Public ITST mod '1.17d' pre-release test

[mar7xion]

The new install worked

[Elias]

By the way, about Kyrgios spin, it has been reported a bit high one or two times.
He has some spin inside, in reality, of course he can hit flat as well, but this is something we can't reproduce with TE.
I guess he would be more representative with 37-38 spin, but for some reason, tweaking this along with power i couldn't find a setup wich i found satisfying enough, with 37 spin and 87.5 power, the ball was still as fast, if not a bit higher, but it was feeling a bit less explosive, just a raw feeling.
Besides this, in our heavy charaters categories, we have only low spinners, the highest ones are 30'ish, Rosol 36 now, and lots of them are below 30. So having a 40+ in this category brings some variety around, thus i think it's not bad to have him at the 40' mark. That's the two main reasons he stayed there for now.

[nolesfan2011]

Awesome job guys! really amazing work as usual so happy that this was finally released and the work was (mostly) completed.

Just a couple of notes/requests, would it be possible to add Joao Sousa, Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, Pablo Cuevas, Federico Delbonis, Steve Johnson, Ivo Karlovic, Jiri Vesely, Simone Bolelli and Thanasi Kokkinakis to the game? perhaps replacing Kubot, Stepanek, Mahut, Zeballos, Lacko, Sela, Melzer, Monaco and Tursunov?

I feel they would provide good balance to the roster, and have fan interest, Kokkinakis being a young Aussie with a varied skillset, who is rising. GGL with his all-court game, and good play over the past year or so, and Sousa being the top Portugese player, and a relatively good all court player (good results on indoor hard, hard courts and clay). Cuevas is now in the top 30 and has won multiple clay court titles over the past 12 months, Delbonis is a young Argentine, Johnson is now the second best American player, Karlovic would be a good serve and volley centric player with a higher ranking and better recent results than say Mahut or Kubot. Vesely just won his first ATP title, and he's another young player to watch with a varied all court game, Bolelli has been on the rise as of late as well and he has a shotmaking skillset.

Stepanek and Mahut are almost doubles specialists at this point, and Kubot and Tursunov are likewise secondary ATP players who may well retire soon. Sela is a journeyman, Monaco and Melzer are aging players in decline, Zeballos and Lacko have been underachieving disappointments overall.

In addition, is there any particular reason why all of the 2D court photos weren't updated to their most recent 2014 or 2015 edition? I know there have been HD or high quality courts posted on the TE forums over the past year for most of the ATP tournaments week to week, and for example with say St. Petersburg, I happen to have an updated 2D court for the last edition of that event (2013), that is newer than the one included in the mod. Otherwise I'll just mod them in manually by editing the PAK files, but I was just curious as to why some of the events, and also their photo tags weren't updated (ie the Atlanta Open vs. the BB&T Atlanta Open)

Lastly I haven't tried out all the players but I did a quick playthrough with RBA vs. Thiem (Dubai R1 this week no less), and I noticed the serve animation for RBA was generic. I know for sure that the final edition of the 2013 Sam Mod actually had a more accurate and realistic serve animation for RBA, so is there any chance that animation could be updated? (I'll look for others that are generic that I've seen better versions of).

Other things I've noticed, Dolgopolov FH and BH animations aren't as good/accurate as previous ones with his quick "swipe" forehand/backhand, and Seppi uses a Pro Kennex Racquet not a Head racquet.

On a similar note, is there any particular reason the "stat boards" that display after the match and in between sets are not in the same "ATP" graphic style as the scoreboards? rather in TE graphic style, I know that generic 250, 500, Masters and slams statboards exist, and it would help with the immersion and cohesive ATP style look of the game.

Thanks and once again great job! really happy with this, it's the best mod around by far

[Fez]

The 3d courts look so much better! Well done! Especially barcelona and all the grass courts and US Open

[MaGav]

1.17c was a really good job about hard courts. It gave us a real advantage of a serve (not many random, down the baseline returns which were giving an advantage too many times to the returner), the feeling of advantage during the point turning into winning the point, less curious passing shots - easier to finish the point at the net after the preparation.

The latest version is again back to basics, pretty the same as 1.16. Just that slight changes of surface made hard courts (plexi and cement as well many times) again the struggling of patience and underpowered shots, too much of pushing the ball, effective backboarding. I must say that Madrid clay is really nice (havn't tried normal clay online).
Settings of plexi, cement and blue-green in 1.17c were much better. They required a slight change, but it went wrong way.
With Richie we've played some test sets in 1.17c and d as well. We both have a feeling that all sorts of hard courts in 1.17c were better. The advantage during the point with no mistake and good placement of accels was turning into the point. Now the accels of hard hitters don't hurt again and can be countered by the opponent easily.

