Commit Graph
116 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 a13ae50f95 feat(rig): every weapon gets its own hold, so the silhouette names the gun
`_apply_rifle_hold` did exactly what its name said, to everything. A knife, an
AWP and a rocket launcher were all solved as a rifle — stock in the shoulder
pocket, support hand out along the barrel, muzzle on the aim line — so in third
person every character stood the same way whatever they carried, and the only
thing distinguishing a sniper from a shotgun was the ~30 cm of gun mesh in
their hands. At the distance an enemy is usually seen that is nothing.

It costs more than looking wrong. A character's pose is the fastest available
answer to "what is about to happen to me": a tube on a shoulder means take
cover, a blade held low means they have to close, a rifle at low ready means
they have not seen you. One hold throws all of that away. It is also the thing
HoYoverse's team say they chase in Zenless Zone Zero — characters read by
silhouette first, and they refuse to settle on one construction method because
one method limits how distinguishable the results can be.

weapons/weapon_hold_profiles.gd gives each of the twelve weapons a style, and a
style is not a bundle of slider values. Three of its differences cannot be
expressed on the rifle solve at all, and those are the ones that carry:

  support   WHERE the off hand goes and HOW IT IS TURNED there — wrapped round
            a handguard, cupped against the firing fist, hooked under a tube
            palm-up, or released entirely. Sending a hand somewhere new without
            re-orienting it gives a hand teleported to the new spot still shaped
            for the old one.
  mount     whether the weapon's rear sits IN the shoulder pocket, ON TOP of the
            shoulder, or nowhere near it.
  head      whether the head comes down to the stock, or leans away to clear a
            tube. The cheek weld is the sniper silhouette, and its inverse is
            what says a launcher is resting on that shoulder.

A blade RELEASES the off arm back to the animation, so it swings with the run
cycle instead of gripping a handguard that is not there — most of what makes a
one-handed weapon read as one-handed — and closes a full fist, because an index
left straight along a knife handle reads as a mistake, not as discipline.

Layered strictly UNDER the existing tuning, so aria's hand-tuned AK-47 hold is
byte-for-byte what it was. WeaponHoldTuning.default_for is weapon-aware now,
which it had to be: the rig lab SAVES every knob it shows, so without it,
opening the lab on the knife and pressing save would silently overwrite the
blade profile with the rifle spec and put the character back to holding a knife
like an AK with nothing to indicate it had happened.

debug/weapon_hold_check.gd asserts the consequence, not the plumbing — storing
an enum and reading it back proves nothing. It measures where the hands and head
ACTUALLY end up, from inside the modifier pass (outside it, Godot restores the
local poses and every weapon reports an identical rifle) and in the shoulder's
own frame, because the hold breathes and two samples of the SAME weapon
otherwise differ by more than two different weapons do. 21 weapon pairs, all
distinguishable; the knife's off-hand weight measured at 0.01.

Two findings only measuring produced. Pushing `gun_fore` further out for the
sniper does NOTHING — the reach solver slides the support hand back down the
handguard until the arm can get there, so it landed at 0.388 m against the
rifle's 0.387. Raising the whole weapon is what makes a scoped rifle read.

And one only LOOKING produced, via debug/hold_capture.gd: the shotgun's barrel
passed through the character's chest. Every assertion passed — the hands were
exactly where they had been asked to go — but +x is toward the centreline, so
dropping the pocket and pushing it across at once swings the muzzle into the
torso.

rig_anchor_check still reports aria: her hand-tuned wrist rotates the anchor
offset. Pre-existing, and this halves it — it was 2 failures on main, now 1.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 12:05:43 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 c4bcbc7fd1 feat(ui): the first-person HUD is one thing, in the game's own hand
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]>
2026-07-28 11:51:22 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 414026f001 feat(ui): every control state is checked for readability, not trusted
The palette has two light accents and one very dark one, and a control
changes its FILL on hover and press. Paper text that reads at 18:1 on the
resting near-black chip inverts to paper-on-yellow the moment the pointer
arrives, which is 1.1:1 — invisible. That is the standard way a stylised UI
becomes unreadable, and it was live on the OptionButton dropdown that every
settings row uses: PopupMenu draws its papaya hover fill but keeps
`font_color` unless `font_hover_color` is set, and it was not set.

So the label now follows the fill. `ink_for(fill)` picks the legible glyph
colour by contrast ratio, and every state's text, icon and outline is derived
from its own fill through it — including the states nobody remembers exist:
`hover_pressed` on a toggle (a CheckButton read as OFF while you touched it),
icon colours on a CheckBox that is all icon, and the list hover that used to
be the same papaya as list SELECTION, so the row you pointed at looked like
the row you had chosen.

debug/ui_contrast_check.gd interrogates the BUILT theme rather than the
palette — a table compared against itself agrees by construction and catches
nothing — and fails below the WCAG floor. It found the PopupMenu gap, a Tree
hover asking for a `font_hovered_color` Godot does not have, and the health
bar's readout at 2.4:1 over its own fill.

That last one is not fixable as a colour pair: a centred readout straddles a
hot papaya fill and a near-black trough, and no single colour beats both. What
carries it is the heavy ink outline this theme puts on every glyph, which is
its first stated rule and the same mechanism that keeps menu text legible
straight over the 3D scene. The check models that as a fallback route —
outline vs backdrop 3:1, glyph vs outline 4.5:1, at least 4 px — granted only
where the backdrop genuinely varies, and substituting two ratios for one
rather than waiving the requirement.

Disabled text moves from 3.2:1 to 5.2:1 on the way past. A greyed-out
"Start Match" is information; an illegible smudge is not.

