Add UiArt.add_screen_backdrop() to place the reference art behind an opaque
panel, then wire the pause overlay and settings screen to it. Pause rows get
larger, rounded styles; settings widens to fit its expanded controls. Headless
226/226 verified in a clean HEAD worktree (the realism WIP currently editing
materials.gd remains unstaged).
NPC characters
- Articulated rig (hips/knees, shoulders/elbows/hands) replaces rigid capsules;
the walk cycle bends knees and elbows and flees with a longer stride.
- Layered outfits (jacket/vest/coat/dress), extended accessories and hand items
(bag, umbrella, phone, camera, clipboard, cup), face details and five hair
silhouettes, all deterministic per profile seed.
- Idle behaviour layers (phone, clipboard, crossed arms, look-around), breathing
and weight shift; escalation raises hands or points, and noticed NPCs turn
toward the guard.
- Reaction symbols above the head (!!, ?!, !, ?), door-queue offsets assigned by
GameManager, three LOD tiers with hysteresis and a billboard impostor.
- smoke_npc_budget.gd: 16 avatars = 534 meshes, ~6.9 ms average (50 ms budget).
Player movement
- Separate accel/decel, step-up assist for kerbs and the entrance steps, and a
forward-axis fix: W was inverted (get_axis(forward, back) is negative).
- Head bob, landing dip and precision-walk FOV, gated by persisted head-bob and
invert-Y settings; precision chip and tick; surface-aware footsteps and a
landing cue forwarded to AudioFeedback.
- Gamepad support (sticks, deadzone, face buttons, bumpers), a control legend
that follows the active device, and named actions for the remaining keys.
- Key/button remapping in Settings, persisted as input_bindings and applied by
InputBindings (mouse and gamepad axes are never removed).
- smoke_movement.gd (windowed): climbs the steps, checks precision speed, chip,
footsteps and landing; new 11-precision-walk capture and catalogue entry.
Verification: headless 208/208, Python tooling 56/56, all 11 smokes pass,
compare 11 good / 0 bad, movement judge match. Version 0.5.0. Only optional
Future ideas remain in TODO.
Session shell
- Startup venue menu (src/game/ui/start_menu.gd): keyboard + mouse, replaces
the live-shift boot and V as the player-facing venue path (V stays a debug bind).
- Pause overlay on Esc (src/game/ui/pause_overlay.gd): resume, restart shift,
settings, quit to menu.
- Settings panel (src/game/ui/settings_panel.gd): mouse look sensitivity and
HUD font scale, persisted via Save into user://settings.json and loaded on boot.
- Shift review "Run another shift" now returns to the venue menu.
- New smoke: src/test/smoke_session_shell.gd (menu -> shift -> pause -> settings
-> menu), passes headless and windowed.
World and presentation
- Skyline backdrop restored with a transparent asset and an alpha-scissor
unshaded material; fixes the opaque black slab from the earlier attempt and
the unimported texture path.
- Steps and landing are a StaticBody3D with per-tread colliders, so the guard
and NPCs walk up instead of clipping through.
- Marquee Label3D scaled up (72 -> 160) so STEP LINE reads from the sidewalk.
- Focus torus and name tag enlarged for 2-3 m readability.
- Routine traffic despawns after an idle lifetime (NpcAvatar.ephemeral), so the
16-NPC cap no longer fills with standers; authored events stay for the shift.
Docs and tests
- PLAN.md test/CI section corrected to the custom headless runner and Gitea Actions.
- README controls table, smoke checklist, test count, and status lists refreshed.
- TODO/DONE/MEMORY updated; completed sections moved to DONE.md.
- Headless suite 77 -> 88 passing (settings round-trip, step colliders, skyline
alpha, session-shell UI behavior, traffic lifetime).
zwitschi