Pieces still read as slow. Cruising speed goes from 120ms per unit to 85: the
median departure across the shipped fifty drops 970ms → 763ms and a level's
whole animation budget 15.6s → 12.7s, about 18% off. The longest departures do
not move — the cap holds them at 3.46s — so if those still drag, the dial is the
cap, which was settled separately and is left alone.
The gates that guarantee a level opens with something worth watching are stated
in milliseconds, and they were picked while a piece crossed a unit in 120ms.
Held fixed while the speed changes, they stop meaning what they meant: this
change alone made 20 of the 50 shipped levels "fail" an opening gate every one
of them had passed, purely from the unscaled number. Scaled to the dial, none
fail — the set is unchanged, and the alarm was an artifact of the constant. So
the cruise threshold and the opening floor now derive from the speed, naming
the speed they were calibrated at.
exitTiming takes msPerUnit the way it already took knee and maxMs, and the
comparison lab gets a speed slider, reads the levels actually shipping rather
than the prototype sweep they were selected from, and totals every route in the
campaign instead of the four on screen — those four skew long, where the cap
flattens any speed change to 6%.
The test that pins constant cruising speed now reads the dial from the token
instead of hard-coding 120, so tuning motion no longer looks like a broken
guarantee.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Exit timing was linear in path length with no ceiling, so the longest route in
the shipped set animated for 17.4s and 19% of all departures ran past two
seconds. MOTION already carried exitMaxTravelMs and exitLongMaxMs for this;
nothing read them.
Below the knee nothing changes — every piece still cruises at the same speed,
which is the property the old test protected and the reason motion reads as
physical. Past it the piece accelerates rather than taking longer, approaching
a ceiling. Length is still legible: longer routes still play longer, just with
a compressing tail.
The test now states the rule it is protecting instead of "no duration cap":
constant speed below the knee, a bounded and monotone tail above it.
labs/exit-timing plays the same real route side by side, uncapped against a
candidate setting, with knee and ceiling on sliders — the numbers say 3.5s but
only watching it says whether that is right. Defaults are provisional at
2.4s / 3.2s pending that call.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