Also styled, because the theme had simply never mentioned them and Godot's
defaults are grey-on-grey: scrollbars, Tree, SpinBox, ProgressBar, tooltips,
LineEdit read-only and selected text.

108 pairs checked, all passing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 02:39:25 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 742d68e318 chore(characters): Aria's AK-47 hold, tuned in the lab
The first tuning pass saved through the rig lab, and the first content in
assets/characters/weapon_holds.json. Aria holding the AK-47 at low ready: weapon
scaled to 0.53, both wrists set, both elbow poles placed, and both hands moved
along and off the barrel line.

Authored by hand at the sliders, not derived — which is the whole point of the
file. Every value here is one the code cannot work out from the skeleton, and
the layering means it applies to this character and this weapon only; every
other character still gets what the code derives.

Also picks up the .uid Godot generated for debug/wrist_gun_check.gd, which was
committed a moment before its companion existed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 02:12:28 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 e97de9aafd fix(weapons): the wrist turns the hand, and the gun stays on the aim line
The weapon is a child of a BoneAttachment3D on the trigger hand, so the two were
welded by construction. Every degree `wrist_r` turned swung the barrel the same
degree off the aim line — and took with it every control that could have
corrected for it, because they are all expressed relative to that same hand.
There was no combination of sliders that aligned a hand to a gun, which is the
one thing the knob exists for.

Both outcomes are now computed where the hand's local pose is set: the rotation
the hand would take without the wrist offset, and the one it takes with it. The
hand gets the second; the difference between them is exactly the counter-rotation
the weapon mount needs, in the hand's own local frame, and
`SkinnedPlayerModel._hold_weapon_still` applies it to the mount each frame. The
gun ends up precisely where the solver put it.

That also gives the two controls a clean split, which is what makes them usable
together:

  TRIGGER / SUPPORT WRIST (hold)     turns the HAND, gun stays on the aim line
  Grip roll / pitch / yaw (anchors)  turns the GUN inside the hand

Identity when `wrist_r` is untuned, so a character nobody has tuned mounts its
weapon exactly as before.

Applied in `_process` rather than inside the modifier pass on purpose. The gun's
mount is not something the skeleton owns, and the compensated value only changes
when a slider moves or the ADS blend travels, so one frame of lag is a fraction
of a degree; reaching into the modifier to touch a scene node would be worse.

wrist_gun_check asserts both halves, because only asserting the first is how
this shipped broken: the hand must TURN, or the knob does nothing, and the gun
must NOT, or the knob cannot be used. Across both poses and all three axes the
hand turns 28.2-28.7 degrees for a 0.5 rad knob and the gun moves 0.1-0.6 —
against the ~28 it would move if it were still following the wrist. The residue
is the arm's own IK settling, since the hand's rotation feeds the chain that
places the shoulder.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 01:43:36 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 a97ccca13c feat(rig lab): wrists in three axes, and sliders that belong to the pose on screen
Three things the lab could not do.

WRISTS. Each hand had one scalar, a twist about the barrel. That is the only
axis a hand wrapping a cylinder is free in ONCE the arc onto the barrel is
solved — which is true of the support hand, was never true of the trigger hand,
and in neither case left a way to cock a wrist forward or break it inward. Both
now take pitch, yaw and roll, applied in the GUN's frame so the three sliders
mean the same thing whether the muzzle is down at low ready or level down the
sights. Zero is exactly the old behaviour, since the roll term defaulted to zero
too.

HAND POINTS. `gun_stock` and `gun_fore` are the distances along the weapon at
which each hand sits, and they were labelled by what they measure rather than by
whose hand it is. They now say TRIGGER and SUPPORT, next to the off-barrel
shifts for the same two hands, so the four controls that place a hand read as
four controls that place a hand.

POSES. The hold's knobs are now per pose, and the lab shows one pose's at a
time. Half of them mean something different at low ready than down the sights;
showing both sets at once meant every slider on screen was for one of two poses
with nothing saying which. Selecting a pose rebuilds the panel.

Two poses, not four, and deliberately: the runtime blends between exactly two
holds on `ads`. Running and Crouched are locomotion states that still use the
low-ready hold, so they edit the same numbers — and the heading says so, rather
than letting someone tune "Running" and wonder why standing still changed.
Offering four independent tunings would be inventing a capability the code does
not have, and the fourth would silently do nothing.

`pitch` is the case that forced the design: down the sights the muzzle follows
the CAMERA, so there is nothing there to tune. It exists at low ready and
nowhere else, and a spec table where a knob names the poses it applies to is
what lets that be said instead of shipping a control that does nothing.

hold_pose_check asserts both halves — that no pose shows another's knobs, that
aiming offers no muzzle pitch, that the heading names the hold being edited, and
that all twelve wrist axes turn the hand they name.

Its first version reported every wrist axis as moving the hand by 0.0 degrees,
which is precisely the answer it would have given if the wrists had never been
implemented: it read `get_bone_pose_rotation` from a SceneTree script, and Godot
restores every bone's local pose after the modifier pass. The repo has a
reference section about exactly this and it still cost a cycle. Measured through
a PoseProbe, every axis turns its hand ~20 degrees.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 01:31:08 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 b1c8bab714 feat(rig lab): drag the anchors themselves, not just the gun under them
The lab could move the GUN and not the anchor points the hands are solved onto.
`grip_offset` slides the weapon around inside the fist; `gun_fore` and
`gun_stock` are distances ALONG the barrel, so the trigger and support hands
could travel up and down the weapon's own axis and nowhere else. Nothing could
take a hand off that axis, which is what a handguard below the bore, an angled
foregrip, or a pistol whose grip is nowhere near its barrel line all need.

