Oliver: from the Runner on the zombie game is very hard. Measured with
the ring bot: the win rate fell off a cliff wherever an opponent's
width crossed ~3.3 m, the auto-run's reach from the centre (at the
Steward, and again at the Seller), and from there every line could be
painted. Legs and flub decay moved nothing.
Every match opponent's spread is now capped at 3.0 m (matchWideMax),
and the put-away chance runs 0.15 to 0.8 instead of 0.2 to 0.85.
Level 10: the Runner goes from 44% to 68% of points, the Champion from
24% to 33%, with a steady slope between them. New test pins the cap.
v387.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: the strawberry seller as act I's first boss is way too hard,
"or it should not cross the net". His charge is the one boss move
exempt from the court band: it runs to a strike line in front of you,
and contact is death. In the story every boss's rush now stops a metre
short of the net and withdraws as before, so the threat is kept and the
reach is not. The Physio in act IV is held the same way. Only the
Champion's MATCH POINT rush in act V stays, because it is the finale.
New test. v385, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The gore bed is "Dystopian Survival", made loopable: the last ten
seconds cross-faded into the first ten, 203.5 s, as MP3 at 128k (the
decoder strips the encoder's delay, so the seam has no gap). High-pass
at 40 Hz instead of 800, level matched to the menu theme.
- The prologue no longer drops into gore for a moment: after the turn,
act I's card and cup take over directly.
- RESET STORY under the build stamp (two taps; test only). It resets
the story, league, cups and title, keeps the level, and pushes at once
so the mirror cannot hand the old act back.
- The story screens have sound: a whoosh and a boom for the act card,
applause and the rack's own click as each weapon lands, applause and
a pock per arcade door on the act's end.
- Chapters are six games: mid-boss after three, the horde after four,
the act boss after six.
v384, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
config.GORE_BED names the track that plays while the dead are being
killed (gore and every story chapter, from the transformation's
run-off on) and its loop length and level. When Oliver has the metal
track, it goes into assets/audio and these three values change; nothing
else does. v383, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- From the third attempt at a checkpoint, the death screen offers TRY
AGAIN · WITH HELP, at most two tiers, said openly. In the cup the help
is fresher legs and a longer swing; in gore, one more heart and a
slower director and horde. Every checkpoint passed resets the offer.
- The arcade shows only what the story has opened. Training and Classic
open after act I, the Climb after II, Splatter Gore after III, and
hosting a friend after IV (joining stays free). Locked doors are shown
greyed with the act that opens them.
- The non-story endings point at the story instead of the cup.
- Store switches for the free tier (act I's card points at the full
game) and a premium arcade, both off.
- The prologue's HUD no longer overlaps the kill pips.
PROJECT.md logs phases 1-4. One new test. v382, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three animated screens in the storyboard's look, built in the page over
a paused world:
- The act title card: the act's court pans in behind ACT n, its league,
its court and its goal; it closes itself after three seconds or on a
tap.
- The cup's ceremony: YOU CLEARED THE COURT, the rounds and the run's
xp, then the act's weapons drop into a rack one by one ("…and gained
these for the hordes to come"), and the chapter preview with the
mid-boss named and game 10 still "???" until the transformation.
- The act card: what the act cost (bodies, bosses, deaths), what it
opened in the arcade, and the next act's court; CONTINUE goes straight
on, THE CLUBHOUSE goes home.
The checkpoint keeps its in-game banner. Headless, every screen falls
back to the plain card it replaced. v381, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The front door now continues the story. An act is its league cup, whose
final is the boss's own body (acts II and IV play their band out of
ladder order for that), then a ten-game gore chapter on the act's court.
The chapter has no duel at all, takes the act's weapon stock into the
rack, meets a mid-boss after game 5 (the checkpoint: restock and full
blood) and the act boss after game 10, then the act card. Death is not
permadeath: it counts the attempt, banks nothing on the boards, and
TRY AGAIN restarts from the checkpoint the profile holds. Barrels hold
what the act has earned. The chapter plays the arcade's games
base+1..base+10 so every director curve keeps its slope.