After talking to Richie and wondering how much that slight changes of ball bouncing height slowed down the gameplay we think that we should try another settings.

1.17c => 1.17d => 1.17e maybe (just about hard courts)
Plexicushion 0.58 / 0.83 => 0.58 / 0.83 => 0.595/0.83 (high bouncing really slows down the ball while plexi especially this year was pretty fast, no need for a big difference between this and cement) isn't it fast?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ui8a6CJmOs
Cement 0.585 / 0.82 => 0.585 / 0.825 => 0.585/0.82 (these settings were best)
Blue-Green 0.59 / 0.815 => 0.59 / 0.823 => 0.59/0.82 or 0.59/0.818 (slight defference makes a huge change to the gameplay)
Indoor 0.60 / 0.80 => 0.607 / 0.818 => 0.60/0.810-0.815

About chars. They were really good balance before in 1.17c.

[Elias]

Hey,

well, there is no really "back to the basics" with plexi or cement.
Plexi 1.17c and 1.17d are exactly the same. values not changed there, so it can't feel different, bounce is 0.05 lower
compared to 1.16. (Bounce is the second value, 0.83, the first one is the friction, higher is the value, lower is the
friction, and faster the ball goes after bounce, so if you make it 0.595, you basically renders Plexi faster than
cement, or even BG, after bounce). But we could go for something like 0.585 / 0.83, or 0.585 / 0.825 for Plexi,
if we keep the bounce at/under 0.82 for Cement & BG.

Cement got 0.005 more bounce, mostly only because it should/could bounce a little bit higher than BG as it's intended to be a slower surface than BG. And BG bounce has been restored a bit higher (after several reports about it playing like indoors and feeling arcadish, with 0.815 bounce). It's just a matter of surface range order, if we lower BG bounce again, the decrease will be reported to Cement as well. Although, we can also simply choose to have the same bounce @ 0.82 for Cement and BG, and just a friction difference (having BG faster after bounce).

Madrid clay is the same as 1.16. Normal clay is a bit closer to Marid than it was in 1.16.

So the principal changes have been Blue green, and indoors, mostly.

Now i have personnaly nothing against lowering this again, really, it's a matter of taste about how renders the game with these different values, and obviously there is conflicting reports about it for now. (like 3d courts, some people like them, some others don't like the surfaces colors. )

[MaGav]

I know that there were no changes for Plexi, but it was needed even due to 1.17c. High bounce causes less control on accels, this, in turn, causes more pushing strikes (normal shots, top spins) and makes the gameplay slow and full of safe shots, a bit of waiting for an opponent's error.
I know which value is a friction and which is a bounce height.
Accels slow down on plexi too much, that's why I'm up to increase the friction to 0.59 at least to make the surface more winners friendly. This surface is not so slow in reality. The difference comparing to other hard courts is just the bounce height. It's not like something between clay and hard - slow and high bouncing, it's kind of hard courts - pretty fast, but higher bounce than on others.

I'd stay with char stats as they are now and keep trying to change just surfaces settings.

[Richie1308]

Plexi is a real problem and I could see it didn't change between 17c and 17d, here stats between me (Federer) and Magav (Wawrinka) with one set on it :
Never saw such a ugly ratio W/faults, especially considering the matchup (and it's not like there were tons of unreturned serves, it was a lot of UEs).

Back in 17c we tried some different matches on Dubai and it felt really great, we had two matches I found really interesting and where I had pleasure playing them, both as a defender and an offensive guy (Federer/Ferrer and Wawrinka/Simon) :
From my side I can say that with Ferrer I could not just run and spam top spin to go and wins the points because at some point some weak shot would come and I would get punished immediately. Defending also meant doing shot that would be hard to attack and have him to take some risks. Also I could do some winners from time to time on some points where I was able to take the lead and move him, which felt quite representative of how the matchup should go. Most of the errors here were forced errors and some UEs from his side, logically since he had to attack in the points with Fed.

On the second I had Wawrinka against Simon, I had to try to dominate with my power and I was able to make a decent amount of winners and force him to make some faults. The points were really intense and we both had weapons to put the other in trouble. It's still a bit easier to play a defensive guy but with effort we both were often rewarded for dominating a point, the winner rarely came from nowhere.

We had with Magav 2 matches on Dubai in 17d, Monaco/Nieminen and Tsonga/Hewitt :


Monaco/Nieminen was quite awful with 12.3 average rally and fantastic W/Fault ratio. Even if it's not the most offensive matchup, far from it, it's certainly not the worst and yet we had that. And this time dominating the point was pretty useless, in fact it was even uncommon for any of us to dominate the point.

