Oliver: "what is this white flashing while applause in the upper right corner of
the crowd". With the photographers switched off entirely it was still there, so
it was never them — it was mine, from this morning. The top fade is baked into
the cached stand, and drawRaisers was painting a spectator's box straight over
it with only the dim applied. Every time that spectator stood up his box lost
the fade and lit up; every time he sat down it came back. Measured on the canvas:
a 146-luminance jump, twice a second, in exactly the two places raisers sit near
the top of the picture.
Both stand treatments now come from one function each and are applied in both
places. The gradient is built in user space, so filling a raiser's sub-rect with
it picks up the right alpha for free. Probed again after the fix: zero bright
pops during applause and during the wave, against the four hot spots before.
While chasing it, two real detector faults turned up and are fixed too: a blob
may not be a pale block (a re-rolled cream shirt is "new material" by the
stand-turned-person test but nothing rises), and it may not cover something
already bright (a genuine arm drawn over a white shirt deletes a white block,
which flashes just as hard). 94 raisers survive both rules.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "in the upper parts of the crowd there seems to be a lot more action
going on, but I can barely see it because the hud is covering it." Measured, 31
of 134 raisers were being drawn under the board or the blood panel — a quarter
of every cheer spent where nobody can see it.
The cause is structural: a raise is only detectable where there is empty stand
above somebody's head, and the sheet only offers that above the top row of each
seating block. One of those rows is at the very top of the picture, which is
where the scoreboard lives.
So both ends are fixed. The two arms-up rolls now ask for the standers to be in
the lower two thirds only, and the pass drops any raiser whose box centre falls
under the board or the blood panel. 92 of 101 raisers now sit below the board's
bottom edge, against 103 of 134 before — and because "how many join in" is a
fraction of the table, pruning the invisible ones makes every cheer denser where
it counts. Measured churn during a won game: 2-5.5% of the mid and lower stand
changing every 90 ms, against 0.1-1% under the HUD.
The re-roll also came back with 41 spectators owning both raised poses, up from
28, so more of them clap rather than just going up and down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "it is too dim to see anything on the centre court and the dark court."
Both were the same mistake — standBack was ADDED to a court's own dim instead of
being the default it falls back to. Centre court's crowd sheet is a night-lit
navy that is dark to begin with, and the night court dims the hard-court sheet
on top of that, so the pair of them went to mud.
standDim is now court.dim ?? TUNE.standBack, plus the rot. Centre court carries
a 0.06 of its own, the night court comes down 0.62 -> 0.5 (it no longer has the
base added to it), and clay and hard keep the 0.22 that was approved.
Centre court's sheet is also graded off a LIFTED target now — the old crowd it
matches sat at a mean luminance of 39 against clay's 96, dark enough to throw
the new roll's detail away before any dim ran. A 0.72 gamma on the target brings
the sheet to 60 and the faces come back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "when clapping I barely see any movement at all now.. also all of the
art could be colored a little more dim as it is perspective wise farther in the
background and should not steal too much attention" — and then, "can't we make
an animation sprite sheet of the new crowd?", which is the answer to the first
half of the first one.
A third roll (_crowdroll.py mid) takes the arms-up frame as its reference and
asks for the same standing people with their hands brought together in front of
their faces. It drifts by 53% of its pixels and that does not matter: the same
filter keeps only what was stand and became person. 100 arm blobs in pose 1, 74
in pose 2, 134 spectators once merged, 28 of them owning BOTH poses — those 28
cycle between two raised poses, which is a clap; the rest alternate with the
seated frame, which is arms going up and down.
The point is the cycle, not the pose. A raiser is ~8x6 logical px on a phone and
one that appears and then holds for a second is not something the eye catches;
arms moving at 3.5 Hz is. Measured: 2-3% of the stand band now changes every
90 ms during a won game, against near zero before.
The sheets are one file per court now — three frames stacked, graded as a single
image so they cannot drift apart in colour — and x_crowd2/_c2/_h2 are deleted.
TUNE.standBack 0.22 dims the crowd and the boards on every court before the
night court's own dim and the splatter rot, in the one function both the cached
backdrop and the live raisers already read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver on the first pass: "the new lighter areas read as rather sloppy artwork.
please regenerate the crowd art and make it more detailed. also the animation
also looks pretty artificial. the flashes from the fotographs are too rare and
the whole thing somehow does not translate well to the other courts. also when
the opponent makes a point there is an aww-sample (which has an applaus trail)
so the crowd should still clap but more subtle."
The paint pass is deleted — recolouring blobs of an old drawing is not drawing,
and the reason it looked necessary was a wrong conclusion: the roll scripts read
OPENROUTER_API_KEY from the repo's .env, so the art could be rolled all along.