Two things fix that.

`grip_shift` and `fore_shift` give the two hand anchors real three-dimensional
freedom, expressed in the GUN's own across/up/along frame so a sideways nudge
stays sideways as the weapon pitches between low ready and ADS. Zero is exactly
the old behaviour. Their z overlaps the along-axis distances, which is redundant
and deliberate: keeping those separate is what lets the reach solver slide the
support hand back down the handguard without undoing a considered sideways
offset.

And the markers are now draggable. They already showed the anchors; now they
are handles. The one under the mouse swells and draws through the body — depth
testing is right for judging whether a hand reached its target and wrong for a
handle, because at any useful framing the hands occlude all three.

Verified three ways, and each one had to be rebuilt once:

  anchor_shift_check first compared absolute positions and reported a 3.5 mm
  error that was the character BREATHING — there is a sin() on the muzzle pitch,
  so no anchor is ever in the same place twice. Measuring each anchor relative
  to the one it hangs off, rotated into the current gun basis, cancels the
  breathing, the ADS blend and the recoil exactly. 48 checks, six characters,
  both poses.

  anchor_drag_check asserts the drag writes the knob the MOUSE asked for,
  derived independently from the camera: 0.00-0.01 mm on all three. It does not
  assert the marker lands under the cursor, because it does not — the anchors
  hang off the shoulder and the arm chasing them moves the shoulder, so a drag
  settles at 0.77x-1.13x. Small enough to ignore interactively.

  That feedback first read as 1.5x-1.8x, because the cases were compounding on
  each other, and waiting LONGER for the pose to settle made it worse rather
  than better — which is the opposite of how a settling error behaves and is
  what gave it away.

The buttstock case also failed for a while on a bug entirely in the test: it
read an absent knob as zero when `pocket_hip` defaults to (30, -70, 60) mm. The
lab has a note about that trap in `_reset`. It is just as easy to walk into from
a test, and now has one there too.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-28 01:05:37 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 700d0925d7 tools: measure rest poses, and diagnose momo
momo's idle plays with her arms overhead and her waist pinched, and every
assertion in the suite passes on her.

The first suspicion was the retarget's rest-relative delta: it applies "what the
clip does to the LIBRARY's rest" to THIS rig's rest, which quietly assumes the
two rests are alike. rest_pose_check.gd tests that, and disproves it — miku's
arms rest 41° off the library's and taila's 32°, and both animate correctly. The
delta retarget handles a rest-pose difference, which is what it is for. Recorded
in the reference so nobody spends that hour again.

Writing the tool reproduced this project's own recurring mistake in miniature.
Measuring "the direction from a bone to its first child" reported kiyoko's and
aria's legs 71° off the library — because a thigh's first child is as likely to
be a skirt bone as a shin, and it was measuring the hang of a skirt panel.
Pointing it at the next limb BY ROLE dropped both to 1°.

What momo actually has: `Root_001` through `Root_007` are in her driven_bones,
and they are her HAIR roots — Hair_A is dominated by Root_001_001, Root_007 and
Root_005. The animation is keying bones the spring solver is supposed to own,
which is non-negotiable #2 broken by the role resolver rather than by a clip.
The surface table corroborates it: her hair surfaces report 1.8% and 9.4% chain
share, because most of their vertices belong to bones in no chain at all.

Not fixed here. `Root_00N` matches no COSMETIC stem, and adding "root" to the
stems would cost a rig whose actual root is called `Root` its hips. The
structural fix is that a bone whose geometry is dominated by a mesh classified
`hair` is a hair bone whatever it is called — which the surface table makes
answerable at build time, and did not when momo was imported. It needs a Blender
re-run and re-verification of all six characters.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-27 15:03:33 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 08ae85b286 feat(characters): rig anchors, and a lab that edits any tuning group
The weapon lab could tune how a character HOLDS a gun. It could not tune where
the gun sits in the hand, and that is a different question with a different
scope: a hold is per character and weapon, an anchor is a fact about the hand.

RigAnchors adds it. A hand bone's origin is the WRIST, not the palm, and how far
down the palm a grip should sit — and how the gun rolls in the fingers — depends
on how big that character's hand is and how the artist posed the thumb. It
cannot be derived, it differs per character, and it is small. So it is an offset
that defaults to identity, and identity means exactly what the code derived
before anchors existed: an untuned character is bit-for-bit unchanged.

Deliberately NOT a fixed rotation on the mount. There used to be one, and a bone
attachment is expressed in the BONE's axes, which no two rigs agree on — that
constant is why the hand mount points were wrong on every character. The derived
mount stays derived; the anchor is a nudge on top of it, and nothing here spells
a bone name.

The layering, the JSON round trip and the res://-then-user:// write are now
TuningStore, because none of that was ever specific to weapons and two copies of
it would mean two places for "an exported build's tuning pass is silently
discarded" to come back. WeaponHoldTuning is built on it with its file format
unchanged.

The lab is a rig lab now, and it grew three things:

  ANCHORS   a second knob group. It cost a spec table — everything in the lab is
            written against "which specs, which file, keyed on what" rather than
            twice against the two groups, so anchors got sliders, live preview,
            reset, save and clipboard for free. A third group is a third row in
            GROUPS.
  CLIP      audition one animation on its own. The four pose buttons are the
            states the game drives; watching a whole clip end to end is how you
            see where a retarget went wrong, and there was no way to do it.
  SURFACES  what the importer decided each surface IS, and a click to isolate a
            class. Isolating is how the decision gets CHECKED: click `hair` and
            anything else still standing was misclassified. Hidden by swapping
            in a transparent material rather than hiding the node, because a
            mesh is not one class — Miku's body, face and hair are three
            surfaces of one mesh.

