Drawn frames, not procedural fakes: brute lurch, boy stride, crowd applause

Every animation in this round gets real frames. The procedural squash-and-sway
on the wounded brute read as fake on sight, and that gait is where the comedy
lives.

- Each brute wound stage now has its own 2-frame lurch (z_gw/z_gwb, z_gw2/z_gw2b,
  ...). The generator gave every B frame a dragged pole that only stage 1
  actually carries, so it would have blinked in and out each step — stripped by
  keeping the largest blob, and where the pole touched the body, by cutting on
  column density (a torso is dense, a dragged pole is a thin diagonal).
- Frames step off DISTANCE COVERED, never elapsed time — boy.dist for ball boys,
  z/bruteStride for brutes. A time-driven cycle moonwalks the moment speed and
  frame rate disagree, which is exactly what "he slides faster than the animation
  suggests" was. Change a speed now and the legs keep up on their own.
- One boy, one slot. sendBoy no longer replaces a boy already on court: that was
  the appearing and disappearing, since every kill teleported him back to the
  wing mid-stride. New mess is appended to his round instead. He now walks for
  10.5s a crossing, and there is a lot of mopping to do.
- The applauding crowd is a real two-frame animation (seated / arms up), swapped
  per column on its own phase. The old "smooth wave" still shifted each column by
  a FRACTIONAL dy, and nearest-neighbour resampling at a fractional y re-snaps a
  column's pixel rows every frame — that boiling beside the HUD is what read as
  the scoreboard flickering. The board art is 99.9% opaque; nothing was ever
  showing through it. With the crowd calm the frame delta is now 0.0%.

Benchmarks: 136/150 serve returns (90.7% ±2.4%, the 11/12 bar is inside one
sigma), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

gameplay.js

@@ -931,14 +931,16 @@ export function update(dt) {
   // ball boy: sprint across, scoop the ball in passing, despawn off the far side
   const boy = G.boy;
   if (boy) {
-    // mopping is not sprinting: the mop crossing takes ~6.6s, which is what fills the changeover
-    boy.x += boy.dir * (boy.mop ? TUNE.boyMopSpeed : 7.5) * dt; boy.runT += dt;
+    // mopping is not sprinting. `dist` is what drives his animation frames (render.drawBoy), so
+    // the legs are tied to the ground he covers and can never out-run or lag behind the walk.
+    const step = boy.dir * (boy.mop ? TUNE.boyMopSpeed : 7.5) * dt;
+    boy.x += step; boy.runT += dt; boy.dist = (boy.dist || 0) + Math.abs(step);
     if (!boy.mop && !ball.collected && !ball.active) { // a mop boy has no ball to chase — he must hold his lane and clean it
       const dz = ball.z - boy.z;
       boy.z += Math.sign(dz) * Math.min(Math.abs(dz), 3 * dt); // track the rolling ball a little
       if (Math.abs(boy.x - ball.x) < 0.4 && Math.abs(dz) < 1.2) ball.collected = true;
     }
-    if (Math.abs(boy.x) > 13.5) G.boy = null;
+    if (Math.abs(boy.x) > 13.5) G.boy = null; // off the far wing — his round is done
   }
   if (G.outMarker && (G.outMarker.t -= dt) <= 0) G.outMarker = null;