Eyes first, then the hand

Camp NPCs now look before they move, point at real things around the camp on the word they mean, and react to each other while they talk. A bug that had been switching off their body language mid-conversation is gone too.

The fifth layer of the NPC body language is about where a body is aimed. Eyes lead and the head follows a fraction of a second later. When someone speaks, they look away to find their words at the start of a phrase and come back to whoever they're talking to by the end of it. With several people listening, they speak to each of them in turn, and they end the line looking at someone. Listeners watch the speaker and glance away now and then. People with nothing to do look round at whoever is near.

Claude now says what a line points at and which word the gesture lands on. "We do not go past the ridge after dark" can come with a point at the ridge, landing on "ridge". The game works out where that thing really is: a campmate by name, you, the fire, the shelter, the woodpile, the sky, or the woods out there. The arm comes up so it arrives on that word, the index finger goes out, the eyes get there first, and the trunk turns a little toward it. In testing the arm landed within a degree of the fire, the player and a campmate.

The gesture clips are timed to the word too. The game finds the moment in each library clip where the hand is furthest out and starts the clip so that moment lands on the stressed word. Small things fill in around it. A hand beat brings its shoulder forward and shifts the weight. Listeners drift toward the speaker's posture, more so for the warm ones. A person takes a breath and lifts their head just before they speak. Each person keeps their own talking distance: they lean back if you're too close and step in if you're too far.

Testing turned up two problems. When a camp person was first spoken to, the work system gave them a tool-handling component, and the body language treated that as the player's body and switched itself off for good. Their posture, gestures and beats vanished the moment the conversation started. That's fixed. Lyle also spotted speakers dropping from sitting into a kneel and bowing forward mid-line. Those were "sitting" idles that are really kneels, plus some hand-over clips, and they're out.