Files
splatter-tennis/assets/_stride.py
T
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 e121df569c The reference sheet was the bug: a clipped head, five scales, frozen legs
Oliver walked the sprite bench and reported the same two faults on every family:
the healthy walk loses its head, and the wounded walk's feet do not move. Both
were in the ONE FILE every zombie tennis character is drawn from — and the family
pipeline had copied it faithfully, which is the pipeline working.

WHERE IT CAME FROM. That sheet was not composed from the sprites. It was a
GENERATED RE-DRAW of the club pro, made in nine separate 4K calls, one per row
band, then stacked (gen4k.py, in a session scratchpad, untracked and now gone).
Nine calls returned nine scales, and call 1 came back with the shuffle frame
decapitated. Measured against the sprite it was drawn from, that one figure
scaled 2.341 wide and 1.996 tall where all thirty others were proportional to
three decimals: 33 px missing off the top, width untouched. The local input to
that call was exact at 2.000x. The sheet lost the head, not the sprite.

THE FIX IS TO STOP PUTTING THE REFERENCE THROUGH THE MODEL. _famref.py composes
it from the 31 z_r* frames on disk — one scale, applied once, NEAREST — and costs
no tokens. That kills the head and the five scales together, and it explains two
things in _zsheet.py that read like fudges: the fall1 re-anchor and the walk-frame
levelling exist only to undo per-band scale drift. The levelling is also what
turned a headless z_sh2 into a headless AND 13% oversized one, by reading the
missing head as a height error and scaling up to compensate.

THE GATE WAS MISSING ON THE INPUT. _zsheet.py checks what comes BACK from the
model — band count, figure count, stacked bodies, edges, palette, heights — and
nothing had ever checked the sheet handed TO it. _famref.check() re-reads the file
it just wrote with _zsheet's own detection and refuses one where any figure's
width and height scales disagree by 2%, or where a stride pair is frozen.

THE THIRD DEFECT NEEDED NEW ART. z_rw1b had the same legs as z_rw1 (15.1% against
the healthy pair's 51.1%), so the club pro has slid through both wound stages
since the day he shipped, and every family inherited it. _stride.py draws the
missing twin, and what made it work after words had failed for as long as they
were tried is SHOWING the edit: image 2 is the healthy pair side by side, the same
character performing exactly the change being asked for. The headless twin then
took the ARM-OFF pair as its example — a wounded body is a closer picture of the
edit, the same chaining the wound ladder already uses. Its gate measures three
things and prints all three: legs moved, body above the hips did not, racket kept
its bed. The thresholds are CALIBRATED on pairs that already ship, not chosen —
my first guesses rejected z_e1/z_e2 and z_g1/z_g2, both accepted art. And a twin
FILLS the racket bed instead of keying it out: the first rolls came back with 959
px of enclosed transparency against their base's 0, which would have flickered the
racket face empty/filled once per step.

AFTER, on the installed sprites — leg difference within each stride pair, where
the wounded pairs used to sit between 4.8% and 19.7%:

  r  51.1 / 68.1 / 36.7     ru 55.9 / 59.1 / 38.7
  br 40.7 / 42.0 / 26.8     gk 41.1 / 44.6 / 30.6
  sh 59.4 / 71.4 / 43.9     lj 38.4 / 45.5 / 27.4
  bb 56.5 / 67.1 / 43.2     st 51.6 / 66.1 / 35.7

All seven families re-rolled off the rebuilt reference, every play row with its
head, and all 24 family/wound-stage states alternating a real pair — checked by
instrumenting drawImage on the bench, not by eye. br and lj sit lowest on the
headless pair and are worth a re-roll if they ever read as stiff; lj needed one,
its first roll came back frozen on all three pairs with the headless row 31 px
short.

AND THE REFERENCE IS TRACKED NOW. It lived in gitignored _refcheck/, so the thing
the entire pipeline rests on was unreproducible for as long as it existed. It is
assets/_pose_ref_family.png, next to _pose_ref_serve.png, and the scripts that
build and consume it are in the repo instead of a scratchpad.

