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 Tower Duel kill is supposed to be the moment the whole mode is built around: a shot that traveled kilometres, bent by drop and a wind that had been shifting the entire flight, replayed so you can actually see it land. Instead, for a while, every replay looked almost the same — a bullet flying in what read as a straight line no matter how difficult the shot had been. It took a specific report to pin down why.
A camera glued to a straight line
The old kill-cam was a chase camera, locked to the recorded flight path and oriented by the trail's local tangent — the direction the bullet was pointing over roughly the last 0.07 seconds of its flight, a handful of samples. Over a window that short, a real long-range round's actual deviation from a straight line is on the order of hundredths of a unit. A camera that only ever knows which way the bullet is currently pointing can never show curvature, because curvature isn't a property of any single instant — it's a property of the whole path, and the whole path was never what the camera was looking at.
The fix: stop following, start watching
The replacement — call it the scope-trace cam — does the opposite of chasing. It picks a single fixed position and a fixed look direction, computed once from the first several samples of the trail: the actual launch line, the way the shot was originally aimed. Then it eases its field of view down to a tight 4 degrees over the first fraction of the replay, and holds there.
Once the camera stops moving with the bullet and instead watches from a fixed point down the original aim line, any real drift the round takes away from that line shows up as motion across the frame — the same way a tracer looks obviously curved from the side, even when it looked perfectly straight to the person who fired it.
The last quarter of the replay hands off to the old chase-cam for the impact itself — that part was never the problem, a close-up hit still reads fine from behind the bullet. The after-action diagram that follows draws the recorded path against the original aim line at a fixed pixel-per-metre scale, on purpose: an early version auto-scaled per shot, and it made every kill look equally dramatic, including the ones that were nearly a straight line. A fixed scale means a small drift looks small and a wild one looks wild, because that's what actually happened.
This shipped today. The kill-cam clips for the media kit are being captured from it next — the ones from before this fix are being retired, because now there's finally something worth showing.