They were running the whole time (0.85 opacity, measured) — they were just
flying ACROSS the artwork, where a 3px gold speck disappears into a pixel
shield. They lift off the top edge into the dark above it now, seven per badge
on a shorter delay window: spread over 2.6s the shield stood empty half the
time, which is what "ich sehe kein glimmen" was looking at.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver wanted to rank the level a league was taken at. The challenge held: xp
comes only from playing, so a board that rewards a low level rewards not
playing — it would pay you to avoid the three rooms the season leans on. It
also inverts every other number in the game, freezes after five entries, and
makes the player who played more look worse.
So the league ranks and the level decides between everyone who got equally far,
where "lower is better" reads naturally. BOARDS.u carries subLow; server
rank_key is the other half, and the same key decides whether a submission beats
the row already standing. The level is written once at the promotion — before
the league moves, because it is the level that WON the cup — mirrored like the
rest of the profile, and inscribed under the shield it belongs to. Earned
shields smoulder while they are on screen: five CSS embers each, no loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three mode tabs times three period tabs, and the same three boxes meant
something different in every one — Oliver had no idea what he was looking at,
which is the correct reaction to a screen with nine states. It is one screen
now: bodies felled, best gore run, deepest climb, runs. Never anything else.
MULTI-KILLS retired (a vanity number on no board) and DEATHS with it (every run
ends in one, so it was RUNS again). The period filter went too: LAST RUN is the
summary you just tapped away, and 7 DAYS is a fitness metric in a permadeath
game. The card stops repeating the ledger and keeps the CAREER instead —
league, cups won, best cup.
The world board drops CLASSIC: that mode is out of competition by its own
room's rule now, so ranking it contradicted the wall. A classic best no longer
opens the name prompt either — it would have had nowhere to go.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was the last place still breaking the wizard's own rule — a question screen
carries no memory of its own answer. Three names, three pip counts, nothing
else. `.last` has no users left, so the rule is gone from the stylesheet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LAST remembered what you played last time, which a gallery of six posters does
not need to do for you, and 18 RUNGS was a number about a mode on the screen
for choosing between modes. Both gone. The difficulty screen keeps its LAST —
there it is the only thing saying what you last set.
The dead sub-poster branch in buildSub went with them: nothing has fanned out
into sub-posters since the cup left the ZOMBIE TENNIS pocket.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The prototype ships a copy of thirty repo assets and the zip is a second copy
again — a megabyte of duplicate art in the history for a document whose
decisions now live in PROJECT.md and in the code. The folder is ignored, not
deleted: it is still there to read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 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>
10 KB instead of 119 — the face carries only the characters this game sets, and
the command to redo it is in PROJECT.md. The header strip's titles take it at
23px: a strip at the top of a screen is signage, not an announcement, so it
stops leaning. Bangers keeps what it was always for — the primary button, the
ceremonies, and everything the canvas shouts. The poster wall's rooms go back
to acid beside it, with the scale carrying the hierarchy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bangers has no upright cut — the slant is in the glyphs, which is also why the
chevrons are Silkscreen — so a heading that wanted to shout without leaning had
to come from somewhere. Bungee is an arcade/signage face, upper case by design,
and it stays in-world where the platform's UI sans did not. Bundled beside the
other two with its OFL licence; the Dockerfile already copies assets wholesale.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Colour stops carrying the hierarchy on this screen — the acid belongs to the
screen title, so the rooms are cream and the canonical one is marked by its
poster's ribbon rather than by its heading's tint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three tries: Bangers, then the HUD face, then the platform's UI face, and back
to Bangers. It works now because the header lost its rule and its left band and
gained air — the size carries the hierarchy (20 against the screen title's 26)
instead of the typeface having to. The strap goes back to Silkscreen under it:
a shouted line over a system-sans line was two foreign voices in one header.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
On nearest-neighbour art the backdrop blur read as a smear rather than depth,
so the caption sits on a plain gradient rising from the bottom edge instead —
solid where the words are, gone before it reaches the art.
And the section headings stop borrowing: the game bundles two faces and both
were already spoken for on this screen (Bangers is the screen title, Silkscreen
is the posters' own captions), so a shelf label in either sounded like
something else. They take the platform's interface face now — heavy, tracked,
upper case: chrome, which is what a shelf label is.