Also in here: the SHAMBLE BOB, which was a 1 px lift on a wall clock applied to
every body every frame whether it was moving or not — a held pose bobbed forever
and a corpse bobbed while it lay on the ground. It only happens while walking now,
and it steps off ground covered, which is the same rule the strides follow.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 22:45:05 +02:00

310 lines
16 KiB
Python

# _stride.py — draw the missing HALF of a stride pair. One frame in, its leg-swapped twin out.
#
# uv run --with pillow --with numpy --with requests python assets/_stride.py z_rw1 z_rw2
# uv run --with pillow --with numpy --with requests python assets/_stride.py z_rw1 --check
#
# WHY. A walk cycle in this game is ONE DRAWING WITH THE LEGS MOVED, and every `…b` frame is that
# second half. The club pro's wound rows never got one: `z_rw1b` has the same legs as `z_rw1` (15.1%
# silhouette difference in the bottom third, where the healthy pair scores 51.1%), so a wounded
# opponent has slid through both damage stages since the day it shipped — and because the family
# pipeline draws every new body off the club pro, all seven families inherited it. Oliver, from the
# sprite bench: "arm off — feet are not moving. headless — feet are not moving."
#
# THE PROMPT SHOWS THE CHANGE RATHER THAN DESCRIBING IT. Every previous attempt at this asked in
# words ("identical above the hips, legs clearly swapped") and got two near-identical drawings back.
# IMAGE 2 here is the HEALTHY pair side by side — the same character performing exactly the edit being
# asked for. That is this project's own rule: a picture beats a paragraph.
#
# THE GATE IS THE POINT. A roll is installed only if the legs moved, the body above the hips did not,
# and the racket kept its bed. All three are measured and printed; a failure leaves the sprite alone.
import base64, os, sys
import numpy as np
import requests
from PIL import Image
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
from _fine import key, block_size, frames, split_piece
from _famref import legs, stride_diff
HERE = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
SCRATCH = os.path.join(HERE, '_refcheck')
MODEL = os.environ.get('SPLAT_MODEL', 'google/gemini-3-pro-image')
# THE THRESHOLDS ARE CALIBRATED ON ART THAT ALREADY SHIPS, not chosen. Every accepted stride pair in
# the repo, measured by the two functions below:
#
# pair legs upper pair legs upper
# z_r2 / z_r3 51.1% 4.4% z_e1 / z_e2 72.1% 24.0%
# z_a1 / z_a2 39.2% 13.2% z_g1 / z_g2 33.6% 8.9%
# z_b1 / z_b2 58.3% 8.0% z_br2 / z_br3 40.9% 2.2%
# z_d1 / z_d2 53.1% 9.9% z_d3 / z_d4 34.6% 5.7%
#
# ...against the frozen pairs this file exists to replace: z_rw1/z_rw1b 15.1%, z_rw2/z_rw2b 14.7%.
# So a real stride starts at 33.6 and a frozen one tops out at 15.1 — 30 sits in the gap with room on
# both sides. Upper allows 25 because the ball boy's accepted pair spends 24 of it: a step moves the
# torso and the racket arm a little, and on a one-armed or headless body there is less silhouette for
# the same absolute shift to hide in. My first guesses (35 / 14) rejected both of those shipping pairs.
# The two-frame BOSS walk (16.3%) is deliberately outside this: it is a slow pace, not a stride pair.
LEGS_MIN = 30.0 # % the legs must differ
UPPER_MAX = 25.0 # % the body above the hips may differ — it is meant to be the same drawing
BED_MIN = 0.60 # the racket bed must keep at least this fraction of the base frame's bed area
def upper(im):
"""Silhouette of the TOP 60%, normalised like legs() — the half that must NOT change."""
a = np.array(im.convert('RGBA'))
op = a[..., 3] > 40
if not op.any(): return np.zeros((32, 64), bool)
h, w = op.shape
y1 = int(h * 0.60)
ys, xs = np.nonzero(op[:y1])
cx = xs.mean() if len(xs) else w / 2