Profiles from before the story start it from the top (league, cups and
champion reset; level kept). The server mirror stores the act and
checkpoint and only ever moves them forward.
Plain cards stand in for the screens (phase 3) and the transformation
(phase 2). Six new tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "das Vorlaufen und Zurücklaufen sollte durch einen Doppeltipp
ausgelöst werden". It replaces v374's flick-length rule: the long
up-flick is only the deep ball again, the long down-flick only the lob.
While his own ball flies there is nothing to hit, so a tap there is not
a swing. Two inside 0.35 s take him in to the net from the back, or back
from the net. "TO THE NET" or "BACK" pops under him. An incoming ball
keeps every tap a swing, so the two meanings never share a moment. After
his own serve it is serve and volley. The short-ball approach stays
automatic.
Measured: the base ladder is unchanged, and following the ball in still
pays against pushers and costs against big hitters. Three tests replace
v374's two; v376.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "wenn der Autoplay den Ball versucht zu bekommen, zittert der
Player schnell hin und her". Measured: the run's target flipped by
metres every other frame. intercept samples the flight every 10 ms
against a 16.7 ms frame, so any candidate on a margin (a low bounce
peaking on the 0.45 m floor, a point on the back boundary, a dying drop)
passed one frame and failed the next. Frames with no candidate sent him
home and back. 9-62 reversals inside 200 ms per five minutes.
The chase now latches its plan: the flight is fixed at the strike, so
the first point stays the answer while his legs still make it in time,
net of any time he stood (split-step, heels). Reach is judged from where
the chase began, and the target eases with a start/stop hysteresis.
After: no reversals at any rung, timing unchanged. He wastes no steps,
so he is a little stronger, mostly at the bottom of the ladder. New
test; v375.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "Steuerung ans Netz gehen", option (1), and "einen Lob vom Gegner
als Volley annehmen soll derb schmettern".
- A long up-flick (90 px or more) is the attack: the deep ball, and he
follows it in. A long down-flick is the lob, and he goes back behind
it. Short flicks keep the deep ball / the drop and leave him where he
is. Length only, never context.
- The net costs him what it costs the CPU: he split-steps (netReact)
before reading the pass, and a CPU facing a net man passes at the
line. Without both, the attacker won 78-95% of his net points.
- The smash: a ball taken out of the air at 1.9-2.5 m is struck harder
and to the open court, read late by the opponent, and pops "SMASH!".
It wins ~80% of its points.
- Lobbed at the net, he decides once whether he can get under it. If he
can, he smashes. If not, he runs it down and only blocks it back, even
if he meets it in the air. Re-deciding every frame smashed every lob.
Measured at level 26: the base ladder is unchanged. Attacking pays
against pushers and touch players and costs against big hitters,
slicers and rushers. Three new tests; v374.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Step 4 (b), Oliver's pick. v372 measured why the ladder could not climb:
nearly every lost point was the player's own early whiff, the CPU barely
missed, and the auto-run reached everything, so no opponent dial decided
a point.
- The follow-through: a groundstroke swing meets a bounced ball up to
60 ms after its window at q 0.05. The early whiff edge goes from ~70 ms
back to ~130 ms, where the volley window had it before step 1.
- A sitter (a player ball under q 0.5) is put away with a chance that is
the ladder (0.2 at the bottom of the Climb, 0.85 at the Champion, by
difficulty in classic): clean, at the line, bounded by the rung's width.
- The player is on his heels for 0.5 s after a put-away of his own sitter.
Without it the auto-run covered the whole court and no put-away won.
- Fixed a step-2 regression this surfaced: the drop's dig-out cap fired on
every slice drive, so every low contact against the slicer was a sitter.
