller; MENU should open the pause menu, not leave the game.
• 185 is on the public link for Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. The Mac build is with Apple for beta review and follows once approved.

The victory call is a setting, and the store is inside Settings on every platform

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Settings › Sound has a Victory call switch, off by default, on every platform.
• The privacy policy and support links are inside the app, and Game Access — Unlock Full Game and Restore Purchases — is in Settings on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac as it is on the headset.
• Controller navigation in Settings, three multiplayer games a day for the free game, and the App Store price on the Unlock button once the store serves it, as in 183. Waves 1–10 are free in this TestFlight build.

Settings answers the controller, and every platform is back

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Settings can be driven end to end with a game controller on Vision Pro. Up and down walk every row, left and right change the value under the highlight, A presses it. A on Advanced opens it like a folder and puts the ring on the first row inside; up and down walk its rows, left and right move each slider, and B closes Advanced and returns to its header. From anywhere else in Settings, B closes Settings. The highlighted row always stays in view — the list scrolls to keep the ring in the visible part of the window and stops at the ends, so Restore Purchases and About at the bottom are shown in full rather than as an orange line at the edge.
• Unlock Full Game, Restore Purchases and About are all reachable with the pad. B closes About, the Vehicle Hall and the standings, and closing one of them hands the controller back to the screen underneath instead of leaving the stick dead.
• The free game gets three multiplayer games a day. Quick Match, Play Friend, an accepted invitation and Local Match each count against the allowance, counted only when a match is actually established — a search that finds nobody costs nothing — and reset at local midnight. The multiplayer panel shows how many are left; when they are used up it says so and points to the full-game unlock, which removes the limit.
• The purchase description names every platform the unlock covers and Family Sharing, everywhere the unlock is offered. The button shows the App Store's own price when the store has stated one, and no price otherwise.
• iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac builds are back. None had shipped since build 152, because the controller navigation added to the multiplayer panel and the Vehicle Hall in August only compiled on the headset. The flat builds now show the same screens and browse them by touch, keyboard or the system's focus.

What to test

• Vision Pro with a controller: open Settings, walk to the bottom with the stick, open Advanced with A, move a lever slider with left and right, close Advanced with B, then close Settings with B. The ring must never leave the window and nothing should stop answering the stick.
• Open About, the Vehicle Hall and the standings in turn and close each with B. Only that window should close — B on About must not close Settings with it.
• On the free game, play multiplayer four times in one day. The panel should count down from three, refuse the fourth with a pointer to the unlock, and a search that finds nobody must not use one up.
• Read the purchase description before buying: it should name your platform and Family Sharing, and show your local price or none.
• iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac: install, play a mission, and open and close the multiplayer panel and the Vehicle Hall by touch or remote. These are the first builds for those devices since 152.
• 183 is on the public link.

Three duels a day, and a store that says what it answered

VISION PRO

What changed

• First appearance of the daily multiplayer allowance: three games a day on the free game, shown on the multiplayer panel, unlimited with the full-game unlock.
• The purchase flow was run against Apple's own StoreKit engine before the build went out: the product loads at its price, a purchase unlocks the game, a refund locks it again whether the app was running or closed at the time, Restore finds a purchase this device never saw and corrects a remembered unlock the account no longer holds, and a store that answers nothing after a purchase does not take the game away.
• The diagnostics log now says whether the App Store offered the product, answered with none, or could not be reached at all, so a greyed-out purchase button can be explained from a report.
• Settings and the store-unreachable message state the free waves from one number rather than a hardcoded “waves 1–3”.

Advanced opens like a folder, and the list follows the ring

VISION PRO

What changed

• Pressing A on Advanced used to expand it and leave the ring on the header. Now A opens it and puts the ring on the first row inside, up and down walk its rows, left and right move each slider, and B closes Advanced and returns to the header. From anywhere else in Settings, B closes Settings; B also closes About, the Vehicle Hall and the standings.
• A window closing over Settings no longer leaves the pad dead. The controller window, About, the Vehicle Hall and the standings all handed the controller to the launch checklist when they closed, and the checklist refuses to read it while Settings covers it, so from then on nothing answered the stick. A window that closes now returns the pad to whoever had it before, and the press that closes it is no longer seen a second time by Settings — B closing About used to close Settings with it.
• Left and right on the lever sliders stay on the slider. A push right on Lever height set it to 60 cm, because the pad clamped the value to a range the slider never had; each slider row now has one range and a push moves a twentieth of it.
• On visionOS 27 the settings list jumped to the Comfort section whenever the highlight moved, so the ring was off screen and the window had to be dragged by hand to find it. The list now scrolls by measurement, centring the highlighted row in the part of the window below the title bar and stopping at the ends so the last rows are fully shown. Build 181 corrects the measurement to the visible part of the window rather than the whole of it. Verified on a Vision Pro running visionOS 27 by driving Settings from a Mac over USB; the device log now records every scroll and whether the highlighted row is on screen.

The highlight goes into Advanced, and out the other side

VISION PRO

What changed

• The settings highlight walks into the Advanced group and out the far side of it. Since 170 the rows inside were in the pad's list, but the ring stopped at the disclosure; it now continues through the calibration sliders, the radar picker and the developer switches, and on to Unlock Full Game, Restore Purchases and About below them. The list does not yet follow it reliably on visionOS 27 — that is builds 180 and 181.
• The log names which window owns the controller, because visionOS reports every window as active. A stick that does nothing can now be told apart from a stick nobody is reading.

Every menu answers the controller

VISION PRO

What changed

• Every menu surface was audited and the ones that had been missed got the controller: each now takes the claim, takes focus, and has a way out the pad can press. No screen should be left that answers a look and a pinch but not the stick.
• The Vehicle Hall answers the pad in full. The stick walks the list and the selection scrolls itself into view, the right stick turns the model on its turntable, right moves into the vehicle's file, and A returns to the main menu.
• The settings list scrolls to keep the highlight on screen as it moves down a list taller than its window. The scrolling was being asked for all along; it was the request that lied about where the row was. On visionOS 27 this still misbehaves — see 180.

The menus say what they see, and no window can strand you

VISION PRO

What changed

• The pad works in the menus, and starting a mission with it no longer silences it. In the menus the controller could press A and nothing else — every stick and D-pad axis read exact zero — and a mission started with the pad then ran with a dead controller, while one started by looking and pinching drove perfectly. The menus were still using the option that silenced gameplay from build 132 to 165; they now use the same plain claim as the battlefield. The menu pollers also stand down while a mission owns the pad, including Settings opened from the pause menu.
• The launch and multiplayer menus answer the stick. Both were re-pinning the highlight to their default row every frame, before a push could be seen — which is why “only in settings it works” was exactly right. A starting row is now chosen once, when the screen appears. The launch window also takes focus explicitly, and a menu pad: line logs what the menu reads from the controller.
• One press of A no longer starts a multiplayer search. Opening the panel with A used to begin looking for an opponent at once, because the press that opened it arrived at the panel as a new press; a screen opened under a held button now waits for it to be released.
• The settings screen navigates all the way down. Unlock Full Game, Restore Purchases and About were unreachable and Advanced highlighted as one block; every control inside Advanced is now its own row, in the pad's list only while the group is expanded, and About is reachable by a route the pad can follow. The Vehicle Hall gained the stick for its list and A to return to the main menu.
• No window can strand you outside the game any more. visionOS restores whichever windows were open when the app last quit, so a Vehicle Hall left open with the menu closed was the only thing the next launch showed. Every window that can outlive the menu carries a Main Menu button, reopens the menu by itself when it finds it missing, and the Vehicle Hall's Main Menu is the first row of its list rather than a toolbar item visionOS may place nowhere.
• The menus report themselves. Settings and the Vehicle Hall log what they read from the controller — stick values, the A button, which row the highlight is on, how many rows are live and every step taken — and the app logs its version and build at launch, so a captured session can never again be ambiguous about which build produced it. A menu can no longer fail silently, and pressing the way out no longer opens a second menu over the first.

