The shared clip library ships exactly one `Dance_Loop`, and five copies of one
clip is not five dances. What the runtime does have is a procedural pose layer
over a real skeleton with spring-driven hair and cloth, which is enough — if
the motion is constructed the way an animator would construct it rather than
the way a programmer reaches for first.
Wiring sine waves to bones is that first reach, and everyone can tell. A raw
sine moves fastest through the middle and slowest at the ends by the same
amount on every channel, all in phase, forever. It floats. It has no weight, no
accent, and no sense that one part of the body is driving and the rest is
following. Four principles fix it, and all four are cheap:
OVERLAP the body is a chain. Hips lead, spine follows a beat later,
head last. One subtraction — `beat - lag * i` — and the spring
solver then carries it out through the hair and skirt for free,
because the dance layer runs before it.
ACCENT a dance HITS poses. `shape` bends the wave so it hangs at the
extremes and snaps between them, which is what a key-and-
breakdown pass produces by hand.
WEIGHT the HIPS translate, not just rotate. A body that never leaves
its own axis reads as a puppet on a stick.
CONTRAST Robot deliberately breaks all of the above — zero lag,
quantised motion — and reads as mechanical precisely because
the other four do not.
Spin spots its head: it holds a heading against the turn and whips round to
catch up, which is what a real dancer does to keep from getting dizzy and the
most recognisable thing about a turn.
The dial is a radial menu because every option is then the SAME DISTANCE from
where the pointer starts — the choice is a direction, and a direction becomes
muscle memory in a way "the fourth row down" does not. Selection is by ANGLE
alone, so a flick and a careful nudge do the same thing. HOLD to open, release
to commit; a tap too short to have aimed replays the last emote, which is what
the button did before, so the old habit still works. Pressing while already
dancing just stops — having to aim at something in order to STOP would be the
most annoying possible way to build this.
debug/dance_check.gd asserts the overlap, and getting it to measure that took
four wrong measurements, each of which is now a comment where it was made:
- correlating the hips' TRANSLATION against the head's position relative to
them compared two different quantities at different periods; it ranked the
Robot, whose lag is zero by construction, as the most overlapped routine.
- a signed scalar `angle * sign of the axis's largest component` is
DISCONTINUOUS — as a rocking bone passes back through rest the axis flips —
so smooth Two-Step measured a full-range jump per frame, which is exactly
what quantised motion looks like.
- a bone's GLOBAL rotation carries every ancestor's, so the head correlates
with the hips at lag zero however delayed the head itself is.
- and the hips and head are driven by different channels anyway.
Measuring two links of the SAME chain, as local rotation vectors, agrees with
the authored lag: Spin measures 9 frames against 8.4 authored, Two-Step 7
against 6.6, Robot 0. The Robot is checked on the property it actually has —
its jump per frame is 0.41 of its range against 0.03-0.06 for the others.
RigRoles is pulled out of ShooterPoseModifier so the dance layer resolves bones
the same way rather than carrying a second copy. Two copies is how a rig ends up
animating correctly under one modifier and not the other.
spawn smoke 0 failures, 11/11 movement, 21/21 weapon-hold pairs, contrast 108/108.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The reticle was five white ColorRects, pasted byte-identically into three
level runtime scripts. The vitals were two stock ProgressBars with a flat
colour override, inlined 1200 lines into the movement controller. The ammo
count — the number a shooter's player looks at most — was drawn by the LEVEL,
in a black rounded panel that shared nothing with the menus, and it had a
special case in it (`elif active_weapon is DoubleBarrelShotgun`) because that
weapon never declared a name or a capacity.
Everything that describes A PLAYER now belongs to ui/player_hud.gd, and a
level owns the level. The immediate symptom that fixed: the screen had two
ammo panels on it at once, in two different styles, overlapping in the corner.
What each piece now says, rather than merely shows:
ui/crosshair.gd one drawn reticle instead of five rectangles, so it can
BLOOM — open with speed, airtime and each shot, snap shut
on ADS. That is the accuracy readout of the whole game and
five ColorRects could not express it. Every stroke is
drawn twice, ink underneath, because a 2 px white line
disappears over pale concrete exactly when aim matters.
