The opponents come back to life: the friendly refresh, open string beds, and a steadier chase

Oliver's batch, delivered in dependency order. "The opponents look pretty
harsh, almost already pre-zombie" — so BOTH tennis opponents got a new
identity: warm skin, human eyes, an easy near-smile, rolled anchor-first so
every later sheet inherits the face. The male's bounce pair also ADOPTS the
female's palm-out posture (his old crouched receiver stance was the wrong
pose for bouncing a ball — her better one is now the shared convention), and
the pre-serve ball was re-measured onto the drawn palms: BOUNCE_IDLE's oDx
0.45 -> 0.24 / oApex 0.55 -> 0.72 for his close carry, with her wider reach
riding TOURS (oDx 0.48 / oApex 0.73) the same way the player's pair already
does.

"parts of the body as well as the inner of the racket are solid" — the beds
were the cutter's own doing: _fine.key repaints enclosed magenta pale grey
(protection against accidental magenta strings), which defeated the beds we
now draw magenta ON PURPOSE. key()/main() grow a bed=True switch (the
famroll convention, used by _runroll and the refresh cuts); the run cycles'
beds went from ~70% to ~44% opaque — strings, not paddles. Enclosed pockets
of a roll's off-spec background (one sheet came back on blue) are scrubbed
by corner-colour distance too.

Both RUN CYCLES re-rolled off the friendly anchors: his landed 8 clean
frames (racket +0.05..+0.30, one side); hers took four rolls — the gates
caught a white background, a crossing racket, near-dup neighbours — and the
keeper drew a 10-frame cycle, from which the best 8 were chosen by
maximising the minimum adjacent stride (29.7%, smoother than his 22.7).
o_run7/8 return to the SPR list.

AND THE CHASE STOPS DITHERING (Oliver: "switching between a left and right
movement increasingly faster the nearer the ball comes"): intercept()
re-solves every frame and the earliest-reachable point jumps around its
solution as the flight shortens, flipping his run direction each time. The
CPU now commits to its stored target unless a fresh solve moves it by more
than 0.35 m. SPRV 121, main.js v244, 66 tests, every opponent frame verified
200 in the live game.

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

src/config.js

@@ -689,7 +689,8 @@ export const CUP_ROUNDS = [
 
 export const TOURS = [
   { id: 'men',   name: "MEN'S SINGLES",   tile: 'tour_m', sfx: null },
-  { id: 'women', name: "WOMEN'S SINGLES", tile: 'tour_w', sfx: '_f', dx: 0.46, apex: 0.78, tossDx: -0.59 },
+  { id: 'women', name: "WOMEN'S SINGLES", tile: 'tour_w', sfx: '_f', dx: 0.46, apex: 0.78, tossDx: -0.59,
+    oDx: 0.48, oApex: 0.73 },
 ];
 
 // netW was the singles-stick width (10.06) while the court is drawn to the DOUBLES lines, so the
@@ -1137,7 +1138,11 @@ export const POSE_TIME = 0.38;
 // opponent's ball out by his racket instead of under his palm. Both are FEEL KNOBS measured off the
 // drawn palm by eye — a skin-detector guess at the hand lands on a knee, so tune these by looking.
 export const BOUNCE_IDLE = { dx: 0.36, apex: 0.68, tempo: 3.6,   // the player, drawn from behind
-                             oDx: 0.45, oApex: 0.55 };            // the opponent, drawn from the front
+                             // the opponent, drawn from the front. Remeasured 2026-08-14 for the
+                             // friendlier anchor art: HIS new palm-out bounce holds the ball close
+                             // (palm +0.24 m, 0.83 m up); HER reach stays wide — her pair rides
+                             // TOURS like the player's dx/apex already does.
+                             oDx: 0.24, oApex: 0.72 };
 
