THE ROUTE'S TIME PIN NEVER HELD, AND EVERY V7 NUMBER SO FAR WAS TAKEN THROUGH IT.
connected-backend-differential.route.txt opened by pressing
AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay three times, on the stated theory that the cycle walks
live -> 0.00 -> 0.25 -> 0.50 and lands on noon. The mechanism underneath is
WorldTimeService.SetDebugTime, and SyncFromServer clears it -- deliberately,
because that setter is the /time slash command and the command is meant to be a
look-at-dusk-for-a-moment affordance rather than a mode. There is even a test
pinning that behaviour: WorldTimeDebugTests.SyncFromServer_ClearsDebugOverride.
ACE sends TimeSync every few seconds. The clock was therefore un-pinned again
long before the route reached its first stop, on every run this campaign has
taken, including V6m's smoke pair.
The Dereth clock does not only move the sky. It moves the SUN, so it moves the
directional term of every lit surface in the scene.
MEASURED, rather than argued. A probe route captured each stop TWICE, 45 seconds
apart, in the same run on the same backend:
GL, Holtburg, capture 1 vs capture 2: 205,772 px 22.33%
Vulkan, Holtburg, capture 1 vs capture 2: 218,732 px 23.73%
GL, Facility Hub, capture 1 vs capture 2: 108,795 px 11.81%
Vulkan, Facility Hub, capture 1 vs capture 2: 130,206 px 14.13%
One backend, one stop, nothing moving, and a fifth of the frame changes while
you watch. No cross-backend number means anything against that noise floor, and
the cross-backend numbers taken during that probe run were duly absurd -- 56% at
Holtburg, where the two launches happened to be at different times of Dereth day.
THE FIX IS A PIN THAT OUTRANKS THE SERVER CLOCK AND SURVIVES SYNC.
WorldTimeService.PinnedDayFraction is a nullable day fraction that wins over both
Calendar.DayFraction(NowTicks) and SetDebugTime, and that SyncFromServer does not
touch. ACDREAM_WORLD_TIME -> RuntimeOptions.PinnedWorldDayFraction ->
WorldEnvironmentController, which writes it once: the Runtime environment owner
and its clock are session-scoped, so one write outlives every teleport and every
reveal generation. Values outside [0, 1) are REJECTED rather than clamped -- a
day fraction of 12.5 is a typo, and silently pinning the world at it would be
worse than ignoring it.
Unset is the default and every ordinary run. The calendar DATE still advances,
which is intentional: the date drives day-group selection, and ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP
already pins that. The differential gate forces the pin at 0.5 -- noon, which is
what the three presses were aiming at -- on both launches, and the route's
presses are deleted rather than left in as decoration.
This is instrument determinism on the footing of ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP and V7's
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS, not a workaround: it is off by default, nothing in the
shipping client reads it, and the alternative was to keep measuring two backends
through a fifth of a frame of sunlight.
WHAT IT MOVED. The same three-stop route, same commit otherwise, before and after:
holtburg_town 9.05% -> 2.86% (83,438 -> 26,330 px)
facility_hub_interior 12.16% -> 0.78% (112,075 -> 7,176 px)
aerlinthe_island 23.09% -> 6.82% (212,824 -> 62,892 px)
The interior stop is the headline. V6m recorded it as a route defect on the
theory that the indoor spring-arm camera settles to different distances in two
runs; that theory is now refuted. The camera was fine. The interior was lit
differently because the sun had moved, and with the sun held still the stop drops
by a factor of 15 to 0.78% -- close enough to the 0.001 threshold that its
remaining population is worth naming rather than guessing at. No route change was
needed and none was made.
