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]>
There was a string — `current_gamemode`, always "Deathmatch" — an OptionButton
with one entry in it, and a five-minute timer that counted to zero, set
`match_active = false`, and did nothing else. No winner was declared, no summary
appeared, the clock froze at 00:00, and players carried on shooting each other
in a match that had stopped counting. Nothing was tracked beyond a running kill
count. A match did not end so much as stop mattering, and everything a player
does in the last minute only matters if there is a last minute.
globals/game_mode.gd answers the three questions a mode has to answer — how you
score, when it ends, who won — for three modes:
Deathmatch 25 frags or 10 minutes.
Team Deathmatch two squads to 50, teams balanced by COUNT on join (a 4v4
that loses three from one side must refill the short side;
round-robin on join order leaves it 4v1 forever), friendly
fire off and enforced on the server before damage is even
broadcast — a mode where the damage lands but the kill does
not count is worse than either.
Gun Game every kill promotes you a rung and swaps your weapon. The
score IS the rung and the limit IS the ladder's length, so
finishing the ladder and reaching the score limit are the
same event and only one win condition exists.
`check_win` is a pure function of the stats and the clock, deliberately, because
a win condition that can only be exercised by playing a whole match is one
nobody tests — and the previous one never was. debug/game_mode_check.gd runs 30
cases over it: a tie is a DRAW rather than a win for whoever came first out of
the dictionary; a team match is decided on the TEAM's total, which a per-player
check never reaches; every ladder rung names a weapon that exists, or that rung
softlocks the mode; and promoting past the top clamps, because the winning kill
promotes before the match-end RPC lands.
Tracking now covers score, team, current streak, best streak and ladder rung.
Score and kills are separate numbers because in Gun Game they coincide and in
anything with an objective they would not. The scoreboard ranks by score, shows
the mode's own noun for it, and puts the limit on the top line — a win condition
players cannot see is one they cannot play toward.
ui/match_summary.gd gives the ending somewhere to happen: who won, WHY (time and
frag limit are different stories about the same scoreline), team totals, full
standings, and a way out that is not alt-F4. Play Again is host-only on a server.
Three bugs found on the way, all of which only became bugs once matches could
actually end: loading a level reset the clock but not the scores, so the second
match on a server would have ended on its first kill; `.rpc()` on an offline
peer does not call locally, so singleplayer had no killfeed and no stat sync at
all; and a rocket already in the air at the whistle could change the result
after the summary was on screen.
spawn smoke 0, game modes 30/30, movement 11/11.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
New Acoustics system (globals/acoustics.gd):
- Occlusion: rays from listener to source collect up to 3 occluding bodies;
each surface's material adds transmission loss and lowers the lowpass
cutoff. A gunshot through wood stays warm (-8dB, 1.4kHz), brick muffles
hard (-15dB, 600Hz), concrete harder (-18dB, 450Hz), metal keeps more
highs (-11dB, 1kHz), glass barely muffles (-5dB, 2.6kHz). Applied via
each AudioStreamPlayer3D's attenuation filter.
- Early reflections: loud sounds (gunfire, explosions) probe 8 directions
for nearby walls; each close surface plays a quiet, delayed (path/343ms),
material-filtered copy from the mirror point — shots audibly slap back
off structures so players can triangulate. Sub-30ms echoes are skipped
(they perceptually merge with the direct sound).
- Surface classification: builder-set acoustic_material meta -> node-name
keywords -> metallic-material inference -> concrete default; cached.
Integration:
- AudioManager.play_3d applies occlusion at fire time and re-filters all
playing positional sounds every 0.12s (walking behind a wall mid-sound
audibly muffles it); flight loops opt in via "acoustic_occluded" group
- Remote players' gunshots were entirely SILENT — rpc_play_fire_effects now
plays the right weapon's shot at the shooter's position, occluded and
reflected like everything else
- Remote players' footsteps were also silent — now positional + occluded,
cadence scaled to their speed
- Test level tagged: brick arena walls, wooden platforms/obstacles, metal
wall-run corridor/rails/dash platforms; dust2 sandstone reads as brick
Tests: debug/acoustics_test.gd (12 checks: per-material loss ordering,
multi-wall stacking, reflection delay/filter, name classification) — all
pass; movement 11/11; smoke 0 failures.
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]>
Godot import artifacts that pair with already-committed assets:
- miku_test_Image_0..3.png: textures extracted from miku_test.glb on import
- .uid files for spawn_smoke_test.gd and audio_manager.gd
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[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