Four more batches: the racket zombie's two wound stages with their stride twins,
the umpire and the ball boy's sprint, his mop-carry walk and his mopping cycle.
Detail roughly doubles on all of them.
Also stripped the last dozen key-colour pixels off p_die5's rim — edge pixels
only, because a racket's strings are legitimately pink and a blanket filter
would eat them.
The brute's wound stages and the chair spectator are re-running as smaller
sheets: four figures carrying a dragged pole or a held-up chair either merge
into one frame or run off the canvas whatever margin the prompt demands, so
they go two at a time.
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>
- boy runs on a proper 4-phase cycle (stride, pass, mirrored stride, pass)
- server holds the crouched bounce stance through pretoss instead of
flickering to standing idle; hand-down/hand-up frames sync with the ball,
which now bounces floor-to-hand height
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- fake topspin: quality shots dive under extra effective gravity, so real pace
(up to 28 m/s) can clear the net AND land in — without it the net-clearance
loop silently slowed every shot to a coverable lob, which is why the CPU
returned everything regardless of aim
- no grass-scraping: balls below ankle height (0.24m) are past you, both sides
- CPU: 0.45s shot-read delay, 4.3 m/s legs, half-speed recovery between shots.
Verified gradient: perfect/good corner shots are winners, center balls and
weak shots still come back
- player aimed shots go wider (3.3m vs 2.7m)
- ball boy: nano-banana mirrored stride frames (was stride-vs-hop), height
1.2m, z-ordered against umpire and CPU (no more running over the chair)
- umpire voice through a synthesized convolver reverb — center-court PA echo
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- intercept() now picks a point the runner can actually reach in time
(travel-time feasibility), falling back to the deepest hittable point
- tapping no longer slows the auto-run: anticipating a shot doesn't lose it
- assist legs slightly superhuman (1.15x) so positioning is guaranteed
- ball boy run frames regenerated with contrasting stride/gather poses
(previous pair was near-identical, which read as no animation)
Verified: 10/10 CPU shots end inside the honest 1.3m contact radius with
zero manual movement.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- ball boy redesign: spawns at the sideline on point end, sprints across at
the ball's depth with a proper side-view run animation, scoops the ball
mid-run, despawns off the other side (no more net-post idling/sliding)
- hit feel: ball snaps to the racket at the contact frame so hits visually
connect; contact radius tightened 1.7 -> 1.3 (assist does the positioning,
the tap must be honest); missed swings now play an audible swish
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