WHAT REMAINS, per the difference maps, all of it now attributable by eye:
the animated portal beside the Holtburg stop; distant scenery foliage; wandering
NPCs and a chimney smoke plume, which are animation and emitter phase; the vitals
readouts, whose stamina and mana genuinely regenerate at different rates across
two logins minutes apart; and, at Aerlinthe, a dense low-magnitude speckle in a
scene whose mean luminance is 28/255 -- half of its differing pixels are exactly
delta 3, one step over a tolerance that is absolute rather than relative.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,134 passed / 3 skipped (one new: the
day-fraction range check); AcDream.Core.Tests WorldTimeDebugTests 6/6, including
the two new ones that assert the pin survives a sync and outranks the transient
override. GL offline pixel gate against the pre-slice tree: 2.66e-05, 15 pixels
of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31 band -- GL did not move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two changes, one measurement. The V6m smoke pair put GL versus Vulkan at
Holtburg at 18.52% of the frame differing at tolerance 2 with MSAA off. The same
stop on the same instrument now measures 9.05%, and the two populations these
address are gone from the difference map rather than merely smaller.
1. THE WORLD ATLASES WERE SAMPLED WITHOUT ANISOTROPY ON VULKAN, AND WITH THE
DEVICE MAXIMUM ON GL.
RhiWorldTextureArray -- the backend-neutral shared object/material atlas, and
the only IWorldTextureArray the Vulkan arm ever constructs -- registered its
clamp and repeat slots with GpuSamplerDescription.WorldClamp/WorldRepeat as
written, which carry MaxAnisotropy 1. The GL arm asks for the driver's own
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY twice over: ManagedGLTextureArray sets
GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY on the image, and the two sampler objects its resident
bindless handles are built from (OpenGLGraphicsDevice.WrapSampler/ClampSampler)
set it again, which is the one that actually wins.
V6i-2 knew it was asking for 1 and said so in a comment -- "the world arm that
draws through these arrays is the next slice, and it is the one that can gate a
filtering change visually." That slice was V6j, the gate is V7, and this is it.
Retail settles the question rather than the GL arm settling it.
RenderDeviceD3D::SetDefaultD3DStates (0x005a3800) loops all sixteen sampler
stages and issues SetSamplerState(stage, 0xA, this->m_D3DCaps.MaxAnisotropy) at
0x005a4230. 0xA is D3DSAMP_MAXANISOTROPY and the argument is the device's
reported cap, not a setting -- so "as much anisotropy as this device has" is
retail's own rule, the GL arm is faithful to it, and asking for 1 diverged from
retail as well as from the shipping backend. No divergence-register row is owed
in either direction: this retires a Vulkan-only gap and lands on retail's value.
The fix asks for a ceiling rather than reading a limit back, because the pinned
RHI contract (plan section 3.3) carries no anisotropy field and is frozen. It
does not need one: VulkanGpuSampler already clamps MaxAnisotropy to
VkPhysicalDeviceLimits.maxSamplerAnisotropy, Vulkan guarantees that limit is at
least 16 wherever the samplerAnisotropy feature is supported -- which this
backend requires -- and 16 is where every desktop driver caps. The request and
the GL arm's read therefore land on the same number.
What it was worth, from the difference map at the same stop: the roof shingles
of both Holtburg cottages, which had been dense hatching across the whole
surface, and the stone courses of the near building are now black. Measured as
high-frequency energy (mean absolute neighbour difference, GL versus Vulkan) the
right-hand roof went from visibly blurred to a ratio of 0.999 and the wall to
1.023; every other textured region in the frame is between 0.99 and 1.02.
Grazing-angle surfaces are where anisotropy is the whole difference, which is
why a roof was the loudest thing in the frame.
2. THE SKY HAS TWO CLOCKS AND ONLY ONE OF THEM WAS PINNABLE.
ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP and the route's AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay presses pin the Dereth
date, which chooses the day group, the keyframe and the sun angle. The cloud
sheet does not read that clock: SkyRenderer accumulates TexVelocityX/Y against
DateTime.UtcNow minus its own construction time, by design, because retail's
clouds drift with real time regardless of the date. Two launches minutes apart
therefore cannot agree about where the clouds are no matter what the route does,
and the V6m smoke measured the cost -- 89% of its 18.52% sat in the top 240 rows.
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS (RuntimeOptions.SkyAnimationPhaseSeconds ->
SkyRenderer.AnimationPhaseSecondsOverride) replaces that elapsed-seconds value
with a fixed one. Unset -- the default, and every ordinary run -- keeps the wall
clock, so nothing a user or the offline gate sees changes. The differential gate
forces it on both launches alongside MSAA and the day group; the offline gate
keeps its top-280 mask, because a same-commit GL pair still has the sun to
disagree about.