W, H, mpp = 64, 32, w / 140
gx = np.clip((cx + (np.arange(W) - W / 2) * mpp).round().astype(int), 0, w - 1)
gy = np.clip((np.arange(H) * (y1 / H)).round().astype(int), 0, h - 1)
return op[np.ix_(gy, gx)]
def pair_ref(a, b, out, scale=4):
"""IMAGE 2: two frames side by side on magenta — the edit, demonstrated."""
ims = [Image.open(os.path.join(HERE, n + '.png')).convert('RGBA') for n in (a, b)]
ims = [i.resize((i.width * scale, i.height * scale), Image.NEAREST) for i in ims]
gap = round(ims[0].height * 0.10)
pad = gap
W = sum(i.width for i in ims) + gap + 2 * pad
H = max(i.height for i in ims) + 2 * pad
s = Image.new('RGB', (W, H), (255, 0, 255))
x = pad
for i in ims:
s.paste(i, (x, H - pad - i.height), i); x += i.width + gap
s.save(out)
return out
def one_ref(n, out, scale=4):
im = Image.open(os.path.join(HERE, n + '.png')).convert('RGBA')
big = im.resize((im.width * scale, im.height * scale), Image.NEAREST)
pad = round(big.height * 0.10)
s = Image.new('RGB', (big.width + 2 * pad, big.height + 2 * pad), (255, 0, 255))
s.paste(big, (pad, pad), big)
s.save(out)
return out
PROMPT = (
'IMAGE 1 is one figure from a zombie tennis game: a walking corpse holding a racket, drawn as '
'hard-edged pixel art on a flat magenta background.\n\n'
'Redraw IMAGE 1 with ONE change: THE LEGS ARE IN THE OPPOSITE PHASE OF THE SAME WALKING STEP. '
'The leg that is forward becomes the back leg and the leg that is back swings forward, so the two '
'drawings together read as one body taking a step. The feet must clearly be in different places '
'than in IMAGE 1.\n\n'
'IMAGE 2 shows exactly the change being asked for: it is the same character, undamaged, drawn '
'twice — one drawing, the legs in the two phases of one step. Copy THAT relationship. The '
'difference between your output and IMAGE 1 must be the difference between the two figures in '
'IMAGE 2, and nothing else.\n\n'
'EVERYTHING FROM THE HIPS UP IS UNCHANGED AND IDENTICAL TO IMAGE 1, pixel for pixel where it can '
'be: the same head or the same headless neck stump, the same shoulders, the same arms, the same '
'racket in the same hand at the same angle, the same clothing with the same tears and the same '
'stains, the same wounds with the same blood, the same colours, the same facing, the same height, '
'the same build. Do NOT redraw the character. Do NOT heal any injury. Do NOT add a head or an arm '
'that IMAGE 1 does not have. Only the legs and the feet move.\n\n'
'Match IMAGE 1\'s drawing technique exactly: the same square pixel grid at the same pixel size, the '
'same hard black outline, the same flat blocks of colour, the same stepped aliased edges, the same '
'dithering. No soft brushwork, no airbrushing, no blur, no gradients, no anti-aliasing.\n\n'
'Output ONE figure only, standing on the same ground line, at the same size as IMAGE 1, on a '
'background of ONE flat solid magenta #FF00FF edge to edge. The inside of the racket head is that '
'same EXACT #FF00FF. No text, no shadows, no ground lines, no second figure.')
def api_key():
if os.environ.get('OPENROUTER_API_KEY'): return os.environ['OPENROUTER_API_KEY']
for line in open(os.path.join(HERE, '..', '.env')):
if line.startswith('OPENROUTER_API_KEY='):
return line.split('=', 1)[1].strip().strip('"').strip("'")
sys.exit('no OPENROUTER_API_KEY')
def u(p):
return 'data:image/png;base64,' + base64.b64encode(open(p, 'rb').read()).decode()
def pale_blob(im):
"""Largest flat pale blob as a % of the body — the racket bed. A bed drawn as STRINGS breaks into
fragments and scores a third of what a flat one does, which is the whole use of the number."""
a = np.array(im.convert('RGBA')).astype(int) if isinstance(im, Image.Image) else im.astype(int)
R, G, B, A = a[..., 0], a[..., 1], a[..., 2], a[..., 3]
