The racket kept changing hands because the art disagreed with itself: p_idle,
p_bounce and p_toss held it in his LEFT hand while p_smash and p_swing used his
right, so every new frame copied whichever reference it was handed. The idle, the
bounce pair, the toss and the four wind-up frames are all regenerated with the
side named — drawn from behind, his right hand is the right-hand side of the
image, and only the racket HEAD crosses behind his back.
What separates the four wind-up stages is how far the racket has fallen, and that
needed the racket head pinned to a body landmark per frame — above his head,
beside his ear, between his shoulder blades, at the back of his thighs. Described
as "further into it each time" it drew four near-identical poses twice running.
They are wired late in the pull, Oliver's call: frame 1 owns the first half and
the three coiled frames are packed into the top half.
assets/_derive.py is deleted. Fixing generated art by mangling it afterwards is
always worse than regenerating; three guards in _regen.py turn the bad rolls that
used to install silently into automatic re-rolls — a portrait reference canvas
(the generator answered with a 2x2 grid), a non-magenta background (a green sheet
keyed away four racket heads), and a mirrored frame.
The bounce pair is one drawing from one sheet now, differing only in the free
hand, so BOUNCE_IDLE moved to his left side and was re-measured off the sprite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The playtest list, art side. The generator had been copying the very frames I
wanted changed, so:
- The player is drawn FROM BEHIND again in every pose — standing, bouncing,
serving, swinging. He had turned to face the camera in the redraw, which is
also why he "looked at you" in different poses.
- The serve frames are back at full size. That batch had been anchored on the
toss frame, so the whole serve set came out about a fifth too small.
- The runner CHARGES AT YOU down the court instead of sprinting sideways across
it, which is what he actually does in the game.
- The brute's wound stages are drawn a pair at a time from their own A frame, so
the injury stops moving between the two feet.
- The bounce frames had a ball painted into them while the game draws a live one
on top — he was bouncing two. The painted one is gone, and the live one now
falls on the side the sprite actually reaches for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
assets/_regen.py plus a batch file: build a reference sheet from the sprites in
the repo, ask for a HIGH-resolution redraw, slice with _fine.py, colour-match
each frame onto the one it replaces, install. The point of the whole thing is the
style block — the old prompts specified coarse art and got it.
It refuses to install a bad sheet. Wrong frame count, any figure touching a
canvas edge (that is what clipped z_f1 in the first place), or a redraw that is
not measurably finer than what it replaces, and the batch is left alone with a
reason printed. Re-running a batch is the fix; three of the first eleven needed
it. The bar is 1.25x inner-edge density rather than 1.5x, because a sheet that
already has blood on it starts high and a genuinely finer wounded body still
scores a smaller gain.
Done so far: both shamblers and their wound skins, the brute's walk and its two
sets of wound stages, the steward and his wound skins, the turned CPU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audited every sprite by detecting the art-pixel BLOCK SIZE each one was actually
drawn at. The set splits cleanly in two: 29 sprites are 112 art-pixels tall on a
2-pixel block — literal 2x upscales, carrying half the detail — against 200-224
for everything drawn since. z_f3 and z_bw are in the first group, z_chairt and
z_mach2 in the second, exactly as Oliver called it.
Regenerated at full detail so far: the player's idle pair, toss and smash (he is
on screen the whole game, and his own run and death frames were already fine, so
he was mismatched against himself), plus the two wounded shamblers and the
runner's three frames — where the wound skins were the worse case, since their
newly drawn second frames were full-detail and their A frames were not.
New pipeline step for it, assets/_fine.py: detect the generator's art-pixel grid
and snap to it, common-scale in ART pixels off a chosen anchor frame (so a smash
with the arm overhead stays legitimately taller), quantise back to the sheet's
own palette, and de-fringe the key colour twice — the generator does not always
return a pure magenta and the halo survives as a rim on a green court.
Still half-resolution, in order of how much they are seen: the brute's seven
wound stages, the seven opponent frames, the racket zombie's two wound skins,
and x_ump / x_boyrun1 / x_boycarry2 / x_boycarry3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The umpire is situational again. Each line is tied to the thing that justifies
it — a new variant appearing, the court filling, one crossing your baseline, a
game lost, a horde, a changeover — behind one shared cooldown, so several
triggers at once still yield one remark. The random timer pool is gone, the
interval went 26s to 55s, and ump_out_of_order, ump_let and ump_no_appeal are
deleted.
"Visually the ball is not yet at the player but somehow the player already is
hit" was real and measurable. The hostile-ball hit test reused the parry's
hypot(dx, dz*0.8), and weighting depth shrinks it: contact fired while the ball
was still 0.68 m up-court and drawn up around his head. It has its own
unweighted test now, and contact lands at 0.25 m with the ball on his chest.
The parry keeps its weighting — a racket sweep really is wider than it is deep.
On "everything is a tad too small": measured first, because higher-resolution
sprites are only half the answer. At RES 3 the player rasterises into 170
device pixels from a 112px source — upscaled 1.5x — while a far shambler is
downscaled to 78. So near bodies needed resolution and far bodies needed the
camera.
Camera: pushed back and lengthened (camZ 42->48, camF 580->760) to flatten the
perspective so distant bodies grow relative to near ones rather than everything
zooming, camY raised for a steeper look-down, horizon re-centred. Far shambler
26->30px, boss 39->45px, player unchanged, court in the same band.
Sprites: the original sheets were still in the repo at full resolution, so
nothing needed regenerating — IDLE_TARGET_H went to 224 and every sheet was
re-sliced. The sheet-to-output mapping was never recorded, so it was recovered
by matching sliced frames to existing assets by image signature: 58 came back
from sheets, the 29 without a confident match were 2x-upscaled to stay on the
shared scale, since a sprite off that scale renders at half height.
Tennis untouched: 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean, all four chapters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- white ring shows where the incoming ball will land; yellow/red ring shows
where your shot will land (red = going out) — Mario-Tennis-style feedback
- ball boys wait at the net posts, fetch every dead ball, and trot home
- canvas renders at 2x density, all sprites re-sliced at 112px; run/swing
sheets regenerated in the finer style
- assist: 0.35m deadzone + facing hysteresis kills the left/right flicker;
player reach 1.5 -> 1.7
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- new 5-pose sheets per character: idle weight-shift x2, ball-bounce crouch,
serve trophy pose (toss), overhead smash
- serve shows toss stance through the ball toss, smash frame on contact
- auto-assist: full player speed, adds depth tracking after the bounce,
and drives the run animation + facing like manual movement
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