Tsonga/Hewitt is certainly the most offensive matchup we made, both can kill you with 2 attacks and can be very dangerous, even more considering Hewitt's counter, it can go very fast. And yet, 50% of the points were >8 shots (by the way, if you compare the two screens between 17c and 17d, you'll notice in c more than 50% of the points were under 8 shots and that's the contrary in the 2 of 17d). There were still at least a good amount of winners, but this time it was really finding the one shot to kill, and dominating the point was often reset fast enough, even with Tsonga it was possible.

For indoor we only had one set with Vram but we found it quite interesting (me Berdych and him Murray) :

We had a good amount of short points but still an important amount of +8 shots despite Berdych having huge shots and Murray having a quite good FH we found. It was still quite nice to play on it, we came to the conclusion that having something like that for WTF would probably be okay regarding how the surface is over there, and this one should have a bit shorter rebound, or maybe a faster speed I don't know.

What I can say from this tests is first of all that to me offensive characters shine way better than before and seem to be able to get their chance against defenders. On the other hand, the points had a really good look in 17c (except plexi which I have to say is quite awful) while in 17d we could see a real difference with a little change in the rebound of the surface. Points were harder to make and defending with good top spin was easier. Overall surfaces like the one on Dubai felt really nice to us in 17c.
The values Magav came up with seems okay to me (well we thought of them together after all), it would need some tests to see how it goes.

Finally for clay I made some matches against Vram (but not so seriously with some matchup that almost don't exist I would say) and one with Magav (a Almagro/Dimitrov) on Madrid and Roma and it felt quite nice for the moment (which is normal after all since the surface didn't change and I already liked it in 1.16).

[Elias]

Good stuff Richie, true that these stats are saying a lot.

On the other hand during 1.17c test i could get such comments from 'Moe & Don :

[21:04] <VMoe> Hey! Just played a 11.5 Average Rally Length set against MaGav
[21:04] <VMoe> Me as Fed, him as Gasquet.
01[21:07] <Elias> omg
01[21:07] <Elias> wich surface ?
[21:07] <VMoe> Decoturf
[21:08] <VMoe> He says it was because we were not using 1.17 perfectly.
[21:09] <VMoe> Always some **** weird ball coming back.
01[21:10] <Elias> just use Cement for your tests, indian wells, miami
01[21:10] <Elias> 82 bounce makes a nice difference vs 81.5
[21:10] <VMoe> I hope so.
[21:11] <VMoe> This was horrible (MaGav liked it).
01[21:11] <Elias> well if he liked it i guess he will like indoors
01[21:11] <Elias> Blue Green shouldn't play like this, not at this point
[21:11] <VMoe> Once in a while this bounce is ok, but not that many tournaments.

or

3:45] <Don_> I tried 1.17
[03:46] <Don_> ball looks a bit sticky to the surface
[03:47] <Don_> speed after bounce is maybe faster but ball bounce a bit too low or too fast is going down
[03:47] <Don_> remember DMTP ?
[03:48] <Don_> there was some version with similar change
01[03:48] <Elias> lol
01[03:48] <Elias> don't exaggerate
[03:48] <Don_> anyway I think its a bit better than 1.16
01[03:48] <Elias> you probably played blue green

(sorry to quote this public but it's also important to know everyone feeling about it and eventually discuss

So i guess you can understand my hestitation about this Especially as i had somehow the same pong like feeling as well, with the 81.5 bounce (at least it wouldn't be shocking on faster surfaces like indoors but felt a bit weird to represent Decoturf).

On the other hand its also a great improvement to get 50% of the rallies under 8 shots and around 9.5 average length between movers like Richie and Magav, instead of a huge 12. undeniably. (though as you saw Moe and Magav could play 11.5 av. rally length on 1.17c decoturf, but that was involving Gasquet).

The stats are better, but the looks are worse, at least to me. Maybe it's what it takes to undermine TE backboarding traits, though. ( along with 70 speed / 84+ power, that is )

I'm not at home at this time so i can't really elaborate or test more values yet, i'll be back home tomorrow late evening probably .

Surfaces probably won't stay as 1.17d then. I guess we can find some intermediate acceptable values, Too bad TE doesn't simply allows some surface physics sliders as hosting options.. would be pretty straightforward to test more values and make a choice. Packing a version to test values is not exactly convenient ..

what about

plexi 0.585 / 0.825
cement 0.587 / 0.82
BG 0.593 / 0.818 or 0.595/ 0.82
ind. 0.60 / 0.810 , or 0.605 / 0.815

Something like that.