The controller drives the tank again, and the pad drives the menus

VISION PRO

What changed

• The gun fires again. Build 164 could not shoot at all: the retired aiming stick's “I am claiming pinches” suppression was still standing, fed by the very measure that reads a resting hand as pinched, and it vetoed every round — 77 trigger pulls and no shots in the trace. It now exists only while the experimental stick is switched on. Holding for the autocannon also no longer risks opening the pause menu on the way through.
• A connected Xbox controller drives the tank again. It was found, claimed and handed a value handler, and every stick reading came back as exact zero: build 132 had asked visionOS for exclusive delivery during gameplay, and the answer to that request was silence. The battlefield is back on the plain claim that ever worked, and a telemetry line reports four times a second whether the pad is heard at all.
• The launch menu answers the controller. The sticks and the D-pad move a highlight up and down the checklist, A presses the highlighted row, and left and right change that row's value — the map, and which country's tank each side fights in. Rows that cannot be pressed are skipped, a held stick moves one row rather than running to the bottom, and a diagonal shove does one thing.
• The multiplayer panel and the settings screen have it too. Up and down move the highlight, A presses it, and left and right change the value under it — a switch, the hand-aiming assist level, a volume, the view height. In multiplayer that covers Quick Match, Play Friend, Local Match, Stats and Close, with the Game Center rows skipped while signed out, and A cancelling a search. Apple's friend picker is system UI, so pad navigation pauses while it is up.
• Hands lose nothing anywhere: every button, slider and arrow remains a gaze target, and the highlight appears only once a controller has moved it.

Your eyes aim, your pinch is the trigger

VISION PRO

What changed

• Grabbing the hand stick takes the whole gun and keeps it. Whether the hand or head aiming flew an axis used to follow the command's value, per axis — so a still hand owned nothing, a horizontal sweep left elevation following the player's head, and any pause handed the axis back to the gaze mid-hold. That was every symptom in the field report: the gun climbing on its own, refusing to come down, the turret swinging away the moment the hand rested. A held stick now owns both axes for the whole hold. The gun also comes down as willingly as it goes up, and hand-aiming assist is a setting — off, low or normal — under How You Play.
• The stick survives the headset's own blinks. A USB trace showed the right hand's fingertip joints dropping out every one to three seconds, each blink cancelling the hold and re-centring the stick on the displaced hand. A hold now rides the whole-hand anchor and survives fingertip loss for seconds. An idle pinch no longer steals the gun from your eyes, the machine gun can no longer switch itself on from a pinch the gaze happened to cross, and the lock-on pulls help only a moving hand — never a still one.
• Three builds of field trials ended in the same verdict, so the turret stick is benched. Look at a target to aim, a quick right pinch fires the main gun, and hold the pinch for a second and the autocannon runs until you let go. Left-hand driving is untouched. The stick's pad is gone from the cockpit panel and three lines there teach the scheme; the stick survives behind a developer setting. The panel and its instruments moved from 0.78 m to 0.55 m, inside everything the tank can swing through your view, so the raised gun no longer stands between you and FIRE and MENU.
• The left hand can no longer fire the gun. The system's pinch gesture cannot tell one hand from the other, so driving with the left hand shelled out the magazine. The trigger is strictly the right hand: any right pinch released within a second fires the main gun, held past one second it runs the autocannon. The gaze-pinch fire remains only for players without hand tracking.
• The autocannon no longer fires at a hand resting in your lap. A relaxed hand measures the same as a pinch when you ask how close the thumb and finger are; firing now reads visionOS's own pinch detector, which knows a squeeze from a resting hand and says which hand pinched. The turret ring also no longer draws over FIRE and MENU: the cockpit and the floating controls share one draw order, panel last.
• Known and fixed next: build 164 could not fire at all. See 165.

A stick for the turret, and a gun that lays itself on the target

VISION PRO

What changed

• The turret gets its own right-hand stick on Vision Pro, as an experiment: pinch with the right hand and move it to traverse and elevate, while the left hand keeps driving. Twelve builds tuned it on the headset — the turret has mass on every control that moves it, brakes harder than it starts, and slows onto a target; a lost hand no longer keeps running the turret and its claim is released when the pinch is gone; elevation is a real axis and traverse the primary one; the two sticks sit at opposite ends of the panel; and the panel follows the input source, so a lost hand really lets go.
• A purchase button no longer dies in silence: a storefront that answers nothing no longer greys out both purchase buttons.
• A cancelled touch no longer leaves the turret spinning on iPhone and iPad. The sticks read touches through a gesture that is never told about touches the system cancels — a notification banner, an edge swipe, a palm — so the stick kept its last deflection. Each pad now tracks exactly one finger and releases the instant a touch is taken away, and the left thumb can never steal the right pad mid-fight.
• A game controller is back exactly where build 132 left it, its turret rates pinned by test, and the battlefield reclaims controller focus when the pad actually arrives rather than before.
• Lock-on for the virtual sticks: once the turret sweeps within the engagement angle of an enemy the gun eases onto the firing solution, in bearing and — new — vertically, so sweeping roughly onto a tank is enough and the elevation is laid for you. A hand on the axis always overrides it. Touch, the visionOS panel pad and the Mac keyboard get it; a game controller never does.
• The touch turret stick gets the aim help it was promised. It had never identified itself as a virtual stick, so the slower traverse, the wind-up, the slowdown near targets and the lock-on were all bypassed and the thumb drove the turret raw. It now takes the virtual-stick path.
• The reticle says when a shot would hit. The flat-screen sight turns red and heavier while the gun line intersects a live enemy, and the touch HUD shows LOCKED — FIRE above the controls. Firing is not gated on it; buildings and led targets remain shootable.
• These builds went only to the headset. The iPhone and iPad changes above reach those devices with build 183.

The purchase button tells the truth

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• The purchase button showed a hardcoded “$9.99” whenever the App Store had not been reached — offline, on a slow connection, or simply early in launch. That is the right number in exactly one currency, so anybody outside the United States was being shown a price they would not be charged, on the one button in the game that takes money. It now shows no price at all until the App Store has stated one.
• A remembered purchase could never be corrected. Ignoring a check that cannot be answered is what stops an offline launch taking away a game you paid for — but it left no way back, so a device that had once held a purchase went on offering the full game to whoever signed in next. Restore Purchases now acts on a check that completes and finds nothing, which is the one definite answer there is.
• A run that died between paying and finishing left a transaction the App Store re-offers indefinitely and eventually refunds — quietly undoing a purchase somebody made. Anything left over is now cleared at launch.
• A refund is noticed even if the game was closed or offline when it happened. It was previously caught reliably only while the game was running, because a refunded purchase disappears from the entitlement list rather than being reported as refunded — which looks exactly like not being able to reach the App Store at all.

What to test

• Check the purchase button in a storefront that is not the United States. It must show your real local price, or no price at all — never a dollar figure.
• Buy the full game, quit, turn on airplane mode, and reopen. It must still be unlocked. This was fixed in 140 and must stay fixed.
• Restore Purchases, on an account that owns the game and on one that does not.
• Everything in 140 is still worth testing, the friend duel especially — shoot buildings and drive into fences with both screens visible.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac are all installable now.

A game you bought stays bought, and a duel can knock the town down

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Buying the full game and then opening the app without a connection could tell you that you had not bought it. The check that asks the App Store what you own answers the same way whether you own nothing or whether it simply could not be reached — and the game read that silence as "nothing", so a lost lookup took back a game somebody had paid for. It re-checked constantly, which turned one bad answer into a repeated accusation. Your purchase is now remembered between launches and unlocked on the first frame with no connection at all; only an actual refund can take it away, and a failed check leaves it exactly where it was.
• Two related purchase faults went with it: a purchase that had just completed could still be reported as not owned, because the game threw away Apple's receipt and asked a second question that could come back empty; and a failed Restore Purchases reported the store as unavailable rather than simply saying it could not run.
• The pause menu opened with Resume already selected, so the confirm button was aimed at the one control that closes the menu and anyone reaching for the view-height row kept landing back in the battlefield. Nothing is selected now until you select it — Resume is reached the same way as every other row.
• When an opponent quit or dropped, the game showed a brief notice and then returned you to the main menu on its own three seconds later. The notice and the battlefield disappeared together, so if you happened to be looking elsewhere you arrived at the menu with no idea what had happened. The duel now stays put, says whether the other player left or lost connection, and waits for you — with Find New Opponent, which takes you straight back to the multiplayer panel, or Main Menu.
• Buildings, fences and trees can be destroyed in a duel. They were deliberately frozen: both devices were knocking down walls from their own view of the same shells, and the two battlefields drifted apart until one player could drive through a wall the other could still see. The player hosting the match now decides what falls and tells the other, so both towns wear down identically — by gunfire and by driving into things, exactly as in a single-player mission.
• When the standings or a duel cannot reach Game Center, the game now works out why instead of printing an error code. It asks a public name server the same question the device just failed to answer; if the device cannot find Game Center and the public server can, it says so and names the VPN responsible. A VPN that is running but working is never blamed.