Measured at level 26: the Climb now slopes from 95% of points at the
Shambler to 28-39% at the Champion. The net rushers are still easier than
their neighbours. The log names put-aways. Three new tests; v373.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver on v371: the praise word is cut off on the left on the iPhone. It
is centred under the player's feet, so out wide it ran past the edge;
every pop is now clamped to the canvas by its measured width.
Step 4, measured first. The rally sim gets a human bot (taps on the timed
ring with a timing spread), a Climb mode and a lost-point breakdown. At
level 26 the ladder falls over six rungs and then goes flat: nearly every
lost point is the player's own early whiff, the CPU barely ever misses,
and the auto-run reaches everything, so no opponent dial decides points.
A quality ramp, a follow-through and CPU put-aways were each measured
and reverted; the options go to Oliver in PROJECT.md.
Shipped: in the rally modes q no longer drops from 1 to 0.43 one ms past
PERFECT; it falls smoothly to the window's edge (TUNE.qSeamless). A tap
30 ms early is q 0.86 instead of 0.61. Same window, same whiff edge. v372.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: the target ring twitches sometimes, and "shot of the day",
"textbook" etc. cover the ball. The timed ring re-solved every frame and a
small shift in the auto-run's target moved its moment by up to 158 ms in a
frame; the drawn cue now counts down on its own clock and eases toward
each solve (p99 jump 100 -> 17 ms). The rally's praise word rose straight
into the struck ball's path (and a serve's sat on the far bounce, where the
return comes back); it now lands under the player, behind his feet, and
stays put. Same moment, out of the way. v371.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A shot's extra gravity is its dive in flight, but it was carried through
the bounce: heavy topspin skidded away low and Oliver met nearly every
ball 0-25 cm off the grass. After its bounce a ball now falls under plain
gravity (tennis modes only), and every planner that rolls a bounce
forward switches at the same moment. The higher bounces pushed the
auto-run into volleys, so it now takes a kicking ball at the top of its
bounce, up to chest height. Median contact rises from 0.42 to 1.13 m at
the bottom of the ladder. v369.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's v367 log: every 62-64 ms flick landed 76-92 ms early and a 97 ms
one whiffed — v366's touch-down timing for flicks was wrong; a flick is
timed by its swipe (flickLead now 0, the age is still logged). The
early-swing half-volley rescue checked the bounce against the long volley
window and then expired on the bounce frame; it now uses the shorter
groundstroke window. The log also records where he stood when the
opponent struck and where the auto-run was taking him on a miss. v368.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
From Oliver's first swing log (cup vs the Brute): 13 of 22 hits were
perfect, 9 badly early or late — mostly forward-right flicks — and the
weak balls became seven "passed you". Every hit was a flick, and flicks
still swung only at the flickMin crossing while the timed ring says "touch
now": they are now timed from touch-down too (capped at flickLead 0.1 s).
The log gains its other half: a THEM line per opponent shot (kind, pace,
where it lands relative to you, coming in) and "never swung" judged per
incoming ball instead of once a point. And an early swing on a low ball
digs it out as a capped half-volley instead of whiffing. v366.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver wants to hand over a log of why he missed balls. It existed behind
a scoreboard tap but was gated on G.mode === 'tennis', so the Climb, the
cup and training (which run as 'splatter') logged nothing. It now writes
in every rally mode: hits with shot, tap age and any quality cap, misses
with the new let-it-bounce reason, and a WON/LOST line naming why each
point went. Tapping the open log copies all 200 entries with a header.
Its first catch: the gold ring went gold at a distance, which is too
early for the slow balls steps 1-3 brought in. It is now timed off the
ball's real path to his reach (against where his run is taking him):
gold means touch now. ringTime 0 restores the old ring. v365.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Step 2 of the rally rework: eight styles as dials on the opponent rows —
pusher, retriever, slicer, big hitter, baseliner, touch, net rusher,
all-court — read where the CPU chooses its shot (moonball, drop, lob,
spin), plans its approach and serves (serve and volley sprints in). The
walk-on names the style in one line so the player can plan against it.
A player lobbed at the net now backpedals and blocks, like the CPU.