 // generated sprite sheets: the idle pose is this many pixels tall; all scales derive from it
 export const SPRITE_H = 224; // 2x remaster (was 112). RES is 3, so the player at the baseline

src/gameplay.js

@@ -1732,7 +1732,15 @@ export function update(dt) {
     G.aiReactT += dt;
     const incoming = ball.active && ball.lastHit === 'P'
       && G.aiReactT >= (G.diff ? G.diff.reaction : TUNE.aiReaction);
-    const tgt = incoming ? intercept('O') : HOME.O;
+    // THE INTERCEPT GETS A DEADBAND (Oliver: "switching between a left and right movement
+    // increasingly faster the nearer the ball comes"). intercept() re-solves every frame, and as
+    // the flight shortens the earliest-reachable point jumps around its solution — each jump
+    // flips his run direction, faster and faster. He commits to the stored point unless the
+    // fresh solve moves it meaningfully (or the chase resets between shots).
+    const fresh = incoming ? intercept('O') : HOME.O;
+    if (!incoming || !G.aiTgt || Math.hypot(fresh.x - G.aiTgt.x, fresh.z - G.aiTgt.z) > 0.35)
+      G.aiTgt = fresh;
+    const tgt = G.aiTgt;
     const spd = TUNE.aiSpeed * (G.diff ? G.diff.speed : 1)
       * (incoming ? 1 : (G.diff ? G.diff.recover : 0.5)); // slow recovery: wrong-footing wins points
 

src/render.js

@@ -221,7 +221,7 @@ function farB(z) {
 // Asset cache-buster — bump with main.js?v=N (see the img.src note below). EXPORTED because the
 // menu screens hang <img> tags on the same files, and two copies of this number is one copy too
 // many: the one that does not get bumped is the one that serves a cached 404.
-export const SPRV = 119;
+export const SPRV = 121;
 // The boot bar in main.js watches this. Nothing here CHANGES when things load — every sprite was
 // already requested at import — it just makes the wait visible and holds the menu back until the
 // last sheet has landed. See the onerror note below for the other half of "sometimes missing".
@@ -230,7 +230,7 @@ const SPR = {};
 for (const n of ['p_idle1','p_idle2','p_bounce','p_bounce2','p_toss','p_smash','p_run1','p_run2','p_run3','p_run4','p_run5','p_run6','p_swing1','p_swing2','p_die1','p_die2','p_die3','p_die4','p_die5',
                  'p_pull', // the serve wind-up: the racket dropping behind him while the pull is drawn
                  'o_idle1','o_idle2','o_bounce','o_bounce2','o_toss','o_smash','o_swing1','o_swing2',
-                 'o_run1','o_run2','o_run3','o_run4','o_run5','o_run6', // the rolled 6-frame cycle (_runroll.py; the model drew 6, and a clean 6 beats a fought-for 8)
+                 'o_run1','o_run2','o_run3','o_run4','o_run5','o_run6','o_run7','o_run8', // the rolled 8-frame cycle (_runroll.py; the friendly refresh landed a full 8 again)
                  'x_ump','x_boyrun1','x_boyrun2','x_boyrun3','x_boyrun4',
                  'x_crowd','x_crowd2','x_ads',                 // CENTRE COURT (grass) — also the fallback set
                  'x_crowd_c','x_crowd_c2','x_ads_c',           // TERRE ROUGE (clay)
@@ -2129,8 +2129,8 @@ export function render() {
     // the racket side. One `* sv.facing` fixes it for both players and both tours; it was wrong in
     // the men's world too, it just took a second body to notice.
     const mine = sv.side === 'P';
-    const bx = sv.x + sv.facing * (mine ? -bounceDx() : BOUNCE_IDLE.oDx);
-    const by = Math.abs(Math.sin(G.idleT * BOUNCE_IDLE.tempo)) * (mine ? bounceApex() : BOUNCE_IDLE.oApex);
+    const bx = sv.x + sv.facing * (mine ? -bounceDx() : (tour.oDx ?? BOUNCE_IDLE.oDx));
+    const by = Math.abs(Math.sin(G.idleT * BOUNCE_IDLE.tempo)) * (mine ? bounceApex() : (tour.oApex ?? BOUNCE_IDLE.oApex));
     drawBall(bx, by, sv.z);
   }
   // hot-ball ghost streak: a fast rally ball drags three fading ghosts behind it. It gated on