A character has arrived as separate body, garment and hair meshes since the
pipeline stopped joining them — but nothing recorded which was which, so every
system downstream re-guessed from the material. That guess ("untextured and
nearly black means ink") had already rendered the mannequin's flat yellow body
as a black silhouette once.
The question is answerable once, at build time, where the mesh, the weights and
the skeleton are all in hand. tools/surface_map.py answers it three ways, in
order of how much it trusts them: the material name, which on VRoid exports is
formal and on hand-authored models is still explicit; the weights, which are
decisive when the name says nothing — a surface pulled by the skirt chain is a
skirt whatever it is called; and the material flags, which catch the model's own
line-work. The answer goes in the rig sidecar next to the roles and the chains,
and SkinSurfaces reads it.
All eighteen of Taila's surfaces, and every surface of the other five skins,
now resolve from the table with nothing falling through to the heuristic
(debug/surface_class_check.gd). The heuristic stays as the fallback, which is
the one job it was ever right for.
What that buys immediately is per-class art direction, which was impossible
while every surface had to take numbers calibrated on skin. Hair takes a much
thinner line — at the body's 5 mm each strand's hull swallows its neighbour and
the head reads as a solid dark cap. Cloth takes a heavier line and a crisper
terminator, because a garment's silhouette is most of what separates a character
from the background at range. Accessories take the heaviest. `body` is unchanged
on purpose, so the look this was all calibrated against does not move.
That required moving the outline from the instance to the surface: Miku's body,
face and hair are three surfaces of ONE mesh, so an instance-wide overlay could
only ever give all three the same weight.
Two things found on the way, fixed here because they are one line each: the
surface classifier skips meshes with no vertex groups, which drops the stray
42-vertex Icosphere that rides inside every shipped skin — two older tools
already skipped it by spelling its name — and load_model now clears _rig_info,
which a model with no skeleton used to inherit from the last character loaded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A third playable character, built with the pipeline skill from a source
that was already in the repo: the animation library ships a rigged
Mannequin mesh on the exact 53-joint reference skeleton, CC0, so it needed
no download and retargets perfectly. 18 clips, 0.3% cross-leg bleed, 7% of
verts at four influences — a clean authored-weight import. Licence
recorded in mannequin.license.json as the other skins do.
It has no cloth chains, correctly: it is a mannequin and has neither hair
nor clothes.
Importing it turned up two real bugs, both of which would have hit any
flat-coloured or single-piece model:
- LevelMaterials.apply_character_look treated ANY untextured surface on a
character as the model's own outline shell and hid it, so the mannequin
rendered as a solid black silhouette — its body and joint materials are
untextured flat colours, not ink. _is_line_work() now asks whether the
surface is named eyes*, is drawn front-face-culled (the inverted-hull
setup), or is near-black. Taila and Miku are unaffected: their materials
are textured and never reach that branch. Verified by render.
- verify_character.py failed the build for having one mesh. That check
cannot tell "the pipeline joined them" from "the artist authored one
mesh" — Quaternius' mannequin is one piece on purpose. It is advisory
now; the join path's two unambiguous signatures, cross-leg bleed and the
4-influences-everywhere spread, are still hard checks.
Also restored Miku's description, which the re-import had blanked.
3 GLB skins selectable (6 with the built-in colour skins). Smoke 0
failures, 11/11 movement tests, cloth idle 0.024-0.078 deg/frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The "linked ankle cuffs" and the "squashed legs" were the same thing, and it
was never the cloth or the weights: it is the model's OWN outline hull.
Isolating it took rendering the raw GLB in a bright scene and toggling one
surface group at a time. The hull ("FullBlack" and "material", the untextured
surfaces that trace the body and hair silhouettes) is a duplicated shell whose
skin weights do not track the base mesh through a deep bend. During a run it
tears into spikes and stretches sheets across the ankles. Hiding just those
surfaces makes the legs render perfectly clean, with no other change — so the
two previous attempts here were both treating symptoms:
* re-weighting stray ankle vertices only tore the cloth (reverted last time)
* deleting cross-leg triangles removed real geometry for no benefit
(SkinMeshRepair is deleted in this commit — the clean render above was
produced WITHOUT it)
The hull is also redundant: characters already get an inverted-hull overlay
from apply_toon_recursive AND the screen-space ink_edge pass, so dropping it
costs nothing visually. The EYE cards (EyesFullBlack lashes, EyesInvL, EyesHL
highlight) are real facial features rather than a hull, so those are kept, flat
as before. They are told apart by name prefix, not by guesswork about geometry.