Oliver on v363: the down-flick "always felt like a lob". The length is read
at contact and a thumb has usually travelled on; on the continuum even
50 px floated the ball. Below dropMax (90 px) it is now the drop, above it
the lob. Also un-flakes the machine-squeak test (seed 31337). v364.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Step 3 of the rally rework, Oliver's pick: in rally modes the down-flick
is soft, always, and its length is how far — a dying drop just over the
net at one end, an attacking lob over a net man at the other. One gesture,
one meaning; not the context-armed lob that was cut.
Ballistics from the cut lob (pace derived from the apex); backspin lives
on ball.spin and every bounce planner reads it, netplay sends it. Against
the CPU it was returned ~100% until the real-tennis reasons went in: soft
balls are read late (disguise), a net man reacts to a pass and backpedals
from a lob, and a lobbed or dug-out reply is a weak block. Four new tests;
v363.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver after step 1: much harder, stuck at the Steward, "trotz gutem
Timing nicht mehr bekommen". A tap only proves it is a tap when the
finger lifts, so the swing started 100-150 ms after he meant it; the old
volley window hid that, step 1's groundstrokes did not. A tap made on the
gold ring fell from q 0.82 to 0.09 (and a third were missed at 150 ms),
murky balls landed short and the opponent came in. The swing clock now
starts at the touch's age (rally modes only); flicks keep their crossing.
The opponents' legs had no ceiling: 7.3 m/s at the Runner, 15.7 at the
Champion against the player's ~6.2. Past legKnee (6 m/s) only 15% of the
growth survives, monotone, so the ladder order holds; champion ~7.5. v362.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every match had collapsed into serve, both at the net, reflex volleys at
~0.7 s per shot. The rally ball landed on the service line by definition,
the match CPU stood on the bounce and volleyed 90-100% of everything, and
the auto-run chased the earliest contact.
Rally modes only (classic + every match; gore and the duel untouched):
rally balls land deep and mistiming only shortens them (no new long outs);
each shot latches the receiver's plan as it leaves the racket — from the
back he lets it bounce and meets it falling, up to 2.2 m behind the line,
a short ball pulls him in and he follows it to the net, nobody approaches
a man already there, and a volley below the tape is a weak block. Measured:
contacts 10.5-13.7 m from the net, back-court volleys 0-8%, 0.8-1.0 s per
baseline shot. Three new tests pin the shape; v361.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixty words on the wall became a dozen. The handoff's own summary of the rule:
Jersey 15 NAMES (screen titles, rooms, cards), Bangers CALLS exactly once per
screen (the fixture, the primary button, a modal headline), Silkscreen INFORMS
(numbers, labels, chips) — and a sentence survives only where it carries a
decision. Everything else moved into a bar, a pip or the modal that opens with
the mode.
· Jersey 15 bundled subset (9 KB) and Bungee retired after one afternoon
· SPLASH: the plaque is one row, the goal line is gone (the fixture button
below said it already), the two doors carry a number each
· PICK A GAME: rooms are one word, posters are their names, the fixture is a
hero with the only second line — the whole wall fits one screen now
· MATCH SETUP: unnumbered blocks, the meters' legend once instead of a
description per court, no summary footer
· DIFFICULTY: three pips instead of three sentences
· TRAINING: the revanche is a full-width row, rungs are numbers, the list
ends on the league that opens the rest of the ladder
· VS: three paragraphs became YOU / HOST / JOIN
· MODALS: one rule per row (the sub was the lead again in other words), the
blood pool as pips on that same line, and the walk-on's two levels in ONE
face at ONE size — a comparison drawn at two sizes is a headline with a
footnote (Oliver)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The tournament is the canonical path, so the game finally says so. The splash's
primary button names the next cup fixture and enters the draw; the poster wall
moved one tap down and deals three named rooms (the season, the training, out of
competition) with the cup at the top. Two profile fields remember every attempt
— rounds ever reached per league, and the body that put you out — so a lost cup
is a line on the board instead of a null event, and the training court offers
that body first, marked. The promotion names what waits in the new league.
