The playtest list, art side. The generator had been copying the very frames I
wanted changed, so:
- The player is drawn FROM BEHIND again in every pose — standing, bouncing,
serving, swinging. He had turned to face the camera in the redraw, which is
also why he "looked at you" in different poses.
- The serve frames are back at full size. That batch had been anchored on the
toss frame, so the whole serve set came out about a fifth too small.
- The runner CHARGES AT YOU down the court instead of sprinting sideways across
it, which is what he actually does in the game.
- The brute's wound stages are drawn a pair at a time from their own A frame, so
the injury stops moving between the two feet.
- The bounce frames had a ball painted into them while the game draws a live one
on top — he was bouncing two. The painted one is gone, and the live one now
falls on the side the sprite actually reaches for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both full sets through the same pipeline: stances and ball-bounce, serve toss,
smash and both swing frames, the four-frame run, and the five-frame death. The
opponent's ten frames with them. Inner-edge density roughly doubles across the
board — the serve frames go 0.22-0.32 to 0.41-0.54.
_regen.py retries a rejected batch itself now (default three attempts). A
rejection is usually just a bad roll — two figures drawn close enough that the
slicer sees one frame, or a limb off the canvas — and re-rolling fixes it without
me sitting in the loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two frames is a lurch, and he is on screen the whole run — during a horde he is
the only thing moving. Regenerated the whole cycle in one pass rather than
bolting two new frames onto the old pair, so the four are consistent with each
other, then fitted them per channel onto the mean and sd of the frames that
stay (idle + swing): mean error under 3 of 255, so he does not change colour
when he starts moving.
The pick is frame-count driven, not hardcoded — the opponent has no run3/run4
and stays on two, and the cycle RATE is unchanged either way: more frames
subdivide the stride, they do not speed it up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The umpire is situational again. Each line is tied to the thing that justifies
it — a new variant appearing, the court filling, one crossing your baseline, a
game lost, a horde, a changeover — behind one shared cooldown, so several
triggers at once still yield one remark. The random timer pool is gone, the
interval went 26s to 55s, and ump_out_of_order, ump_let and ump_no_appeal are
deleted.
"Visually the ball is not yet at the player but somehow the player already is
hit" was real and measurable. The hostile-ball hit test reused the parry's
hypot(dx, dz*0.8), and weighting depth shrinks it: contact fired while the ball
was still 0.68 m up-court and drawn up around his head. It has its own
unweighted test now, and contact lands at 0.25 m with the ball on his chest.
The parry keeps its weighting — a racket sweep really is wider than it is deep.
On "everything is a tad too small": measured first, because higher-resolution
sprites are only half the answer. At RES 3 the player rasterises into 170
device pixels from a 112px source — upscaled 1.5x — while a far shambler is
downscaled to 78. So near bodies needed resolution and far bodies needed the
camera.
Camera: pushed back and lengthened (camZ 42->48, camF 580->760) to flatten the
perspective so distant bodies grow relative to near ones rather than everything
zooming, camY raised for a steeper look-down, horizon re-centred. Far shambler
26->30px, boss 39->45px, player unchanged, court in the same band.
Sprites: the original sheets were still in the repo at full resolution, so
nothing needed regenerating — IDLE_TARGET_H went to 224 and every sheet was
re-sliced. The sheet-to-output mapping was never recorded, so it was recovered
by matching sliced frames to existing assets by image signature: 58 came back
from sheets, the 29 without a confident match were 2x-upscaled to stay on the
shared scale, since a sprite off that scale renders at half height.
Tennis untouched: 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean, all four chapters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- white ring shows where the incoming ball will land; yellow/red ring shows
where your shot will land (red = going out) — Mario-Tennis-style feedback
- ball boys wait at the net posts, fetch every dead ball, and trot home
- canvas renders at 2x density, all sprites re-sliced at 112px; run/swing
sheets regenerated in the finer style
- assist: 0.35m deadzone + facing hysteresis kills the left/right flicker;
player reach 1.5 -> 1.7
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