What to test

• Duels need both players on build 140. The messages describing a falling wall are new, so a 140 device and a 132 device will decline to match rather than play a duel where the two towns disagree. Update both ends before testing multiplayer.
• A duel with a friend, shooting buildings and driving into fences, watching both screens: a wall that falls on one must fall on the other, and neither player should be able to drive through something the other can still see.
• Buy the full game, quit, turn on airplane mode, and reopen. The game must still be unlocked. This is the fault the build exists for.
• Have one player quit a duel mid-match and check the other gets the screen explaining it, with both buttons working.
• Open the pause menu and adjust the view height without the game resuming underneath you.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac are all installable now — the Mac cleared beta review the same day, which it does not always do.

One neon tank everywhere

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• The new neon wireframe tank is now the primary application icon on Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. Every platform derives its required icon sizes from the same supplied artwork without stretching the tank or clipping its cannon.
• Build 138 changed the Vision Pro icon, but Apple’s public TestFlight page selected the separate iPhone/iPad icon and therefore kept showing the old tank. Build 139 updates that source as well, and Apple’s live TestFlight image now displays the new artwork.

What to test

• Open the public TestFlight invitation link and confirm the neon front-facing tank appears.
• Install build 139 and check the application icon on each device you use.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac are available to both internal and external TestFlight testers now.

A cockpit that fits, a truthful radar, and friend duels that start

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Friend invitations now stay in Game Center’s synchronized invitation flow, including invitations accepted while a mission is already running. Both players reach the same handshake instead of one seeing Accepted while the duel never starts.
• The amber radar line now follows the real gun heading. The scope also plots both sides’ live rounds, uses the actual shapes of obstacles, and adds subdued contours from the battlefield’s terrain.
• Enemy, tutorial and multiplayer placement rejects the complete footprint of town buildings, while their destructible walls, open windows and drive-through breaches continue to work as before.
• The autocannon carries four retained 30-round belts per wave or duel round. Belt changes take 1.25 seconds, the HUD shows loaded rounds and remaining belts, and ammunition returns only at the next round.
• View height now moves in the direction its label and arrows say. Automatic seat alignment samples each player’s headset height at mission entry, with a persistent fine-adjustment slider and a manual Auto Align action.
• Xbox input is reclaimed as the immersive battlefield opens, menus expose controller selections, and a compact Menu button remains available when the full virtual-control panel is hidden.
• Settings now contains a compact About page and keeps developer diagnostics under Advanced. The Vision Pro build also carries the new neon wireframe tank as its primary application and TestFlight icon.

What to test

• Invite a friend from each headset in turn, accept the invitation, finish a duel and start a rematch.
• Enter the tutorial and a normal mission with an Xbox controller already connected; driving should respond immediately, and menu buttons and sliders should be reachable from the pad.
• Check Auto Align from two different chairs or player heights, then verify Higher raises the view and Lower lowers it.
• Follow the amber radar line while rotating the hull and turret, and confirm tanks begin outside every building.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac are available to both internal and external TestFlight testers now.

The tank keeps its tail

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Turning a tank on the side-picker sliced its tail off against the panel behind it. Build 131 gave the models more room and it was the wrong fix: the model was not sitting in the middle of the space it had been given, it was two centimetres towards the back of it, so the tail was already past the panel while three and a half centimetres went unused in front. More room simply added it to the end that was not short. The model is centred now, with equal clearance in front and behind — a centimetre and a half either way, which no orientation can reach.
• The models also sit a couple of centimetres further from the panel than in 131, which is the direction the report asked for.

What to test

• Turn both tanks all the way round, slowly, and watch the tail and the gun as they pass the panel. Nothing should disappear at any angle.
• Everything in 131 is still worth a second look — the friend duel especially, since the fault it fixed was intermittent.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV are installable now. The Mac build is uploaded and waiting on Apple’s beta review, as a Mac build usually does; it appears on the public link once approved.

Friend duels that connect, and flags that are the right country

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Two players who accepted each other’s invitation could be told “Could not agree a match with the opponent” and sent back to the menu. Each device introduces itself once when a match opens, and Game Center hands over a connection that is already established — so nothing noticed if that single introduction went missing, and nothing repeated it. One dropped packet left the two devices waiting on each other: one knew about both players, the other knew only about itself. Devices now keep introducing themselves until the other end confirms it heard, the player hosting repeats their description of the battlefield to anyone who arrives late, and a description mentioning somebody you have not met yet is treated as early rather than wrong.
• Sweden was flying the Ukrainian flag on the side-picker. The little flag beside a country’s name was drawn as a stack of that country’s colours, which is only a flag for the nations whose flags are horizontal bands — Sweden’s blue and yellow laid out that way is exactly Ukraine’s. The tank standing next to it was drawn correctly, so the card disagreed with its own model. Both now come from one description of the flag, and every nation’s layout is checked.
• Choosing Green Force, Desert Corps or Arctic Corps showed a tank under a Chinese flag. Those are designations rather than countries and have no vehicles of their own, so the preview fell back to the oldest machine in the register and flew that machine’s nationality. The stand-in is the newest vehicle now, and in the menu the tank flies the side you picked — the hall still shows each vehicle’s true nationality, which is what the hall is for.
• Turning a tank in the side-picker no longer slices its tail off against the panel behind it, and the models sit a few millimetres further out.
• The game controller no longer gets stuck on a window you left open. Starting a mission closed the menu and the controller screen but nothing else, so Standings or the Vehicle Hall stayed floating in the battlefield — and a controller drives whichever window has your attention, which meant the pad kept working the leaderboard while the tank ignored everything. Every window now closes as a mission begins.
• Sound comes back after an interruption. Siri, a call or another app taking the audio route stopped the game’s engine and nothing ever asked again: the game believed it was still playing, so every later mission was silent and the only cure was force quitting.

What to test

• A friend duel, twice in a row, from both ends — invite and be invited. This is the build that fixes it, and the fault was intermittent, so once is not a test.
• Scroll through every side on the picker and check each flag against the flag on the tank beside it.
• Open Standings or the Vehicle Hall, leave it open, then start a mission: it should close, and the controller should drive the tank.
• Trigger Siri or take a call mid-mission and check the sound returns, and that the next mission still has sound.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV are installable now. The Mac build is uploaded and waiting on Apple’s beta review, as a Mac build usually does; it appears on the public link once approved.

Getting two players into the same battle

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Apple’s friend picker no longer appears for a second and disappears. Two faults, either enough on its own: the picker and the statistics panel were two screens competing for one slot, so the picker was dismissed whenever anything redrew; and the multiplayer panel was still building part of itself while it was on screen, which rebuilt it a moment after it opened and took whatever it was showing away with it.
• An invitation that arrives while you are driving now reaches you. Only the launch screen was watching for one, and the launch screen is closed for the whole of a mission — so a friend who invited you mid-battle was answered by silence until you happened to return to the menu, by which point the invitation had usually expired. A panel now appears beside you in the battlefield with their name: join and you leave for the duel, decline and they are told rather than left waiting.
• The multiplayer panel lists the devices in the room that have the game open, so two people sitting together can see that a local match will work before either of them presses anything. It only announces this device while that panel is open.
• The two tank models on the launch screen no longer hang in front of whatever you open. They are real 3D objects standing out of the window, which is why no menu could ever cover them — they sat on top of Apple’s friend picker. They step aside for anything opened over the checklist and come back, at the angle you left them, when you close it.
• Those models also sit close against their cards now rather than an arm’s length in front, near enough to read as part of the card and far enough that turning one never pushes its gun through the panel behind it.
• The tutorial’s lesson card is aimed at the seat rather than straight down the direction of travel, so it presents square to you the way the radar does instead of leaning away on one side.
• Every step of an invitation now records itself in the diagnostics report, including the case where nothing in Game Center ended it and the screen was simply taken away. If a picker vanishes again, the report says why instead of leaving a tester to describe a flash.

What to test

• MULTIPLAYER › PLAY FRIEND: the picker should stay up until you dismiss it or choose somebody.
• Open the multiplayer panel and settings and check that no tanks are floating over them, then close both and check the tanks come back as you left them.
• Two devices in one room, both on the multiplayer panel: each should name the other under NEARBY.
• If you can, have a friend invite you while you are mid-mission and use the panel that appears.
• Duels still want two devices on the same build — 129 plays 126 through 129, since the match rules have not changed since 126.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV are installable now. The Mac build is uploaded and waiting on Apple’s beta review, as a Mac build usually does; it appears on the public link once approved.

