- 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>
At match point of an act's cup final the beaten finalist does not fall.
The ceremony lands (the loot, still a plain card), then the applause is
cut, the camera closes in, and on the turn he bursts and the act's boss
stands where he stood, growing into the frame with his name and
"GAME 10". He runs out of the picture to the left while the stands empty
onto the court, and game 1 of the chapter begins without a cut: the
crowd that came down is its first wave. The interlude holds serving,
spawns and the boss's AI through the scene.
The prologue is one game of tennis against a living opponent with the
old transformation exactly as written; when it hands over, act I's cup
takes the court. Two new tests. v380, 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 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>
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>
Two netplay-only finds from Oliver's two-phone session.
THE FRIEND'S STRIKE was silent: every other opponent is simulated locally
and cracks through gameplay's shared return path, but the friend's swing
runs on their phone alone and arrives as a 'shot' message that wrote the
ball and nothing else. netApplyShot now plays the same sample at the same
volume, pitched off the pace that was actually sent (strikeRate, read after
the ball is written). Both netplay modes, not just the death match.
THE REMATCH: the summary's only netplay door was THE CLUBHOUSE, so playing
the same friend again meant two trips through the lobby and a fresh code.
The relay cannot re-pair, so the rematch is the socket that is still open —
one 'again' frame and both phones reset the run under the decisions the room
already carries (same side, same mode, same court, host serves). netAgain
keeps G.net across restartRun(true) and replays netFresh, netStart's own
tail split out so pairing and rematch cannot drift into two courts. Applied,
never echoed; a 2 s window swallows the second frame when both tap at once;
a dead line refuses and falls through to the clubhouse.
Also: the dev server runs with SPLAT_AUTH= (server.py always said local dev
should), which the shared password had been 401-ing. audio.sfxTest is a new
test seam in netTest's shape. 146 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 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 draw" was tennis for the field of entrants, and nothing has been drawn
since the cup rounds went deterministic — Oliver had to ask what the button
meant, which settled it. Beside it, an unqualified PLAY AGAIN was an
instruction without a subject: both buttons read as "start something" and only
someone who remembered how the evening began could tell them apart. It carries
the mode now — GORE AGAIN, CLIMB AGAIN, CLASSIC AGAIN, TRAIN AGAIN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A 100px label in a 120px half-button left ten pixels of air, which reads as a
squeezed chip. A tall screen has the room, so the two doors stack full width —
filled primary over ghost secondary, the same shape the modal footer and the
splash already use. A short landscape cannot stack, so there the box itself
grows to 344 and the halves come out comfortable instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's second pass over the new box language. The modal is narrower and the
button spans it; every row got real spacing and the footer its own margin, so
the end screens stop reading as cramped. The xp bar is taller and its ramp now
rides the FILL — spanning the gradient across the whole track meant an early
level only ever showed one flat green inch of it. An illustrated announcement
puts its two lines beside the picture, under the headline, instead of in a
boxed row below its own icon.
The poster wall's section headings leave the announcement face to the posters
(it read as a second card headline), drop the left band and the rule, and let
air do the grouping. On the splash, OTHER GAMES gets its gap to the stats row,
and the boot shows nothing but the court, the title and the loading bar — the
plaque skeleton was still a plaque telling a level-25 player he was level 1.
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>
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>
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>
Oliver: "I start a new zombie tennis match. when playing and scoring no
fotograph flashes appear, but at a random place in the crowd some frozen
midflash circle is visible. after a few points the flashes unfreeze."
Both halves are the same cause. resetState() puts G.idleT back to 0 for every
new run, while the flash list and its "next at" live in render.js's own closure
and survive it. So the new run inherited a flashNext from the old one — no
photographs at all until the clock climbed back past it — and any flash still in
flight was left with a t0 in its own future, which makes its fade
1 - (now - t0)/life permanently greater than 1: a shutter stuck at full
brightness in the stand until something else cleared it.
tickFlashes now notices the clock moving backwards and clears and re-arms. One
guard, in the only place that owns the state, so it covers any future mode that
rewinds the clock as well. Verified on the canvas: after a rewind there is no
permanently-bright pixel in the stand, and the photographers resume within
seconds instead of staying dark.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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 tour is which body you play in, so it belongs in the look message next to the
kit, the skin and the name. Without it both phones drew the friend in whatever
tour THIS phone had picked, and a men's/women's pairing showed each player
someone their friend was not using.
`oTour()` is the one accessor — yours everywhere, theirs in netplay — and it
feeds the three things that must agree about a body: the sprite suffix, how the
art takes a colour (her whites wash, his blue dyes) and the palm the idle ball
bounces under. An older build sends no tour and falls back to ours, which is
what it did before.
The palm knobs were re-checked against the new front sheets rather than assumed
— the poses were copied, so the ball still lands under the drawn hand.