Scoped to the section HEADER while doing it. The posters live inside .mgroup
now, so the old bare descendant selector had been restyling every caption on
the wall — invisible only because it still named Silkscreen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The scrim used to be a hard linear-gradient riding in the button's own
background stack. It is a masked backdrop-blur now: nothing at all at its top
edge, a surface by the time it reaches the words. The art stays art where the
art is, the caption gets something to sit on, and no box edge appears anywhere.
Measured on this machine it costs 0.2ms a frame — the backdrop is static while
the menu is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The entrance is no longer a one-off on the boot: dealStage re-arms the class at
the funnel every stage change already passes, so the title screen flies its
plaque and buttons in whenever you arrive at it. The sub-menus join in — their
header, content and footer arrive one after the other instead of the panel
dropping in as one slab — and the poster wall deals its three rooms rather than
its list, since a moving child inside a moving parent starts at twice the
offset and reads as a stutter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The splash's elements fly in from the left on the boot, 70ms apart, on the same
easeOutBack overshoot the canvas modals have always used. It hangs off
:not(.busy), so taking the loading state off IS the trigger and it never plays
again — returning from a run should not make you wait for a flourish you have
seen. Reduced motion turns it off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the phone found. The splash's loading state was applied by main.js —
but this is a module script, so the browser paints the markup, placeholders and
all, before it runs: LEVEL 1 stood there and then snapped to the real values.
The busy class ships in index.html now and main.js only takes it off; the
keyboard hints hide with it.
And #intro is the one scroller the menus share, so a scroll earned deep in the
stats screen outlived it: going back put the splash up scrolled, with its
buttons off screen. go() resets it, at the funnel every stage change passes.
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>
Oliver: the group headings were "sehr klein". Each group is a section now with
its posters inside it — the announcement face one size under the screen title,
a rule closing the header, and an inset band down the left. The canonical room
wears the primary's colour, because it is the one that moves your career.
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>
Oliver's read: the modes feel decoupled, the menus and end screens enforce no
story-line. Settled in discussion: the tournament is the canonical path and
everything else is Beiwerk, a cup attempt is one evening (no resume, no
seeding), classic stays a side room. The spine — the splash names the next
fixture, the club remembers your attempts, the side modes are described in cup
terms, every ending hands over, and the season opens inside the promotion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The lingering doubles were a real bug, not a taste problem: racketAI's
!incoming return kept the last chase's vx/vz on the body, so the speed
ghosts trailed a zombie that had already stopped. The velocity dies with
the chase now (tested). The look is halved with it: ghost alphas
0.22/0.10 -> 0.11/0.05, trailK 0.05 -> 0.035 — a hint of speed in the
corner of the eye, never a second body.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, same day: 'die Gegner sind jetzt etwas zuu einfach.' The habit takes
four same-lane shots to learn (was three) and the wrong-foot costs about a
third less on every dial: surpRead 0.85->0.6, surpSlow 0.45->0.3, surpFlub
0.35->0.22. The whiff-window test pin rides down with it (0.25->0.15); the
slower-than-the-coach pin still holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four answers to one phone report:
- THE READ: repeat a lane and the opponent anticipates it; break the habit
and it is wrong-footed for that ball — scaled by rung, so surprise is the
weapon that opens the ladder past the HEAD COACH (TUNE block THE READ).
- The opponent walk-on is a real modal now (head, punchline, tap to dismiss)
in arcade, tournament and training — readable without a clock.
- THE TRAINING COURT: third card under ZOMBIE TENNIS, pick any rung, one
game at a time, the felled body walks straight back on, nothing banks,
bleeding out is a popup instead of a death. mode_train.png rolled in the
banner style.
- MOVEMENT READS: sprinting feet kick per-court dust and fast bodies leave
a two-ghost speed streak (trailMin gates both; feel verdict pending).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, on the build: "all good but the lob. please remove it - this is
totally unpredictable."