And it takes the game's theme, applied to its own panel rather than only to the
Window, for the same reason the pause menu needed it: a CanvasLayer is not a
Control, so theme inheritance stops at one.

debug/rig_anchor_check.gd asserts the physical consequence rather than the
plumbing — an anchor system is easy to build so that the sliders move, the file
saves, the JSON round-trips and the gun does not budge. All six characters move
their weapon by exactly the offset asked for, measured in the attachment's frame
because a world-space delta on an animating skeleton is mostly the idle
animation, and all six return exactly to the derived mount when it is cleared.

Also fixes BoltRule, whose zigzag was self-intersecting: draw_colored_polygon
triangulates, and a crossing outline fails triangulation and draws nothing at
all except a console full of "Invalid polygon data". Same silhouette, walked as
a closed loop, with the ink edge as a polyline rather than a grown polygon —
growing a concave shape from its centroid reintroduces the crossing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-27 14:56:03 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 26f7c2c622 feat(ui): one high-voltage theme, and pick your character from the escape menu
The theme was a comic one — cream paper, ink borders, papaya. It is now a
charged one: near-black violet, hot papaya, and a lightning yellow spent
nowhere except the instant a button is pressed. Chips are cut with two sharp
corners and two round ones on a diagonal, which is as close to a skew as a
StyleBoxFlat gets and is the difference between a button that reads calm and
one that reads fast. BoltRule draws the motif itself, struck a third of the way
along its rule rather than centred, so it reads as something that HIT the line.

The pause menu was 900 lines of hand-rolled UI that never referenced UITheme at
all, so it rendered in Godot's default grey. It now applies the theme — and
applies it to its own root Control, not only to the Window, because a Control
inherits from its nearest Control ANCESTOR and this screen hangs off a
CanvasLayer, which is not one. That was invisible at first: the parts built with
UITheme.title() carry their own overrides and looked right next to a list and a
button that did not.

And it now has a Character screen. The roster on the left, the character
themselves on the right, turning — a name in a dropdown is not a character
selection screen. The preview is a real SkinnedPlayerModel in its own world, so
it shows exactly what will spawn: the same cel look, the same per-class
outlines, the same cloth and hair on springs. Selecting applies immediately;
there is nothing destructive to confirm, and applying on selection means the
character behind the menu changes as you arrow the list, which IS the
comparison.

PlayerMovementController.set_skin() is the supported way in. Both halves of a
skin change are easy to do by halves — `synced_skin_id` is what REMOTE peers
rebuild from, and only their _process watches it, so setting the property alone
would change everyone else's view of you and not your own.

Checked rather than asserted. debug/character_picker_check.gd walks the whole
roster and proves each entry loads a skeleton, animations, a surface table and
body surfaces — and that the skeleton is MOVING, because the clip name is a
variable this class sets on itself and reads "Idle" just as happily when nothing
is ticking. debug/ui_capture.gd and debug/roster_capture.gd photograph the
screens and every character, which is how three things were found that no
assertion could see: the theme break above, a preview showing the back of the
character's head, and a turntable that carried on from the last character so the
third one you looked at was side-on.

Known and not fixed here: momo's idle pose is wrong — arms overhead and a
pinched waist. Her rig, not the picker; every other character is correct.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-27 14:46:14 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 53f175ed6d feat(characters): say what every surface IS, and light it accordingly
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]>
2026-07-27 14:35:06 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 33d07b3717 feat(tools): a weapon hold lab for tuning each character's grip in 3D
I have been guessing at numbers that want an eye on them. This is the
environment to set them instead.

  godot --path . res://debug/weapon_lab.tscn

Pick a character, pick a weapon, pick a pose, drag sliders, press Save.
Thirteen knobs — weapon size, support-hand distance along the barrel, grip
to buttstock, muzzle pitch at low ready, both wrist rolls, three finger
curl amounts, the stock pocket for low-ready and for aiming, and both elbow
poles. Three markers show the points being solved for: red trigger grip,
green support hand, blue buttstock. If a hand is not ON its marker the IK
could not reach it, which is a different problem from the marker being in
the wrong place, and the two used to be indistinguishable.

Results land in assets/characters/weapon_holds.json, resolved in layers so
a number can be set once and contradicted where it matters:

  defaults              every character, every weapon
  skins.<skin>._all     this character, every weapon
  skins.<skin>.<weapon> this character, this weapon

An empty file means "use what the code derives", so the game runs exactly
as before until something is actually tuned. The knobs that CAN be derived
from the skeleton still are — mount rotation, wrist frame, weapon size —
and their sliders read "auto" at zero rather than silently overriding.

Two things this had to get right to be honest rather than merely present.
Slider defaults come from the same table as the code defaults, because a
slider parked at 0 beside a code default of 1.0 means the first touch of
that slider silently switches finger curl off. And the markers are
depth-tested: drawn through the body they look like they are floating in
front of the chest when they are really behind an arm, which is the exact
wrong impression for judging whether a hand is on its target.

`-- shot <path> [skin] [weapon]` renders one framed close-up and quits, so
the lab can be checked without a human at the controls — which is how both
of those bugs were caught.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-26 21:15:53 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 270d5f0973 chore: track Godot uid files for the new debug tools
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-26 13:19:55 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 040b595397 feat(anim): point the legs where the character is actually going
The clip library has one forward locomotion cycle and no strafe or
backpedal clips, so a character sidestepping ran forwards on the spot
while sliding sideways. Nothing in the animation said which way they were
travelling and a body lean was carrying the whole burden of telling the
player.