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>
Hidden behind TUNE.aimCloud rather than deleted: the reading it gives — how
much width the swipe is buying, before the ball leaves — is the only teacher
the gesture has, and the panel can flip it back live for the next look at it.
And "a little harder to hit the out" is a number: flickReach 0.62 -> 0.52,
which halves the worst-case rate from about 15% to about 7%, with the test
tightened so it cannot drift back. The shape is untouched — a perfect flick
still never sails, a badly timed full swipe still can — but a mistimed one now
lands nearer the middle than the line, which is the only half of that trade a
player who cannot see his own timing can do anything about.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The live flick readout was a ring on a ray from the player's feet — a HUD
element laid across the court, and read as one: "pretty bare bones... the line
must go away, it is distracting". It is a soft cloud on the ground now, in the
register the dust and the blood already use: it sits where the ball is being
asked to land, grows with the length of the swipe, and warms from pale lime
through gold to red as that ask approaches the width no timing can keep in. The
threshold stopped being a flip, so too hard is something you watch coming.
Three things it took to make it read, kept in the comments so the next pass
does not re-learn them: it is sized in METRES off the projection, or it is an
eight-pixel smudge at the far corner where it actually lives; it is a stain and
not an additive glow, which turned the red end yellow over green grass; and the
ramp starts pale rather than green, because green on green showed nothing at
all across the whole safe half of the range.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The rally flick was read as three lanes: sideways past 0.38 of its own length
took the whole corner, a hair under it took dead centre, and nothing lived in
between — "sometimes applied very strong, sometimes it barely does anything",
with no way to tell which one you had asked for. swayOf reads the swipe's LENGTH
as a continuous strength, exactly as the serve already did, and doHit spends
that instead of the lane vote. Keys keep the full lane; the opponent's aim has
no length and is untouched.
That is also what hands the OUT back: going out was never a choice, because
every aimed shot took the full width and then the scatter on top. Below about
0.7 of a full swipe — the line minus aimError, over the width timing can earn —
the worst mistiming in the game cannot sail it now, and above it the old risk
curve is exactly as tested.
And the aim is drawn while the thumb is still moving: the placement ring is a
receipt that arrives with the ball already gone, so the same ring is shown live
with a ray from the player's feet, cream while the ask is safe and hot once the
sway crosses that derived threshold. The receipt goes red when the shot really
is out, so the two rings together are the lesson.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The flick lesson rode the incoming ball, over the player's shoulder — the one
moment he has no attention to spare for reading anything. It moves into the
room this game already keeps for teaching gestures: the serve stance, standing
still, mimed on the apron by the very demo the slingshot lesson plays. Same
clock, same hand, same words slot — one teacher, three lessons, and nothing new
drawn over a live rally.
The words carry both halves now, SWIPE AS YOU HIT TO AIM: WHEN alone teaches
nothing, and WHAT FOR alone gets tried at the wrong moment and read as a
gesture that does not work.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The gate said `G.mode === 'tennis' || G.match`, and mode 'tennis' is two
different things: classic, and the single prologue game a gore run plays before
the court turns. Placement is not the skill that prologue is asking for.
rallyFeel() already draws exactly the line wanted — classic and zombie tennis,
the two modes that ARE rallies — so the hint rides that instead of a mode
string. Verified both ways on a phone-sized preview: the lesson beside the
player in zombie tennis, and gone under gore-opener conditions with everything
else identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Score-is-the-body was a picture: the opponent lost an arm and swung exactly as
far, lost its head and missed exactly as often. Two dials now read the same
racketStage the SKINS are picked with, so what you watch it lose is what it
loses — deliberately small (6% reach, 17.5% whiff per stage), texture under the
ladder rather than a second difficulty curve, with a test on that ceiling. An
unhurt body still returns exactly 1 and 1, and the whole thing is gated on
G.match: the gore duel's racket zombie is untouched.
And the placement flick, the mode's one act of skill, was taught nowhere on
touch — the placement ring is a receipt, not a lesson, and you only get one if
you already knew to swipe. The ghost hand teaches it now, in the same register
as PULL DOWN and TAP AS IT ARRIVES, riding the failure it answers: a run of
returns that left with no aim on them. The tap lesson still wins when both
qualify — placement is the wrong thing to teach someone who cannot reach the
ball.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
His family sheet was rolled against a description that disagreed with every picture
of him — "stained work overalls and a shapeless hat" against a green club blazer and
braces — so the 31 frames averaged the two and came out a third character. The card
portrait and the boss on court have been different men ever since.
He now anchors on his own throw frame redrawn at the grain the other bosses ship at
(density 0.34 against the legacy 0.21, tracked as _ref_gk_hi so the roll stays
reproducible), and the description names what the art actually shows. The hopper
basket is called out as gone: a prop at head height is the one thing a 31-figure
sheet cannot hold.