Reverted in full — oppAtNet, farBody, TUNE.lobArm, TUNE.lobApex,
SHOT_DEPTH.lob, the branch in doHit and its two tests. The forward flick is
the smash it always was. Everything else from that commit stays: the pace
feedback (streak, crack, camera kick) and the death match's blood alignment.
The reason is worth more than the code, and PROJECT.md carries it as a rule:
a gesture whose MEANING depends on where the opponent is standing is
unpredictable however well the shot is tuned. It is the same objection
input.js already states about the slingshot — the direction you moved is the
thing you asked for, no invisible modes — and the written comparison let
option (c) past it on the argument that context cannot mis-fire. It can: you
do not track where the far body is standing while a ball is coming at you, so
one thumb movement produced two shots for reasons you were not watching. The
LOB word at contact explained the surprise; it did not prevent it.
If it comes back it needs a gesture of its own. The ballistics are solved and
are in the history at 4f4534e.
111 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three from Oliver.
THE LOB. He picked option (c) from the written comparison — "no additional
gesture to learn" — and corrected the premise: the zombie does come to the
net (racketAI chases to the far service line, the classic CPU to z 9.5). So
the forward flick keeps its one meaning, "put it deep behind him", and the
game picks the trajectory that actually does that: a smash while he is back,
over his head once he is in. oppAtNet() is the whole switch, and it reads the
BODY, not O — in the match O is the invisible tennis body and only moves
between points, so it would have answered "on his mark" all rally.
lobArm 7.0 m is measured, not taste: a lob peaking at lobApex passes a man 7 m
from the net at almost exactly CONTACT.maxY, so the shot arms exactly as far
out as it can still clear him. The pace is derived from the height, so the same
arc comes off the baseline and off mid-court, and SHOT_DEPTH.lob is deeper than
deep — at the ordinary deep target the ball passed 2.05 m over him at the edge
of the band, which is inside his reach.
PACE, SEEN FROM THE STRIKER. "the opponent sees the ball really fast - the
player barely sees the speed increase." Measured: the ball is the same ball on
both phones, the camera is not — it compresses your own ball into the distance
and expands theirs as it arrives. Pace untouched; three channels added on the
striker's side: the ghost streak now reads pace (3-8 ghosts, was 3 at every
speed), the crack is pitched by it, and a fast ball kicks the camera. The
serve's own ladder is 49.2 plain / 50.8-52.4 hard, because serveArc's loft
margin takes 10% of the +9 back — widening that is his call, and PROJECT.md
records the knob and the risk.
THE DEATH MATCH. "each player has 8 blood points but the player explodes for
the winner already at 0:40." Two clocks: a game is four points, a life is
eight. A won game is only a game now (flash, serve, heal); the burst moved to
the death itself, on the dead message, where both phones agree. The summary
waits 1.4 s for the gore, because update() freezes the world on G.done and
would have hung a still frame of an explosion behind the trophy screen. And
bleedO tracks THEIR blood off the pos stream instead of our points-this-game,
which reset every game and ignored the heal.
4 new tests, 113 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
Oliver on the first shell build: *"I don't hear any of the games sounds.. daniel the umpire is
synthesized which is horrible and no music is playing on start"* — two independent causes.
- **Opaque fetch.** Capacitor serves the bundle through a custom WKURLSchemeHandler, and `fetch`
reports those responses as `status: 0, ok: false` with the whole body present and decoding
perfectly. All three loads in `audio.js` guarded with `if (!r.ok) throw`, so inside the app every
recorded sound failed at the door: the umpire fell through to the synthesized `say()`, no bed
started, no sample played. The synthesized sfx kept working, which made it read as a mixing bug
rather than a loader one. Fixed once, in the shared `bytes()` helper every audio fetch now routes
through — a status of 0 is the ABSENCE of an HTTP status, so trust it only when there is one and
a real 404 still falls back. Any future `!r.ok` on a bundle-relative fetch is this same bug.
- **The ring switch.** WKWebView's WebAudio runs in the SoloAmbient session, which the hardware
silent switch mutes outright — a silent game on a phone that lives on silent, with nothing on
screen to explain it. AppDelegate now sets AVAudioSession `.playback`, the games category.
Confirmed in the shell: the bed reaches PLAYING, the context is `running` with no gesture at all
(autoplay really is allowed in WKWebView, as LATER predicted), and `say()` never fires. On the web,
a genuinely missing file still falls back — checked both.
