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/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