This is instrument determinism on the same footing as ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP, not a
workaround: it is one input to a UV offset, it is off by default, and no shipping
path reads it. The alternative on the table was -MaskTopPixels, which would have
permanently blinded the campaign's strictest instrument to the entire sky -- one
of the five surfaces the offline gate already cannot see. Rows 0-32 of the
Holtburg pair went from 23,090 differing pixels to 1,211, and what remains up
there is roof and portal rather than cloud.
WHAT THE SAME PAIR STILL SHOWS, unattributed and carried to the next commit: the
distant treeline, the player and the NPCs, and the animated portal. The portal is
phase and expected. The treeline is not filtering -- sharpness now matches within
5% and a shift search finds no sub-pixel offset -- and the two runs entered the
world at different last-logout positions (0xC95B0001 versus 0x09040008), so the
far-tier streaming history differed. That is the next thing to prove or refute.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,133 passed / 3 skipped against the
4,132/3 baseline (one new: the sky-phase parse). GL offline pixel gate against
the pre-change tree: 2.31e-05, 13 pixels of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31
band -- GL did not move. One offline Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation
proven inserted by the loader: zero validation errors, zero warnings. Full
three-stop differential recorded at artifacts/v7-diff-c1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Instance, physical-device selection, logical device, queues, swapchain, and the
three-layer capability gate, behind ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan. Nothing of
the game renders through it. OpenGL stays the default and the only live backend
until V10, and with the variable unset or set to gl the GL path executes not one
new statement.
The shape of the slice. Plan §4.11 asks the Vulkan gate to mirror the GL one
exactly - passive record, active probes, an Evaluate producing operator-facing
sentences, NotSupportedException into Program.cs's exit-code-4 contract, and an
atomic JSON report. The harder question was where to put the seam, because a
capability gate is precisely the code you cannot exercise on the machine that
already passes it: this box has one discrete GPU, so device ranking, the split-
queue path, an sRGB-only surface, a minimised window and a device missing
descriptorBindingVariableDescriptorCount are all unreachable by running the
client. So every decision the gate makes is a pure function over plain records,
and the Silk interop layer only has to be right about which Vulkan field feeds
which property. VulkanPhysicalDeviceSelection ranks candidates,
VulkanExtensionSelection does the required-versus-optional set arithmetic,
VulkanSwapchainConfigurationFactory chooses format, present mode, image count,
extent, usage, transform and composite alpha, VulkanSwapchainRecreationPolicy
classifies every acquire and present result, and
VulkanCapabilityRequirements.Evaluate turns a captured record into failure
sentences. All of it is unit-tested with no driver, no device and no window.
This commit is the integration of that work onto the post-revert tree. The V5
branch was written on b064668b, before V4c/V4d were reverted, so GameWindow.cs
had to be merged rather than taken: the file here is eb2ba4e5's GameWindow plus
V5's fifteen-line backend branch, and it keeps _terrainModernShader, which the
revert restored and which the V5 branch never had. Every other file is byte-
identical to the branch - git diff e1ef4313 over Rendering/Gpu/Vk,
tests/.../Gpu/Vk and RenderBackendKind.cs is empty, no BOM was introduced, and
CRLF is uniform across all seventeen files.
Gate results, recorded verbatim.
Release build: succeeded, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
App tests, Release: Failed 0, Passed 3981, Skipped 3, Total 3984 - the 3,866
baseline plus V5's 115 new tests, exactly.
Offline pixel gate against eb2ba4e5: PASS world-offline.png, differing fraction
1.06534090909091E-05, which is 6 differing pixels out of the 563,200 compared
after the top 280 sky rows are masked. §5.1's re-measured same-commit control
band is 15-23 pixels at fraction <= 4.1e-05, so this sits below the noise floor
rather than merely inside it - the expected result for a slice that adds no
statement to the GL path.
