Campaign N Slice N5 (docs/plans/2026-07-29-network-transport-campaign.md
section 8 rung 3): the permanent removal of the loopback blindness that let
#260 ship. Local ACE never drops a datagram, so every historical connected
gate was structurally incapable of exercising the N1-N4 recovery machinery;
from this slice on, tools/run-connected-loss-gate.ps1 runs the standard
lifecycle route through deterministic seeded loss and passes only on proven
non-zero recovery.
Observability:
- [net-tick] gains resend/s nak-out/s nak-in/s rej-in/s dup-drop/s parked/s
reclaim/s cache= nakset= - TransportStats window deltas mirroring the
acks/s cumulative-delta pattern, plus the two instantaneous depths (the
unbounded-like-retail sent-packet cache watchdog and the inbound NAK set).
TransportStats gains RejectsReceived (inbound RejectRetransmit packets).
Counters increment unconditionally; every string is behind
NetDiagnostics.ProbeNet (Code Structure Rule 5).
- WorldSession.Dispose emits one cumulative [net-final] totals line so the
loss gate asserts exact counters instead of reconstructing them from
rounded per-second rates.
- LinkStatusSnapshot.PacketLossPercentage is deliberately NOT wired: filed
#261 - retail's CLinkStatusAverages formula
(LinkStatusHolder::GetPacketLossPercentage @ 0x00411370) must be located
first; inventing a ratio is forbidden.
N4-review F3 fold-in:
- Fresh reliable sends stamp Header.Iteration = the session iteration
through the same shared retail header build already cited for Time (N3)
and the N4 control packets: FlowQueue::TransmitNewPackets @ 0x00547A60,
the stack build at 0x00547A84/0x00547AA8. The control-header rule now
holds across all three send shapes (fresh reliable, ack, NAK). ACE reads
neither Time nor Iteration inbound (campaign section 3) - wire-safe, and
resends keep the stamp verbatim per the N1 rebuild rule.
Loss injection (Transport/LossyTransportDecorator):
- IWorldSessionTransport wrapper with deterministic seeded per-direction
loss. Config via NetDiagnostics typed env properties read once:
ACDREAM_NET_DROP_PCT (0 = off = default), ACDREAM_NET_DROP_SEED (default
1), ACDREAM_NET_DROP_DIR (out|in|both, default both).
- Arming gate: NOTHING drops in either direction until the decorator has
FORWARDED the first ENCRYPTED outbound datagram - parse-free check on
length > 20 with EncryptedChecksum set in the LE flags word at bytes
4..8. The cleartext handshake always survives and the arming datagram is
never a casualty; handshake-loss testing belongs to N6's ConnectResponse
0.333 s retransmit.
- Structurally absent at 0%: WrapIfConfigured returns the raw transport -
WorldSession's default factory is the only production seam and a normal
run never constructs the decorator.
Root-cause fix the gate immediately exposed:
- The logoff-confirmation wait in Dispose processed inbound datagrams but
never pumped the transport, so a lost S2C logoff confirmation was
gap-detected but its healing NAK never went out. Retail's pump
(Client::UseTime @ 0x00411C40 -> PacketController::UseTime @ 0x005410D0)
runs until LogOffServer; the wait now sweeps per processed datagram,
making the logoff wait the third covered blocking pump (after Tick and
the handshake loops). A lost C2S logoff REQUEST remains unrecoverable by
ACE design (arrival-driven NAK; a quiet client is never NAKed - campaign
section 3 row 1), recorded in the gate header.
Gates:
- tools/run-connected-loss-gate.ps1 (-DropPct 2 -Seed 1): PASS vs local
ACE - the first automated observation of packet loss in project history.
Decorator ledger: dropped out=3 in=10 of forwarded out=183 in=496.