Yaw the HIPS onto the travel direction and unwind it up the spine. The
legs hang off the hips, so the whole stride turns with them and it costs
no new animation; the chest keeps facing roughly where the player aims.
Past about a right angle the hips cannot follow, so the cycle plays in
reverse and the legs point the other way — a real backpedal instead of a
moonwalk. The regime is hysteretic and the yaw is eased, so crossing
between them reads as a pivot, which is what a person does there.

The lean moved into the travel frame with it. Leaning "forward" along the
facing while the legs run off to one side leans them sideways relative to
their own stride, which is what being dragged rather than running feels
like. It is also driven by how hard the character is moving rather than
by signed forward input, so a sidestep leans into its own stride instead
of standing straight up.

debug/travel_dir_check.gd measures it. How far the stride points from the
actual direction of travel:

  forward 9°   fwd-diagonals 5-6°   backpedal 2°   back-diagonal 2°
  pure sidestep 39-42°, which is the deliberate hip cap

Two things worth knowing about that tool. It reads bone poses from inside
the modifier pass, because Godot restores them afterwards and anything
read later is the animation with the pose layer missing. And it averages
over a full stride: a run cycle twists the torso against the hips by tens
of degrees twice per stride, so a single-frame sample measures the clip,
not the layer.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-26 03:16:24 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5 0dd9d01ac7 fix(cloth): solve the garment instead of repairing it five times
The skirt glitched when the character moved and the thigh still came
through it. Both came from the same place: the solver integrated one
spring per bone and then ran four more passes behind it — resolve the
collision against the target, resolve it again against the answer, relax
the cross-panel links and rebuild every pose from the corrected tips,
then walk a separate ancestor "lift" — each writing bone poses the next
read back and partly undid. The lift wrote poses that were never fed back
into the spring state at all, so every frame began by pulling against a
pose the springs did not know about.

Replaced with one position-based solve, the shape Magica Cloth 2's
BoneCloth uses. Every JOINT is a particle, so a bone's head can move;
predict with inertia in the anchor's frame; relax length, bend, backstop,
the cross-panel links and the colliders together; convert to rotations
once at the end. A contact with no rotational leverage is now resolved by
the panel moving, which is what a bodily chain push, an ancestor lift and
a drape weight were each approximating separately.

Measured, at a dead-still idle and over a movement sweep:

  idle jitter (skirt)      0.53 -> 0.025 deg/frame, worst 24 -> 1.9
  settling after a dash    103 -> 18 mm of leg left inside the skirt
  fall / air / walk         82 -> 40, 96 -> 75, 72 -> 76 mm
  run / slide / dash        unchanged, ~95 mm

The idle buzz and the failure to come home after a hard move are gone —
those were the "glitches out". Peak clipping in a run, a slide and a dash
is NOT fixed and is still around 95 mm.

Four things this turned up on the way:

- debug/cloth_clip_check.gd was measuring the animation, not the render.
  Godot restores bone poses after the modifier pass, so reading them with
  force_update_all_bone_transforms() afterwards sees nothing any modifier
  did. It reported the same ~95 mm with collision fully enabled and with
  it commented out. It now observes from inside the pass. Every number
  ever taken from this tool before now was measuring the wrong pose.

- The collision hulls came from ten farthest-point samples per bone,
  which describe a panel's corners and hem and leave its MIDDLE unsampled
  — exactly where a thigh comes through. Built from the real mesh at load
  time instead.

- The drape term is gone. It was there to move a panel the old solver
  could not, and once the solver could, it was worse in every state but a
  walk and cost 20x in stability: its target sat inside the leg the
  collision was pushing out of, so the two ran against each other forever.

- Cost was 10.9 ms per character. The inner loop rebuilt every capsule
  and reallocated the hull array for every (bone, collider, pass). Now
  2.6 ms at full quality with a distance LOD behind it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-26 03:07:30 -04:00
Nicholas Butzke 374d9f9822 feat: implement automated 3D character pipeline with retargeting and rig management tools 2026-07-24 20:52:35 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 1e12c36cca tools: give the limb deform check a baseline that validates itself
The measurement was comparing skinned lengths against BIND-POSE lengths. A
character is never in bind pose, so ordinary posing registered as deformation:
with the animation frozen it still reported 0.42x-2.56x edge ratios, and during
a run it reported edges collapsing to 0.08x and blowing out to 5.2x. Those
numbers were an artefact of the metric, not the model.

The baseline is now built from the skeleton's REST transforms, so every ratio
reads exactly 1.00 on an unposed model and the tool validates itself. Corrected
readings on Taila through the full runtime stack, worst over run, walk, jump,
fall, slide and dash:

  lengthwise stretch  1.07 Body, 1.08 ClothB, 1.09 ClothCAndW, 1.03 shell
  cross-section       0.97-0.99 knee, 0.85 hip, 0.92-0.94 ankle

That is ordinary linear-blend skinning.

Also records, in the header, the two ways this measurement was previously wrong,
because both nearly produced a bad "fix":

  * the bind-pose baseline above;
  * flagging vertices weighted across "non-adjacent" leg bones with
    max_slot - min_slot >= 2, which flags shin+foot+toe — a perfectly normal
    contiguous run. A repair pass built on that was written and reverted before
    it shipped; it was stripping legitimate toe and shin influences.

Checks that did come back clean and are worth not repeating: bone pose bases are
pure rotations to 0.00001, bone lengths never drift from their rest offsets, and
of 4019 coincident-vertex groups not one carries mismatched weights, so there
are no split seams tearing at the joints.