Worth recording: no bone is EVER scaled, in any clip. Measured again here
across the whole Run cycle — worst deviation of a bone's pose basis from a pure
rotation is 0.00000. There is no squash-and-stretch in this rig; it only ever
looked that way because of the shell.
Backpedalling now plays the locomotion cycle in reverse (negative TimeScale)
instead of moon-walking with the forward clip — the library ships no authored
backward run. Directional lean is raised from 0.18/0.30 to 0.30/0.42 rad: with
one forward cycle and no strafe clips, the lean is the only cue for which way
the character is travelling, so it has to be legible rather than subtle.
Blends raised again: base 0.22 -> 0.32, locomotion 0.28 -> 0.40. Verified the
cross-fade genuinely applies rather than snapping — instrumented an idle->run
switch and the thigh ramps gradually over the window instead of stepping on
frame one, with xfade_time reading 0.400 s on the Transition node.
FSM tests 11/11, spawn smoke test 0 failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Two separate causes behind "too glossy with a thin white outline":
1. The model carries its OWN cel line-work as extra, UNTEXTURED surfaces —
an inverted-hull outline shell plus eye-line/highlight cards (Taila names
them FullBlack / EyesFullBlack / EyesInvL / EyesHL). They are authored to
read as flat black, but the glTF import hands them a default near-white
albedo, and apply_toon_recursive then LIT them. That is the thin white
rim: a pale, toon-shaded outline shell tracing every hair strand. They now
render unshaded flat ink (flat white for the "HL" highlight card).
2. The skin textures already have cel shading painted in. Stacking our hard
3-tone break on top produced a bright stripe that slid across the hair as
the camera moved — the "gloss". Characters now get a soft terminator and
an almost-invisible second step, so the painted shading carries the form.
Both live in a new LevelMaterials.apply_character_look(), called only for
imported character GLBs, so props and level geometry keep exactly the crisp
banding they were calibrated with. The one shared change is that the toon
shader's second-step darkness is now the mid_tone uniform, defaulting to the
0.82 that was hardcoded — no change for existing callers.
Character shadow tint (0.64, 0.56, 0.72) is measured off the Sketchfab
reference render rather than guessed: sampling the hair there, shadow/midtone
lands near (0.63, 0.53, 0.70). Green drops hardest, which is what keeps
copper hair copper instead of washing it to brown.
debug/character_look_capture.gd renders the raw import beside our treatment
under matched lighting — the comparison this was tuned against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Outline: the inverted-hull width was tuned when the look was heavier and
now reads as a thick marker stroke. Cut every call site to roughly a third
(characters 0.012 -> 0.004, level geometry 0.015 -> 0.005, Neon Alley's
size-scaled clamp 0.02..0.05 -> 0.007..0.018) plus the shader default, so
the ink line stays readable without fattening every silhouette.
Third-person weapon on HumanoidModel: the gun was parented to root_pivot at
a fixed (-0.15, 1.0, 0.4) — floating 40 cm off the chest while both arms
posed at it from a distance. Give the rig a real right-hand node at the end
of the forearm and hang the weapon there, so it travels with the arm. Its
aim is re-derived from the body each frame (hand_r_pivot's global basis is
copied from root_pivot), otherwise the barrel would swing around with the
arm animation. The hold pose is retuned to match: right elbow tucked at the
ribs with a level forearm, left arm crossing to the handguard.
_seat_weapon_in_hand() slides each weapon along its own barrel axis so a
plausible grip lands in the fist regardless of where the artist left the
model origin. It measures with MeshInstance3D.get_aabb(), not
mesh.get_aabb() — the FBX gun parts are skinned, so the Mesh resource still
carries bind-pose bounds tens of metres across.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Weapons no longer reload by spinning the gun 360 (that was the upside-down
flip; nothing detached). New ViewmodelAnim module drives per-style manual-of-
arms sequences on the existing model_root + named arm pivots, with a temporary
magazine/shell/rocket/cell prop that visibly leaves and returns to the gun:
- mag (M4/AK/MP7/DMR): roll gun to present the well, hand rips the mag
down and away, fresh mag up, seat, charge. Gun stays UPRIGHT.
