Shape the cone by hand, and give the playground its knobs back

Oliver's tuned numbers become the defaults: beamY 0.95, beamLen 23, beamW0 0.08,
beamW1 3.1, beamOriginLift 0.44, beamBorder 0.18.

Three knobs earned their keep on the way there.

beamLen is the DRAWN length now, not only the kill range. The drawn length was
solved every frame so the far end landed on the middle of the ad strip, which
made this a control that visibly did nothing. One meaning beats one clever
behaviour -- and it pairs with beamY, since a lower plane meets the ads sooner.

beamOriginLift replaces beamOriginY: the apex is a lift ABOVE the plane rather
than an absolute height, so lowering beamY brings the near end down with it
instead of leaving it hanging at chest height with the beam sloping away.

beamBorder exposes the edge width, which was hardcoded.

And the playground is back, deliberately NOT paused. The first version froze the
world so the picture would hold still, and then nothing redrew, so every value
changed did nothing -- a still frame you cannot change is worth nothing. The
bodies are held still individually and spawning is off instead.

Also: a boolean living in TUNE has to be tested with >= 0.5. The panel steps
every key by 0.02, so one nudge set beamBand to 0.02 -- still truthy -- and the
renderer switched variants under him mid-tune.

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

config.js

@@ -240,27 +240,36 @@ export const TUNE = {
   testSpawnEvery: 0.9,// s between spawns: they keep coming
   testLevel: 20,      // the roster level pickVariant pretends to be at, so every body type can turn up
   // ---- THE LASER's wedge: aim and release like a serve, and a plane of light widens down the lane
-  beamLen: 34,      // m it reaches. Was 26, which stopped at the far baseline and read as the beam
-                    // being CUT OFF in mid-court; the player stands at z~24, so this carries it past
-                    // the baseline and up into the courtside ads, which is where light should stop.
-  beamY: 1.15,      // m — the height the plane HOLDS down the court, and the line it cuts bodies at.
+  beamLen: 23,      // m it reaches — the DRAWN length as well as the kill length. It used to be only
+                    // the kill: the drawn length was solved each frame so the far end landed on the
+                    // middle of the ad strip, which meant turning this knob did nothing you could
+                    // see. One meaning now. Tuned WITH beamY: a lower plane reaches the ads sooner,
+                    // so dropping one wants the other shortened. Oliver's numbers, 2026-08-03.
+  beamY: 0.95,      // m — the height the plane HOLDS down the court, and the line it cuts bodies at.
                     // It used to slope to the ground by about 20 m out, which meant that across the
                     // whole far half it lay flat on the grass: nothing to cut, and the split would
                     // have been invisible exactly where the crowd stands. Chest on a shambler, belly
                     // on a brute, thigh on the roller man — so a bigger body visibly takes it lower.
-  beamOriginY: 1.25,// m — it leaves the PLAYER at chest height, not the racket head. Emitted from
-                    // the racket (2.2 m) the apex hung in the air above him and read as detached;
-                    // out of his chest, level with the plane it becomes, it reads as HIS shot.
+  beamOriginLift: 0.44, // m the apex sits ABOVE beamY. It is a lift, not an absolute height, so
+                    // lowering beamY brings the near end down with it — set as an absolute, dropping
+                    // the plane left the apex hanging at chest height with the beam sloping away
+                    // beneath it. It leaves the PLAYER, not the racket head: emitted from the racket
+                    // (2.2 m) the apex floated above him and read as detached.
   beamRise: 0.14,   // fraction of the length it takes to settle from the origin to that height
-  beamW0: 0.06,     // m half-width at the racket — a POINT. At 0.35 it left the racket as a 0.7 m
-                    // bar hanging in the air rather than as something emitted from the strings.
-  beamW1: 5.0,      // ...and at the far end. It is a CONE: the spread is the point of it
+  beamW0: 0.08,     // m half-width at the racket — very nearly a point
+  beamW1: 3.1,      // ...and at the far end. It IS a cone — but a gentle one. At 5.0 the world width
+                    // grew so much faster than the projection shrank that on screen it opened out
+                    // while the court receded, and the eye read that as a flat shape stuck to the
+                    // glass. Growing slowly, the two roughly cancel and it lies in the world.
   // A/B, live from the T panel on the phone. 1 = draw the laser the way the BALL's aim band is
   // drawn: a path down the lane whose width comes from each point's OWN projection scale, so it
   // tapers into the distance and sits in the world. 0 = the solid widening cone.
   // The cone is a real projection, but it GROWS in world width (0.06 m -> beamW1), so on screen it
   // opens out while everything else recedes — which is what reads as a flat sticker.
-  beamBand: 1,
+  beamBorder: 0.18, // px of the two outer edge lines — a hairline. At 1 they were the heaviest
+                    // thing on the court and boxed the cone in.
+  beamBand: 0,      // 0 now: the CONE won, once it stopped ballooning (see beamW1). >= 0.5 is ON —
+                    // the panel steps by 0.02 and a nudge to 0.02 used to flip the renderer silently
   beamBandW: 0.30,  // world half-width of that band — CONSTANT, which is what makes it taper
   beamT: 0.42,      // s the wedge stays drawn
   dmgBeam: 8,       // what it takes off a BOSS. An ordinary body is not damaged by the beam, it is