This is what the operator's report was actually describing, and it was never a CPU
hitch: median frame was 12.2 ms with a kill costing ~15 ms, wave respawn is not a
spike, and enemies carry no PhysicsCollider so corpses never blocked.
Two bugs in PrototypeCameraRig.LateUpdate, both measured with a STATIONARY player
so the ideal camera motion is exactly zero and everything observed is artifact:
1. Shake was integrated by the follow filter. The smoothing ran as
Lerp(transform.position, desired, k), and transform.position already contained
last frame's random shake — so the filter treated shake as real positional error
and corrected only ~9 %/frame. Shake was never subtracted, just slowly lerped out
while new shake piled on, so in sustained combat the camera random-walked around
its framing and never settled. One kill left it 0.447 units off-frame and still
0.199 off 24 frames later. The follow now smooths a _basePos that shake never
touches; shake is applied only when writing the transform.
2. The position HOLD froze the follow for a fixed number of RENDER frames on every
kill and heavy hit (2, or 7 on a finisher), making the freeze framerate-dependent
— 49 ms at 144 fps, 233 ms at 30 fps — and it took its base from
transform.position, permanently baking that frame's shake in as a 0.283-unit
single-frame jump. A camera that stops while the world keeps moving reads as a
hitch, not as crunch. Dropped; impact rides the FOV punch + shake alone
(operator's call). HitStopMaxFrames / HitStopFreezeEnabled / FinisherHoldFrames
retire with it, and the three saved feel profiles drop the dead keys.
Worth recording: dropping the hold ALONE measured slightly worse (max deviation
0.653 vs 0.447) — the hold had been partly masking the shake integration. Both
fixes together: deviation returns to 0.000 within a few frames of a kill, mean
deviation 0.038 across the window. The 0.428 peak is now the shake impulse itself,
a transient punch that immediately returns instead of a drift that lingers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
kronic