_crowdroll.py rolls the crowd itself: individually drawn spectators with hats,
sunglasses, drinks, cameras, flags and banners, empty seats, stairways, and
three zombies sitting in the middle of it behaving like furniture. ONE roll now
serves all three courts through a per-channel histogram match onto each court's
old palette, so anything the art gains shows up on clay and at night too.
_crowdpass.py keeps only what was empty stand in the seated roll and became a
person in the clap roll — the raised arms, 1.2% of the sheet — so the clap frame
cannot drift by construction, and writes a box around each pair of arms into
src/crowd.js. render.js raises ONE SPECTATOR AT A TIME out of that table, each
on their own period: the 16-column strip swap moved a seventeenth of the crowd
as a block, which is what read as machinery. crowd.pop is now a head count, so
the same code covers a dozen people and the whole stand, and past 0.75 the wave
travels person by person.
aww() sets a small crowd.pop of its own — the sample is a groan that settles
into applause, and the stand has to match what you can hear. flashEvery 5.0 ->
1.9, because at a five-second mean over a stand this wide nobody ever saw one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The wobble was never the animation. x_crowd2 was a RE-ROLL of x_crowd, not a
pose of it — 13-16% of its pixels differed, over faces, torsos, seat backs and
the railing — so swapping 16 columns at 4.5 Hz re-hashed a strip of crowd twice
a second. assets/_crowdpass.py rebuilds the pair: the clap frame is now the
seated frame plus 36 genuine raises, each contained in ONE of render's columns,
so any column swap is seamless by construction and an empty column is invisible
instead of being a wobble. The three courts are one composition in three
palettes, so a raise found in one court's roll is transplanted into the other
two through a colour map learnt from the aligned seated pair.
The same tool paints the crowd, because at ~8 logical px a spectator detail can
only mean chroma and silhouette: 55 shirts and 44 heads of hair in colours the
court does not own, 28 caps, 4 flags above the heads, 8 emptied seats, 8 people
permanently standing — and 3 who are already turned, grey-green, mid-row, who
are also the only three who never applaud.
Movement, one draw path and three behaviours: applause scatters per column, a
WAVE crosses the stand for a moment big enough to deserve one (crowd.pop >=
0.75), and with nobody cheering ONE column stands for a third of every
TUNE.fidgetEvery, so the stand between points is no longer a photograph.
Paparazzi now scale with the moment: cheer() records the size of it (vol was
already exactly that at every call site) and queues shutters proportional to it,
drained at a fifth of the normal gap. pop is held at the loudest while an
applause is live, so a won rally landing inside a match-point ovation cannot
demote the stand to a polite clap — that rule has a test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The crowd sat in the dark, worst of all in splatter mode where you spend the
game. Both crowd frames get an identical gamma lift (means 30/14/39 ->
42/22/56) and the rot tint drops 0.5 -> 0.26. The curve MUST stay identical
across the two frames or the clap swap flashes brightness; _sheet_crowd1.png
keeps the pre-lift original.
- The splatter hint led with the tap when pulling is the whole gesture. It now
reads PULL BACK TO AIM - RELEASE TO FIRE, and after 1.5s of sitting in the
serve stance untouched a ghost thumb slides back while chevrons grow up-court
on a loop. Pull back, shoot forward is an inverse relationship that a line of
text cannot carry on its own.
- The mop boy has three sheets instead of two: the push cycle now plays ONLY
while he is stopped and working, a new carry sheet walks him upright with the
mop shouldered, and the run sheet stays for the tennis-mode ball fetch. He was
mopping thin air the entire way to the stain.
Sheet note: frames 2 and 3 of the carry sheet merged (a mop handle bridging the
gap), so it is cut at the true column gaps plus the thinnest column inside the
merged pair, then common-scaled — same technique as the brute stride sheet.
26-game soak clean. Serve returns 133/150 = 88.7% +/-2.6%, 30 human-tapped
points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Umpire chair moved courtside (UMP_X 5.6, was 7.1 — which projected to
x=272 on a 270px-wide portrait canvas: literally one pixel off-screen).
Tap-cheat coords follow the constant.
- Generated pixel-art night crowd (x_crowd.png) replaces the tier stripes +
random dots; drawn in 16 columns that bounce independently while the crowd
cheers. Old procedural crowd kept as the loading fallback.
- Generated courtside sponsor boards (x_ads.png): ACEADE, TOPSPIN & CO,
VOLLEX, NETTO GRIP, SLAMWICH — tiled at native aspect so lettering is
never half-cut at any viewport width. Replaces the 'SPLATTER OPEN' text.
- One rot tint over crowd + boards driven by the shared paletteT() (new
helper), so the stadium dims into splatter and brightens back for duels.
Verified: fresh origin; tennis + splatter screenshots (boards tile cleanly,
crowd reads, tint dims, umpire on-screen beside the court); umpire triple-tap
works at the new chair position; tennis serve benchmark 33/36 across two runs
(first 12 was flub noise); no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