No character or gameplay code changed. skin_leg_repair.gd is byte-identical in
behaviour to the last commit; only its header comment gained a pointer to this
tool.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2026-07-22 07:51:18 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 204846bf09 tools: measure limb deformation instead of eyeballing it
Adds debug/limb_deform_check.gd, which skins the leg vertices by hand and
compares them against the rest pose across a sweep of run, walk, jump, fall,
slide and dash. It reports lengthwise stretch (bending a knee can only shrink
this, so growth is genuine stretching) and cross-section loss (the linear-blend
"candy wrapper" collapse at a bent joint).

No gameplay or character code changes in this commit. Current readings on
Taila, through the full runtime stack:

  lengthwise stretch   1.05 worst (Body, ClothB, ClothCAndW), 1.03 outline shell
  cross-section        0.93 knee, 0.84 hip, 0.91 ankle

Sanity check on the method: the measured rest span of the leg vertex cloud is
0.818 m against 0.843 m of thigh+shin bone length, so the skinning maths is
producing real positions rather than plausible-looking noise.

That is ordinary linear-blend skinning. Combined with the earlier findings — no
bone pose basis deviating from a pure rotation by more than 0.00001, and no
bone length drifting by more than 0.0000 m — the leg geometry is not squashing
or stretching in any measurable way, so there is nothing here to fix blind.
Committing the instrument so the next round starts from a number.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2026-07-22 07:39:42 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 35ada4f34a fix: unlink the ankle cuffs, stop the reload head-dive, soften every blend
Three animation complaints, measured before changing anything.

There is NO squash-and-stretch. Instrumented every bone every frame: the
worst deviation of a pose basis from a pure rotation is 0.00000. Every clip's
position tracks match the skeleton's rest pose to within a millimetre (only
DEF-hips translates, as it should) and no scale key deviates from 1. The
"squishing" is a deep BEND, not a scale: the shared library's PistolReload was
authored for someone watching their own hands, and it dives the head 33° with
the whole neck chain at 67°. At that depth Taila's head/hair weights pinch and
the skull changes shape. Dropping neck+head from the upper-body one-shot's
filter leaves them on the locomotion layer: head dive is now 14° and the neck
chain 48°, and the character keeps looking downrange through a reload, which
is what a shooter wants anyway. Trade-off: Throw/Hit no longer swing the head.

The ankle cuffs are not linked by the rig or the clips — the foot bones swing
independently (left/right Z correlation -0.94). They are linked by SKIN
WEIGHTS: 16 vertices belonging to the LEFT cuff, sitting at x = -0.002 just
across the centre line, are weighted to the RIGHT leg, so the far foot drags a
band of cuff across the gap. Position alone cannot classify them (the cuff
they belong to spans x = 0.00 .. 0.05), so SkinWeightRepair decides by
CONNECTIVITY: a vertex that disagrees with 80%+ of the vertices it shares
triangles with gets its leg influences mirrored. Ankle-height cross-leg
triangles go 24 -> 0 on Taila; the pass is conservative enough that Miku needs
exactly 1 vertex and her face/hair/skirt are untouched (only leg bones are
ever considered). Meshes with blend shapes are skipped rather than rebuilt.

Blending: nothing cuts hard any more. Base cross-fade 0.15 -> 0.22, locomotion
0.28-0.30 (Idle/Walk/Run/Sprint switch constantly as speed drifts across their
thresholds, which is where the snapping showed most), reaction moves raised
off their near-instant values but still snappy, and the upper-body one-shot's
own fades widened to 0.14 in / 0.22 out.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
2026-07-21 18:56:21 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 d8b0c08611 fix: Taila reads like her source render — no white rim, matte hair
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]>
2026-07-21 17:54:41 -04:00
Nicholas Butzke 1172e465c1 chore: add UID file for bone dumping debug utility 2026-07-21 17:08:50 -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 df0bf18e0f feat: real per-weapon reload/recoil choreography + knife slash, fully matte hair
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]>
2026-07-21 00:26:29 -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 87b8ae70df feat: Fortnite-style OTS camera + Alt free-look orbit in third person
- Third-person camera chain is now HeadPivot > OrbitPivot > ShoulderOffset
  (0.55m right, 0.12m up) > SpringArm(2.6m, 14 deg) — the character sits
  slightly left of screen centre over-the-shoulder instead of dead centre
  behind. Aim is unchanged (still the first-person camera).
- Hold Alt in third person to orbit the camera freely around the character
  with the mouse (yaw wraps, pitch clamped -69..+29 deg); the character
  keeps facing and aiming where it was. Release Alt and the camera springs
  back behind the shoulder.
- debug/orbit_capture.gd: screenshots the OTS framing, a driven orbit, and
  the spring-back for visual regression.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-19 23:59:44 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 d0c746d084 feat: Taila — second anime character through a hardened import pipeline
New selectable skin: Taila (original anime character by Partaevil,
CC-BY, license kept alongside the model), cel-shaded with ink outlines,
running the full 18-clip animation set + the new rifle-hold pose layer.

Pipeline hardening learned the hard way (each of these produced a broken
character before the fix):
- tools/strip_rig.py: strips a foreign rig (VRoid/Mixamo names bake FLAT
  clips in the name-based retarget), keeps only meshes skinned to that rig
  (scene props were joining into the player model), recentres feet-on-origin,
  and reroutes image textures into Principled base color for re-export.
- tools/unlit_to_pbr.py: KHR_materials_unlit anime models carry their albedo
  in emissiveTexture over a black base — Blender 5.1 drops the texture on
  import, rendering the character pitch black. Rewrites the GLB JSON to
  standard textured PBR before Blender ever sees it.