The hit confirmation is the same cross at 45 degrees, so
it lands where the eye already is.
ui/vital_bar.gd segmented, so remaining health can be COUNTED rather than
estimated, with a drain ghost that holds the old value for
a beat — the gap between fill and ghost is the size of the
hit, which a bar that merely gets shorter never tells you.
ui/ability_chip.gd dash and grapple as a wipe across a chip rather than a
tinted JPEG with a 12 px number under it. A shape changing
size is readable in peripheral vision; 12 px type is not.
chain meter promoted out of the debug panel. Movement is this game's
first stated pillar and chaining is its skill expression,
so the count is a score, not a diagnostic.
The numerals moved OFF the bars and beside them. Text centred on a two-tone
bar cannot be given a colour that beats both the fill and the trough — that is
the 2.4:1 debug/ui_contrast_check.gd measured on the old HUD — so this fixes it
at the source rather than leaning on an outline to rescue it.
debug/hud_layout_check.gd measures where every element actually lands, which is
how three real bugs were found rather than squinted at: `set_anchors_preset`
moves the anchors and LEAVES THE OFFSETS, so the reticle spanned the viewport
with a size of exactly (0,0) and drew itself in the top-left corner; a
PRESET_CENTER applied after the ring's own `_ready` undid its centring; and a
BOX CONTAINER's own `alignment` is what pushes content to an edge, not a
SHRINK_END flag on the box, whose minimum width depends on children that may be
hidden. The ammo card was hanging off the right edge of the screen because of
the last one.
DoubleBarrelShotgun now declares `weapon_name` and `max_shells` like every
other weapon, and the four inline `2`s are gone.
spawn smoke 0 failures, 11/11 movement tests, contrast 108/108, layout PASS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Third-person player characters now animate every action with readable
intent (all networked, cel style preserved):
- Look-around: upper body follows the owner's camera pitch — distributed
over spine/neck/head so aiming up/down reads on the whole silhouette
(driven by the already-synced HeadPivot rotation on remotes)
- Reload: the baked PistolReload clip plays as a one-shot whenever the
equipped weapon starts reloading (local edge-detect poll -> new synced
action counter replays it on every peer)
- Grenade throw: new Throw clip baked from the library's overhead swing
(Sword_Attack retarget); triggers on throw, synced the same way
- Shot recoil: visible kick on the shooter's model (shoulders snap back,
forearms rise, fast decay) driven by the existing fire-effects RPC —
remote players' shots now look like shots
- Slide: trailing arm braces against the ground for balance on top of the
feet-first pose
- Armed idle confirmed in capture: weapon held at ready, not arms-down
Plumbing: synced_action/synced_action_seq added to all three player
spawners' replication configs; ACTIONS table on the model maps names to
clips + lock times.
Verified: 18 clips resolve (incl Throw), smoke 0 failures, movement
11/11, acoustics PASSED; third-person run + armed idle captures clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Audio (all CC0 — Kenney packs + OpenGameArt, see assets/sounds/SOURCES.md):
- Replace every procedural synth WAV with forged sounds (ffmpeg pitch/layer
mixes): distinct fire sounds per weapon with 2-3 variations, explosions,
footsteps x5, land/jump/dash/vault, knife swing, hit/kill confirms,
bullet impacts, reload, flight loops, UI hover/click/confirm/error,
match jingles, menu music
- AudioManager.stream_for(): AudioStreamRandomizer per sound id — every
weapon now gets variation + pitch randomization on each shot
- Explosions and bullet impacts play positional audio; landing has its own
sound instead of a pitched footstep; ambient wind bed on every map
Visuals:
- ExplosionVFX: shared cel-shaded burst (white-hot stepped core, ink
shockwave ring, star spikes, flat smoke puffs) replaces the orange
sphere in both local and remote-replay paths
- Comic star muzzle flashes on all weapons; unified cel tracer bolts with
ink outlines across hitscan/shotgun/remote paths
- Impact decals: hard-stepped ink-splat gradients instead of soft airbrush
- Toon shading on first-person view models + arms, third-person weapons,
and the procedural humanoid fallback (no hull outlines on FBX weapons —
their hard normals tear the inverted hull)
- Fix: giant soft "blob" highlight on floors — toon rim/specular disabled
on level-geometry materials (pre-existing artifact since the cel commit)
- Fix: own third-person weapon rendered into the first-person camera
(shadows-only now covers first_person_mode)
UI:
- UITheme: comic theme on the root window — Bangers display font (OFL),
paper panels with thick ink borders + hard drop shadows, papaya accent,
themed buttons/inputs/popups; hover/click sounds on all menu buttons
- Main menu: tilted comic wordmark, sunset toon diorama, looping menu music
- Match HUD: themed scoreboard/killfeed/kill counter
Viewports:
- 4x MSAA project-wide + viewmodel/diorama viewports (crisp ink lines)
- Viewmodel camera near plane 0.01; third-person camera FOV syncs settings
- debug/visual_capture.gd: dev tool to screenshot menu + level for review
Verified: 11/11 movement tests, spawn smoke test 0 failures, before/after
screenshot comparison of menu and level.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
- SkinnedPlayerModel: generic play_oneshot() (generalizes the Land lock),
Hit and Dance in the clip table (Dance loops), restartable clips
- Hit flinch: victims visibly react on every peer's screen via the existing
damage broadcast — no new RPC
- Dance emote on B: toggles while grounded and idle, breaks on any movement;
synced to remotes via synced_is_dancing (all three spawner configs)
- Anime radial speed-lines overlay (canvas shader): fades in past ~1.2x walk
speed, spikes on dash, widescreen-corrected clear center
- New input action 'emote' (B) in project.godot
11/11 FSM tests, spawn smoke 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
- Quake-style air-strafe accelerate (real speed gain from strafing; external
speed from dash/rockets never clamped)
- Wall run: keeps entry momentum (incl. upward carry), accelerates along the
wall instead of hard-setting velocity, gravity fades in over the run
- Slide: slope physics (gravity projected along floor accelerates downhill),
flat-ground decel instead of multiplicative friction, entry boost, direct
slide->wallrun and slide->dash transitions
- Dash: cooldown 10s -> 2s, per-player (was a static shared across instances),
momentum fully kept on exit, FOV punch event
- Grapple: taut pendulum with active rope control (W reels in, S pays out),
release keeps swing energy
- Wall climb: carries upward momentum in, jump-off kick, shared vault helper
- Crouch capsule: single owner in the machine, smoothly lerped, ceiling check;
camera eye height follows via crouch factor (no more head snapping)
- Landing: machine emits 'land' events scaled by impact; camera dip + pitched
down thud; footsteps get pitch variation
- Camera rig: event-driven (land dip, dash FOV kick, vault pitch impulse),
slide roll tilt
- Model: Jump vs Fall split by vertical velocity, Land one-shot on heavy
landings, wall-run body lean (synced to remotes via synced_wall_side)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Layer a procedural SkeletonModifier3D (ShooterPoseModifier) on top of the base
clip so the character reads like a movement-shooter avatar:
- Directional lean: banks into the movement direction (right/left/back) and
blends smoothly for diagonals, driven by velocity relative to facing.
- Slide: leans the torso back and pitches the head up to look forward, instead
of the base clip's forward-torso/legs-out "spine break".
- Airborne: plays a composed Jump pose (weapon ready) rather than a flailing
fall.
- Weapon hold: the base clip already keeps the arms down (weapon at the hip);
on ADS both arms lift and swing in toward centre-front to aim. ADS is read
from the active weapon and synced (synced_is_ads) so remote players raise
their weapons too.
The controller feeds movement direction + ADS to SkinnedPlayerModel.set_locomotion()
each frame (works for local and remote via synced velocity/rotation). All
rotations are authored in skeleton space (fwd=+Z, up=+Y, right=-X) and converted
per-bone; tuning constants are at the top of ShooterPoseModifier.
Verified by rendering the poses (idle/strafe/back/slide/ads) in a real Godot
viewport. Smoke test 30/30.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Character pipeline (tools/):
- sketchfab_import.py: search/download via Sketchfab Download API with
license/attribution tracking (SKETCHFAB_API_TOKEN)
- autorig.py: headless Blender auto-rig — fits a Mixamo-named skeleton
to unrigged humanoids, binds automatic weights
- merge_animations.py: merges the shared Mixamo-skeleton animation
library onto any rigged character, strips root motion, canonical names
- pipeline.py: one command chains download -> rig -> animate -> register
In-game skin system:
- SkinManager autoload reads skins.json (auto-written by the pipeline)
- SkinnedPlayerModel rewritten: canonical clips with fallback chains,
blend times, speed-scaled locomotion, weapon bone attachment
- First-person: full animated body for the owner, head hidden via
SkeletonModifier3D; third-person: full model for other players
- Skin selector in main menu; skin id synced in multiplayer
- Fixed GLBLoader crash (GLTFDocument.get_animation_count doesn't exist)
Multiplayer sync overhaul:
- Movement is now client-authoritative: the owning peer simulates
locally (no input round-trip), server keeps health/kills/death
- Remote players interpolate synced_position/velocity with
extrapolation and snap-on-teleport
- Knockback/impulses routed to the simulating peer
Audio:
- AudioManager autoload: SFX/Weapons/Footsteps/UI/Music buses, pooled
3D players, variation + pitch randomization, auto-registration from
assets/sounds
Docs: 3D_ASSET_PIPELINE.md rewritten end-to-end, new ASSET_SOURCES.md
(non-procedural animation/map/sound sources) and SOUND_DESIGN.md.