The menu stops hanging panels in the air, and a duel agrees on where the tanks are

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Two empty glass rectangles hung in the air in front of the launch menu, one over each tank preview, moving with the wearer's head. Each preview card holds a real 3D model, and that turns the card into a volume reaching out towards the player — so the card's own dark panel and its outline were being drawn on the front face of that volume, out in the room, instead of on the window, and being nearer the eye they were magnified to more than twice the size of the card they belonged to. The panel is drawn on the window again. The cards look exactly as they did, the tanks keep their depth, and nothing floats.
• Your opponent's tank now moves the way their own device is driving it. Each player's device reports the tank it is actually simulating alongside its controls; the match host checks that report against speed, elapsed time and the shared world before trusting it, and corrects the picture continuously instead of letting it drift and then snap.
• The opponent's shells exist on your device. A shot the match host has confirmed is drawn, tracked on radar and heard going past on both headsets. Damage is still decided only by the host — the shell you see is the picture of it, not a second opinion about who was hit.
• The two hulls no longer slide into each other on screen. The opponent is drawn a tenth of a second in the past, which could show the tanks overlapping at contact even when both devices agreed on where they were; the drawn position is now held at the point of contact.
• A lost packet no longer leaves an opponent driving. If the message that says the controls were released goes missing, the host stops that tank a quarter of a second later instead of holding the throttle open until the disconnect timer runs out.
• For multiplayer, both devices must be on this build. The match data and the rules changed shape again, so build 126 deliberately refuses to play 125 and anything earlier.
• Autopilot takes the hull the moment it is switched on. A virtual control that is still holding its last value used to take the tank straight back on the next frame; an explicit AUTO now means exactly that, and manual driving resumes only once the controls have returned to neutral and been moved again. The red STOP is a full stop for the same reason, not a brake pulse that a stale control can undo.
• Boxed into a pocket between buildings or against the arena edge, the autopilot stops and pivots rather than committing to a route it has not checked, and it treats other tanks as moving obstacles while choosing a course instead of driving into them.
• A sound queued by a mission that has ended no longer plays into the next one.
• iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac testers have been on build 106 since 10 August; this is their first update since, and it carries everything in between — the guided tutorial, the rebuilt launch menu, the reorganised settings, and the controller, audio and battlefield-lifecycle fixes.
• Said plainly: the duel changes have not yet been confirmed on two headsets. That is the main thing this build is asking for.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV are installable now. The Mac build is uploaded and waiting on Apple's beta review, as a Mac build usually does; it appears on the public link once approved.

What to test

• Look at the launch menu from off to one side, from above and from below. Nothing should hang in the air in front of it, and both tank previews should still turn with a pinch-drag.
• Run a duel with both devices on build 126: drive at each other and stop hard, ram from the side and from behind, and watch the opponent's shells rather than only your own.
• Switch autopilot on and off while a virtual stick is deflected, and press the red STOP while driving.
• On iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac this is the first sight of the tutorial and the rebuilt launch menu — check both read the same as they do on Vision Pro.

A training range for the first drive

VISION PRO

What changed

• A guided tutorial now teaches one control at a time: forward, reverse, left and right turns, free driving, aiming and firing. It recognises the same hand lever, virtual controls and game controller used in a real mission, confirms each success before moving on, and offers help if the player becomes stuck.
• The range begins with no other tanks. Gunnery introduces one stationary target that cannot fire back or damage the player; after a kill, the next target relocates nearby so practice includes finding and driving to it rather than shooting the same patch of ground forever. Targets keep returning for as long as the player wants to practise.
• The launch window has been rebuilt as one full-height instrument panel. Every action is visible without scrolling, the arena and sides are chosen at the top, and the 3D tank previews sit close to the panel instead of floating into the room. Pinch and drag either preview to inspect it from another angle.
• Settings now lead with the decisions that matter in play — aiming, driving assists, virtual controls, comfort and sound — and explain what each one changes. Calibration, rendering and diagnostics remain available inside a collapsed Advanced section.
• The controller, audio and battlefield-lifecycle fixes tested in builds 117–123 are included: analogue input no longer burdens the render thread, the battlefield takes controller focus as it opens, audio retries a route that was not ready, and leaving a mission releases its frame loop.

What to test

• Complete the tutorial with hands, the virtual panel or an Xbox-style controller, then remain in the open range and hunt several relocating targets.
• On the launch screen, confirm every row is visible without scrolling and rotate both tank models with a pinch-drag.
• Open Settings and check that the everyday choices are understandable without expanding Advanced.

Three faults wearing the same disguise

VISION PRO

What changed

• Testers reported a frame rate that started low and fell further with every new mission, and it turned out to be three unrelated faults producing one symptom. All three are fixed.
• Every mission was leaving its entire battlefield behind. The game hands the system a piece of code to run each frame, and that code owned the world it was driving; the only thing that cancelled it was a notification the system sends when an immersive space closes, and it does not reliably send it. So a finished mission stopped drawing and stopped simulating — looking, from the outside, exactly like one that had been cleaned up — while nothing could actually free it. Memory climbed a mission at a time. The frame handler now holds the world weakly and the world cancels its own handler, on every way out.
• Connecting a game controller cut the frame rate by three quarters. A tester found it by accident: eighty-four frames a second with no controller paired, fifteen with one, on the same battlefield with the same nine hundred objects in it. A controller reports every change to every stick and trigger as it happens, and analogue sticks are never perfectly still, so that is a constant stream even when nobody is touching it — and every one of those reports was being delivered on the thread that draws the picture, each triggering a full read of the whole device. They now arrive on a thread of their own.
• The controller often would not drive the tank at all until the player waved a hand or grabbed the cockpit lever. Telling the system "this part of the game handles controller input" only applies while that part of the game holds the system's attention, and the battlefield never asked for it. A controller in that state reports its sticks as exactly zero rather than as missing, which is why the diagnostics could describe a perfectly healthy controller while the tank stood still, and why the autopilot switch made no difference — the controller was not being heard at all. Touching something in the world is what moved the system's attention there. The battlefield now takes it as a mission opens.
• Sound no longer goes missing for a whole mission. The audio engine asks the system for the audio route while the battlefield is still being built, and if it does not have it yet the request fails; the game used to give up at that point and stay silent until it was force quit. It asks again now.
• Diagnostics can be sent off the headset. A button on the launch screen writes a full report — build, system, thermal state, frame times, memory, what each mission built and what it released, the controller pipeline and every setting — and hands it to the share sheet for AirDrop, mail or Files. Two testers' reports are what found the faults above.
• Some things this ruled out, which is worth as much as what it found: the headset was not overheating, the game's own simulation was using under five milliseconds of a seventy-three millisecond frame, and the battlefield's geometry was being released correctly after all.
• Still internal, and still honest about it: the frame rate on a first, clean mission has not yet been confirmed on hardware with these fixes in place. Until it is, none of this goes on the public link.

Chasing a frame rate that fell the longer you played

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Two testers reported the same thing: the game ran well at first and got slower the longer they played, and the only cure was force quitting it. Starting a mission, leaving to the menu and starting another was leaving the previous battlefield running — a whole second world, terrain and town and tanks, still being simulated and drawn behind the one on screen. Four missions measured 780 MB of memory and eight frames a second, against 443 MB and twenty on the first. It is fixed: the app owns the live battlefield directly now, starting a new one shuts down its predecessor immediately, and a battlefield that has been shut down refuses to do any further work.
• The reason it took so long to find is worth saying plainly. The counters built to catch exactly this fault were compiled out of every build anyone had ever played, so they read zero in the field and the readout meant to prove it was blank. They count in real builds now, and the fault showed itself within a minute of a tester restarting a mission.
• Sound could go missing for an entire mission. The audio engine asks the system for the audio route while the battlefield is still being built, and if the app does not have it yet the request fails — at which point the game used to give up and stay silent until it was killed and relaunched, which is exactly the workaround testers had found. It asks again now.
• Diagnostics can be sent off the headset. A button on the launch screen writes a full report — build, system, frame times, memory, the lifecycle counters, geometry, input pipeline, every setting — and hands it to the share sheet for AirDrop, mail or Files.
• The controller screen can see thumbsticks again. That window never told the system it wanted the pad, so it showed dead sticks and a working D-pad for a controller that was perfectly fine — the one screen built to answer "is my controller working" was giving the wrong answer, and had been for many builds.
• Being dropped out to the home screen no longer strands the game with its start button greyed out and force quitting as the only way back.
• Held back from public release on purpose. The frame rate on a fresh mission is still lower than it should be, and that is being worked on with the measurements these builds added. Build 107 also carried a fault of its own — a diagnostics panel moved into the player's view took the controller away from the game entirely — which was found and fixed the same day, in 108, without ever reaching the public link.

