> Written by Coroner
The 049 release of TCE was a sandbox release for us. We published a game with some dramatic changes that were not really tried in other gamesbefore. I guess we learned our lesson.Like mentioned before, some coding effort went into the now client side configurable screen aspect modes.

The new system seems quite pleasent and offers all choices from standard 4:3 with locked 90 deg horizontal field of view (FOV; like it always used to be in TC) to 16:9 with increased FOV to the sides and same vertical FOV (104 degs horizontal, like, e.g., HL2). My personal favorite is the 16:10 with balanced FOV mode which gives you some more FOV to the sides while you loose some vertical. We might add a 3 stage adjustment for the vertical gun position, comparable to the already existing adjustment for the horizontal gun position. Another aspect which will be considered and gets focus now is the game mechanics. Compared to 048, the dramatic change was the complete removal of cone spread in iron sight mode. While I see discussions about changes to recoil and damage here and there, this was actually not touched, except for the sniper rifles (less damage, faster retrigger rate, less recoil).

After intensive team internal discussion, we decided to take the current system a base and will now kind of overamplify differences between the weapon groups. This will be done with the game aspect in mind, since in real life there would be hardly any difference between the weapon groups in close quarters battle like mimicked in 049. The idea is to give more distinct characteristics to the weapons and to increase the skill required to use the weapons for different purpose in game.

Changes will be along the lines of quicker behaviour of SMGs (less damage, shorter effective range, less sway due to stance and movement, fast change to pistol ...) and more and more slower behaviour for bigger weapons combined with more damage and penetration capabilities of the rounds. TCEs damage model assumes that all players wear body armor. The goal is to find a better compromise between realistic weapon behaviour and gameplay requirements.

Finally, we aim at a patch release featuring the above changes and many bug fixes in the next weeks.