Minute like small, not like time.

• Tweaked the behavior of the various mobs so they don't die quite so easily; in particular, after they're hit they stay hit-immune until all balls have passed through them
• Improved the paddle stun behavior; previously a new stun wouldn't take effect at all if the paddle was already stunned, but now the stun will be extended by up to half of the new stun's length minus the duration of the remaining stun. This still feels like a penalty for getting hit multiple times without feeling unfair
• Changed the boundary on the reflective sphere shader to use masking instead of a branch; this should slightly improve performance on older GPUs while also improving the quality in general
• Changed the water physics to be nicer to slower machines (so it doesn't go crazy on larger time increments) and older GPUs (so it behaves better on 16-bit floatingpoint hardware). Your GPU still needs to support at least 16-bit floatingpoint buffers to show the water at all, though. (If your hardware can't do that then the water's probably really bad for performance anyway!)

Anyway I haven't tested these changes that much but at least in my brief testing they make the game feel a bit more fair, and at least on the oldest Windows machine in my home the performance is at least better (although it still drops when there's at least two ROAMING EYEs on the screen). Haven't tried it on my Atom-based netbook. Not sure I'm feeling quite that masochistic.

(EDIT: I have since tried it on the Atom-based netbook. It runs surprisingly not-horribly! I mean, it's not playable, but it wouldn't take much to make it be.)

(In the future it'll be possible to set graphical quality settings.)