Missions stop leaving things behind, and the two tanks stop driving through each other

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Restarting a mission cost frame rate every time. The old restart threw away every building, tree and fence and generated fresh geometry for the replacements — and the discarded graphics resources can outlive the objects that owned them, so the scene looked identical while the memory behind it climbed with each restart. The town is now built once and put back by moving the original pieces into place; nothing new is generated on restart.
• Leaving the battlefield now takes the old scene apart immediately instead of waiting for the system to get round to it. That gap is what let a new battlefield briefly exist alongside the old one and draw the doubled, flickering wires.
• Hand and head tracking belong to the mission now. They used to start on the launch screen, before the headset could supply anything to track, and then start again when the battlefield opened. One mission is now one hand loop and one head session.
• A duel has one owner and one exit. Leaving the battlefield, quitting from the pause menu, cancelling entry and refusing a mismatched world all go the same way out, so a single-player mission started afterwards can no longer wake up in duel mode or inherit the duel's map.
• The pause menu knows it is in a duel: Resume and Leave Duel rather than Restart, which a duel cannot do, and DUEL ENDED with Return to Multiplayer once the match is over.
• The two tanks in a duel are now solid to each other. Contact is settled by the match authority — head-on, from the side, from behind, and both tanks moving at once — so both devices agree on where the hulls end up.
• The diagnostics panel gained the numbers this was measured with: worst frame and 1% low next to the average, entity counts, and live counts of what a mission owns. The panel now updates four times a second rather than every frame, because redrawing those numbers ninety times a second was itself costing frames.
• Three new switches in settings: the hand skeleton, the virtual drive lever, and the multiplayer diagnostics overlay. Turning the hand skeleton off leaves hand tracking and hand control working — it only stops drawing them.
• For multiplayer, both devices must be on this build. The match data and the rules both changed shape, so this build and the previous one deliberately refuse to play each other.
• Available on Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac.

One battlefield instead of two, and an Apple TV that keeps up

VISION PROIPHONEIPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Both players in a duel were fighting on the same battlefield and looking at a different one. The simulation was rebuilt from the map the match agreed on; the picture on screen stayed on the map generated when the app launched. Tanks stood on ground nobody could see and inside buildings that were drawn somewhere else — and because the error depends on where a tank happens to be standing, each device got it wrong by a different amount. Single player never showed it, which is why it lasted so long.
• There is one battlefield now, generated once, and the screen draws the same one the tanks drive on. Before a duel starts, both devices fingerprint the world they built and compare; if they disagree the match refuses to start rather than pretending.
• Spawn points are chosen against the finished map — the real buildings, the real ground, the tank’s real width — with room to turn and to reverse off the line. Both arenas were checked across a thousand maps each.
• Tanks lean with the ground. Driving uphill lifts the nose, a side slope drops a track, and the hull settles instead of staying flat.
• Apple TV was running at eight frames a second, which read as the whole battlefield moving in slow motion rather than as stutter. It was rebuilding the entire scene sixty times a second and discarding it unused. Same scene, measured: eight frames a second before, fifty-four after. iPhone and iPad were never affected.
• A small frame-rate readout now sits under the heads-up display on every screen.
• For multiplayer, both devices must be on this build. The match data changed shape, so this build and the previous one deliberately refuse to play each other.

The hall stops spinning, and stops eating the processor

WEB

What changed

• The vehicle index no longer turns its models by itself. Forty-nine of them rotating at once kept the processor busy and made the page crawl. Drag any model to turn it in your hands instead; the hint on each card says so.
• Turning off the rotation on its own would have saved nothing. The render loop redrew every card sixty times a second regardless, because the turret traverse and the running track animate independently of the spin. The loop now stops outright on the index, and a card redraws only when you turn it.
• Models are also built as they scroll into view rather than all at once when the page opens.
• Dragging a card no longer opens its file. The canvas sits inside a link, so a rotation used to count as a click and navigate away mid-turn.
• Vehicle files are unchanged: open one and the model turns on its own, as before.

Performance data, in numbers the game can use

WEB

What changed

• Every vehicle file now carries a numeric performance block underneath the written specification: weight, engine type and displacement, power, power-to-weight, road and cross-country and reverse speed, fuel capacity internal and external, consumption per 100 km, range, rounds carried and ready, reload time in seconds, armour front and side and rear and roof, secondary armament, defensive systems and a list of weak points.
• Each vehicle is sorted into an era and a generation, from the Great War to the present, and carries a battle rating from 1 to 10. A Mark IV rates 1.8 and an M1A2 rates 9.1, six ratings apart — so a campaign has to opt into that fight rather than stumble into it.
• Fire control is stated as hit chance, halted and on the move, which is where the generations actually separate. A Tiger I had the finest optics of its war and no stabiliser, so it stopped to shoot: 60% halted, 6% moving. A Leopard 2 fires at speed: 95% and 88%.
• Five derived ratings — mobility, protection, firepower, accuracy, endurance — are computed from those numbers rather than typed in, so they cannot drift from the data, and are normalised across the whole register.
• Ammunition stowage is now a named scheme with a stated risk. A carousel in the floor rates 90% chance of catastrophic loss when the magazine is hit; a bustle behind blow-out panels rates 15%. One rule applied to all 49 vehicles, not 49 separate opinions.
• Armour figures for composite arrays are labelled as RHA-equivalent estimates, because every array in service is classified and the published numbers are informed guesses.

Eighteen more vehicles, and six nations that were missing

WEB

What changed

• The register is 49 vehicles. China, Sweden, Israel, Italy, South Korea and India build tanks and had no entry at all; they do now, each with its own camouflage.
• The current generation is in: T-90M Proryv, T-80BVM, T-14 Armata, M1A2 SEPv3, Type 99A, K2 Black Panther, Type 10, Leclerc and Merkava Mk IV. The register used to stop in the 1990s.
• Two of them change the silhouette rather than the details. The Stridsvagn 103 has no turret at all and aims by tilting the whole tank on its suspension. The Merkava carries its engine in the bow, so the deck slopes down towards the front and the turret sits at the back — a thousand horsepower of iron between the enemy and the crew.
• The T-14 is the one that answers the question the rest of the register keeps raising: its crew sit in a capsule in the hull and nobody rides in the turret, which is where the ammunition is. Russia has not built it in numbers, and has fought with the T-90M's floor carousel instead.
• The Cold War gap is filled too: T-62, the first smoothbore gun in any tank; Chieftain, whose driver lies on his back so the glacis can lie flatter; M48 and M60 Patton; AMX-30; and the Type 59, where the Chinese industry began by building somebody else's tank.

A full specification for every vehicle

WEB

What changed

• Every one of the 31 vehicle files now carries a real specification: service period from and to, crew and what each man does, road speed, engine and fuel type, tank capacity and range, armament, rounds carried, armour, and fire control from open sights to thermal imaging.
• Ammunition stowage has a section of its own on each file, because where the rounds are kept is what decides whether a crew survives a penetration. It is the difference between the Sherman's wet stowage, the Abrams bustle behind blow-out panels, the Challenger's separated propellant charges, and the T-72's carousel lying in the floor beneath the crew.
• The Mark IV, the A7V and the StuG III are back in the register, bringing the hall to 31. They had been held back because every vehicle without a turret drew as an empty frame.
• That fault was in the model builder, not the drawing. An assault gun has nothing that traverses, so its gun group is built into the hull — but the panel lists were still filed under the turret, pointing at a group with no vertices in it. The first frame failed on the first panel, before a single line was drawn.
• Figures are the widely published ones, marked as approximate where sources disagree — which for wartime production, fuel capacity and range is most of the time.

A website change. No TestFlight build is involved, and the game itself still builds every tank from one model.

