Commit Graph
4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 2efc21b18d feat(menu): PLAY is one press, and the level cards are photographs
Reaching a game was Singleplayer → pick a level. Reaching a multiplayer game
was Multiplayer → Host Game → wait → pick a level → wait, and the gamemode
dropdown had exactly one entry which set a string nothing read.

PLAY now starts the last map and mode played, and says which — "Akiba Crossing
• Deathmatch" under the button, so pressing it is a promise rather than a leap.
Everything else on the home screen is a detour from that, which is the right
shape for a menu: the common case is a button, not a path. Hosting is one press
and lands in the lobby already hosting; the lobby puts map, mode, players and
start on ONE screen; Enter connects, so typing an address does not then require
reaching for the mouse.

This is the lesson HoYoverse published about Zenless Zone Zero's first months
more loudly than anything else they have written. Their postmortem on the TV
mode names three complaints — it took too long, it sat between the player and
the combat, and there was too much of it early — and 1.2 removed it from the
story entirely rather than shortening it. Time spent BEFORE the thing the
player came for is not neutral, it is a cost.

The cards were a two-stop gradient generated from two colours in a meta file,
whose hover state was `use_hdr = true` — not a visible change on any of them.
They are photographs now, shot by debug/map_preview_capture.gd, which took
three attempts to get right and each attempt is a comment in the file:

  - framing each map from OUTSIDE by merging every VisualInstance3D's AABB
    produced five tiny dioramas floating on a table, and one solid black
    rectangle. That is a minimap, and a minimap is not a photograph.
  - standing at a spawn point fixed three maps and left two black: fps_blockout
    is genuinely dark and most of its spawns face an unlit wall, and
    procedural_arena builds its geometry at runtime so no fixed offset is
    reliably inside it.
  - so the tool now RENDERS several vantages and scores each result — mean
    luminance times its standard deviation, because brightness alone picks the
    empty sky and variance alone picks a high-contrast corner of a dark room.
    Their product picks a photograph. A black rectangle passes any check that
    only asks whether the camera ended up somewhere sensible.

Also fixed, and caught by looking at the screenshot: the selected mode chip was
unreadable. Its glyph is ink on volt, and the theme gave every button a 5 px INK
outline — an ink glyph inside an ink outline is not outlined, it is five pixels
fatter, and on a small chip that is a solid blob. Button labels now carry no
outline at all, which is the same reasoning debug/ui_contrast_check.gd already
encodes: an outline separates a glyph from a backdrop it cannot beat alone, and
a label on a solid chip does not have that problem. The chips keep their heavy
ink border, so nothing about the drawn look changes.

`current_gamemode` is normalised on the way in, because it used to hold a
display string and six callers still pass one. An unrecognised id compares
unequal to GameMode.GUN_GAME and would silently disable that mode's weapon
issuing — half a mode is worse than none.

The menu's background character is the player's OWN skin holding their weapon,
rather than the box-and-capsule mannequin that stood there before.

spawn smoke 0, game modes 30/30, movement 11/11, contrast 108/108, HUD layout
PASS, weapon holds 0, dances 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 12:40:50 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 0d125dc03f fix: third-person gun actually held — IK to the weapon, real recoil, no flip
Four separate third-person defects, one shared root: the arms were posed at
art-directed ANGLES that merely approximated the gun, and a stuck one-shot
flag kept handing them back to the animation clip.

- The rifle hold was silently DEAD after the first reload or throw. The gate
  trusted AnimationNodeOneShot's `active` parameter, which never clears, so
  clip_owns_arms stayed true forever and the clip drove the arms while the
  gun hung off the hand. `_upper_lock` (a timer we own) is now the
  authority, and the one-shot is explicitly faded out when it expires.
  This alone is why the gun was never held correctly.
- Arms are now solved with real two-bone IK (`_ik_arm`) onto points derived
  from the WEAPON: the stock is anchored in the shoulder pocket, the grip
  and foregrip fall out along the barrel, and the support hand is placed on
  the actual handguard (sliding inboard if the model is too long to reach).
  Verified numerically: the hand lands within 2mm of its target.
- `_measure_weapon` measures the model's AABB along its barrel and re-seats
  it so the hand sits at a realistic pistol-grip point. Weapon models put
  their origin anywhere — the M4's was 10cm from the muzzle end, so parking
  its stock in the shoulder drove the hand INTO the shoulder and folded the
  arm up behind the head.
- Recoil now shows for the OWNER in third person: server_play_fire_effects
  only ever fired for remote shooters, so the local player saw nothing. The
  ammo counter dropping now kicks the model. The kick rides in the gun's aim
  direction so the IK carries BOTH hands up with it, instead of rotating the
  arms and shoving the support hand off the gun.
- Reload no longer flips the gun. The library's pistol-reload rotates the
  wrist the gun is parented to, which turned the rifle upside-down (mag to
  the sky) while the hand reached down for it. The hold now keeps the right
  arm through a reload and the support hand does the magazine work at the
  real mag well, under the receiver.

anim_capture gains recoil shots and lets ADS settle before framing;
debug/dump_bones.gd prints a skin's bone hierarchy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2026-07-21 10:15:54 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 1ad3563e5a feat: animations follow the mechanics — upper/lower split + real grapple pose
Two fidelity gaps closed:

- Reload/throw/shoot/hit used to REPLACE the whole-body clip, so reloading
  mid-slide snapped the character upright on standing legs. The model now
  runs a runtime AnimationTree (clips -> Transition -> TimeScale -> OneShot)
  whose one-shot layer is FILTERED to upper-body bones: the arms play the
  action while the legs keep sliding/running/falling. Land stays full-body.
  The rifle hold releases exactly while the one-shot node reports active.
- Grapple no longer plays the library's horizontal-swim clip. The zip pose
  is procedural: Fall as the airborne base, the spine pivots to fly along
  the line to the actual anchor point (capped so overhead shots don't fold
  the body), the head sights the anchor, legs trail behind, the FREE left
  hand reaches up the rope — and the right hand keeps holding the rifle.
  The anchor point feeds in from the controller for local and remote
  players (synced_grapple_point).
- anim_capture: deterministic open-ground teleport + two new regression
  shots (reload-while-sliding, grapple zip toward a real anchor).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-20 22:51:04 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 6c227b5538 feat: real two-hand rifle hold — armed animations finally read as a shooter
The clips were playing all along, but every locomotion state used unarmed
jog arms while the gun floated at the hip, so nothing looked animated.

- ShooterPoseModifier now REPLACES the arm chain with a direction-based FK
  rifle hold (low-ready at hip, shouldered on ADS) instead of nudging the
  unarmed clip additively; the wrist is solved so the muzzle points exactly
  along the aim line, gun kept upright (no-roll constraint).
- Per-arm release logic: reload/throw/hit one-shots, dance, death, the
  slide ground-brace, wall-run reach and grapple free the authored clips.
- Third-person weapon: fixed re-hide on weapon swap while in third person,
  scaled to character proportions, gripped along the hand.
- Armed idle uses Idle (arms owned by the hold) instead of arms-crossed
  PistolIdle base.
- FP viewmodel arms: character-styled sleeve + teal cuff + skin hand
  instead of the blue slabs.
- debug/anim_capture.gd: front+side screenshots of every movement state,
  one-shot action and ADS for visual regression of the model pipeline.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-19 17:55:05 -04:00