Hello Manutoo!
I'm returning to this game after a long absence and I'm glad to see there has been substantial improvements since the 2011 version I played. I do have some comments that I'd like to share, from the perspective of a person who actually plays tennis at a decently high level. You have the ambition to create a realistic tennis simulator, so I thought I'd point out things that, IMHO is still not very realistic. Some of these I and others have pointed out in the past as well.
Below I also list a series of mods to the tennis.ini file that produces much more realistic tennis in my opinion.
First, though, I would like to say that this is a great tennis game and only Topspin 3 can rival it for a realistic simulation of the sport. I don't want to come off as a complainer. OK., that being said, things that aren't realistic:
1) Backhand smash. Too powerful and too accurate. The Backhand smash is more or less an emergency stroke you play when no other alternative is viable. The normal way is to to try to run around the backhand smash and hit a normal smash. The cpu doesn't do this, the player doesn't have to since the backhand smash is just as good as the forhand smash in the game.
2) When a vollyers get a shot at the body, they take it with a backhand volley, not a forehand volley like the player and cpu does in the game. it looks weird and would in real life trap the player and he would make an error or at the very least hit a very weak reply because he can't get his body out of the way quick enough. I linked a video of this way, waaaaay back.
3) Not enough errors from the CPU, both forced and unforced. The tennis is always perfect, even when the cpu dips it's way to high quality level compared to real tennis. This applies in general rallies, vollyes (not so much maybe, more unforced and forced errors here), and particularly service returns. Nearly all serves come back with high quality shots, wheras is real tennis powersful serves produce errors all the time.
3) Not enough "weak replies". Related to errors, these are weak shots forced by being out of position, but which still land within bounds. Floaters, mishits etc.
4) And the old chesnut: Too much power in the ground strokes and the players run too fast. Related to the above, they are always in position and can hit back everything with power. No floaters, very few errors, the errors that do show are the cpu taking risks with accelerations and slightly missing the lines. No floaters, no mishits etc. The maximum power level is probaly ok, but the average is way too high.
Now, most of this things are fixable with a little tinkering. Try this:
Set Pro 10
AiSlowerReturner to 0.08
MtRun at 0.85
Sweetspot scale to 5.0
SpeedConversion to 0.90
Reduce power levels to about half for the ground strokes (the rest is ok)
Do a CPU versus CPU. Alas, you really can't play the game with SweetSpotScale set to 5.0 (default is 0.05, I belive) It's too hard, but I'm sure this can worked around. Set elite controls in the help screen (don't know if this matters in cpu vs. cpu but I do it)
Voila! Weak replies, mishits, floaters, missed returns, occalsional lobs that go over the head of the cpu, but also a good mix of winners and powerful, but realistic tennis. Like watching real tennis. Some things are still kind of funny in cpu versus cpu but hey, it's a game meant to be played by a player, so it doesn't really matter.
I realize that people might not want to have the game ultra realistic. It will certainly become hard to play, but maybe you can make it an optional feature.
Other things:
I know you're trying to get it on Steam and I would love to see it getting the recognition it deserves, but alas, I believe the game needs better graphics to gain wider recognition. I know forum members always yell "gameplay matters the most" but in the end, it doesn't. People want to be amazed at how real things look when they see movies and play games, and at this point Tennis Elbow is lacking here. An HD texture replacement package to produce more true to life visual would go a long way. Many of the animations are pretty good (volleys are still not so good, alas).
That's it. I hope you find the feedback constructive and useful.
Thanks
Lreese
Try it and s