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>
Oliver, three notes; two of them are here.
"when the opponent serves the player does not stand at the baseline - but
that's how it should be." setupPoint's receiving marks sat over a metre
INSIDE the court on both sides (22.5 near, 1.2 far) — where you stand to
attack a second serve, not where you wait for a first one. They mirror the
server's depth now, in the one line every serving mode shares.
"when serving results in an out there should be a second service... the
umpire should announce 2nd service and the player must get another chance."
True in tennis mode since forever and absent everywhere else: the duel, the
match and the death match had no service rule at all, so a serve long or
into the net was judged as an ordinary ground stroke — a point, and in the
match a point costs blood. The out branch of onBounce's interlude block
routes a serve to fault() instead, so the second serve, the HUD line, the
umpire and the double fault all come for free.
Three things it dragged out with it:
- fault()'s double-fault branch called pointTo — TENNIS scoring — which in
an interlude banks a number and skips the mode that owns the court. It
goes through resolveInterlude there now. Nothing had ever reached that
line from a duel or a match, because those modes could not fault.
- startDuel never reset G.serveNum: harmless while a duel could not fault,
the next duel's death loop the moment it can.
- the match puts the body back on its receiving mark for the second serve
(placeReceiver, split out of matchReady, which resets the serve number).
"Fault. Second service." is one voiceSeq — a second voice() call would be
dropped, one man one microphone. New recording via the usual say/afconvert.
The service BOX is still not enforced in the match, deliberately: this is
strictly more forgiving than what shipped. The lob gesture is OPEN 14.
4 new tests, 110 pass.
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>
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>
'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>
Oliver's service-line report: flicking the incoming ball LEFT was near
impossible mid-court at the service line while RIGHT worked, easing toward
the baseline. The lane math was symmetric to the centimetre — the defect
was latency. The swing waited for the RELEASE, so the whole gesture ran as
dead time on top of the windup: ~120 ms of lateness drops contact quality
1.0 -> 0.08, where flickReach halves the width and aimError drowns the
rest. A left swipe is a right thumb's slowest direction, the service line
leaves ~700-870 ms of budget (measured), and any swipe over FLICK_MS was
silently dead. Left + service line was the slowest gesture meeting the
shortest budget.
Now, in rally modes: crossing flickMin fires the swing (once per gesture,
rally phase only) and the vector stays LIVE — trySwing reads G.swipe at
contact, with the released flickAim carrying the aim only when the ball
arrives after the finger lifts. The FLICK_MS deadline goes with it where
the crossing can fire; it survives where it cannot (gore free-aim, the
serve strike). Serve gesture, duel, gore and keys untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 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 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>
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>
The slid-serve test asked for 6 of 10 sliced serves returned. Measured over 200
trials a seed across eight seeds, the receiver's real rate is 0.85..0.92 — so
the assertion was sound and the SAMPLE was too small: at p ~= 0.88, 10 trials
land at or below 5 with probability ~0.004, one seed in 230, and SEED=80 was it.
n is now 40 at the same 60% bar, which puts the threshold five standard
deviations below the true rate while still failing instantly if the receiver
regresses toward the 0-in-24 the test was born from. It is free: a returned
serve breaks the frame loop early, and the suite still runs in ~0.11 s.
Green on seeds 1..400.
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>
Testers asked for some control over how their player looks. From behind — the
only way you ever see him — there are two things worth controlling, and neither
needs a single new asset: the kit and the skin are one hue-bucket pixel pass over
the sheets already loaded, cached per frame and built on first draw.
The buckets are measured, not guessed, and three neighbours had to be fenced off
one at a time: the shirt's warm HIGHLIGHTS (which spattered the man with mud on
every dark pick), the drawn BLOOD on the death frames (which turned the pool
brown — the worst bug this file could ship), and the women's HAIR, which is the
same hue as his shorts and cannot be told apart from it by any rule. Her set is
played in whites and has no kit to dye, so it is flagged out and the row says so
rather than silently doing nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every run starts the ambience, and the ambience was un-ducking both court beds
at once — so once you had played the gore mode, its music followed you into
classic tennis for the rest of the session. Leaving the court is one event;
arriving is not. Each bed brings itself back and nothing else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Splatter gore no longer makes you win a game of tennis first — the mode you
pick is the mode you get, with the man you came to play already turned. The
transition itself is untouched and still reachable; it just isn't a toll booth.
