emojunky character round 6 -- the rope, the wind, and four crouches

Every clip is real frames off a running instance, every second rendered frame at 60 Hz, played back at 30 fps and magnified 4x. The controller, the hitbox and every tuning number are identical in every cell, and each row is the same input script, so the clips of a row are the same motion and loop in step — what differs is only the drawing. The window is pinned to the character's feet, so the world streams past rather than the character across the frame. Everything here is build a4b2, juice full — the picks of 2026-09-17. Styles are tagged by author — core, o (mine), x (Astra's).

1 — the three fixes

Left is the code as it stood at the end of round 5, captured on this same build before any of this round was written; right is now.

	before	after
naruto run the same with SHIFT			The arms are pinned straight back, so nothing about them moved. Now each hand traces a thin vertical ellipse whose rate and size both grow with \|vx\| and whose two arms are a third of a cycle apart, plus a small backward droop with speed. At a standstill the pair is dead still.
flail fall_land walk off a 7-tile pit, land			The cycle was the same whether the character was falling straight down or sideways at ten tiles a second. Now every target drifts opposite the frame's own forward velocity — arms hard, legs less — so at speed the whole flail happens behind the body, and the hands trail upward through a fast descent.
monkey rope throw a rope (E), climb it (W), back down (S)			Every hand was placed relative to its SHOULDER, so the grip rode up with the body and nothing was ever planted: the character glided up the rope holding a picture of a grip. Now all four limbs keep a world-space grip on the rope until the body has risen to it, then swing and re-grab, and the hip is yanked up at each catch. Measured: the grip's world y is constant to 0.000 px between grabs and jumps 12.4 px at each one, six times a second.

2 — every rope style

Fifteen, on the owner's build. hands (1) and monkey (5) are converted to the grip rule; haul (8), sailor (9), sloth (10) and panicrope (11) are new and are built on it. The rest are unchanged and are here to compare against. Read the HANDS: on a style with the grip rule they stop dead on the rope and the body climbs to them; on the others they slide.

1 hands core

2 inchworm core

3 swing core

4 vpull o

5 monkey o

6 swinggrab o

7 frantic o

8 haul o

9 sailor o

10 sloth o

11 panicrope o

12 lockstep x

13 seatlock x

14 armhaul x

15 yoink x

16 pedal x

17 sidle x

18 inverted x

19 corkscrew x

3 — every crouch style

Fifteen. kneel (8), squat (9), lowsneak (10) and slink (11) are new: an all-fours scoot with the hands on their own stepping rule, a deep flat-footed waddle, the sneak taken properly low, and a cat under a fence. Solved heights while crouched, top of the skull above the feet: kneel 11.4, squat 12.8, lowsneak 12.3, slink 9.4 px — all inside the 1-tile corridor's 24 px.