Six sessions of asking an image model for a row of running figures, and it
never once drew a gait: three phases repeated with the same leg leading,
"ropeskipping, not running". A frame-by-frame LEFT/RIGHT skeleton spec, a
closing checklist, a loop clause, six figures instead of eight — all lost.
One 5-second image-to-video clip has no such problem, because it moves a
body instead of drawing poses. ~$0.42 a character through the key already in
.env, pose pinned at BOTH ends (pinned only at the front, she rotated into
profile halfway), stride period MEASURED off the frames rather than sampled
by eye — hers repeats in 6 clip frames, his in 23 — and the phases cut and
palette-snapped through _stride.cut. assets/_vidroll.py films and cuts it;
her first frame came from one still roll that took his approved pose as a
picture instead of a paragraph.
Wired: runN probes the sheet through SK() so the women's tour counts HER
frames, the player is no longer clamped to a two-frame pair, runHz 2.4 ->
1.9 ("this looks like roadrunner"), and the bench grew two PLAYER stops —
a cycle only ever seen mid-rally is a cycle nobody has watched.
Also in: the difficulty retune (medium is a real step above the shipped CPU
and is where `smart` first appears; hard stepped back off superhuman; easy
closed its gap) with MEDIUM's dial-for-dial pin to TUNE removed from the
test, and Oliver's own transparency fixes on the male frames.
SPRV 138 — the frames were right on disk and wrong on screen for an hour
because assets are cached for a year unless the ?v= moves. main.js v269.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Oliver, after the facing fix: still flashing, female worst. Film-strip
diagnosis in the pane: with facing pinned the racket STILL alternated —
frame 4 of the female cycle tucked it across the body, and half the frames
of both player cycles lost or shrank the hoop to cut fragments (overlapping
figures sliced by the even-spaced valley cuts).
Both cycles re-rolled with three new prompt rules that now live in
_runroll.py: the racket stays right of the midline in EVERY figure (named
again for the airborne pose, where it kept vanishing), and the figures
never overlap (no more sliced hoops — a debris-stripping pass was tried
and removed: after the recrop a real racket is indistinguishable from a
fragment, prevention beats cleanup). The model returns 2-row grids at
times; a coherent band is cropped and cut. Installed: racket-side spread
+0.01..+0.05 across all frames of both cycles (was a full side swap).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: 'the motion seems very flashy and unnatural'. Two causes, both
measured: drawChar centres a frame by its total width while the racket's
reach varies across the cycle, so the BODY teleported sideways up to 28
source px on a frame swap (the female player was worst) — every frame is now
padded until its lower-third centroid sits at the frame centre (residuals
±0.2 px, the normalisation lives in _runroll.py's cut). And the hardcoded
4.5 cycles/s was tuned on 2-4 near-duplicate frames; on eight real phases it
was a strobe — rolled sets stride at TUNE.runHz (2.4), old art keeps 4.5.
In-pane: body wobble down from ~36 device px per swap to 3.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The old run frames were generated one at a time and it showed: 91/110/92/98 px
of body-width drift, duplicated poses drawn differently, no racket. Each
character (player m/f 6 frames, opponent m/f 8) now comes from ONE 4K call
anchored on a composed identity reference of its settled frames — the broken
run art stayed out of the reference on purpose. Stride-gated, cut with _fine,
judged by eye per roll. drawChar probes run8/run6/run4/run2.
Side effect: the male opponent's old run art faced LEFT against the
art-faces-RIGHT convention — he had been moonwalking right since install.
Fixed by drawing the new rows to the convention.
Pipeline lessons recorded in PROJECT.md (the model negotiates the count; a
back view has no direction; the racket clause goes early and loud).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5