On a flat screen you can finally look where the gun is pointing

iPHONEiPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• The view follows the turret. The camera was welded to the hull, so traversing the gun moved the sight but not the picture — anything that was not in front of the tank was invisible, and therefore unshootable. That is now a gunner's view: the picture turns with the gun and the hull pivots underneath it, so a course can be held with one thumb while the other sweeps for targets. It pans rather than cuts, because tapping a tank lays the gun instantly and a welded camera would have thrown the horizon across the screen.
• The radar shows where you are driving. Which had just become something you could no longer see. The arrow is the gun; the small circle on the dashed line is the hull.
• The game opens on a menu. It used to drop straight into a live battlefield with a wave already spawning and the tank already being shot at, before anyone had agreed to play.
• There is a menu button, and it says MENU. It was a pause glyph in the corner, which was not read as "everything is behind here". Settings, standings, the vehicle hall, restart and a way back to the main menu are all behind it.
• The turret no longer spins on its own. The touch sticks return to centre when a thumb lifts, which never happened if the control left the screen mid-drag — and it leaves whenever the game pauses, ends, or a controller is connected. A stick that vanished while pushed over kept that deflection for ever, and the turret turned until the run did.
• The standings can be left. There was no way off that screen at all, which on Apple TV meant no way back to the game. There is a done button, a retry, and failures now say what they are — a device that cannot reach Apple used to report that a server hostname could not be found, which reads as a broken game rather than a missing network. Apple's own board can be opened from there too, so the scores are reachable even when ours will not load.
• The autopilot button stopped covering the autocannon. It floated over the fire controls and could take a shot's tap.

Known

• iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Vision Pro are installable now. The Mac build is waiting on Apple's beta review and will follow.

The autopilot stops standing still, and Vision Pro gets hands on the controls

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• The autopilot no longer parks you in front of the guns. On every platform. Once the gun had a target the assist held station so you could shoot — which was a fair trade against enemies that aimed at where you were, and a death sentence against the ones that now lead their shots, because a stationary tank is the single target a leading gunner cannot miss. It never stops now: it strafes across the engaged tank's line of fire, closes and breaks off at an angle rather than driving down the barrel, leans away from the weight of the wave harder as your hull falls, and weaves continuously so even the orbit is not an arc anyone can solve. If you drive with the assist on, you should live noticeably longer.
• Vision Pro: a driving lever you take hold of. A control stick stands in the cockpit by your left hand. Put your hand to it, close your fingers, and push — forward and back is throttle, left and right is steering, and the tank answers your hand rather than a button. Let go and it keeps the speed you set, so holding a course does not mean holding your arm out. Your thumb rests on the machine gun trigger.
• Vision Pro: a joystick on the panel, for when you would rather not reach. Round, drawn on the control panel, worked by looking at it and pinching. Drag to drive; the throttle stays where you leave it and the steering springs straight. It works whatever hand tracking is doing, which makes it the control that is always there.
• Vision Pro: the assist has an off switch you can actually reach. AUTOPILOT ON/OFF sits on the panel, and it is worked by looking and pinching — no controller, no hand tracking, nothing to pair. Taking hold of the lever also hands you the tank.
• Vision Pro: the tank keeps driving while you look around. Turn to work the turret or read the radar and your hand leaves the headset's view, which used to stop the tank dead. It holds its speed instead, and everything needed to stop it is one pinch away.
• Vision Pro: your room stops showing through the sky. Nothing was ever drawn above the horizon, so easing the Digital Crown let daylight in over the battlefield from the top down. The sky is real geometry now and the world is sealed at any setting.
• Vision Pro: hand tracking repairs itself. Two faults, both of which made hands look broken for weeks. The permission was requested at launch, next to a menu window, long before anything used it — the worst possible moment to be asked, and visionOS asks exactly once; it is now requested when you enter the battlefield. And the flow of hand data could stop mid-mission with nothing noticing, which is now detected and restarted.

Known

• The hand lever is new and still settling. If it will not co-operate, the panel joystick drives the tank on its own.
• Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV are installable now. The Mac build is waiting on Apple's beta review and will follow.

You can hear where it came from, and they stop queueing up to be shot

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Being hit now has a direction. The sound of a shell striking your hull played in the centre of your head, which made the one cue whose whole job is to answer "which way do I turn" the only cue that could not answer it. It arrives from the side the shell was fired from — not from the point of contact, which sits on top of you and carries no direction at all.
• Shells that miss can be heard going past. Until now the only evidence of being shot at was being hit, so fire from a quarter you were not watching was silent until it landed. Rounds passing within twenty metres announce themselves once each, at their closest point.
• Your own gun fires from your gun. On the headset the main gun's report came from the middle of your head whatever the turret was doing. Traverse left and the bang comes from the left.
• A wave no longer files in from one direction. Every arrival was placed behind wherever your turret happened to be pointing — and a player who is fighting holds the turret roughly still, so the whole wave landed in one arc and then walked the same ground to you. It read as a column queueing up to be shot. Arrivals are now spread around the full circle, each one as far from the last as it can be, and reinforcements keep clear of the group already closing. The distances and the difficulty are unchanged: this is about where they come from, not how hard they hit.
• Enemy tanks no longer get stuck against walls. When one bounced off a building it wrote a new destination to a value nothing ever read, so it drove back into the same wall on the next frame — and one wedged out of sight could grind against a corner for the better part of a minute. They look ahead before driving now.
• They aim where you are going, not where you were. At every wave they had aimed at your current position, which is why driving across their front always worked. They begin leading from around wave five and by the mid twenties allow for most of the shell's flight — never all of it, so changing what you are doing always beats them. A late wave also spreads out around you rather than bunching.
• The autopilot is better company, which matters most without a controller. It drove at the nearest tank and held a fixed distance — fine against two and suicidal against eight, since the nearest tank of a spread wave is surrounded by the others. It leans away from the weight of the wave now, takes more room as your armour drops, and watches for buildings.
• The engine used to keep running after you died. It idled on the high-score screen at the pitch of the moment you were destroyed, because nothing had ever told it the run was over. It winds down now.
• Your music keeps playing. Starting the game claimed the audio route outright and silenced whatever you had on. It mixes now, so Apple Music, Spotify or a podcast carries on underneath while the battlefield stays fully spatial. There is also an optional music bed of the game's own, off unless you turn it on in Settings — deliberately not a tune, since a melody is the quickest way to hide a shell passing behind you.
• A controller that the system is still holding now says so. On Apple Vision Pro a connected controller can report itself perfectly while the system keeps its input, which looks exactly like a broken controller. The battlefield explains it and says what to do. Hand tracking is unaffected and always available.
• Being destroyed, clearing a wave and levelling a structure all have their own sounds. A run used to end in silence, and a falling fence used to sound like a tank dying.

Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV can install this from the public link now. The Mac build is in Beta App Review and joins the same link once Apple has looked at it. Internal builds 72 to 74 are folded into this entry.

A score that says how you played

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• Two players finished on wave seven with exactly the same score. That was not a coincidence. Points came from two places only — a kill paid 100 × the wave, clearing a wave paid 250 × the wave — the number of enemies in a wave is fixed, and you cannot move on without killing all of them. So a score was a pure statement of how far you got, and everyone who got that far had the same one. Clearing wave one was 450 points for anybody who did it. A leaderboard whose entries cannot differ is a list, not a ranking.
• Range is now the biggest thing you can control. A kill pays double at the main gun's full reach and nothing extra in a target's face. Shells fly at 90 metres per second and do not drop, so a hit at 300 m is two and a half seconds of lead you judged correctly; at ten metres there is nothing to judge. This is also why the autocannon needs no rule of its own — it reaches a third as far, so it earns roughly a third as much of the bonus, because of where it can be used rather than because a number says it is worth less.
• And where you were standing when you took the shot. A shell through a tank's flank is worth a quarter more than one through its glacis, and one over its back deck half as much again. Stacked with range, a long shot into a rear means three times a point-blank shot into a front. Getting behind something is a decision made long before the trigger, and it is now the decision that pays best.
• Two awards at the end of each wave. Precision, scaled by your main-gun accuracy over that wave alone — so a clean first wave cannot carry a sloppy seventh. And a flawless award for clearing a wave without being touched at all, which is the plainest thing a player can say about a wave. Both have their own sound, so you can hear which one you earned.
• Auto-fire now halves the run. It lays and fires the main gun whenever a target crosses the gun line, which is the central skill of the game done by the machine. Autopilot driving stays free: it switches itself on whenever no controller is connected, so charging for it would quietly tax everyone playing with their hands for a choice they never made.
• Apple TV says it needs a controller. The game wants two thumbsticks and two triggers, because the hull and the gun traverse independently — that is the whole tactical idea. A Siri Remote is one touch surface and two buttons, so there is no honest way to map it. The App Store listing now leads with the requirement rather than letting anyone find out after downloading.
• The pause menu used to announce "3 FREE WAVES COMPLETE" while the game actually let you play ten. Both now read the same number.
• Scores already on the leaderboards were set under the old scoring and are not directly comparable. Game Center keeps your best, so an old run stands until a new one beats it.

