Bellum Beta Build #707

New Features

Gameplay

• Right-mouse aim scheme: Right mouse button now carries both aim and view zoom. A tap toggles aim-down-sights, a hold zooms the view for as long as it is held, from the hip or in the sights, standing or moving. Shift is sprint only now. “View Zoom” is rebindable under Combat Settings.
• Movement-aware view zoom: View zoom is full strength when standing still, half strength while moving, and off while sprinting. Breaking into a sprint mid-zoom eases the zoom out and stopping eases it back in.
• Slope movement: Movement speed is now penalized by the grade you are climbing, ramped in smoothly rather than snapping, and sprinting uphill costs up to 50% more stamina at the steepest slopes.
• Fire from the move: Pressing fire while jogging or sprinting drops you to a walk and holds the shot until the weapon is aligned, instead of firing from an unaligned pose.
• Casualty drag overhaul: Dragging a downed body no longer means fishing for a prompt.
  • Hold F anywhere on the body. Targeting now traces the ragdoll itself instead of six invisible boxes, and the prompt sits in one place on the torso.
  • Drag reach is measured along the ground from your feet, so a standing player can actually reach a body lying in front of them.
  • The grab glides the body into your hand instead of snapping it there in one frame.
  • Two-player buddy carry is offered at the prompt: “Hold To Buddy Carry” appears when exactly one other player already has the body, and “Requires Lead Carrier” explains why it is greyed out.
  • A body someone is already dragging cannot be stolen. Joining as a buddy is the only way onto a held body.
  • The Medical prompt on a downed body now matches the drag range, so it no longer reads as dragging being blocked at 1 to 3 m.
• Shot punch: Each round you fire now puts a short screen-space pulse on your view, a zoom thump, a vertical kick, a few pixels of vibration and a chromatic fringe. It is deliberately not camera motion, so it never breaks your sight picture. Strength is per weapon and scales with measured recoil, so heavier weapons punch less. The first round of a burst punches hardest and the rest ease off.

UI

• End-of-round debrief, expanded: The debrief now shows your round in numbers and pictures.
  • YOUR ROUND: rounds fired, hits with accuracy, enemy downed, treatments given, casualties revived and time deployed, with your role, callsign and lives on one line.
  • A personal round strip charts your own spawns, downs, revives and death across the round. Revives are labelled with who got you up (“REVIVED BY 16M”).
  • A team ledger on the roster tab (rounds, hits, downs, revived, treatments, friendly hits), and every element header shows its downs and survivors.
  • The end-of-round window is now 60 seconds (was 45) so there is time to read it.
• After Action Map: Press R on the debrief to open a scrubbable replay of the round on the map. Team positions, downs and kills play back at 50x, 100x or 200x (Tab), Space plays and pauses, Left and Right scrub 10 seconds, Q and E filter by team, and MY ELEMENT filters to your own unit. A right-hand rail shows the next-match countdown, round time, players in the field per team and the last events feed. Downed players show as a faded mark, kills as an x that fades over 90 seconds. Press R again to return to the report.
• Main menu news pane goes live: The news pane now pulls the real content feed instead of baked placeholder cards. Cards are clickable and open in your browser after a confirmation, rows show thumbnails, and the Guides tab now lists the Field Manual.
• Screen percentage slider: A TSR Screen Percentage slider (40 to 100%) is now exposed in the video settings. Your upscaler preference is retained.
• Lean Camera Roll toggle: A new on/off toggle under Controls for the camera roll applied while leaning.
• Interaction Opacity setting: A new setting controls how strongly in-world interaction markers are drawn.

Changes

Gameplay & Systems

• Head bob roll reduced: After motion-sickness reports the head-bob view roll has been cut by 71%. Peak roll at walk, jog and sprint drops from about 0.07 to about 0.02 degrees.
• Shot punch comfort pass: Following reports that the center of the screen distorted on every shot, the punch now leaves the center of the screen untouched. The zoom component is reduced to a quarter of its launch value, the vibration frequency drops from 26 to 15 Hz, and a radial mask keeps the crosshair area pixel-exact.
• Own-fire muzzle blast fades faster: Your own muzzle blast now fades in about 200 ms instead of sharing the 1.3 s nearby-fire fade, so automatic fire reads as a concussion per round rather than a permanent haze. Nearby fire keeps the slow fade.
• Sprint cancels lean: Starting a sprint cancels an active lean, and you cannot start a new lean while sprinting.
• Lean camera roll follows your lean command rather than the speed-driven lean pose, so the roll no longer wobbles with movement speed.
• Interaction markers: The white interaction dot now fades in and out instead of popping, eases toward the camera when you look around, keeps its on-screen size under a sight or wide FOV, no longer blinks on a single blocked line-of-sight check, and is drawn 25% less prominently overall.
• Cross-loading: Loadout allowance is now counted in units, and the stackable supply path is gated correctly. (fixes infinite Lee Enfield ammo)

Weapons

• AKM recoil: The AKM’s recoil curve is flattened onto the RPK curve at +15% past the first shot.
• LMG recoil: The LMG curves receive the first-shot retune factor, so LMGs open below their carbines again.
• LMG and MMG hipfire deadzone: The hipfire yaw deadzone is capped at 6 degrees on all eight LMG and MMG definitions
• Lee Enfield move sway: Rear-hand sway offsets now come from the bolt-rifle row instead of the GM-94 launcher’s.
• Recoil hand and depth lanes: The weapon-in-hand recoil hand offset now kicks to the correct side, and the depth kick (the weapon driving back into the shoulder) is ported into the rotation manager as a baseline for tuning.

Graphics & Performance

• Scalability tiers rebuilt: Low and Medium now have complete quality ladders tuned for frame rate first. Previously many keys were missing at those tiers, so Low was silently running Epic’s global illumination gather and volumetric fog grid. High is now a deliberate, visible step down from Epic (shadow page pool, Lumen probe density, reflection resolution and anisotropy) instead of being identical to it. Software variable-rate shading and contrast-adaptive shading are off on Windows, since lowering shading rate in low-contrast areas is the wrong trade when a prone soldier at range is a low-contrast area.
• Far soldier network corrections deferred: Replicated movement corrections on distant soldiers are now held until the displacement would actually be visible on screen, instead of teleporting their whole attached tree on every update. This addresses one of the larger game-thread costs measured on Highlands.

Fixes

• C4 could be placed forever. Arming a C4 charge never consumed it, so the squad leader’s single charge was infinite. Placement now consumes the charge for both the US and RU kits.
• Loading screen black flashes fixed.
• Radio deadzone exploit. The radio animation could be used to disable the weapon deadzone. Closed, including the animation follow-up that was missed in the first push.
• Pelvic hit while prone dropped ADS. A pelvic knockdown no longer drops aim-down-sights when you are already prone.
• Lee Enfield snapped into the camera on firing. The rifle carried the launcher group’s placeholder depth kick (2.5 m of rearward travel in one frame). It now has its own tuned values and is the deliberate high mark for depth kick on the roster.
• Rocket sound kept playing after detonation.
• Tsavo: Removed white placeholder boxes that had made it into the public build.
• End-of-round teardown hardened against a crash path when players leave during the map change.

Known Issues

• Kambori ground textures are low res
• The killed marker on the After Action Map is drawn at 6 px and may be hard to read on a busy replay. Mouse scrubbing on the map timeline is not yet built; use Left and Right.
• Two of your own events within one label width at the end of the round strip can still overlap.