Verified with debug/spawn_smoke_test.gd (headless: 24/24 checks pass).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The Miku model T-posed because the previous _update_skin() used
set_bone_pose(i, get_bone_pose(i)) which is a no-op when the pose
is unchanged. Replace with skeleton.notification(NOTIFICATION_UPDATE_SKELETON)
to force the Skeleton3D to recompute bone transforms and notify the
MeshInstance to update vertex buffers.
Also fix scale: the GLB is ~1.2m tall (not 1.6m as documented), so
set scale_factor=1.25 to fit the 1.8m player capsule, and add
position_y_offset=-0.2 to align the model's feet with the player origin.
Co-Authored-By: Hermes Agent <[email protected]>
The skinned player model was loading miku_rigged_final.glb which only
contained a single "Idle" animation (1 track, near-rest pose). This caused
"animation 'Jump/Walk/Run' not found" spam and a T-pose appearance.
Switch to miku_rigged_animated.glb which has all 7 animations
(Crouch, Death, Idle, Idle2, Jump, Run, Walk).
Additional fixes:
- Fix scaling: the GLB is already in meters (~1.6m tall), not cm.
Removed the unconditional 0.01 cm->m conversion that was shrinking
the character to 1/100th size.
- Fix bone track paths: use "MikuRig/Skeleton3D:" prefix matching the
actual scene tree structure (AnimationPlayer is sibling of MikuRig).
- Add _ensure_locomotion_animations() to create Walk/Run/Jump/Idle
procedurally if the GLB is missing them.
- Eliminate per-frame "not found" log spam with rate-limited warnings.
- Update level_runtime.gd and test_level_builder.gd to use animated GLB.
Closes #3d-player-model animation pipeline
The Blender GLTF exporter was stripping animation tracks (only 1 of 51
channels survived export). Now SkinnedPlayerModel detects this at
runtime and creates a proper Idle animation programmatically using Godot's
Animation API with 5 bone tracks (Spine, Arms, Neck, Hips).
Also switched model_path back to miku_rigged_final.glb since the
re-export wasn't adding usable animations.
- Remove duplicate is_local variable in level_runtime.gd line 224
- Remove orphaned animation code from old load_model in skinned_player_model.gd
- Both files now compile cleanly
Godot headless/CLI can't import GLB files — the GLTF loader only works
in the editor GUI. Switched SkinnedPlayerModel to use GLTFDocument.append_from_buffer()
which parses GLB data from raw bytes at runtime.
Verified: GLB parses successfully, generates scene with MikuRig skeleton,
AnimationPlayer, and 7 animations (Crouch, Death, Idle, Idle_001, Jump, Run, Walk).
Also added characters/glb_loader.gd as a reusable utility for loading
any GLB file at runtime.
- Add miku_rigged_animated.glb (3.27MB) with 18-bone skeleton and 6 animations
(Idle, Walk, Run, Jump, Crouch, Death) via Blender auto-rig script
- Add tools/rig_and_animate.py: reusable Blender script for rigging any humanoid
mesh with Mixamo-compatible bone naming
- Update SkinnedPlayerModel: scale_factor, first-person mode, animation state
matching (Idle/Walk/Run/Jump/Crouch/Death)
- Update level_runtime.gd: use skinned model for local player, procedural
humanoid for remote players
- Update skin_manager.gd and test_level_builder.gd to use animated model
- Fix Godot 4.2.1 'is not Type' syntax in 5 weapon files
- Add editor/import_miku_to_tscn.gd for editor-based GLB import
Nicholas Butzke
Hermes