The menu theme could only ever be started, never brought back, so the first
run of a session silenced it for good while the court's ambience followed you
into the menu. Starting a bed now un-ducks it too.
Three world boards instead of one: kills, opponents felled, and games taken
off the CPU, each with its own name prompt and its own row per player.
...and the gore economy stops paying a barrel for every game won past game 16,
while the shamblers, the mix and the ball machines keep escalating past the
point they all used to stop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six new opponent families (head coach, stringer, strawberry seller, chair
umpire, spectator, roller man) through the famroll/zsheet route, placed by
hierarchy into an 18-rung ladder; the champion steps up behind them.
THE DRAW: picking the tournament now rolls its own bracket in front of you —
only the final was ever settled — and what lands is what walks on.
Netplay, off Oliver's cellular report: the mid-flight early-decide was missing
its !G.net gate, so the striker judged its own outbound flight and the two
scoreboards drifted a point apart into a court nobody could serve on. The
host's court now rides the room, its scoreboard rides the pretoss stream, and
a called ball rolls to its own halt instead of freezing where the call caught it.
Plus the night court, and somebody in the stand is taking pictures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two retest findings, one root: the death match borrowed the roster's
body. Gone — nothing spawns, no walk-on card, the living opponent is the
whole picture. His damage reads as blood (bleedO: an anchor per point
taken this game, love to game point, thin drops as ever), the game
point bursts him where he stands, and IT RISES AGAIN brings him back
clean. The heal beat became a card in netplay — a modal freezes this
world while the other phone's keeps moving.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three chips under VS A FRIEND — the host's pick rides the room and the
start message rebuilds both courts on pairing. In the death match your
opponent IS the zombie: their lost points tear its wound stages, their
won points draw your blood, and bleeding out crosses the wire as the
other phone's win. The same receiver-is-judge verdicts drive the match
machinery through resolveInterlude, so the fall, the mop beat and the
burst come along unmodified. New: gushProne — the game-winning body
bleeds out on the ground, from prone-height anchors, until it bursts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One event on the toss, replayed as a real toss over O — update() already
poses the server off the phase and drops an uncaught ball back to pretoss
by plain physics, so the wind-up, the cancel and the re-toss all carry for
free. The strike's shot event overwrites whatever drifted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
VS A FRIEND on the mode screen (host a code, join a code), a ~110-line
RFC6455 relay in server.py that holds no game state, and src/net.js: each
phone plays itself near-side and the opponent's court is this one rotated
half a turn about the net. The phone a ball flies toward makes every call
on it; the striker's copy is picture. Six tests pin the rule from both
seats. No reconnect yet — a dropped radio is a card and a reload.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver benchmarked HARD against the game's own roster: "the runner in zombie
mode is way faster than the regular player in hard" — and the numbers agreed.
The RUNNER covers 6.15 m/s (racketSpeed x rung x foe.speed) with no reaction
gate; HARD's classic CPU did 5.59, only after its 0.22 s read, and ambled
back to centre at HALF speed between shots — that recovery jog was the free
points. HARD now moves 4.3 x 1.5 = 6.45 m/s, and DIFFS grows `recover`: the
between-shots factor, 0.85 on HARD where the shipped 0.5 stays pinned on
MEDIUM. Wrong-footing him still works; strolling him side to side no longer
does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"the hard mode is still too easy — make it really challenging." The dial that
was missing is aim: the CPU rolled a random lane on every shot, so a third of
everything came politely back to your racket regardless of the other six
numbers. DIFFS grows `smart` — the probability the CPU plays the OPEN court,
the corner away from P.x — and HARD sets it to 0.8: four shots in five now
make you run. EASY and MEDIUM keep random aim (MEDIUM pinned by test), so
the shipped classic is untouched below the top chip.
