docs(rendering): record G4 automated gate

Capture the exact capped, uncapped, and dense physical evidence, reveal-readiness corrections, comparison-mode performance interpretation, pending visual gate, and single surgical rollback boundary.

Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>

docs/research/2026-07-25-slice-g4-production-cutover-automated-gate.md

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+# Slice G4 Production Cutover — Automated Gate
+
+**Date:** 2026-07-25
+
+**Production cutover:** `ef1d263337997bb030eadb7b8e71d73dc659907a`
+
+**Gated source:** `03b10183e95985c658e5975d2cc1a082a589738d`
+
+**Result:** automated gate accepted; user visual gate pending
+
+## Purpose
+
+G4 makes the retained, scene-built `RenderFrameView` the production entity
+source at the five existing retail PView stages. Terrain, buildings, EnvCells,
+particles, alpha ordering, selection, lighting, mesh/texture ownership, and GL
+execution retain their established owners. The old route is still built only
+as a diagnostic referee while lifecycle automation is enabled; it is not
+drawn.
+
+## Cutover shape
+
+- `RetailPViewRenderer` borrows the exact generation/frame-stamped product.
+- `RetailPViewPassExecutor` expands its ordered route ranges at the same five
+  PView stages used before the cutover.
+- `WbDrawDispatcher` classifies and draws packed candidates through the
+  established shader, texture, light, alpha, and selection owners.
+- Unchanged static classifications and ordered scene indices persist across
+  frames; only dirty records refresh.
+- Full-scene digests and old/new comparisons are consumer-gated and absent
+  from an ordinary launch.
+- Production does not require or call the current-path referee.
+
+## Corrections made before and during the gate
+
+The first implementation pass found and corrected four integration costs
+before the cutover commit:
+
+1. ordinary runtime composition incorrectly required the optional comparison
+   observer;
+2. selection geometry was constructed twice;
+3. a diagnostic scene digest sorted the full scene every production frame;
+4. outdoor/dynamic indices were copied and sorted every frame despite stable
+   membership.
+
+The first exact nine-stop run then exposed an independent reveal-readiness
+weakness. Composite warmup used the same 128-item limit for cheap candidate
+discovery and expensive mesh/texture preparation. Caul's roughly 21,000
+retained objects could exhaust the portal reveal window before discovery
+finished. `129dd77d` separates those budgets.
+
+A second run proved that a late membership edge could still restart the
+whole-world follow-up scan. `03b10183` adds a stable destination-neighborhood
+source over `GpuWorldState`'s canonical published buckets. Warmup now reads
+only the 3×3 reveal neighborhood, including static and live projections while
+the generation is deliberately quiesced. Both corrections apply equally to
+the old and retained draw paths; neither changes the visual rollback boundary.
+
+## Exact physical evidence
+
+| Route | Report | Product comparisons | Final rebuild / cross-frame reuse | Result |
+|---|---|---:|---:|---|
+| Capped nine-stop | `logs/connected-r6-soak-20260725-043955.report.json` | 20,502 | 1 / 6,109 | pass |
+| Uncapped nine-stop | `logs/connected-r6-soak-20260725-044923.report.json` | 24,463 | 2 / 6,037 | pass |
+| Uncapped dense Arwic | `logs/connected-dense-town-20260725-045805.report.json` | 1,634 | 2 / 3,833 | pass |
+
+Every route used a Release binary whose embedded commit exactly matched
+`03b10183e95985c658e5975d2cc1a082a589738d`, exited with code zero through the
+graceful logout path, and recorded:
+
+- zero product/referee candidate mismatch;
+- zero reveal invariant failure;
+- every canonical reveal ready;
+- zero composite warmup items at every stable checkpoint;
+- zero pending render-journal operations or rejected scene deltas;
+- retained-classification reuse across returns;
+- fixed-camera PNG artifacts for every checkpoint.
+
+Dense Arwic exercised 15,530 resident objects and 111 active animated statics.
+Its final frame retained 4,949,760 bytes of packed classification and reused
+3,833 unchanged visible projections.
+
+## Performance interpretation
+
+The connected G4 gate intentionally keeps the complete old route and
+field-level referee enabled on every sampled frame. Dense Arwic therefore
+reported 29.3 ms CPU p50 and roughly 10 MiB of diagnostic allocation per frame
+while GPU p50 remained 1.8 ms. These are comparison-mode costs, not the
+production-only result. An ordinary development launch after consumer-gating
+measured roughly 8 ms with about 90 KiB frame-thread allocation in a dense
+scene. The authoritative production-only performance matrix belongs to G5,
+after the user visual gate permits deletion of the old route and transition
+diagnostics.
+
+## Deterministic gate
+
+- Production composition succeeds without a comparison observer.
+- The product routes in exact PView stage order.
+- Transform-only scene updates preserve index revision and refresh only the
+  dirty record.
+- Membership/sort changes advance index revision and rebuild ordered indices.
+- A 21,025-record warmup discovery completes independently of the conservative
+  128-entity preparation/upload budget.
+- Readiness snapshots include destination static/live projections even while
+  ordinary gameplay visibility is quiesced.
+- App Release: 3,775 passed / 3 skipped.
+- Complete Release solution: 8,259 passed / 5 skipped.
+- Release build: zero errors; the complete test build retains 16 pre-existing
+  test warnings.
+
+## Visual gate and rollback
+
+The user must still inspect login, outdoor/dungeon portal transitions,
+selection, alpha/translucency, animated/equipped objects, particles, radar,
+and repeated destination returns before G4 can delete the old referee.
+
+If that visual gate fails, the exact surgical command is:
+
+```powershell
+git revert ef1d263337997bb030eadb7b8e71d73dc659907a
+```
+
+Do not reset the branch and do not revert G3 (`6a026c5a`). The two
+reveal-readiness corrections are valid on both draw paths and remain after the
+cutover revert.