TaCZ Performance & Polish

# 4.0.0 RC4

RC4 is the first-person gunfeel/refinement candidate. The experimental RC3 enhanced-F5 camera is removed completely; vanilla F5 behavior is restored. No projectile, damage, accuracy, hit-registration, ammo, networking, or BRL dependency changes are introduced.

## First-person gunfeel

- Recoil 2.0 separates weapon/model kick from camera delivery.
- Lower default vertical camera recoil and strongly restrained horizontal camera recoil.
- First-shot visual kick, sustained-fire settling, brief kick hold, and frame-rate-independent visual recovery.
- Pistol / SMG / AR / Shotgun / LMG / DMR / Sniper presentation personalities feed recoil, ADS response, sway, inertia, movement transitions, and muzzle-flash scale.
- Weapon Motion 2.0 adds subtle look inertia, strafe roll, sprint raise/lower behavior, landing impulse, reload blending, and movement-aware sway.
- ADS 2.0 supports independent enter/exit response multipliers; exiting ADS is intentionally a little faster by default.
- Existing per-gun presentation overrides remain available.

## Crosshair + combat feedback

- Persistent center dot remains the aim anchor.
- Hipfire outer arms now use much tighter defaults and a hard maximum gap.
- ADS/zoom is dot-only: no outer-arm spread or recoil expansion while aiming.
- One-time RC3.1 -> RC4 migration updates untouched old crosshair defaults while preserving custom values.
- Compact tactical hitmarker hierarchy differentiates hit, headshot, and kill.
- Low-ammo context HUD gets a restrained pulse.
- Near-miss suppression can add a very faint edge-pressure cue with no blur, accuracy penalty, or gameplay debuff.

## FX polish

- Local first-person muzzle flashes keep gunpack-authored textures but receive a small class-aware size personality.
- Optional nearby material-impact accents emit one budgeted vanilla block-debris particle using the struck block state.
- Impact accents participate in the existing global battlefield particle budget and stop first under load.
- Gunpack/TaCZ authored gunshot audio remains authoritative; RC4 intentionally does not stack generic replacement gunshot layers.

## Camera / F5

- Removed RC3 enhanced third-person camera.
- Removed shoulder offset, shoulder swap keybind, third-person crosshair and F5 camera config.
- Vanilla first-person/F5 camera behavior is restored outside the existing TaCZ first-person recoil/ADS presentation hooks.

## Safety / performance policy

- No per-shot world/entity scan added.
- No gun JSON parsing in render/fire hot paths.
- Weapon class/profile state remains tick-cached.
- Motion state is sampled once per client tick and exposed as primitive render transforms.
- Material impact accents are bounded by the existing FX governor.
- BRL remains optional/complementary only; there is no hard BRL dependency.

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# 4.0.0 RC3

RC3 adds a client-only enhanced vanilla F5 camera while keeping the validated 4.0 combat kernel frozen.

## RC3 changes

- Enhanced rear third-person F5 shoulder camera that is active for normal Minecraft play, not only while holding a TaCZ gun.
- Vanilla first person and front-facing F5 remain untouched.
- Configurable camera distance, shoulder offset, vertical lift and wider exploration FOV.
- New `Swap Third-Person Shoulder` keybind under Options > Controls > TaCZ Performance & Polish; unbound by default to avoid modpack conflicts.
- Shoulder side persists in the client config and transitions smoothly instead of snapping.
- TaCZ-native ADS integration: existing right-click/aim progress tightens camera distance, shoulder offset, vertical offset and FOV. No second ADS input is created.
- Optics can still request a tighter native TaCZ FOV than the configured third-person ADS cap.
- Optional third-person crosshair works universally; TaCZ guns reuse existing dynamic spread and hit-feedback presentation.
- Shoulder/vertical offset collision is clipped after vanilla rear-camera collision.
- New dedicated Camera config page with full RC2-style hover explanations and reset defaults.
- Camera settings are included in TP4 client profile export/import.
- No projectile, damage, hit-registration, ammo, server, packet or BRL dependency changes.

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# 4.0.0 RC2

RC2 is a focused UX and diagnostics polish pass over the feature-frozen RC1 architecture.

## RC2 changes

- full hover help for every primary config row, including layouts where inline descriptions are hidden;
- hover explanations for all five global quality presets;
- clearer config discoverability text;
- gun-pack diagnostics now defer/retry across slow TaCZ index rebuilds and world joins instead of ending in a misleading empty-index warning;
- actual gun-index mismatches still surface as warnings;
- release-facing version branding updated to RC2;
- no combat/projectile kernel changes;
- BRL remains optional/complementary only.

