We present a new version of the FILDSIM code (Galdon-Quiroga et al 2018 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 60 105005), which significantly refines the modelling of the fast-ion loss detector (FILD) signal. We demonstrate that the FILD weight functions computed using this new version of FILDSIM are more accurate relative to synthetic benchmarks than those computed using the previous version. Thus, the new version enables higher-quality velocity-space sensitivity modelling and reconstructions. We validate the improvements on experimental data from discharge #75620 at TCV. Additionally, we present a novel approach for characterizing FILDs through a gross FILD measurement and a gross weight function based on the calculations from the new version of FILDSIM. We use them to characterize the TCV FILD.