5 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
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
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 e1ce2486c0 SERVE UP was dropping you into gore whatever you picked
THE MENU BUG, and it explains three reports at once. cStart's handler was
`addEventListener('click', start)` — and addEventListener hands a listener the
MouseEvent as its first argument, so `start(modeId = pickedMode)` never saw its
default: modeId was an EVENT OBJECT. `G.classic = modeId === 'classic'` was
therefore always false and the zombie branch never fired. Picking CLASSIC or
ZOMBIE TENNIS on the setup screen did nothing at all; SERVE UP always started
the gore mode. A default parameter only applies to `undefined`, and a click
handler always passes something. `() => start()`.

That is also why "in normal tennis i dont see the ball circles and the serve
hint bar": there was no normal tennis to be in. Both are drawn unconditionally
in render() and the tennis struggle hints are already mode-gated correctly.
Verified through the real menu after the fix: CLASSIC gives mode=tennis with
no bodies on court, ZOMBIE gives match=true against the SHAMBLER in its own
body. Every other bare handler in the codebase takes no parameters — checked.

THE MOP BOY had the same class of bug one layer down. sendBoy was called and
mopWorthIt() refused: it tests `d.z >= COURT.netZ - 2`, the NEAR half, because
in the gore mode everything dies on the near court. A match's blood is all on
the FAR side, where the body stands and bleeds through four wound stages, so
the boy could never qualify. The near-side bias stays; the match is the
exception.

DANIEL was being dropped, not missing. Two causes, both mine: the asides were
queued at 0.7-1.5 s and matchPoint fires the score call at 0.4 s with a clip
over a second long — voice() drops anything that would start while he is still
talking (one man, one microphone). And asideEvery is 55 s, a whole match game.
Delays moved past the score call; matchAsideEvery is 15 s, which fits a mode
whose events are a limb and your blood rather than a wave of bodies.

THE FALL: quicker down, longer on the floor (0.09/0.11/2.0/0.30). And it was
genuinely SHRUNKEN — the generator draws fall rows smaller than standing rows
(the brute's buckle came back 190 px against a 224 px stance) and _zsheet's one
global scale preserved that faithfully, so the body shrank the moment it
started to fall. A fall row is anchored on its own buckle now, which must draw
at standing height. All seven generated families re-cut: 224/153/98/181 against
the hand-made racket family's 224/154/85/179 — the convergence is the check.

THE FLICK: 0.42 made going out impossible, which fixed the 8-in-10 bug and
overshot it ("too easy. i must be able to play out"). 0.62 puts risk back where
it belongs — ~15% out at quality 0, 5% at 0.75, and never on a perfect flick.
The test now asserts that shape: bounded, monotonically falling, zero at 1.

59 tests green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 20:07:02 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 cba2fb8a8b One roll, one character: the whole zombie family from a single sheet
Nine sheets meant nine chances for the character to drift, and all day it took
every one of them — a brute that was three different brutes, a corpse that came
back a living man. Asking for the WHOLE family in one image removes that by
construction: one roll, one light, one palette, 31 figures.

What was missing was the way back down. _fine.py cuts a single row; a family
sheet is nine. _zsheet.py is that step and nothing else — it reuses _fine's
keyer, block detection and column cutter, and adds the two things that have to
be GLOBAL or the family breaks:

  SCALE    taken once from the play row's standing frame. Per-band scaling would
           make the serve strike the same height as the idle stance, and the game
           sizes a sprite off its own PNG height. Measured after: serve 319,
           prone fall 83 — the racket family's are 307 and 85.
  PALETTE  taken once from the largest figure anywhere, so a wound row cannot
           quantise onto slightly different colours than the row above it.

The enclosed magenta rule is INVERTED here, deliberately. _fine.py repaints
magenta trapped inside a figure because the generator used to fill string beds
with the backdrop colour by accident. This sheet asks for exactly that and gets
it, so the bed cuts to transparency and the racket is an open hoop.