- boltmag (AWP): mag swap + a distinct bolt-cycle rock.
- break (double barrel): hinge open, flick both shells out, drop fresh
shells in, snap shut.
- tube (rocket launcher): tip the tube in, shove a rocket home, shoulder.
- cell (plasma/nail gun): glowing energy cell swapped on the side.
Per-shot viewmodel recoil kick (ViewmodelAnim.apply_kick) scaled by each
weapon's recoil_amplitude, so an AWP slams and an MP7 chatters — replaces the
old flat model behaviour. Weapons expose reload_style; base classes call
play_reload / stop (on unequip) / apply_kick.
Knife: the old barely-visible flick is now a real diagonal slash that
alternates backhand/forehand, whips the blade through screen centre, and
fires the third-person melee arm-swing action (synced to other players).
Hair/materials: specular fully to 0 (even a 2% stepped glint swept as shine
across Taila's hair when the camera moved); rim trimmed to a whisper. Fully
matte cloth/hair now.
Verify: debug/fp_weapon_capture.gd screenshots each weapon's reload phases,
the knife slash, and the fire kick.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The saturation grade (1.3) was shifting authored hues — Taila's auburn
ginger hair rendered fire-truck red and the whole game read filtered.
Saturation 1.3 -> 1.08, contrast 1.05 -> 1.03: textures now carry their
own vibrancy. Verified by sampling the rendered hair against the source
texture: lit hue 18-20 deg vs authored ~20 deg.
Character rim/specular cut again (rim 0.15/0.4 -> 0.08/0.32, spec
0.06 -> 0.025 @ 64): hair and cloth read fully matte, no wet sheen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Everything read as wet plastic or glowing porcelain for two stacking
reasons, both fixed centrally:
- toonify() shipped every character/prop/weapon with a hot rim (0.45 over
65% of the silhouette) and broad stepped specular (0.25 @ shininess 24) —
patent-leather highlights on any dark surface. Now a thin rim (0.15/0.4)
and a small tight glint (0.06 @ 56); shader defaults match.
- The LINEAR tonemapper clipped lit white surfaces (sun + ambient push
facades past 1.0) and the glow pass bloomed the clip, so buildings glowed
like porcelain. Switched to FILMIC with white=2.4: near-linear through
the cel bands (they stay crisp), soft shoulder above 1.0. Glow threshold
1.1 -> 1.45 so only genuine emissives (neon, tracers, plasma) bloom.
- Saturation 1.22 -> 1.3 compensates filmic mids — vibrancy unchanged.
- Neon Alley: ambient 1.7 -> 1.35 / sun 2.2 -> 2.5 — the shoulder no longer
hides the ambient lavender cast, so let the sun shape the facades.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
- LevelMaterials.flat(): toon-banded FLAT color material (no greybox grid
texture) for dressed maps; cached per tint, rim/spec off
- Neon Alley overrides _box_static: every structure renders flat cel color;
prop-scale pieces (<10m) get an inverted-hull ink outline scaled to their
size. Building-scale boxes skip the hull — the inflated plates smear into
black voids at close range (found via fixed street-camera capture)
- Pylon wires render as flat ink lines; warmer wood + hotter vermilion for
flat shading (the grid multiply used to brighten tints)
- visual_capture: deterministic street-level shot after the aerial for
style comparisons
Street capture now reads properly BoomerangX: flat lavender asphalt, hard
light bands, torii framed down the underpass, neon strips + sign glow.
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]>
- 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]>
- Generated CC0-style prototype grid textures (0.5 m cells) and a shared
LevelMaterials factory: world-space triplanar mapping over every code-built
level (test level, dust2, procedural arena) with the existing color coding
kept as tints. Readable surfaces at speed instead of flat color boxes;
materials are cached per tint so identical surfaces batch.
- .gdignore + .gitignore the raw downloaded asset packs in addons/ whose
overlong paths broke Godot import scans and spammed git warnings.
- Replaced the rotted FSM test file (invalid call(t) on Callables, stateless
stub nodes, hung forever without quitting) with a real suite: 10 tests
covering state registration, jump bookkeeping, wall-run momentum
preservation and upward-carry cap, per-player dash cooldown (regression for
the old shared static), dash speed stacking, chain soft cap, landing
events, and slide entry momentum. New headless entrypoint:
godot --headless --path . -s res://movement/tests/run_fsm_tests.gd
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Nicholas Butzke