Bellum Beta Build #769

Everything since Build 755.

Changes

Gameplay

• Getting shot can put you on the ground. Torso, plate and helmet hits roll a fall, and the harder the hit the likelier the fall (a close AKM round into a plate is about 1 in 4). Moving at near full speed, you fall the way you were going; otherwise the way the round was travelling. During the fall your turning is slowed and your aim is cancelled, and movement and sprint stay locked for half a second after it. Holding RMB re-aims on its own once you recover. Each landing direction has its own first-person impact shake.
• Water limits your stance: no prone in water deeper than 45 cm, no crouch below 55 cm. Sprint dives and shot falls in water still drop you, then stand you back up to whatever the depth allows. Going under puts a murky, wobbling underwater view on the camera.
• A leader beacon inside your base’s 100 m protection radius now fills your crossload preset on spawn, like a FOB spawn.
• Kit refill at every building (Patrol Base, ORP, COP, hideout, cache, FOB crate) also tops up your crossload preset. A crossload-only top-up counts as a refill: it spends the charge and starts the 20-minute timer.
• The crate’s REFILL KIT spends a charge only when it actually restored something.
• Taking one unit of a dropped stack into crosspoint storage leaves the rest on the ground. A picked-up charge goes back onto the item that placed it, and only if it fits. A shared stack hands over one unit, not the whole stack.
• The pickup prompt says why it is greyed out: “Already Taken”, “Giver Is Crewing Mortar”.
• Roster rows show the lives left on an empty role that has been played (EMPTY, 3 LIVES).
• Exploitation: while the circle fills, al-Zalaam defenders spawn at a base in the middle of the AO and their FOB spawn is off. The base goes when the circle fills; the team keeps one drone. A destroyed cache clears the grass and small plants under and around it.
• Mortar HE loads reduced: Rangers and al-Zalaam team leader 10, gunner 6; SATYR team leader 8, gunner 4.
• The server re-checks every building placement before it spawns, so a modified client can no longer put a Patrol Base inside the AO or in rock.
• A round that clips the chest on its way into the A-box now counts as an A-box hit.
• Vaulting is blocked during medical treatment. Crouching out of a prone full-body reload is blocked until the reload ends.
• Aiming down sights waits for your reload to finish. A held RMB resumes aiming the moment it does, and a tap queues it.
• You stand up before taking a mortar gunner seat. Holding a mortar round blocks the B-TAK and watch.
• Sprinting no longer lets your body aim downward; it eases back when you stop.
• Sprinting on empty stamina no longer rubber-bands you backward.

Gunplay & Weapons

• Recoil depth: the rearward shove is 25% when mounted, 50% when braced against cover, full when unsupported.
• Equip, unequip and throw animations now start and end on the held pose, and item swaps start before the animation tick, so switching items no longer jitters the view or flashes an idle frame. 1P rifle sprint animations updated.
• Reload animations across URGI, AKM, AK-74M, RPK, RPK-74M, M320, GM94 and GP25 normalized (blend-ins, right-hand IK). The reload deadzone offset now shows on remote soldiers.
• The ammo readout shows the loaded magazine’s real count right after a swap instead of a full magazine.

Mortars

• Elevation clicks and a traverse loop, heard by the gunner and nearby observers.
• An enemy at a dropped M224 sees the Destroy prompt with hold progress, and the 10 s timer runs on the server too.
• After your last round the mortar equips another round if you have one, else your primary.

Audio & VFX

• Footstep volume follows your speed, attenuation differs per surface, interior explosions have debris sounds, nearby sonic cracks are louder.
• Ricochet sounds for wood, dirt and water, and ricochets play more often. 7.62x54 rounds use the 7.62 projectile sound.
• 40 mm HE explosions reworked on dirt and concrete: blast-wave dust ring, bigger flash, sparks, and smoke that reacts to nearby walls.
• Smoke grenades are visible from any distance (they vanished beyond 150 m), a late joiner sees a smoke cloud at its real age, and the RDG-M smoke lasts its full 180 s.
• Distant impact sounds and the RDG-M smoke pop no longer go missing.

B-TAK & Watch

• Downed squad mates fade on the phone map like they do on the watch.
• The old IED list is gone; the Call app replaced it.