_regen.py keeps three fixes found on the way: margins as a PROPORTION (an
absolute pixel margin means nothing to a model that picks its own resolution —
it clipped 3 rolls in 4), reference sheets that fill keyed-out string beds
instead of showing the model a magenta racket, and --verify, which asks the
question no gate here ever asked: is the art already on disk what it claims to
be. It found 27 of the brute's 31 frames dead — z_brw1fall was one drawing
pasted four times, 0.011 apart where a real sequence is 0.53.

The brute is live: ZFAMS gains 'br', the KEEPER wears it. Verified in #bench,
healthy and arm-off, 54 tests green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:37:18 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 759488dd44 Recover the brute's serve and fall sheets, which I overwrote
Re-running --variant to rewrite a spec re-seeded EVERY placeholder from the
master, and placeholders are copies of the lean red-shirted man the poses came
from. That silently replaced a finished brute's bounce, toss, strike and four
fall frames with racket-zombie art. I restored z_br1..4 by hand afterwards and
did not notice the other seven were gone — so three subsequent passes were
regenerating sheets that already existed and had been good since this morning.

Recovered from 0e92c72, and variant() now refuses to seed over a frame that is
already there: a placeholder is a stand-in for art that does not exist yet, and
nothing else.

Then colour-matched every brute frame onto z_br1 rather than generating: five
moved from failing the palette gate to passing, with no generator calls at all.
That is the point of the correction being arithmetic — it applies retroactively
to art already on disk.

WHERE THE BRUTE HONESTLY STANDS:
  HEALTHY   11/11 — stance, shuffle pair, forehand, bounce, toss, strike, and
            the full fall. Consistent, colour-matched, done.
  ARM OFF   the play and serve frames read; the four FALL frames are standing
            figures of the wrong build entirely.
  HEADLESS  not headless — z_brw2 still has its head, and is near-identical to
            the arm-off frame it was drawn from. The `changed` gate passed it
            because SOMETHING moved; it does not know that the something has to
            be the head.

So about a third of the brute is right and it is the third that matters least —
the healthy row was always the easy one. The wound stages are the job.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 14:50:36 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 0e92c72457 ONE palette gate replaces four feature-picked ones
Oliver, on the brute's fall frames: "now the fall zombie has a different skin
tone.. man this is all so tiresome." Both halves were right. The skin IS twenty
points lighter across that sheet, and the tiresome part is mine: I had been
adding one hand-picked gate per drift I discovered — redness, then hue, then
`changed`, then no-grids — which is a loop with no end, because naming features
is not the same as comparing pictures.

`kit` names four: shirt redness, shorts brightness, shorts hue, near-white
fraction. Every character breaks a different one. The brute's shirt has no red
in it at all, so its reference redness was 0 and blood scored 70-100 against a
tolerance meant for a garment. A body face down shows a fraction of the shirt it
shows standing, so two of the four move with POSE. And nothing in that list ever
measured SKIN, which is exactly how a brute's flesh drifted across a whole sheet
with six gates green.

The palette gate asks the only question that generalises: are the big colour
areas of this frame the same colours as the anchor's? Top SIX by area — the
garments and the skin. Proportions ignored, so a pose change is invisible; blood
is never in the top six, so a fresh wound cannot look like drift.

CALIBRATED BEFORE IT WAS WIRED IN, which is the discipline I skipped all day.
Frames known to be right score 0.0-8.5; the drifts we could actually see score
12.0-15.9. The threshold is 10, in the gap. Three formulations were measured and
the two that overlapped were thrown away.

And every sheet of a variant is now anchored to that variant's FIRST sheet, not
to the stage above it. Chaining let a legal hop compound into a drift nobody
authorised — the shorts walking -9 to -19 down the wound ladder was that, and so
was this.

Its first verdict on the existing brute: br_play is the character, and every
other sheet sits 15 to 48 away from it. It would have caught all of this on the
first roll.

Also in: the GRID guard from the same session — the valley-cut rescue would slice
a 2x2 sheet into four frames of a torso above someone else's boots, turning a
loud failure into a silent one. Asked per cut PIECE, because a body is vertically
continuous and a piece with a gap in it caught two of them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 13:45:41 +02:00