Forty-nine machines, a fourth platform, and a turret that stays on

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TVMAC

What changed

• There is a vehicle hall now. Forty-nine machines from the Great War to the present, reached from the pause menu beside Standings. Each one has a model you can turn in your hands, a full specification — service period, crew, speed, fuel, ammunition stowage, armour, fire control — and an interior drawn from its own layout rather than a shared template, so a Mark IV's inside is a Mark IV's inside. It is on all four platforms.
• Every nation flies its own flag. Four of them were flying somebody else's: flags were drawn as horizontal bands of a country's colours, which is right for Germany, Russia and Poland and wrong for most of the rest. Flags now have a layout as well as a palette, the canton sits on both faces of the cloth so a flag reads correctly from behind, and the neutral panel that used to sit behind every flag is gone.
• Camouflage is a scheme, not a tint. Colouring a whole vehicle in its base colour was a tank in a different single colour; the panels are painted separately now, and the paint is bright enough to see — it was being authored at the brightness paint has and then dimmed again on the way to the screen, arriving at black on black. Twenty-seven of the forty-nine wear a disruptive scheme and the other twenty-two do not, which is what those tanks actually looked like.
• The game runs on the Mac. A fourth platform on the same app, so one purchase carries across the headset, the phone, the television and the desktop. It drives from the keyboard — W A S D to move, I J K L to lay the gun, space to fire — because a Mac that demands a game controller is a tablet app in a window.
• Firing could throw your own turret off the tank. Deep into a wave, with the machine warm and the frame rate sagging, a shot could fling the turret shell tens or hundreds of metres — flickering in front of you and then behind your head, frame after frame, before snapping back. It looked like the shell was flying away with the shot. It was the recoil: the gun was sprung back to battery by a method that only holds while frames stay short, and past about a sixteenth of a second each step fed the spring instead of damping it. It is solved exactly now, so however long a frame takes, the barrel travels its 42 centimetres and comes home.
• Shooting costs far less than it did. Every round used to build five separate pieces of geometry from nothing on the very frame the trigger was pulled, and the reload countdown rebuilt its numbers ten times a second for the whole of every reload. Both now reuse what has already been drawn. That was the same frame that set the recoil off, so it is both a smoothness fix and a second lock on the first one.
• Internal builds 61 through 70 are folded into this one. If you have been on build 60 since the leaderboards landed, everything above is new to you — and the thing most worth firing at is the turret: shoot repeatedly late in a wave and watch it. It should stay bolted on however hard the frame rate drops.

Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV can install this from the public link now. The Mac is waiting on Beta App Review — it is that platform’s first public build, so Apple has to look at it once — and joins the same link when it is approved.

Stars on both sides, paint you can see, and a Mac

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What changed

• The stars were only on one side. Separating an overlay from the field beneath it by pushing it forward put the canton on the front of the flag and behind the back of it, so from the reverse the United States showed bare stripes. The same went for the Chinese and Korean marks. Cloth has two faces and a flag turns: an overlay is now drawn thicker rather than further forward, so it stands proud on both faces and is in front wherever it is seen from.
• Camouflage was correct and invisible. Armour paint is authored at the brightness paint has — about a quarter — and the fills were then dimmed again on the way to the screen, so a painted vehicle arrived at roughly (0.16, 0.18, 0.13): black, on black. The paint is lifted to read now, by the same single rule everywhere.
• Plain does not mean flat. Twenty-two of the forty-nine wear one colour, and giving every panel exactly that colour drew a solid silhouette with no modelling in it. The second tone each scheme carries is there for shading, so a minority of panels take it — painted metal catching light across its panels, without inventing a scheme the vehicle never wore.
• The game runs on the Mac. A fourth platform on the same app, so one purchase carries across the headset, the phone, the television and the desktop. The port was small because the work done for Apple TV had already done most of it: that battlefield was a plain SwiftUI view with its own camera and no ARKit anywhere, which is exactly what a Mac needs.
• It drives from the keyboard — W A S D to move, I J K L to lay the gun, space to fire — because a Mac that demands a game controller is a tablet app in a window. An Xbox pad works as it does everywhere else, and a pad left resting on the desk no longer takes the keyboard away by merely being connected.
• Flags and camouflage are now checked by reading the colours and positions off the built geometry, rather than by reading the code. Three flag faults shipped in three consecutive builds and every one of them was found by looking at a headset.

The blue plate behind every flag is gone

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Every flag was drawn twice. Build 67 gave each band of cloth a coloured fill sitting on top of a second, full-size panel filled in the neutral structure tone — an outline that had no business being solid. That panel was the blue backing showing through every flag in the game and in the hall, and its face sat six tenths of a millimetre from the colour’s, close enough that the two fought for the same pixels every frame. That is the flicker between red and blue on the Chinese flag. There is one filled surface per band now, and the outline is wire, which is what an outline is everywhere else in this game.
• Flags with a layer on top no longer strobe. A canton over stripes, a disc on a field, a cross over a ground — all of them drew the overlay in the same plane as the field beneath, and two coplanar surfaces have no defined winner. Each patch now sits a hair in front of the one before it. The cloth is also thinner: it was a 6 cm slab on a flag 1.35 m tall.
• An enemy at ramming distance no longer blanks out the fight. Cloth on the battlefield is translucent — a flag is 2.2 m of sheet on a 3.2 m pole, and an opaque one fills the whole view when a tank closes. The hall, where the flag is the thing being looked at, keeps its full colour.
• Camouflage was invisible on most of the register. The paint was washed under a wireframe that stayed phosphor green, and most of these tanks wear a plain green: green under green is green, so the mode looked like it did nothing at all and only the two-tone schemes ever showed. The wire itself carries the paint now, so an olive tank reads as olive whether or not it also wears blotches.
• Seventeen schemes, and they still tell each other apart. Lifting each paint to a fixed brightness would have made them look like three; multiplying them all up would have turned desert tan and Sinai grey white. The hue is exactly the paint’s.

The right flags, and camouflage that is actually a scheme

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Four nations were flying somebody else’s flag. Every flag was drawn as horizontal bands of a country’s colours, which is right for Germany, Russia and Poland and wrong for most of the rest: the United States came out as the Netherlands, China as the lower two thirds of Germany, Sweden as Ukraine, and France — a vertical tricolour — as the Netherlands as well. Flags now have a layout as well as a palette.
• All fourteen nations in the register look like themselves and none looks like another. These are flags a few centimetres across on a model, so it is recognition rather than heraldry — seven bars rather than thirteen, because the extra ones are a solid block at that size.
• A black band no longer disappears. Brightening it would misstate the colour, so the cloth keeps its true tone and every patch is outlined in one neutral one.
• Camouflage paints instead of tinting. Colouring a whole vehicle in its base was a tank in a different single colour; a scheme is a base with disruptive colours broken across it, and the panels are now painted separately. The pattern is fixed per vehicle rather than crawling as the model turns.
• Plain schemes stay plain. Soviet 4BO green and olive drab carry a second tone for shading, not as a pattern — 27 of the 49 wear a disruptive scheme and the other 22 do not, which is what those tanks actually looked like.

The hall reaches every platform

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• The vehicle hall was on Apple Vision Pro only. It is on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV now, reached from the pause menu beside Standings, with the same five drawing modes and six views the website has.
• Each platform needed something different to render it, which is the opposite of what you would guess. A headset window is looked at through your own eyes and ignores a camera; a phone or a television has no viewpoint of its own and the app must supply one.
• Apple TV has no touch, so it cannot be told to drag a model. It gets the turntable and the view presets, and a hint that says so.
• iPhones on iOS 17 keep the whole vehicle file and lose only the turntable, which needs iOS 18. Dropping those users to show a model would have been the worse trade.

