Field Notes.
Why every kill-cam replay looked the same (and how we fixed it)
The old camera was technically showing the real, physically simulated bullet path. It just couldn't show the one thing that made it worth watching: the curve.
A "perfect" shot only landed 43% of the time — at 30 fps
A bullet doesn't move in a straight line between two rendered frames. On a slow computer, that gap is exactly where a mathematically correct shot can go missing.
Wind isn't a number. It's a field.
Most games hand you one wind value for the whole level and call it realistic. Here, the same shot from the same spot can land differently ten metres to the left — because the wind ten metres to the left is a different wind.
Our bots got worse when we let them learn
We gave the sniper bots a way to correct their aim after every miss. The hardest difficulty got worse, not better. The reason is the same reason a real shooter with a shaking hand can't fix a bad zero by trying harder.