Overlays consolidated in the same pass: three modal drawers became one box with
a masthead, hairline-separated rows and a real footer button (any tap still
dismisses), and the run-end summary wears the same box — headline, xp, mark, and
the fixture with ENTER THE DRAW beside PLAY AGAIN. The cup's own exit is a
ceremony now: OUT IN THE QUARTER-FINAL, your best standing beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The lingering doubles were a real bug, not a taste problem: racketAI's
!incoming return kept the last chase's vx/vz on the body, so the speed
ghosts trailed a zombie that had already stopped. The velocity dies with
the chase now (tested). The look is halved with it: ghost alphas
0.22/0.10 -> 0.11/0.05, trailK 0.05 -> 0.035 — a hint of speed in the
corner of the eye, never a second body.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, same day: 'die Gegner sind jetzt etwas zuu einfach.' The habit takes
four same-lane shots to learn (was three) and the wrong-foot costs about a
third less on every dial: surpRead 0.85->0.6, surpSlow 0.45->0.3, surpFlub
0.35->0.22. The whiff-window test pin rides down with it (0.25->0.15); the
slower-than-the-coach pin still holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four answers to one phone report:
- THE READ: repeat a lane and the opponent anticipates it; break the habit
and it is wrong-footed for that ball — scaled by rung, so surprise is the
weapon that opens the ladder past the HEAD COACH (TUNE block THE READ).
- The opponent walk-on is a real modal now (head, punchline, tap to dismiss)
in arcade, tournament and training — readable without a clock.
- THE TRAINING COURT: third card under ZOMBIE TENNIS, pick any rung, one
game at a time, the felled body walks straight back on, nothing banks,
bleeding out is a popup instead of a death. mode_train.png rolled in the
banner style.
- MOVEMENT READS: sprinting feet kick per-court dust and fast bodies leave
a two-ghost speed streak (trailMin gates both; feel verdict pending).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, on the build: "all good but the lob. please remove it - this is
totally unpredictable."
Reverted in full — oppAtNet, farBody, TUNE.lobArm, TUNE.lobApex,
SHOT_DEPTH.lob, the branch in doHit and its two tests. The forward flick is
the smash it always was. Everything else from that commit stays: the pace
feedback (streak, crack, camera kick) and the death match's blood alignment.
The reason is worth more than the code, and PROJECT.md carries it as a rule:
a gesture whose MEANING depends on where the opponent is standing is
unpredictable however well the shot is tuned. It is the same objection
input.js already states about the slingshot — the direction you moved is the
thing you asked for, no invisible modes — and the written comparison let
option (c) past it on the argument that context cannot mis-fire. It can: you
do not track where the far body is standing while a ball is coming at you, so
one thumb movement produced two shots for reasons you were not watching. The
LOB word at contact explained the surprise; it did not prevent it.
If it comes back it needs a gesture of its own. The ballistics are solved and
are in the history at 4f4534e.
111 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three from Oliver.
THE LOB. He picked option (c) from the written comparison — "no additional
gesture to learn" — and corrected the premise: the zombie does come to the
net (racketAI chases to the far service line, the classic CPU to z 9.5). So
the forward flick keeps its one meaning, "put it deep behind him", and the
game picks the trajectory that actually does that: a smash while he is back,
over his head once he is in. oppAtNet() is the whole switch, and it reads the
BODY, not O — in the match O is the invisible tennis body and only moves
between points, so it would have answered "on his mark" all rally.
lobArm 7.0 m is measured, not taste: a lob peaking at lobApex passes a man 7 m
from the net at almost exactly CONTACT.maxY, so the shot arms exactly as far
out as it can still clear him. The pace is derived from the height, so the same
arc comes off the baseline and off mid-court, and SHOT_DEPTH.lob is deeper than
deep — at the ordinary deep target the ball passed 2.05 m over him at the edge
of the band, which is inside his reach.