The rest of HARD tightened in the same pass: reaction 0.22 s, speed 1.30,
reach 1.85 m, quality floored at 0.70 under a cap of 1.0, serve 1.15, flub
one ball in a hundred. It reads your shot almost instantly, covers what it
reads, and places its reply where you are not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"using the difficulty in classic tennis I don't feel any difference" — and he
was right, verified live: G.diff arrives intact, the dials were just the
wrong ones. flub/cap/speed barely register: the quality cap trims a
distribution whose 0.45 floor never moved (EASY and HARD averaged 0.59 vs
0.70), and ±12% on aiSpeed never binds because the CPU pre-plans its
intercept. What a player reads as SKILL is how fast the CPU reacts to the
shot (aiReaction — the config's own comment says corners are winners because
of it), how long its racket is (aiReach), the FLOOR of its shot quality (a
raised qMin means every ball comes back with pace), and the serve — none of
which the first cut touched, and the serve was hardcoded 0.6-0.95 besides.
DIFFS carries seven dials now with real spread: EASY whiffs one ball in
three, reads late, swings short and serves soft; HARD reads in 0.28s, swings
1.75m, floors quality at 0.62 with a cap of 1.0, and serves 10% hotter.
MEDIUM is pinned dial-for-dial to the shipped TUNE values by test, so the
middle chip remains exactly yesterday's classic. All G.diff-guarded, so the
racket zombie and gore's opener keep their own numbers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's restructure: mode first, then what the mode asks — classic deals
EASY / MEDIUM / HARD chips, ZOMBIE TENNIS deals two sub-mode posters (ARCADE,
the exhibition ladder as was, and THE TOURNAMENT), and SPLATTER GORE stands
alone as the third top card. config.MENU is the grouping, MODES stays the four
run modes, and pickedMode stays the run-mode id — start(), stats and the
summary never learn the menu got taller. The sub-row sits inset under the
posters; sub-cards are the poster at 2/3 height centred on their scene.
DIFFICULTY is the one real gameplay addition: config.DIFFS scales the three
dials the classic CPU already reads (flub, quality cap, aiSpeed), MEDIUM
pinned by test to the shipped classicFlub/classicQualityMax so the middle chip
IS yesterday's game. Rides on G.diff next to G.classic, so restarts keep it.
AND THE FEEL SPLIT OLIVER REPORTED IS REAL: "in classic tennis I tend to miss
balls way more often" — the match's three contact helpers (matchReach 1.35,
the matchAssist floor, the short-ball chase) were all G.match-gated, so
classic played with a 35% smaller racket and no rescue on the dying drop
shot. rallyFeel() = match || classic now carries all three; gore's opener
keeps the old prologue feel on purpose.
The ARCADE poster took two rolls: the first came back a flat sticker line-up
("very constructed, not artsy"), the second anchors on the zombie poster
itself as a MOOD reference — one challenger lit at the net, the queue receding
into purple haze. Rolls in _refcheck/modebtn. The cup's stats mapping also
joins MODE_MATCH (it banks through endRun as MATCH and read back as GORE).
SPRV 117, main.js v233, 66 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's tournament freeze was the stale latch by a THIRD route:
matchFallWillPlay kept the deathmatch /4 while cup matchPoint divides by
4*need, so it promised a fall on a no-crossing point — whose synchronous
matchReady left the after-set latch scoping a dead rally. No more ordering
arguments: the latch is set BEFORE the resolve, the swallow exempts the
in-progress resolution via G.matchEarly, and every path that arms a rally
clears it in matchReady. willFall now mirrors the cup divisor exactly and
knows a mid-round game keeps its body. Regression test drives the full QF
sequence (no-crossing points, the fall, the mid-round game, game two).
