Mythic Masters: animation and graphics hill climb to 9/10, rounds 16+ (from #3840) #4045

Continues the animation and graphics hill climb toward 9/10 from #3840 (rounds 14-15, PRs #3870 and #4043), #3455 (round 13, PR #3839), #3441 (round 12, PR #3452) and #2943 (rounds 6-11; 6-8 merged in #3409). Part of #2802.

Where it stands

2.5/10: 1.75 after the owner halved every climb (2026-11-05), then +0.25 in round 14 and +0.5 in round 15. Each round reports half the judge's gain. Agent judges called the same build 5, so they run about 2 points generous: read a judge for before vs after, never for the level. One build also drew 4, 4.5 and 5 from three judges, so use two judges a round (or two fight seeds) to tell a half-point gain from noise.

Goal: 9/10, a polished indie 3D game a player would call good-looking and alive.

Next rounds, in order

1. Stands with depth. A flat grey bowl and identical crowd figures fill half of every frame: tiers, rails, banners, a darker back, a varied crowd (src/arena.ts, src/crowd.ts).
2. Framing, in the camera players use. Fighters fill about 15% of the frame. Change the lock camera (lockCamera in src/main.ts), not only the side camera: the side camera exists only for the judge, so moving it alone would raise the score without the game looking any better.
3. Fur along the limb, per bone segment. Round 13 showed an interpolated per-vertex bone direction can't be sheared into the strand noise: it turns to moire where bones meet (apps/mythic-masters/docs/shots-2026-11-06-anim-r13/fur-dropped-rougarou.jpg). Lay the pattern in each bone segment's own frame and blend across joints by skin weight (src/hide.ts, with the skinIndex and skinWeight attributes).

How to run a round

• bun scripts/burst-shots.ts <dir> <prefix> in apps/mythic-masters takes the bursts: three fights from the side camera, 4 frames 0.3 s apart, a hit scene cued on a hit landing (4 frames 0.1 s apart), plus three close-ups. Shoot the BEFORE build and the NOW build into one folder with different prefixes.
• A change to src/sim.ts or src/bot.ts goes into sim-rs/ too, and src/sim.wasm is rebuilt: bun run builder run apps/mythic-masters bun scripts/sim-rust.ts checks 24 fights hash for hash (round 15 piped the built wasm back as base64). It also moves every bot fight, so BEFORE and NOW bursts land at different moments: tell the judges, and read their gain as partly timing.
• Spawn a fresh judge agent each round with the folder and the two prefixes. Don't anchor it on your reasoning; keep a change only if the judges see a gain.
• Every foot must still come out as a rig tip (bun run beasts). Imugi stays at budget 3200.
• One growing PR from main saying "Part of #N", with shots in docs/shots-<date>/. End each round by hopping the climb forward: open a new issue ("rounds N+", this body with the table and list updated) and close this one with "Moved up to #M", so the climb stays at the top of the issues. Seed the new one with a comment starting Score: x/10 (target 9) and ending Next: <gap>. After three rounds with no gain, post Stalled: and stop. At 9, file a MANUAL RUN: for the owner's own score.