Rolled through _famroll, cut with _zsheet. Density 0.26 -> 0.36 across the family.
First roll came back with a lilac panel over the top rows and was thrown away — the
cutter keys the corner, so that panel would have shipped as opaque background.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six head icons recut by hand; the new cuts are square, and a 1:1 portrait beside a
long punchline pushed the head against the left edge while the line itself ran off
both. The sub lines now wrap to the same room the title already shrank to fit, and
the plate grows with them — one line each still lands on 30/44, so every card that
fit is pixel-identical.
THE BULK is THE BRUTE: the gore mode's stats screen has called that body THE BRUTE
since it dragged a pole, and one character may not carry two names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The trick: hard serve, slight slide, and the first ten opponents died where
they stood. Measured headless — that serve was returned 0 times out of 24 at
EVERY rung. Three things were wrong and all three were the same thing: he
waited on the tennis mark 1.3 m off the centre line (covering the T, conceding
the whole corner), he took no first step, and he chased the ball's LIVE
position, which during a serve is still up by the server's baseline.
Now: he waits on the bisector of the serves he has to cover, takes a
returner's first step (serve-scoped — the rally is untouched), and runs at the
bounce instead of at the ball. The slid serve comes back from rung one; a
flush serve into the very corner of the box still aces the bottom of the
ladder, which is the reward placement is supposed to earn.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six sessions of asking an image model for a row of running figures, and it
never once drew a gait: three phases repeated with the same leg leading,
"ropeskipping, not running". A frame-by-frame LEFT/RIGHT skeleton spec, a
closing checklist, a loop clause, six figures instead of eight — all lost.
One 5-second image-to-video clip has no such problem, because it moves a
body instead of drawing poses. ~$0.42 a character through the key already in
.env, pose pinned at BOTH ends (pinned only at the front, she rotated into
profile halfway), stride period MEASURED off the frames rather than sampled
by eye — hers repeats in 6 clip frames, his in 23 — and the phases cut and
palette-snapped through _stride.cut. assets/_vidroll.py films and cuts it;
her first frame came from one still roll that took his approved pose as a
picture instead of a paragraph.
Wired: runN probes the sheet through SK() so the women's tour counts HER
frames, the player is no longer clamped to a two-frame pair, runHz 2.4 ->
1.9 ("this looks like roadrunner"), and the bench grew two PLAYER stops —
a cycle only ever seen mid-rally is a cycle nobody has watched.
Also in: the difficulty retune (medium is a real step above the shipped CPU
and is where `smart` first appears; hard stepped back off superhuman; easy
closed its gap) with MEDIUM's dial-for-dial pin to TUNE removed from the
test, and Oliver's own transparency fixes on the male frames.
SPRV 138 — the frames were right on disk and wrong on screen for an hour
because assets are cached for a year unless the ?v= moves. main.js v269.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Multiplayer setup moves out of a canvas modal and a prompt() dialog into one
menu screen: your name, the two ways to host, and the friend's code. The socket
opens from the menu and the game stays parked behind the overlay until the room
fills — netHooks.paired takes the court one line before netStart writes to it —
so the room code can carry a real SHARE button and a wrong code is a typo you
fix rather than a CONNECTION LOST card over a match that never began.
The name is the world board's name (stats.saveName), crosses on the existing
look message, and the scoreboard finally names the person instead of CPU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things off the back of the picker.
THE LIVE PLAYER on the setup screen is the real sprite through the real tint, not
a mock-up of the pick — so the menu cannot promise a colour the court will not
keep. It redraws on every tap of a tour, a kit or a skin.
THE WOMEN'S TOUR IS NO LONGER SAT OUT. Her set is drawn head to toe in whites, so
there was no hue to rotate — the answer is not a dye but a WASH: the pick laid
over her whites at a low saturation with the lightness kept, which is how you dye
a white kit in life and gives rose, powder blue, mint, lilac. Her hair and skin
fall out of it on lightness alone, which is exactly what a dye could not manage.
THE FRIEND ACROSS THE NET now wears what they picked on their own phone. Their
look crosses on pairing, and since the opponent art is red rather than blue the
kit rides its own hue arc — safe there for the one reason it would not be on the
player's own sheets: the opponent sprites carry no drawn blood. An older build
simply never sends it and the opponent draws as before; the match still plays.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's hunch was right: the tap unlocks audio and starts a 768 KB fetch, but
the source starts seconds later inside a promise with no gesture near it. iOS
suspends an idle context in that gap, and a source started into a suspended
context is silent for good — nothing on the splash ever asks for audio again.
Resume once more when the buffer lands, which the first tap has already
authorised, and again when the app comes back to the foreground.
Intermittent because it only bites when the decode outlasts the browser's
patience: a phone, a cold cache, a slow radio.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5.5