feat(game): ship the Synty characters — bots are no longer the generated one

[ralyodio]

This is the "people look identical" fix.

The bots have used the generated character.glb since the beginning, because the Synty animation retarget did not work. It works now — 650e8a2 solved it and said so in its own commit message — but it was never wired in, so nothing on screen changed.

The documented blocker did not exist

retarget_mocap.py's header said dropping the result into Opponents made bots invisible, and that the next step was to instrument what placeAnimated returns. I did that with NullEngine, and found no bug in placeAnimated:

	generated	synty (new)
container rootNodes	__root__	__root__
picked root	✅	✅
clip keys after split("_").pop()	death, fire, idle, run, walk	idle, run, walk
meshes under root	3	1

The multi-root theory was about the old import_synty.py output. retarget_mocap.py exports a single target_rig root, so the wiring that failed before simply works.

Measured on the animated mesh rather than the bind pose: 1.72 m tall, 0.57 m across — arms down, not the 2.03 m T-pose that broke both earlier attempts.

Wiring

fighter_insurgent → Directorate, fighter_soldier → Nightcell. The generated character stays as a fallback, so a failed licensed load degrades to a working bot rather than to none. Shell budget 7.84 MB against the 9 MB guard.

Clips are MoCap Online's rifle set — in-place (IPC) variants deliberately, since the server owns movement and root motion would fight the simulation.

Two honest gaps, recorded not glossed

1. The animation licence is unconfirmed, and it blocks commercial release. The pack contains no licence, EULA or terms file — only format notes. It appears to be MoCap Online's free sample pack, but "appears to be" is not provenance, and CLAUDE.md requires provenance for every public asset. Fine for a dev build; not fine for a paid episode. Swapping the clips is a --clips argument, not a code change.

2. No death animation exists in the pack. Opponents.play() already tolerates a missing clip by stopping every group, so a killed bot freezes in place rather than erroring. Imperfect, and the truth until a death clip exists.

Verification, including what I could not verify

• ✅ Both GLBs requested and loaded in the real game, zero page/console errors
• ✅ NullEngine: mesh present, clips resolve, dimensions correct
• ✅ 263 tests, full pnpm check green
• ❌ A bot visibly on screen. Headless SwiftShader runs at ~1 FPS, so the bot sim barely advances and none walked into frame during capture. Photo mode returns before opponents are created, so the capture tool cannot show them either.

Given I have twice this session claimed a visual result I had not actually seen, I am flagging that last point rather than implying otherwise.

[github-actions]

vu1nz Security Review

0 finding(s) in PR #?

No security issues found.