Voice

• Microphone capture rewritten. Fixes the dead mic on launch for anyone whose playback device runs above 200 kHz. Mic selection remembers the device itself, and the settings strip shows a short state (“Mic Blocked”) with an Open Settings button when Windows blocks it.
• Receiving: a loudness ceiling per packet, pauses play at the noise’s own level, and a distorted talker is dropped for the rest of the transmission and told nobody hears them. Incoming voice is paced instead of bursting.

Spectator & Admin Camera

• Controls redesigned for the left hand: hold X Select, Tab Display, Ctrl Lens, Alt Voice. Caps Lock zooms everywhere. Ctrl+V hides you (one switch for mesh and relevancy). Voice duck and mute moved to Alt+1/Alt+2. A legend strip bottom-left shows the held layer; a readout top-left shows who you are eavesdropping and recent speakers. Replay transport toggle is now F10.
• Health overlays (Tab+F): wounded body parts drawn on every soldier within 25 m and a blood ring within 50 m, colored by tier, pulsing while bleeding, with a tourniquet band. Zooming in extends the reach. Armor plates are no longer drawn.
• Debrief: ENEMIES HIT counts hits (3 s window per enemy), FRIENDLIES HIT replaces TREATMENTS GIVEN, and SURVIVED / N LIVES LOST / SPECTATING sits at the right end of the YOUR ROUND header. Element downs show only for your own element.
• After Action Map: SAVE REPLAY exports the whole match as a GIF to your machine; OPEN FOLDER opens it.

Settings

• Convertible laptops folded into tablet mode keep mouse look.
• Blank unbindable rows no longer appear in Mouse & Keyboard after a match.

Maps & Environment

• Foliage pass: every plant dissolves within 55 cm of the camera; grass sways and flutters at normal winds, bush leaves flutter twice as much and tree leaves 1.5x; bushes lean with the wind; wind changes ease in instead of jumping every plant in one frame; grass shimmer reduced; umbrella acacia leaves no longer bend for soldiers. Tsavo grass regenerates after a settings change.
• Highlands: the river reacts to players with ripples, wading splashes and spray. Coal mound placeholders replaced.
• Tsavo: see-through water fixed, open hillside faces closed, tree collision fixed, bad-performing foliage removed.
• Kambori: many more prop placement fixes.
• Painted terrain layers no longer blend into one tone where several overlap.
• Sky and weather updated to Ultra Dynamic Sky 9.7.

Performance & Stability

• Fixed the AMD GPU hang on first deploy after a map change with FSR (1 in 6 AMD crashes).
• Fixed the crash on quit seen on Build 755, and a rare crash when the first sound plays during garbage collection.
• After a map change the screen stays black until the area around you has streamed in, and the team selection opens even if that times out. The client streams the area it is showing, which fixes missing Tsavo grass and a render crash after travel.
• Tsavo and Kambori preload the scene before the fade-in, like Highlands.
• The starting camera’s area is no longer kept loaded for the whole match.
• Streaming hitches halved: physics for streamed cells builds on worker threads and two cells can appear at once.
• Fewer stalls when new text glyphs appear.
• Server network cost of soldiers’ inventories cut: reads no longer wake them, firing no longer writes the magazine count every 2 s, and a wake reuses its replicators.
• Distant soldiers no longer pop 50 cm up or down after standing or going prone off-screen, or float after a crouch.

Under the hood

• Reloads, pickups, crossload, the J menu, mortar charge wheels, equip, gear checks and weapon anim data moved off the old inventory plugin onto a new access layer. Behavior is meant to be unchanged; report anything that feels different.
• GeForce NOW support groundwork.

Fixes

• Fixed the B-TAK cursor pinned at the phone’s top-left corner with dead controls when a vote-kick or fireteam toast was up, and the same after a map rotation.
• Fixed the B-TAK assign and name box losing your draft after a game hitch.
• Taking a dropped item into crosspoint storage works on clients (it was refused).
• A pickup interrupted mid-animation no longer blocks every later pickup until you respawn.
• A crosspoint take of a magazine no longer duplicates it.
• Concussion vision no longer carries over a FOB respawn.
• A soldier downed on a slope is no longer thrown 1 to 2 m into the air.
• The RRC Grenadier has fireteam leader permissions, matching the SATYR Senior Grenadier.
• Mouse & Keyboard settings no longer show blank rows after a match.

Known Issues

• NVIDIA drivers 592 and older: since Build 757 the client ships without GPU breadcrumbs as a test for the device-removed crashes. If you still crash, report it with your driver version.