PACE, SEEN FROM THE STRIKER. "the opponent sees the ball really fast - the
player barely sees the speed increase." Measured: the ball is the same ball on
both phones, the camera is not — it compresses your own ball into the distance
and expands theirs as it arrives. Pace untouched; three channels added on the
striker's side: the ghost streak now reads pace (3-8 ghosts, was 3 at every
speed), the crack is pitched by it, and a fast ball kicks the camera. The
serve's own ladder is 49.2 plain / 50.8-52.4 hard, because serveArc's loft
margin takes 10% of the +9 back — widening that is his call, and PROJECT.md
records the knob and the risk.
THE DEATH MATCH. "each player has 8 blood points but the player explodes for
the winner already at 0:40." Two clocks: a game is four points, a life is
eight. A won game is only a game now (flash, serve, heal); the burst moved to
the death itself, on the dead message, where both phones agree. The summary
waits 1.4 s for the gore, because update() freezes the world on G.done and
would have hung a still frame of an explosion behind the trophy screen. And
bleedO tracks THEIR blood off the pos stream instead of our points-this-game,
which reset every game and ignored the heal.
4 new tests, 113 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A drop shadow under the scoreboard, the game/sets panel, the BLOOD panel and
every rack tile — and the same numbers in CSS on the quit chip, because half the
overlay lifting off the backdrop while the other half sits flat on it is worse
than neither. Canvas shadow offsets are device pixels and are not scaled by the
transform, so hudShadow multiplies by RES; without that a 3px shadow is three
quarters of a logical pixel on a 4x phone.
And the top of the frame now fades out of black the way the bottom already fades
into it (TUNE.standTop) — Oliver: "the bottom of the screen falls off into a
black tone.. please make the top come out of a black tone". The stand comes up
out of the dark instead of being cut off at the top edge, which also gives the
scoreboard something to sit on.
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>
A Capacitor iOS project (`npm run ios`), and the first three bullets of LATER item 2 built. The web
build is untouched and stays primary: every line here degrades to a no-op in a browser.
- HAPTICS ride the sound map, as the plan said they would: six call sites, all of them places an
sfx already fires — your racket contact, the serve strike, `killZombie` (the one funnel every
weapon routes through), `explode`, `hurtPlayer`, `killPlayer`, the weapon swap. The restraint
rule lives in `haptics.js`, not at the call sites: a minimum gap per kind, so a bomb that kills
twelve bodies is felt twice and the machine gun is a metronome rather than one long rumble.
Pinned by a test. Untested on hardware — the simulator has no Taptic Engine.
- The plugin is reached through the INJECTED bridge, `Capacitor.nativePromise('Haptics', ...)`.
`Capacitor.Plugins.Haptics` reads like the zero-dependency answer and is silently empty without
@capacitor/core's registerPlugin — it would have fallen through to the web path inside the app
and looked exactly like a phone with haptics switched off. No package JS ships.
- PORTRAIT is enforced where it can be: one orientation in Info.plist, so the app never rotates.
That retires landscape as a surface rather than fixing it (OPEN 6). The web half is best-effort —
`orientation` in both manifests and one guarded `screen.orientation.lock()`.
- SWIPE LEFT GOES BACK. The gesture finds the screen's one visible chevron and clicks it, so the
shape of the wizard stays in the handlers that already own it. Not passive on purpose: a swipe
inside a poster card also fires that card's click, and preventDefault is what stops the screen
answering forward in the frame the chevron walked it back.
- The app has no server behind it, so `config.API` and one branch in `net.js` point the shell at the
live host by name. Consequence: the app always talks to PROD, never staging.
`node test.js` green (105) over four seeds; builds, launches and reaches the native plugin on the
iOS 26.5 simulator; swipe-back walks the whole wizard in the browser pane.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
His colour landed on the shirt while yours lands on the shorts, because he was
drawn on the roster opponent's red sheets and dyed on an arc of his own. Red is
the one hue that art cannot hang a kit on: the men's shorts are neutral grey at
saturation 0.05, so no rotation ever reached them, and the women's red top sits
at her skin's and her hair's hue — a dark pick was painting her arms and her
ponytail, live, on the shipped build.