Vulkan check (a), ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan on the RX 9070 XT with an
automation artifact directory:
vulkan: capability gate passed (Windows, AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, Vulkan
1.4.349, vendor 0x1002, device 0x7550, driver 2.0.395 (raw 0x0080018B));
swapchain B8G8R8A8Unorm/PresentModeImmediateKhr 1280x720 x3
vulkan: device selection - automatic: 'AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT' (DiscreteGpu,
15.92 GiB device-local) ranked first of 2 enumerated device(s).
[world-gate] screenshot-complete name=vulkan-bringup path=...
artifacts\vk-bringup\vulkan-bringup.png size=1280x720
vulkan: presented 64609 clear-colour frame(s); shutting down.
Exit code 0 on CloseMainWindow. The PNG is 5,238 bytes, 1280x720, and uniformly
RGBA(11,19,39,255) - exactly ClearColor [0.043, 0.075, 0.153, 1] scaled to
UNORM. Orientation is right-side-up by construction rather than by inspection,
which a uniform clear could not show: VulkanBackbufferSwizzle.ToGlOriginRgba
writes source row y into destination row height-1-y precisely because
FrameScreenshotController flips again on the way to the PNG, so the two
cancel. That double-flip is unit-tested.
Vulkan check (b), ACDREAM_VULKAN_FORCE_UNSUPPORTED=timelineSemaphore:
[ERR] acdream's Vulkan renderer is unsupported by the selected device.
Platform: win-x64, Windows, AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (DiscreteGpu), Vulkan
1.4.349, vendor 0x1002, device 0x7550, driver 2.0.395 (raw 0x0080018B)
- timelineSemaphore is required; the frame serial is the semaphore value.
Full capability report: ...\diagnostics\graphical-capabilities-vulkan.json
Exit code 4. The report records ForcedUnsupportedFeature timelineSemaphore,
TimelineSemaphore false against an otherwise complete feature set, and the
matching SupportFailures sentence, so the injected rejection is distinguishable
from a genuinely absent feature. Both enumerated devices, all five surface
formats, all four present modes and a clean FunctionProbe with no failures are
recorded beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Complete Slice D4 by adding aggregate lifecycle occupancy and traffic facts, validating physical source reports, and including decoded audio under the typed startup budget. Exercise every domain under forced pressure and retain the real cache/fence convergence gates.
Define Slice D's transition and concurrency contract, add generation-safe asset handles and owner leases, and parse the existing cache ceilings through typed runtime budgets. Stale generations cannot release or revive replacements, and worker observations are bounded and coalesced.
Co-authored-by: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Introduce explicit loaded, missing, and corrupt outcomes over typed pak keys, validate package/DAT identity at open, add zero-I/O TOC probes, preserve cancellation, and route the package path through RuntimeOptions. Production injection follows in the next checkpoint.
Move camera/root resolution, live settings and listener preview, sky/lighting/fog preparation, animated classification, and building visibility scratch behind a typed WorldRenderFrameBuilder while preserving retail frame order and borrowed lifetimes.
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Lands the codex-worktree D.2b stream plus the extraction the 2026-07-02
UI architecture review mandated before commit:
- ItemInteractionController: single owner of double-click use/equip/
container-open, targeted-use mode (health kits), drag-out drop;
toolbar shortcut drags don't drop the real item. ItemEquipRules for
multi-slot (coat) coverage via equip masks.
- Cursor phase: CursorFeedbackController (semantic priority chain:
drag > resize > window-move > target-mode > text) + RetailCursorCatalog
(enums 0x27/0x28/0x29, hotspot 14,14; ClientUISystem::UpdateCursorState
0x00564630) resolved through the portal EnumIDMap chain by
RetailCursorResolver; RetailCursorManager applies dat cursor art to the
OS cursor. Register row AP-72 covers the OS standard-cursor fallback.
- Character window goes live: CharacterSheetProvider owns sheet assembly,
XP-curve/raise-cost math and the raise flow — extracted out of
GameWindow per Code Structure Rule 1 instead of committing the ~430-line
feature body there. Optimistic XP/credit debits go through eventful
store APIs (new ClientObjectTable.UpdateInt64Property +
LocalPlayerState.DebitIntProperty/DebitInt64Property) instead of raw
property-dictionary writes; register row AP-73 covers the still-missing
raise ledger (#163).