If you know how to edit the pak03.pak (with qped, not difficult), you can do some tests editing the surface values for some courts, but your opponent has to do the exact same changes on the same court or it would desync.
For Blue Green reference court you'd need to edit /data/court07/court.ini.

[MaGav]

About sets with Moe. We played Djok(Moe) vs Lopez and the avg rally lenght was 7.5, not that bad, but not fine at all (Lopez).

It was a day after publishing 1.17c and my thoughts just after those sets were that we had to change our habits from 1.16. The ball was going faster of what we didn't take advantage which I mean ability to use more accels and net approaches. Our old habits were being afraid of attacking high top spin with an accel and of going to the net.
Net approaches:
Moe(Fed) 2/5, me(Gasquet) 6/11

Other avg rallies lenght:
don't remember which chars isaldor was using unfortunately, but it was on Cement (IW or Miami) as I remember
isa vs Cilic - 6.1
isa vs Nishikori - 7.6
Richie vs Tsonga - 6.7
Richie (Almagro) vs Monfils - 11

The last one was telling the most. We both were using defensive chars. In 1.16 perhaps we would be able to play never ending rallies, many 50+. As I remember there were max 2 extremely long rallies (41 the longest one). Much more interesting was the feeling. Not much of pushing, higher control on accels, taking advantage of attacks, not of weird down the baseline defensive moonballs.

against Isniper (on Cement) all sets from 4.2-6.2 except: Isniper (Coric) vs Nadal - 10.5
Interesting set was Isniper (Brown) vs Nadal - 4.9!
There he was using lots of effective net approaches (17/30) and we went to a tie-break. It shows we are able to use a variety of tactics. Ball bounces lower after volleys, so there are not many weird, easy made passing shots.

What I liked in 1.17c:
- the feeling of effectiveness of aggressive style
- much less random down the baseline defensive moonballs
- less ability to do backboarding
- higher effectiveness of net approaches after preparation
- higher control on accels even from opponent's top spin
- serve gives an advantage

Gameplay on hard courts in 1.17d I felt closer to 1.16 than 1.17c.

[Don_]

1.17 is much less prone to unforced errors, maybe a bit too much ? But gameplay looks much better (speed), there are more exciting rallies now.

[VMoe86]

The closest surface to 1.17c Decoturf is Indoor Hard: It is a 0.607/0.818 surface, compared to 0.59/0.815 for Decoturf in 1.17c. A bit higher bouncing, but a good bit faster. Maybe this is a reasonable basis for Decoturf in final version of 1.17. It should be better than the proposed Decoturf of MaGav (he suggested 0.59/0.818, which is the same bounce, but slower surface ).

So, why not play test there more thoroughly? One match-up, 4 sets, next match-up again over 4 sets. Lets also involve match-ups with popular characters, like Djokovic vs. a big-hitter.

[cabalek98videos]

I have problem with animation, i need version 1.17c to download

[MaGav]

The closest surface to 1.17c Decoturf is Indoor Hard: It is a 0.607/0.818 surface, compared to 0.59/0.815 for Decoturf in 1.17c. A bit higher bouncing, but a good bit faster. Maybe this is a reasonable basis for Decoturf in final version of 1.17. It should be better than the proposed Decoturf of MaGav (he suggested 0.59/0.818, which is the same bounce, but slower surface ).

Even better! I up to that as well. I'd like to see it as fast as you said. I just wrote those physics according to some reports that 1.17c hard courts are too fast and bounce is too low. Personally the best solution would be something around 0.60/0.815 for BG and 0.605/0.815 for indoor. I remember 0.59/0.815 for BG in 1.17c was already fast, but we can try faster physics which you proposed.

[Elias]

i doubt BG friction should be >0.60. i'd reserve 0.60+ friction for indoors and/or faster surfaces. It's more about the bounce (0.815) that reports were reserved. An Intermediate value for BG wich feels more acceptable for BG is 0.818<>0.820. I think we'll go for 0.818 if you agree on it.

imo BG Friction is low enough somewhere in between 0.59 and 0.60. 0.59, 0.592, 0.595, i may be wrong though, maybe 0.60 would better. I may post an 1.17e with different surfaces values to test out anyways so you can test different friction values with this bounce, you guys will decide about it once you/we agree on something. For now i was working a bit on some new scoreboards (not sure they will be ready for final release though).

Then i think Cement can get back to 1.17c cement values, maybe a bit faster (friction), like 0.592/0.82, or 0.595, 0.82. And then Plexi could get something close to 1.17d Cement values (0.585, 0.825) or around these values. Main thing i'd like is to have some logic in our surfaces values range.