So he gets his own sheets. `assets/_frontroll.py` is `_famroll`'s trick pointed
at the tennis poses — image 1 is the ten `o_*` frames composed from disk, image 2
is the player from behind — and two calls drew all twenty. He rides the PLAYER's
arcs and the tour's own mode now: his shorts dye, her whites wash. `TINT.oKit` is
gone. The roster CPU keeps the red art; it is not a person.
The setup screen shows that front too — picking a face off the back of a head was
only ever what the art allowed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
'No that's way too difficult now - I am dying constantly of out. revert
it.' aimAnchor is gone — the lane is absolute again, every out invariant
back exactly as tuned. What survives is the answer to his follow-up: the
ball sometimes flew a LITTLE RIGHT out of a left flick, because a
mistimed left flick's target sits only slightly left of CENTRE — which
is right of a player standing in the left service box. The absolute
lane's blind spot, stated the other way round.
The aimed target is now clamped to the player's own x on the flicked
side, bounded at flickWidth so a body parked in the alley clamps to the
corner rather than conjuring an out. From the left box a left flick goes
at least down your own line, from centre it can no longer cross centre,
a perfect corner flick and the crosscourt sweep are untouched, and the
outward scatter tail keeps the whole tuned out-risk. Verified in his
scene: ten rushed weak left flicks land -2.0..-2.7 where the same case
used to target -0.7..-1.3 (a visibly rightward flight); the clean full
flick still lands -3.92.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Third round of the flick report, and this was the core all along: 'when
the opponent and the player are both standing in the left service box it
is virtually impossible to flick the ball into the left out. no matter
how hard/good I flick.' The lane was absolute — a full flick asked for
flickWidth off the court's CENTRE — so the gesture saturated near a
sideline: from x -2 a perfect left flick moved the ball under 2 m and
could never pass the line, and the better the timing the firmer the cap,
because scatter was the only thing that could cross it. 'Left is
impossible, right works' was never left-vs-right: it was
toward-the-near-sideline vs across-the-court.
TUNE.aimAnchor: the anchor slides from the court centre to the player's
own x as the swipe commits (ch.x * |sway| * aimAnchor), so a flat tap is
exactly what it always was and a full flick is a full sweep from where
you stand — including past the line. Out-by-aim is a choice now, per
Oliver's explicit direction; the placement ring already turns red for
it. 0 restores the absolute lane, blendable live in the panel. Player
rally lanes only; the opponent's lanes and the centre-stated pOut
invariants are untouched. Verified in his exact scene: full left flick
from the left box lands -5 (the alley), half swipe -3.07, full right
+1.93.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Second round on the service-line flick report. The crossing-fired swing
alone did not move the feel, and Oliver's sharpened observation — the
flick only lands left when the opponent already stands left — pointed at
a magnet that does not exist: measured with the body teleported at
contact, the aim never tracks it. The real mechanism: at rushed quality
the symmetric scatter (aimError x (1-q)) outweighs the quality-shrunk
aim, so a mistimed left flick landed anywhere in a ~4 m blob around
'slightly left' — usually centre — and the eye anchors that on the
opponent. Its position was a proxy for preparation time all along.
TUNE.aimTrust: an outward scatter roll is untouched — the committed
swipe's chance of sailing keeps its exact tuned shape, flickReach stays
the only out dial — but an inward roll keeps only 0.3 of itself. Bad
timing costs width, never direction. Player lane shots only; the
opponent's symmetric scatter is its width mechanic. Verified at
worst-case q~0.08: 14/14 rushed left flicks landed left, 9/9 right
flicks right, where before it was a coin toss. The suite pins the
direction guarantee and the aimTrust/aimError/flickReach relationship.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5.5