Every tank gets its own inside

VISION PRO

What changed

• The cabins were all the same room with a few switches changed. They now follow the vehicle: a Renault FT is a box one man can touch every side of, a Mark IV is wide and low with its guns out in sponsons and nothing at all ahead, a Churchill is tall. Forty-five of the forty-nine are a different size inside.
• Walls are built the way the hull was — overlapping riveted plate, one seamless casting that bows out at shoulder height, welded plate with a seam, or bolted composite panels.
• You can see what you are sitting among. A T-72 has its carousel of shells set into the floor beneath you, drawn in the warning colour because it is the most consequential thing in the vehicle. An Abrams has an armoured door astern with the blow-out panels above it. A Chieftain keeps its charges in bins below the ring. A Tiger has its rounds racked along the walls at shoulder height, which is where a side hit found them.
• Instruments are mounted into that vehicle’s own console rather than floating at fixed coordinates. Every tank has a radar including the 1917 ones — a game convention, deliberately — but a rhomboid gets an iron bracket bolted to a plate, not a screen.
• The website’s CAMOUFLAGE mode is in the app now, so both menus offer the same five ways of drawing a model.
• Flags are mounted on the deck instead of hanging in the air beside the tank, they ripple at rest, and a black band no longer disappears into a black background.

The models sit properly in their frame

VISION PRO

What changed

• A point on this platform is about a millimetre, so the model panel stood 0.32 m tall while the longest vehicle was drawn 0.34 m long — longer than its own frame is tall. That is why everything felt crowded and why anything standing up ran out of the top. The panel is taller and the models have real margin inside it now.
• Models are centred on what is actually there rather than on a guess at the hull height, so a flag can no longer push a vehicle out of frame.
• The model floats clear of the panel rather than sitting on it. That parallax is the whole reason to render this in three dimensions instead of drawing a picture.
• The vehicle name was on screen twice, as the window title and again as the file heading. Once is enough.

Five fixes to the hall

VISION PRO

What changed

• Dragging no longer stops the turntable. Turning a model used to switch it out of rotate mode, so you could adjust the angle or keep it spinning, but not both. Now you nudge it where you want and it carries on from there.
• Flags are no longer cut off. The pole stands 3.2 m, which is right beside a tank you are sitting in and far too tall once the whole vehicle is shrunk to the size of a model on a shelf.
• Flag colours read as colours. Every filled surface in the game is drawn at 17% brightness so it sits behind the wireframe, and the flag was getting the same treatment — which made a United States flag black with one grey stripe. Cloth now opts out: it is the one surface whose colour is the entire point.
• The green number beside each name is labelled. It is the battle rating, 1 to 10, and it now says so in the list and under the model. A Mark IV is 1.8 and an M1A2 is 9.1.
• The drag hint sits under the model rather than floating over the list beside it.

The hall shows its models

VISION PRO

What changed

• Build 61 opened the vehicle hall with all the text and none of the tanks. The models were being drawn eight metres wide inside a window a third of a metre across, with a camera the system was quietly ignoring — a headset window is viewed through your own eyes, and a camera entity does nothing there.
• Models are now sized for the window and the model turns rather than the viewpoint, which is also the better illusion: an object on a turntable you can lean towards.
• Every vehicle shares one scale, so a Renault FT reads at 45% the length of a Tiger II — which is what it is. Fitting each one to the frame separately would have drawn them identically and thrown away the comparison a hall of forty-nine machines exists to let you make.

Forty-nine machines, and a hall to walk round them in

VISION PRO

What changed

• Every vehicle from the website register is now in the app — all 49, from the 1917 Mark IV to the T-14 Armata, with their measured geometry, written histories and full specifications.
• A vehicle hall inside the game, reached from the launch window. Pick a machine, watch it turn, drag it round in your hands, switch between wireframe, flat wire, armour and solid, and read everything about it. Models are shown at their real relative sizes here — a Renault FT beside a Tiger II is most of the point.
• An inside view for each one. A 1917 rhomboid is a riveted box with a vision slit and no instruments at all; a Tiger has periscopes and optics but no displays; an Abrams reads screens and has a sight of its own. None of that is invented — it follows from what each vehicle actually carried.
• Any of the 49 can now be built as a battlefield tank through the same machinery the current one uses, so they can be dropped into a mission when the design for that is settled.

Nothing here changes how the game plays yet. The battlefield still fields the vehicle it always has — this build is the hall, the data and the plumbing underneath it.

Leaderboards, and the radar stays on the panel

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Two Game Center leaderboards: points scored in a run, and furthest wave reached. Finishing a run posts to both automatically — there is nothing to press. Open them under Standings in the launch window, or in the pause menu on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
• The standings are drawn in the game's own hand rather than handed to Apple's standard sheet, and your own row is always shown even when your score sits far below the visible page.
• All-time, this-week and friends-only views of both boards. Game Center is entirely optional: decline it and the game is unchanged.
• The radar dial turned out of the instrument panel as the turret traversed, so the instrument you were trying to read went edge-on and then faced away from you. It now sits flat in the panel, in the same plane as the buttons beside it, at every angle of the gun.
• The cause was a correction applied twice. The dial had been locked to the world so a contact ahead of the hull stayed physically ahead of you — but the panel swings round with the turret, so holding the dial still in the world necessarily took it out of the panel: 80° out at a quarter turn, 132° with the gun reversed.
• A dial is an instrument, not a window. It is now read the way a heading-up map is read — the top of the dial is where the hull is pointing — which the projection was already doing on its own.
• The map no longer moves at all while you traverse, which is what makes it readable mid-fight.

The radar tells the truth again

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• The radar no longer turns with your gun. Traversing the turret was rotating the whole map underneath you: with the gun a quarter turn off the nose a tank dead ahead was drawn dead abeam, and with the gun reversed it was drawn behind you. Buildings and walls were displaced the same way.
• The amber line on the dial is the gun line — it shows where your cannon is pointing relative to the hull. It looked meaningless because the map beneath it was rotating; it now points where the shell will go.
• On iPhone, iPad and Apple TV the radar had a second, separate fault: contacts were plotted correctly only when driving "up the map" and drifted further out the more you turned. It now uses the same tested transform as Apple Vision Pro.

Sound everywhere, and one game on every screen

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Battlefield audio now plays on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV: cannon, autocannon, incoming fire, hull hits, explosions and an engine tone that follows your speed. Shots are placed around you, so a round from behind is heard from behind.
• A mute control sits in the HUD, and sound can be switched off in Settings.
• Settings arrive on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV with the same options and wording as Apple Vision Pro: faction colours, sound, driving and firing assists, and stick sensitivity.
• Faction colours expand to combat designations (NATO, Red, Blue and Green Force, Desert and Arctic Corps) and national colours, each with a preview of the flag your tank will fly.
• Flags now stream with travel: the pole leads, the cloth trails, reversing swings it the other way, and stopping settles it back down.
• Apple TV renders the full 3D battlefield instead of the overhead schematic — the same view the phone and the headset draw. Apple TV now requires tvOS 26.

Solid walls and a steadier thumb

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Walls, barriers and fences now stop shells along their whole length. Previously a shot could pass through most of a long obstacle, and enemy tanks could fire back through one.
• Cover is where it looks like it is: tanks stop at a wall's face instead of at an invisible circle drawn around its longest side, and drive freely past its ends.
• A shot fired over a low wall still clears it, so gun elevation continues to matter.
• Knocked-down fences fall flat on their side instead of swinging upright.
• The virtual sticks now centre themselves wherever your thumb lands, with a dead zone and a softer response near centre, so a grab that misses the middle no longer starts at full deflection.
• Tapping an enemy tank is more forgiving: a near miss selects the closest tank on screen.
• Tapping the same tank again in quick succession switches to the autocannon; a single considered tap still fires the main cannon.

Faster touch combat

iPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

What changed

• Tap the right virtual turret joystick to fire the primary cannon on iPhone and iPad.
• Drag-to-aim remains independent: moving the stick does not accidentally fire.
• A new scope symbol and “TAP FIRE” cue make the shortcut discoverable.
• The dedicated FIRE and AUTOCANNON buttons remain available.
• Apple TV is rebuilt from the same current gameplay source for platform parity.

Unified Apple-platform beta

VISION PROiPHONEiPADAPPLE TV

Public changes accumulated since earlier platform builds

• Native iPhone, iPad and Apple TV editions with controller support and mobile virtual controls.
• Forward chase-camera mobile battlefield, visible player tank and faction flag, radar, aiming reticle and autopilot control.
• Tap an enemy tank on iPhone or iPad to aim and fire directly.
• Classic and war-torn town battlefields with ruins, walls, trees, fences and destructible structures.
• Primary cannon and lighter autocannon use distinct damage, ammunition and reload behavior.
• Heading-up radar, off-range enemy indicators, battlefield boundary treatment and incoming-hit flash.
• Controller detection, default stick driving and turret control, plus controller-aware end-of-game menus.
• Seat-height controls, reset behavior, faction selection and free testing access through ten waves.