Also dropped the Elle import attempt: her rest pose is seated (posed scene),
which the T-pose autorig cannot use.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-19 23:07:17 -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
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 7920aecec5 feat: player animation quality pass — aim follow, reload/throw, recoil
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]>
2026-07-19 12:03:30 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 04d91dea31 feat: street-level detail pass — real roads, streetlights, trees, cables
Closes more of the gap to hand-authored city art at eye level:

- Kenney City Kit Roads (CC0) installed: every street in the 10x10 grid is
  now real road meshes — lane-marked straights (single stretched mesh per
  segment) and line-marked crossroad tiles at all 81 intersections, tinted
  to sit under the toon lighting without clipping
- Kit streetlights (curved arms over the road) along both central avenues,
  with slim pole colliders kept for grapples
- Kenney Nature Kit trees replace the cone/box stand-ins in shrine
  courtyards and plaza planters (original kit materials kept — the toon
  swap mangled their vertex colors into cyan)
- Overhead cable bundles sag across the east-west streets (the classic
  urban-Japan sky clutter), drawn as ink lines; central avenue kept clear
- Construction sites get cones + barriers from the roads kit
- Per-building tint jitter so repeated kit models read as distinct shops

Verified via street/aerial captures (dark marked asphalt, green trees,
detailed facades); movement 11/11, smoke 0 failures, acoustics ALL PASSED.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-19 02:33:31 -04:00
Nicholas Butzke f62f4f2503 feat: add Kenney road and nature assets and implement map builder script 2026-07-19 02:32:06 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 b0af2ea9ee feat: Akiba Crossing city — 100 blocks with unique landmarks + detail pass
Scaled the single block to a full 10x10 city grid (48m cells, 16m streets,
640m across) with a hand-authored layout so the fabric stays varied:

Block types:
- S standard retail (70%): paired parametric buildings facing the N-S
  streets, seeded heights/colors per block; ~half get a mid-block alley
  with fire-escape climbs so no two blocks play identically
- T landmark towers: 8-10 floors on a walkable retail podium, mega corner
  sign, double-sided rooftop crown billboard (skyline wayfinding)
- J shrine courtyards: walled court, torii, slide-roof hall, lanterns,
  trees — the green quiet break in the fabric
- M market streets: dense stall rows + lantern strings between low
  buildings (close-quarters cover mazes)
- P plaza cluster at the city centre with planter cover and a giant
  4-face screen tower at the exact middle (the Crossing)
- C construction sites: open slab frame to wallrun, access ramp, container
  stacks, and a 28m crane whose jib is the city's tallest grapple anchor

City systems:
- Brick rail viaduct runs the full east-west width on per-block piers with
  vending arcades under alternating arches + slide ramps at the centre
- Central avenues x=0/z=0 get matched streetlights and zebra crossings at
  every block line; brick wall rings the district; city-haze fog for depth
- Detail pass per building: window bands every floor, water tanks/antenna
  masts seeded on roofs, denser sign stacking

Perf/physics: decoration (signs, windows, leaves, lamp heads) is
render-only MeshInstances; only gameplay surfaces are static bodies, all
acoustics-tagged. Spawns distributed across block types facing centre.

Verified: full-city aerial (all 100 blocks, aligned grid), avenue-level
capture (clean canyon, viaduct vista); movement 11/11, smoke 0 failures,
acoustics ALL PASSED.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-18 14:45:48 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 233f88aee3 feat: full cel treatment for Neon Alley — flat toon colors + ink outlines
- 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]>
2026-07-18 14:23:37 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 0813d0b40d feat: Neon Alley — urban-Japan movement map built on the acoustic materials
New map (scenes/maps/neon_alley/, auto-appears in the level selectors):

Layout for movement flow:
- Main N-S street = the long sightline, crossed by a pedestrian bridge
  (slide ramps up both ends, underpass cover below, railed high ground)
- West machiya row: wooden two-story houses with a jump route
  (awning -> balcony -> roof deck) and 25-degree slide roofs facing the street
- East concrete towers with glass storefronts; brick wallrun alley between
  them (AC units to vault); metal fire-escape platform route to the roofs;
  angled rooftop billboard as cover + grapple anchor
- Three power pylons with crossarms over the street chain a grapple route;
  the torii gate crossbeam at the north shrine plaza is a fourth anchor
- South market: wooden stalls with neon canopies + metal vending machines
  = scattered mid cover; shipping container corner piece
- Spawns ring the block and face the map center

Acoustics as level design: every surface is tagged (machiya/stalls/torii
wood, towers concrete, storefronts glass, alley+perimeter brick, escapes/
AC/rails/container metal) so occlusion tells you which structure a shot
came through and reflections differ per street.

Style: sunset sky + fixed dusk-lavender ambient (calibrated for the toon
shader's 1/PI light response), warm low sun, neon sign columns, shop signs,
lantern strings, billboard glow, underpass strip lights.