And the swipe flips: **right goes back**, the way iOS's own pop gesture goes (*"that's the iOS
way"*). Left now does nothing. Noted in PROJECT.md that on a platform gesture the platform's
convention beats the literal wording of the brief, and that is worth saying up front.
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>
The header block in tools/scenes.json is now the whole schema — every key with
its range and default, what each of the EIGHT weapons does (fire, laser and gun
were missing from both the docs and the validator), the five beats, the crowd
roster diversity walks in order, the bosses by chapter, and the traps worth
knowing: a serve tin is spent in about four seconds of autopilot fire, a burst
tin owns its own window, a horde locks the rack, a boss cannot start inside a
match, and `movement` fights the match's own auto-run legs.
Two scenes added from the campaign's own wish list: `epidemic` (the fire ball
lighting a whole wave off the body it hit) and `champion` (chapter ten, the
night court). Both verified on film.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tools/scenes.json says WHAT to shoot; tools/clips.js only knows how. Every
knob Oliver asked for is a key: seconds, setting (gore/zombie), beat, court,
boss, weapons, movement, density, diversity, gore, games, screen — documented
in the file's own "_" block, validated in capture.py so a typo names itself
instead of coming back as fifteen seconds of empty court. Nine scenes ship in
the default list, across all four courts.
The frame is a PHONE now (393x852 -> 1080x2340), not 9:16: the portrait branch
derives its logical height from the canvas box, so a 9:16 take was never the
framing a player sees. The player has legs — held arrow keys through the real
axisX, so horde and flamer are no longer a statue with a flamethrower. The
crowd tops itself up where the game's own spawner puts it, diversity walks the
roster, and `gore` paints in the run's history a fifteen-second clip has no
time to earn. The pilot is picked by what the court is doing rather than by
config: tennis mode taps to swing, splatter draws the slingshot.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`python3 tools/capture.py` fills promo/clips/ with 1080x1920 h264/aac takes of
the moments the campaign plan (item 4) already named — transition, horde,
flamer, mopboy, death on the gore side, boss and match on the zombie-tennis
side. capture.py serves the repo with tools/clips.js injected, opens a
throwaway-profile Chrome and converts each POSTed webm with ffmpeg; clips.js
stages every scene through the real doors on window.T and drives it with the
reachability soak's own mediocre autopilot. Nothing is faked for the camera.
The game gains four names on window.T (start, intoSplatter, startHorde,
sendBoy) and nothing else: the frame is pinned by the canvas box rather than
the window, RES 4 comes from lowPower 0 plus device-scale-factor 3, and the
audio is tapped by making BaseAudioContext's `destination` a gain node — so
audio.js needs no master bus for a tool that ships to nobody. tools/ and
promo/clips/ are ignored by git and docker alike.
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>
On touch, a drag in zombie tennis and classic still walked the player — and
that was not a harmless second option. A manual axis suppresses the assist, so
holding a drag traded a full-speed run to the intercept point for a 0.35x
shuffle aimed wherever the thumb went instead of where the ball will be.
Walking was strictly worse than standing still, which is most of "i tend to not
be able to reach the balls".
touchAxis is no longer written under rallyFeel. The drag keeps its one rally
meaning — released quickly it is the aimed swing — keys stay a deliberate
desktop override, and gore keeps its drag-walk, where the assist recovers depth
only and holding your own lane is the entire point.
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>
HANDOFF-MATCH.md was always temporary — written when a session ran out of
context mid-slice, and carrying its own instruction to fold into PROJECT.md and
be deleted once the slice was done. The slice is done, so it is.
What crossed over is the contract, not the diary: what the mode is, the
blood-only scoring and the misreading that forced the blood readout, the four
ladder dials, the card of ten, the wound dials, the fall's frame contract, the
flick arithmetic and its lesson, the umpire and the boy, the opponent's serve
games, classic as its own mode, the record shape, the traps, and the do-nots
(now including the scratched body-shot thrower). The reasoning behind the
numbers already lived in the drill/match session logs and was not copied twice.
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>
wuwiandClaude Fable 5