And the two 'not really' reports: the trail's 0.26 alpha was tuned on the
gore palette and vanished on the bright lawn — 0.38 now, gate at 13 m/s;
oppBright 1.18 -> 1.3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The fourth mode: four rounds up the dead hierarchy (CUP_ROUNDS), each round
drawing a rung from its band, the champion always the final. It rides the
match machinery whole — cupDraw feeds the drawn rung through d.opp so every
ladder dial scales untouched; the body's pool spans the round (need-scaled
pool and divisor, so wounds carry between games); cupGameWon holds the same
body mid-round, kills it on the round, and past the final cupWon banks a
NOT-dead match run under CHAMPION OF THE DEAD CLUB. Blood carries; round one
is a single game; deathmatch stays as the arcade run. Full-run state test.
Sidequests: the ghost trail is pace-qualified (TUNE.trailSpeed) so both
tennis modes streak — pow>0.8 was only ever reached by the gore slingshot;
opponent sprites draw ~18% brighter via a load-time baked copy
(render.brighten, TUNE.oppBright) with no PNG touched; the cup scoreboard
line names the round instead of lying with deathmatch arithmetic; the rack
and the apron demo no longer draw under a trophy screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, three refinements in one breath: the frame PROGRESSION quicker
(drop 0.06+0.25 -> 0.05+0.15 — against a live rolling ball the slower drop
read as mush), the prone hold KEEPS its bench-tuned 2 s ('the lying itself
can stay that long'), and the rise row is cut ('the opponent respawns
anyway') — done() re-marks the body in its wound skin regardless, so rising
first was a respawn with extra steps. The rise frames stay in the sheets
for the bench. Wound-beat test updated to the new contract.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's retest: 'the fall never happens, the game does not continue, the
ball is gone.' Root cause: the decided latch was set AFTER resolveInterlude,
and on a point with no stage change matchPoint re-arms the next rally
synchronously — so the latch outlived the rally it scoped and swallowed
every resolution after it.
Two changes: matchFallWillPlay() gates the early resolution to points that
actually put a collapse (or the game-winning kill) on court — an ordinary
point keeps its ordinary bounce-2 ending, so the ball never vanishes
mid-roll — and with only those paths admitted, the after-set latch is
provably safe: both defer matchReady until their beat ends. A regression
test drives the exact soft-lock sequence through the real update loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: 'the zombie falls after the ball is lost although we know this
earlier — it could play out as ball lost because of the falling.' The match
point now resolves at bounce ONE when the winner is provably beyond the
body's reach (closed-form flight vs its own chase dials, full swing reach
plus 0.6 m of doubt — borderline balls wait for the ordinary bounce-2 call).
startFall keeps the ball rolling for an early-decided point, and the
d.decided latch swallows the rally's later resolutions so it can never bank
twice. Verified in-pane: collapse starts ~0.3 s after the bounce, ball rolls
past the prone body, score banks exactly once.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five of Oliver's six (the sixth is a play-mode discussion):
- THE DOUBLE FAULTS WERE FRAME QUANTIZATION: the bounce registered a full
integration step after true contact — ~0.75 m of travel at serve pace — so
serves aimed half a metre safe were judged long. Classic enforces the
service box, the match only the court, hence 'zombie tennis does not'.
The bounce now rewinds to y=0 before anything reads the position.
Measured in-pane: 30/40 faults on good taps before, 0/40 after (mistimed
and smudged taps also 0/40; aimed hard serves keep their scatter risk).
Also: the strike flick dead zone is 44 px so a smudged tap stays a tap,
and the aim base clamps 0.18 m inside the lines — scatter, not the aim,
is what faults.
- The mop beat holds the walk-on until the boy actually LEAVES the court
(ordered off at beat end, 6 s cap).
- A match game win that restores blood shows the duel's WOUNDS TREATED
popup; full-blood wins stay silent.
- The opponent walk-on card holds 4.0 s (was 2.4).
- Card heads are cut from the 4K sheets at 144 px (assets/_heads.py,
z_<fam>head.png, HEAD_CROP stays as fallback) — the old 65 px crops were
the 'very low res' heads.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's four picks, each rolled off its own settled BOSS frame through the
family pipeline (rows in _famroll.py) — the rung and the chapter boss are the
same person. matchFoe decoupled from bossArt's cycling on his call: the match
ladder is 12 with the champion capping rung 12; chapters keep their ten.