Verified: aerial + street-level + third-person captures; movement 11/11,
smoke 0 failures, acoustics ALL PASSED.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-18 14:18:06 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 a51595e3b9 feat: material-aware sound occlusion + early reflections for localization
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]>
2026-07-17 23:48:38 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 a9b0775de3 feat: real gunshots, localized 3D audio, seamless music, better animations
Audio:
- All ballistic weapons now fire real firearm recordings (The Free Firearm
  Sound Library, CC0): AK-47 uses actual AK-47 shots, M4=AR-15, MP7=PPSh,
  AWP=Mosin Nagant, DMR=Savage 10, shotgun=Mossberg/Nova, nailgun=Ruger .22,
  rocket/mortar layered with real booms. Plasma keeps its energy sound.
- Reload is real lever-action foley instead of interface clicks
- Projectile flight loops localized: unit_size 50->6, max_db 6->0,
  max_distance 45 — no more mortar/rocket drone in every player's ear;
  loops also got proper loop_end (was a zero-length loop)
- Flight loops lowpassed into soft whooshes instead of sci-fi engine drones
- Menu music converted to OGG with native full-track looping (47s seamless,
  replaces the broken manual WAV loop points)

Animations (movement-shooter pass):
- Rebaked miku.glb with 4 new clips from the CC0 library: Grapple (swim
  reach — reads as a swing), PistolIdle (armed idle with weapon up),
  PistolShoot, PistolReload
- Armed idle: standing with a weapon now uses PistolIdle instead of
  arms-at-sides
- Slide pose overhaul: legs kick out front (lead/trail thighs, knees
  straighten) — feet-first slide instead of "sitting in a crouch"
- Wall run: forward drive pitch + inner arm reaches out to the wall
- Per-transition blend times: dash/hit/jump cut fast (0.05-0.08s),
  locomotion cross-fades smoothly (0.2-0.25s); CrouchWalk speed-scales

Fixes:
- Third-person camera no longer renders the first-person viewmodel layer
  (the gun/arms floated in front of the third-person view)

Verified: 11/11 movement tests, smoke test 0 failures (17 clips resolved),
third-person run screenshot shows grounded animated model, no floating gun.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-17 21:49:10 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 6c8b0ddd28 feat: cel-shaded look & feel overhaul — real audio, comic UI, themed VFX
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]>
2026-07-17 18:15:42 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 5bcbcfdc3f feat: emotive animations + anime speed lines — hit flinch, dance emote (B)
- 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]>
2026-07-17 13:40:49 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 37c15bed1a feat: cel-shaded look — toon shader, ink outlines, stylized environment
- 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]>
2026-07-17 13:37:27 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 198345177a feat: world-grid level materials + real movement test suite
- 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]>
2026-07-17 12:14:30 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 0ba14a9469 feat: overhaul movement for flow — momentum-preserving states, smooth crouch, landing feel
- 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]>
2026-07-17 11:58:14 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 4.8 c4a538a469 chore: add miku_test skin textures and script .uid files
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]>
2026-07-07 01:31:52 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 29fdca3565 feat: shooter animation feel — directional lean, slide, composed airborne, weapon hold
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]>
2026-07-06 23:23:51 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 22cb0a58b7 fix: T-posing skinned models — autorig produced an orphan skin with no weights
The model animated its skeleton but rendered a permanent T-pose: the mesh
wasn't skin-bound. Root cause was in autorig's binding, introduced while
chasing an earlier "skins:0" export:

- The earlier "skins:0" was actually caused by bone-heat weighting failing
  (0 weighted verts → empty skin gets dropped), NOT by the Armature modifier.
- The "fix" then stripped the Armature modifier and used parent_type=ARMATURE.
  That makes the glTF exporter emit a skin OBJECT but with no node.skin
  reference and no per-vertex JOINTS/WEIGHTS — an orphan skin. The mesh then
  renders its bind pose (T-pose) forever while the skeleton animates unseen.

Fix: keep the standard ARMATURE_AUTO result (Armature modifier + vertex
groups). With the nearest-bone fallback ensuring real weights, the exporter
now writes a COMPLETE skin (verified: meshnode.skin=0, JOINTS/WEIGHTS present).

Also:
- skinned_player_model: _ensure_meshes_bound() re-binds any skinned mesh whose
  skeleton NodePath doesn't resolve at load — graceful degradation instead of
  a silent T-pose for imperfect GLBs.
- smoke test now asserts the spawned player's mesh is bound to its skeleton,
  so this class of bug fails the test instead of shipping. 30/30 pass.
- regenerated miku_test.glb with the corrected pipeline.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-06 18:11:26 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 e2fbc424a7 feat: third-person camera toggle (V) + fix first-person showing inside the model
The first-person head-shrink (SkeletonModifier3D) left the camera looking at
the inside of the neck/torso/hair. Replaced it: the owner's model now renders
shadows-only in first person (clean FPS view, still fully animated and visible
to others and in shadows).

Added a third-person toggle (V / toggle_camera_view) so you can actually see
your own animated model — the easiest way to verify a new skin's animations:
- over-the-shoulder SpringArm3D camera (wall-collision aware) on the local
  player; press V to swap, press again to return
- firing still uses the first-person camera, so aim is unchanged
- reveals the owner's model via set_owner_visible() on both SkinnedPlayerModel
  and HumanoidModel; hides the first-person weapon viewmodel while in TP
- death forces first person so the toggle can't fight the death cam

Smoke test extended to cover the toggle (camera boom created, becomes current,
round-trips) — 28/28 checks pass for both color and GLB skins.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
2026-07-06 17:18:16 -04:00
Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Fable 5 d05477c135 feat: Sketchfab-to-game character pipeline, FP/TP animated views, client-auth netcode, audio system
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]>
2026-07-06 02:28:58 -04:00
Hermes 11d079b38c restore test level and dust2 from main branch 2026-06-25 17:30:30 -04:00
Hermes a351cf2dc4 restore test level and dust2, fix dust2 builder to not use TestLevelBuilder 2026-06-25 17:27:47 -04:00
Hermes e0844a3d3a remove stale dust2 files referencing deleted TestLevelBuilder 2026-06-25 17:16:06 -04:00
Hermes b23a307201 clean up stale test_level files (project uses LevelRuntime now) 2026-06-25 17:12:58 -04:00
Hermes 1121a2f0ee restore test_level_builder.gd (accidentally deleted) 2026-06-25 17:07:00 -04:00