V1.0.5 — Playtest Close-Out: Smooth Camera, Occupancy & Living Emotion

Highlights

• Smoother: when the replay follows a character, the camera now glides along instead of stuttering.
• More real: when a character "lies down on the bed to sleep," she's now actually on the bed rather than standing beside it; sitting actually sits on the chair.
• Emotions came alive: a character's mood now has a positive/negative direction — something wary or distressing actually turns her mood negative, instead of being stuck on "calm" forever.

What this release is about

The previous release (v1.0.4) built the Void Realm — the tiny one-character world — and let us run a real simulation and watch it in the browser for the first time. Watching it revealed that the framework stands, but some details felt "off." This release cleans those up one by one.

Camera: from stutter to smooth follow

With "follow focus" on, the camera tracking the character jittered and hitched. Two causes: the draw loop was being torn down and rebuilt constantly, and the map and the characters used inconsistent pixel alignment, so the map "vibrated" against the moving character. This release makes the draw loop run uninterrupted and aligns map and characters to the same pixel grid — the camera now glides smoothly.

Bed: actually on it when lying down

To stop characters walking through tables, chairs, and beds ("clipping"), the previous release made furniture impassable. The side effect: heading to sleep, pathfinding bumped the character to the tile beside the bed, so she looked like she was sleeping standing next to it.

This release introduces occupancy: beds and chairs are objects you occupy with your body — lying or sitting puts the body on the object's own tile — whereas a stove or a shelf you use while standing adjacent, unchanged. This is a physics rule about kinds of objects, not a hardcoded behavior for any character: which piece of furniture to use and what to do is still decided by the character's own mind. Furniture is still impassable; only its rightful user lands on it while using it.

Text: hiding the leaked "internal labels"

A character's action descriptions occasionally showed wording like "subtask: return to the bedroom to wash up…" — "subtask" is an internal label the system uses when breaking a task down, and shouldn't appear in human-facing text. This release strips those leaked prefixes and requires each action to describe a single continuous action, no more "do A then B then C" run-ons.

Emotion: giving mood a direction

This is the one place this release touches the cognitive core. The previous release wired up the emotion system, but only connected "arousal" (the more important the event, the more agitated) — and missed "direction." So no matter what happened, the mood's positive/negative value stayed 0, frozen on "calm."

This release adds the direction: when a character perceives a salient event, the system judges whether it's positive (joy, reassurance) or negative (fear, wariness, sorrow) for her, and the mood actually moves up or down — and the finer labels (anxious / uneasy / pleased) come alive with it.

Technical Notes

Of the five version axes, this release advances system, cognition, and replay runtime; the world and bundle format are unchanged:

This is the first cognition-axis bump since v1.0.2 — because emotion valence is a genuine cognitive change. The world data didn't change (object occupancy is an engine rule keyed on object name) and the bundle format didn't change, so old replays play unchanged.

This release also verified and dismissed a few "looks-like-a-bug but is by-design" false alarms — e.g. a 1-day replay shows only the familiar visitor (strangers are scheduled for later days by design).

What's Next

Keep polishing the Void Realm from playtest feedback, and prepare to extend the single-character test into longer multi-day runs to observe forgetting, dreaming, and self-evolution across days.