## Combat HUD 2.0
- refined target health/armor bars from the 3.5 RC6.3 baseline
- distance-aware world-bar scaling/fading
- armor-break and headshot labels
- directional damage cue and optional offscreen threat hints
- lightweight TaCZ bullet near-miss/suppression cue
- BRL/EasyNameTags nameplate clearance without hard integration
- global HUD opacity and accessibility palettes

## Gunfeel profiles
- Pistol / SMG / AR / Shotgun / LMG / DMR / Sniper presentation classes
- exact client per-gun class overrides
- class-aware ADS response, transition polish, visual recoil/recovery and sway
- breathing, low-ammo, EMPTY and CHAMBERED feedback
- tick-cached classification and periodic capacity refresh; no per-frame gun data parsing

## Battlefield presentation
- unified combat-state policy for tracers, shells, particles, muzzle flash and impacts
- shared CALM / ENGAGED / HEAVY_FIREFIGHT / CRITICAL_LOAD states
- hysteresis and one-step recovery
- Cinematic preset
- existing per-second and per-tick hard FX bounds retained

## Compatibility + diagnostics
- expanded optional stack detection
- 120-frame p95/worst-frame diagnostics
- worst-frame combat-state attribution
- compatibility/diagnostics screen
- copyable diagnostics report
- `/taczpolish clientstatus`
- `/taczpolish copydiagnostics`
- TP4 clipboard client-presentation profile transfer

## Dependency policy
Better Randomized Loot is not required. Polish has no BRL build dependency or BRL class imports. BRL may complement Polish through optional nameplate/provider coexistence only.

## Kernel policy
The trusted 3.5 projectile/damage path is not rewritten by 4.0's presentation work. The governor scales optional client cosmetics; TaCZ remains authoritative for damage, hit registration, ammo and ballistics.

## RC1 freeze policy
- no new major features
- no projectile, damage, hit-registration, ammo, raycast or networking rewrites
- no BRL dependency; BRL remains optional complement-only compatibility
- release-facing branding/diagnostics updated from BETA1 to RC1
- remaining changes before FINAL are limited to confirmed bugs, compatibility regressions, configuration clarity and presentation polish

### RC4.1 - ADS optic visibility hotfix
- Polish crosshair rendering is now completely suppressed whenever TaCZ ADS begins or is still interpolating out.
- Removes the RC4 center dot from iron sights, red dots, holographics, and scopes.
- Removes the visible `ADS Dot Only` config option; TaCZ owns the ADS sight picture unconditionally.
- Hipfire dynamic crosshair and center-dot customization are unchanged.
- No changes to TaCZ accuracy, recoil calculation, projectiles, damage, hit registration, or networking.

### RC5 - First-Person Handling Integration
- Adds a presentation-only handling state machine with `IDLE / MOVE / SPRINT / READY / ADS / FIRE / RECOVER / RELOAD` states.
- Existing recoil, weapon motion, ADS, sprint, reload and firing presentation now blend through one coordinator instead of stacking independently.
- Recoil 3.0 keeps TaCZ recoil authoritative while coordinating first-shot punch, sustained-fire rhythm, calmer camera delivery and state-aware visual model recovery.
- Adds a post-sprint READY presentation window so the gun returns to ready instead of snapping straight to idle.
- Adds subtle model-only direction-change weight transfer for strafing/reversals; camera aim and projectile direction remain untouched.
- Adds a visual-only ADS intent buffer while sprint/reload blocks aim. It never calls TaCZ aim APIs and only boosts visual catch-up after TaCZ itself accepts ADS.
- Reload presentation blends through the same handling coordinator while preserving gunpack-authored reload animations.
- First-person motion sampling remains tick-cached and the render hook reuses a single motion object to avoid per-frame motion allocations.
- Debug/diagnostic output now reports the active first-person handling phase.
- New handling controls are exposed on the Gunfeel config page and included in TP4 profile export/import.
- Enhanced F5 remains removed and ADS remains completely free of Polish crosshair geometry.
- No changes to TaCZ damage, accuracy, RPM, ammo, ballistics, hit registration, server authority or networking.
- BRL remains optional/complementary only.

## 4.0.0 Final - TaCZ hotfix2 compatibility

- Rebased the public release on TaCZ 1.1.8-hotfix2.
- Fixed the exact-version dependency gate that rejected hotfix2.
- Re-audited critical TaCZ mixin/API surfaces against hotfix2.
- No gameplay-balance or projectile/damage changes.