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]>
- 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]>
- toon.gdshader: banded diffuse with cool-tinted shadows (3 tones), stepped
specular, rim light, and an optional world-triplanar albedo path so level
geometry keeps the 0.5 m grid with no UVs
- toon_outline.gdshader: inverted-hull ink outline, applied via
material_overlay so it works on skinned (deforming) meshes
- LevelMaterials: tinted() now returns toon grid materials; toonify()/
apply_toon_recursive() convert imported character/prop materials in place
- SkinnedPlayerModel: characters get toon shading + outline on load
- LevelEnvironment: shared stylized environment for all maps — saturated
anime sky, linear tonemap (filmic/ACES crush cel bands), bloom for
emissives, saturation+contrast grade, light depth haze; test level and
dust2 now use it and the procedural arena (which had NO environment)
gets it plus runtime toonification of its baked geometry
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]>
Nicholas Butzke