The champion refused to bulk through four rolls (words lost, then a new
pair-reference in char_ref only half-won), so his mass is stature: OPPONENTS
rows carry an optional world height h read by zombieH — champion 2.1 m, the
Bulk 2.0 m — and the serve aims at the body actually drawn. HEAD_CROP measured
for all four; ramp test extended to 12 rungs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three mechanical causes of 'no serve agency', measured then fixed:
- the 0.12 m perfect snap was ~0.3 s of hang time (now TUNE.apexSnap 0.05,
and the gold band reads the same knob);
- the fixed mid-box target depth capped every good serve at ~36 m/s in the
loft loop — player serve depth now rides quality, flush aims 0.3 m inside
the service line (ladder: 49 / 52 hard / 36 mistimed / 30 bad);
- the strike flick was splatter-only — in tennis and the duel it now sways
placement (horizontal) and buys pace (vertical, serveHard + serveHardSpin,
the extra dive IS the clearance), paid for in scatter against the real
fault machinery. Tap stays the safe second serve.
Phone verdict pending — see the PROJECT.md session log.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's batch, the code half:
- The tennis serve lost its ghost fingers (idle tap demo + apex rider deleted
with their counters; the rally-return hint survives).
- The toss rises over the tossing HAND, measured off the toss frames' raised
fingertips (TOSS.dx/oDx, women's tour override) — not over the head.
- An uncaught toss returns to the bounce stance instead of flashing the smash
frame the player never earned.
- Between match games the court belongs to the mop boy: 5 s (TUNE.matchMopT),
full job allowance, a hurry speed between stains, and the far-court reach
limit lifted for the match (his stains are exactly where opponents die).
The next opponent walks on only after — d.ending guards the empty court.
- The walk-on card wears the opponent's own head: config.HEAD_CROP, straight
crops measured off the family sheets, no new art.
- The match intro is DEATH MATCH, counting the real blood pool.
- Daniel is benched: every ump_* personality line routes through aside()'s
early return; officiating calls keep speaking. Personality pass later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CLASSIC TENNIS, third time asked and this time actually found. Both cues open
with a mode gate and I checked the wrong two features twice: drawApproachRing
(the closing circles that show when to tap) and drawApexBand (the serve bar
with the gold perfect window) each began `if (!G.match ...)`. So the mode whose
whole pitch is "if the core tennis is good everything else is good" was the one
mode with neither. They run on `G.match || G.mode === 'tennis'` now — the gore
mode stays out on purpose, there is no rally there. A test reads both function
bodies and fails if either is ever gated on the match alone again.
(The two I kept pointing at — the landing ring and the placement ring — really
are shared. They were just not the ones being asked about.)
THE BOUNCING WAS IN THE ART, and measurable: the six generated families came
back with the shuffle frame 30-44 px shorter than the stance it walks out of,
against 9 px on the hand-made racket family. The game draws every frame at its
own PNG height, so the body rose and dropped once per step. A walk cycle is one
drawing with the legs moved and must be one height; _zsheet levels the stance
and the stride pair now and leaves the forehand its own, exactly as the serve
and the fall keep theirs. All seven families re-cut: spreads are 1-8 px.
THE BENCH GETS BUTTONS. Arrow keys are not a control scheme on a phone, which
is the device the walk has to be judged on — so every family and every wound
stage was unreachable from the place the problem shows. Three on-screen pads:
BODY, WOUND, POSE, the two-way ones split left/right. Geometry lives beside the
drawing and input hit-tests the same function, the rule the rack established.
THE FALL is quicker still (0.05/0.07/2.0/0.30): drop, lie there, get up.
Three umpire lines pulled — ump_wound_you, ump_felled, ump_wound_opp2. Not
funny enough to keep. Files deleted, call sites collapsed to the two that stay.
60 tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
wuwiandClaude Fable 5