lo, hi = np.minimum(np.minimum(R, G), B), np.maximum(np.maximum(R, G), B)
pale = (A > 40) & (lo > 140) & (hi - lo < 50)
lab = np.zeros(pale.shape, int); n = 0
for y, x in zip(*np.nonzero(pale)):
if lab[y, x]: continue
n += 1; st = [(y, x)]; lab[y, x] = n
while st:
cy, cx = st.pop()
for dy in (-1, 0, 1):
for dx in (-1, 0, 1):
ny, nx = cy + dy, cx + dx
if 0 <= ny < pale.shape[0] and 0 <= nx < pale.shape[1] and pale[ny, nx] and not lab[ny, nx]:
lab[ny, nx] = n; st.append((ny, nx))
if not n: return 0.0, None, None
sizes = [(int((lab == i).sum()), i) for i in range(1, n + 1)]
big, idx = max(sizes)
m = lab == idx
colour = a[m][:, :3].mean(0) if m.any() else None
return round(big / max(1, int((A > 40).sum())) * 100, 2), m, colour
def fill_bed(crop, ref):
"""Repaint the racket's enclosed background in the BASE frame's bed colour.
`_fine.key` keeps background trapped inside a figure as ink rather than punching it out, so the
hole is here to be filled; the colour comes off the base's own bed so the pair cannot disagree.
"""
_, _, colour = pale_blob(ref)
if colour is None: return crop
a = crop.copy()
op = a[..., 3] > 40
h, w = op.shape
seen = np.zeros_like(op)
stack = [(y, x) for x in range(w) for y in (0, h - 1) if not op[y, x]]
stack += [(y, x) for y in range(h) for x in (0, w - 1) if not op[y, x]]
for y, x in stack: seen[y, x] = True
while stack:
cy, cx = stack.pop()
for dy, dx in ((1, 0), (-1, 0), (0, 1), (0, -1)):
ny, nx = cy + dy, cx + dx
if 0 <= ny < h and 0 <= nx < w and not op[ny, nx] and not seen[ny, nx]:
seen[ny, nx] = True; stack.append((ny, nx))
inside = ~op & ~seen
if inside.any():
a[inside, :3] = colour.astype(a.dtype)
a[inside, 3] = 255
return a
def cut(sheet, like):
"""Slice the roll down to ONE sprite at the SAME height as the frame it twins, on its palette.
Same height is not a nicety: the game draws every frame at its own PNG height, so a twin that
came back 20 px taller would make the body rise once per step — the bounce this project has
already fixed twice.
"""
src = Image.open(sheet).convert('RGB')
a = key(src)
# THE RACKET BED IS FILLED HERE, NOT KEYED OUT — the opposite of what _zsheet.py does, and for the
# opposite reason. _zsheet cuts a whole family, where every frame's bed keys out together and the
# racket is an open hoop throughout. A stride twin is half of a PAIR whose other half is already
# on disk with a painted bed, so keying this one out makes the racket face flicker empty/filled
# once per step — measured: z_rw1 has 0 px of enclosed transparency and the first z_rw1b roll had
# 959. `_fine.key` already keeps enclosed background as ink; it is repainted in the base frame's
# own bed colour so the pair matches.
b = block_size(a)
spans = frames(a, [], 1)
if len(spans) != 1:
return None, f'{len(spans)} figures in the roll, expected 1'
x0, x1 = spans[0]
sub = a[:, x0:x1]
ys = np.nonzero((sub[..., 3] > 0).any(1))[0]
xs = np.nonzero((sub[..., 3] > 0).any(0))[0]
crop = sub[ys.min():ys.max() + 1, xs.min():xs.max() + 1]
if split_piece(crop):
return None, 'the roll holds two stacked bodies'
ref = Image.open(os.path.join(HERE, like + '.png')).convert('RGBA')
crop = fill_bed(crop, ref)
snap = Image.fromarray(crop, 'RGBA').resize(
(max(1, round(crop.shape[1] / b)), max(1, round(crop.shape[0] / b))), Image.BOX)
k = ref.height / snap.height
im = snap.resize((max(1, round(snap.width * k)), max(1, round(snap.height * k))), Image.BOX)
arr = np.array(im).astype(int)
solid = arr[..., 3] > 110
px = np.array(ref)[np.array(ref)[..., 3] > 200][:, :3].astype(int)
pal = np.unique((px // 8) * 8, axis=0)
f = arr[..., :3].reshape(-1, 3)
arr[..., :3] = pal[((f[:, None, :] - pal[None, :, :]) ** 2).sum(2).argmin(1)].reshape(arr.shape[0], arr.shape[1], 3)
arr[..., 3] = np.where(solid, 255, 0)
