2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 1b7fc2cdcf Both players run from a video, and the middle chip finally plays you
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>
2026-08-15 17:53:58 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 e121df569c The reference sheet was the bug: a clipped head, five scales, frozen legs
Oliver walked the sprite bench and reported the same two faults on every family:
the healthy walk loses its head, and the wounded walk's feet do not move. Both
were in the ONE FILE every zombie tennis character is drawn from — and the family
pipeline had copied it faithfully, which is the pipeline working.

WHERE IT CAME FROM. That sheet was not composed from the sprites. It was a
GENERATED RE-DRAW of the club pro, made in nine separate 4K calls, one per row
band, then stacked (gen4k.py, in a session scratchpad, untracked and now gone).
Nine calls returned nine scales, and call 1 came back with the shuffle frame
decapitated. Measured against the sprite it was drawn from, that one figure
scaled 2.341 wide and 1.996 tall where all thirty others were proportional to
three decimals: 33 px missing off the top, width untouched. The local input to
that call was exact at 2.000x. The sheet lost the head, not the sprite.

THE FIX IS TO STOP PUTTING THE REFERENCE THROUGH THE MODEL. _famref.py composes
it from the 31 z_r* frames on disk — one scale, applied once, NEAREST — and costs
no tokens. That kills the head and the five scales together, and it explains two
things in _zsheet.py that read like fudges: the fall1 re-anchor and the walk-frame
levelling exist only to undo per-band scale drift. The levelling is also what
turned a headless z_sh2 into a headless AND 13% oversized one, by reading the
missing head as a height error and scaling up to compensate.

THE GATE WAS MISSING ON THE INPUT. _zsheet.py checks what comes BACK from the
model — band count, figure count, stacked bodies, edges, palette, heights — and
nothing had ever checked the sheet handed TO it. _famref.check() re-reads the file
it just wrote with _zsheet's own detection and refuses one where any figure's
width and height scales disagree by 2%, or where a stride pair is frozen.

THE THIRD DEFECT NEEDED NEW ART. z_rw1b had the same legs as z_rw1 (15.1% against
the healthy pair's 51.1%), so the club pro has slid through both wound stages
since the day he shipped, and every family inherited it. _stride.py draws the
missing twin, and what made it work after words had failed for as long as they
were tried is SHOWING the edit: image 2 is the healthy pair side by side, the same
character performing exactly the change being asked for. The headless twin then
took the ARM-OFF pair as its example — a wounded body is a closer picture of the
edit, the same chaining the wound ladder already uses. Its gate measures three
things and prints all three: legs moved, body above the hips did not, racket kept
its bed. The thresholds are CALIBRATED on pairs that already ship, not chosen —
my first guesses rejected z_e1/z_e2 and z_g1/z_g2, both accepted art. And a twin
FILLS the racket bed instead of keying it out: the first rolls came back with 959
px of enclosed transparency against their base's 0, which would have flickered the
racket face empty/filled once per step.

AFTER, on the installed sprites — leg difference within each stride pair, where
the wounded pairs used to sit between 4.8% and 19.7%:

  r  51.1 / 68.1 / 36.7     ru 55.9 / 59.1 / 38.7
  br 40.7 / 42.0 / 26.8     gk 41.1 / 44.6 / 30.6
  sh 59.4 / 71.4 / 43.9     lj 38.4 / 45.5 / 27.4
  bb 56.5 / 67.1 / 43.2     st 51.6 / 66.1 / 35.7

All seven families re-rolled off the rebuilt reference, every play row with its
head, and all 24 family/wound-stage states alternating a real pair — checked by
instrumenting drawImage on the bench, not by eye. br and lj sit lowest on the
headless pair and are worth a re-roll if they ever read as stiff; lj needed one,
its first roll came back frozen on all three pairs with the headless row 31 px
short.

AND THE REFERENCE IS TRACKED NOW. It lived in gitignored _refcheck/, so the thing
the entire pipeline rests on was unreproducible for as long as it existed. It is
assets/_pose_ref_family.png, next to _pose_ref_serve.png, and the scripts that
build and consume it are in the repo instead of a scratchpad.

Also in here: the SHAMBLE BOB, which was a 1 px lift on a wall clock applied to
every body every frame whether it was moving or not — a held pose bobbed forever
and a corpse bobbed while it lay on the ground. It only happens while walking now,
and it steps off ground covered, which is the same rule the strides follow.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 22:45:05 +02:00