- RetailWindowFrame: the shared nine-slice window mount recipe; the
character window uses it, remaining windows migrate via #164.
- Status-bar buttons toggle inventory/character windows; retail row-major
backpack ordering; WorldSession.SendUseWithTarget + raise/train sends.
GameWindow shrinks 14,214 -> 13,877 lines despite the new features; the
sheet/raise logic is unit-tested in CharacterSheetProviderTests instead
of trapped in the god object. Build green; full suite 3,286 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lifts 13 startup-time environment variables out of GameWindow.cs into a
single typed AcDream.App.RuntimeOptions record read once in Program.cs.
Behavior-preservation only — no live behavior change, no visual change.
Verified end-to-end against ACE on 127.0.0.1:9000: full M1 demo loop
(walk Holtburg, click door, click NPC, portal entry) plus DEVTOOLS
ImGui panels load cleanly.
Why: GameWindow.cs is 10,304 LOC and scattered Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable
calls were one of the structural smells called out in the new
"Code Structure Rules" doc. Typed options is the safest cut to make
first because the substitution is mechanical and parsing semantics
get pinned by unit tests.
What lands:
- CLAUDE.md: removed stale R1→R8 execution-phases line, replaced with
pointers to the milestones doc + strategic roadmap (the actual
source of truth). Tightened the "check ALL FOUR references"
section to describe WB as the production rendering base, not
just a reference. New "Code Structure Rules" section (6 rules)
captures the discipline we're committing to.
- docs/architecture/acdream-architecture.md: removed dangling link
to the deleted memory/project_ui_architecture.md.
- docs/architecture/code-structure.md (NEW, 376 LOC): rationale for
the 6 rules + 6-step extraction sequence
(RuntimeOptions → LiveSessionController → LiveEntityRuntime →
SelectionInteractionController → RenderFrameOrchestrator →
GameEntity aggregation). This PR is Step 1.
- src/AcDream.App/RuntimeOptions.cs (NEW, 100 LOC): typed record
with FromEnvironment(string) factory and Parse(datDir, env)
overload for testability. Covers ACDREAM_LIVE, _TEST_HOST/PORT/
USER/PASS, _DEVTOOLS, _DUMP_MOVE_TRUTH, _NO_AUDIO,
_ENABLE_SKY_PES, _HIDE_PART, _RETAIL_CLOSE_DEGRADES,
_DUMP_SCENERY_Z, _STREAM_RADIUS.
- src/AcDream.App/Program.cs: builds RuntimeOptions once, passes
to GameWindow.
- src/AcDream.App/Rendering/GameWindow.cs: ctor takes RuntimeOptions;
7 startup-cached env-var fields become expression-bodied
properties or direct _options.X reads; TryStartLiveSession,
audio init, legacy stream-radius branch all route through
_options.
- tests/AcDream.App.Tests/ (NEW project, 10 unit tests + csproj):
pins parser semantics — default-off bools, the literal "0"
gate for RETAIL_CLOSE_DEGRADES, the >=0 guard for
STREAM_RADIUS, null-vs-empty for user/pass, exact-"1" check
for diagnostic flags. Registered in AcDream.slnx.
Out of scope (per code-structure.md §4):
- Per-call-site ACDREAM_DUMP_* / _REMOTE_VEL_DIAG diagnostic reads
sprinkled through GameWindow (~40 sites). Rule 5 in CLAUDE.md
commits us to migrating these opportunistically as larger
extractions land, not in a bulk pass.
- AcDream.Core's project-reference to Chorizite.OpenGLSDLBackend.
Only the stateless .Lib namespace is used; tightening the project
reference is documented as future work in code-structure.md §2.
Build: green.
Tests: AcDream.App.Tests 10/10 ✓, Core.Net.Tests 294/294 ✓,
UI.Abstractions.Tests 419/419 ✓,
AcDream.Core.Tests 1073/1081 (8 pre-existing failures verified
against pre-refactor baseline by stash-and-rerun).
Visual verification: full M1 demo loop against ACE +Acdream login
including DEVTOOLS panel host load.
Next: Step 2 — extract LiveSessionController per code-structure.md §4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