return Image.fromarray(arr.astype('uint8'), 'RGBA'), None
def gate(new, base):
"""Legs moved, body did not, racket still has a bed. All three numbers, always printed."""
ref = Image.open(os.path.join(HERE, base + '.png'))
dl = stride_diff(legs(new), legs(ref))
du = stride_diff(upper(new), upper(ref))
bn, br = pale_blob(new)[0], pale_blob(ref)[0]
# the bed is drawn, not keyed out, so it must survive at close to the base's area. A string mesh
# fragments it — the first z_rw2b roll scored 2.25 against its base's 7.22.
bed = bn / br if br else 1.0
ok = dl >= LEGS_MIN and du <= UPPER_MAX and bed >= BED_MIN
print(f' legs {dl:5.1f}% (>={LEGS_MIN}) upper {du:5.1f}% (<={UPPER_MAX}) '
f'bed {bn:5.2f}% vs {br:5.2f}% = {bed:.2f}x (>={BED_MIN}) {"PASS" if ok else "REJECT"}')
return ok
def attempt(base, example, i):
"""One roll. EVERY candidate is kept under its own name — a re-roll that comes back worse must
never be able to overwrite one that passed, which is exactly how the first good z_rw1b was lost."""
twin = base + 'b'
i1 = one_ref(base, os.path.join(SCRATCH, f'stride_in_{base}.png'))
i2 = pair_ref(example[0], example[1], os.path.join(SCRATCH, f'stride_ex_{example[0]}.png'))
r = requests.post('https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/images',
headers={'Authorization': f'Bearer {api_key()}', 'Content-Type': 'application/json'},
json={'model': MODEL, 'prompt': PROMPT, 'resolution': '2K', 'aspect_ratio': '1:1',
'input_references': [{'type': 'image_url', 'image_url': {'url': u(i1)}},
{'type': 'image_url', 'image_url': {'url': u(i2)}}]},
timeout=1800)
if r.status_code != 200:
print(f' [{i}] HTTP {r.status_code} {r.text[:160]}'); return None
d = r.json().get('data') or []
if not d:
print(f' [{i}] no image returned'); return None
b64 = d[0].get('b64_json') or d[0].get('image_url', {}).get('url', '').split(',')[-1]
raw = os.path.join(SCRATCH, f'stride_raw_{twin}_{i}.png')
open(raw, 'wb').write(base64.b64decode(b64))
im, err = cut(raw, base)
if err:
print(f' [{i}] {err} — discarded'); return None
cand = os.path.join(SCRATCH, f'stride_cand_{twin}_{i}.png')
im.save(cand)
print(f' [{i}] cut {im.width}x{im.height} -> {cand}')
return im if gate(im, base) else None
def run(base, example=None, tries=3, install=True):
fam = base[2:base.index('w')] if 'w' in base[2:] else base[2:]
example = example or (f'z_{fam}2', f'z_{fam}3')
twin = base + 'b'
print(f'{base} -> {twin} stride example: {example[0]} / {example[1]}')
for i in range(1, tries + 1):
im = attempt(base, example, i)
if im:
if install:
im.save(os.path.join(HERE, twin + '.png'))
print(f' installed {twin}.png')
return True
print(f' {tries} rolls, none passed — {twin}.png left alone. Candidates are in _refcheck/.')
return False
if __name__ == '__main__':
# a flag's VALUE is not a frame name — skip the token after every option that takes one
argv, args, skip = sys.argv[1:], [], False
for i, a in enumerate(argv):
if skip: skip = False; continue
if a in ('--example', '--tries'): skip = True; continue
if not a.startswith('-'): args.append(a)
if not args: sys.exit('usage: _stride.py <frame>... [--example z_rw1] [--tries N] [--check]')
# --example NAME uses NAME / NAMEb as the demonstration pair instead of the healthy shuffle. A
# wound stage is a closer picture of the edit than an undamaged body is — same chaining logic the
# wound ladder itself uses (see _master.py).
ex = None
if '--example' in sys.argv:
e = sys.argv[sys.argv.index('--example') + 1]
ex = (e, e + 'b')
tries = int(sys.argv[sys.argv.index('--tries') + 1]) if '--tries' in sys.argv else 3
if '--check' in sys.argv:
for base in args:
print(base)
gate(Image.open(os.path.join(HERE, base + 'b.png')), base)
else:
for base in args:
run(base, ex, tries, install='--no-install' not in sys.argv)