[net-final] resends=2 nak-in=2 nak-out=6 rej-in=0 acks-out=114
acks-in=119 dup-drop=0 sanity-drop=0 cksum-fail=0 parked=9 reclaimed=0
uncached-nak=0 cache=1 nakset=0. Every injected loss healed: both
ACE-driven C2S resend recovery (nak-in=2 -> resends=2) and client-driven
S2C NAK recovery (parked=9 -> nak-out=6) fired on a real connected
route, all six checkpoints validated, graceful logout confirmed, ACE
recorded the transport Disconnect.
- tools/run-connected-world-lifecycle-gate.ps1 (decorator absent): PASS -
zero behavior change on the no-loss baseline; the gate now defensively
clears the drop env vars.
- Core.Net Release: 747/747 (737 + 10 N5: decorator determinism/direction/
arming/structural-absence/env parsing, the 5% seeded WorldSession lossy
lifecycle with zero message loss both ways + ACE Headroom 256, the
[net-tick] field pins, the Iteration stamps).
- Full solution Release: 9,763 passed / 5 skipped / 0 failed.
Test-fixture note: FakeAceTransport gains AutoAdvanceOnBlockingReceive so
virtual time can move during the blocking Connect()/EnterWorld() pumps -
with the clock frozen there, a dropped handshake-window datagram could
never be NAK-healed (a fixture artifact, not a transport property).
Campaign section 9 ledger row added (SHA recorded at N6 kickoff).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The N4 review confirmed the draw-order reclaim design (invariant attacked
from five angles, held) and NAK fidelity down to the decomp''s x87
comparison masks. This acceptance commit settles the two process debts it
found: AP-125 (standalone control packets vs retail''s CoalesceData
piggyback - the ACE-safety divergence that has shipped since N3''s ack and
N4''s NAK) now has its register row; the false rounding-bug justification
in AckNakScheduler (0.6 x 1e7 rounds UP under IEEE-754, truncation never
lost a tick) is rewritten as the defensive hardening it actually is; and
Admission.Process''s defaulted draw-ordinal is now ulong.MaxValue so an
accidental cleartext repark can never head a bubble-shift chain. Core.Net
737/737 green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign N slice N4 completes the AckNakScheduler NAK branch and closes
the ACE cleartext-reject keystream hazard - the slice that makes S2C
loss actually RECOVER.
NAK emission (SharedNet::EnqueueNaks @ 0x00543BD0):
- One cleartext exact-flags RequestRetransmit per sweep behind the
STRICT 0.6 s gate on the ONE shared timestamp (the x87 0x41-mask test
at 0x00543C03 proceeds only on strictly-greater; the ack's gate stays
>=). Never an ack in a NAK sweep; a NAK delays the next ack by 2.0 s
and vice versa (landmine #7).
- Body = u32 count + ids ascending, capped at 114 (ReceiverData::GetNaks
@ 0x005490C0, cap 0x72; the m_cbData = 4*count+4 store at 0x00543C3E);
header Sequence borrowed from highestIDSent_ without incrementing;
cleartext or ACE ignores it (landmine #6, NetworkSession.cs:283-284) -
and a NAK never refreshes ACE's 60 s timeout.
- Control-header rule decided once for BOTH ack and NAK: Time = the
interval id, Iteration = the session iteration, matching retail's
shared header build (FlowQueue::TransmitNewPackets @ 0x00547A60, the
stack build at 0x00547A84). ACE reads neither field inbound.
- Gate ticks now round instead of truncate: 0.6 has no exact double
form, and truncation opened the strict gate exactly AT the boundary.
RejectRetransmit reclaim (divergence register AD-51, ACE adaptation):
- ACE's RejectRetransmit consumes a FRESH sequence, cleartext, with NO
keystream word, and is cached (ACE NetworkSession.cs:299-304,
:722-725, :743-748) - the one place ACE breaks retail's gap-walk
invariant that every missing id was word-bearing (retail cleartext
always borrows live sequences). Unhandled, the gap walk parks a word
for the reject's id and the inbound stream runs permanently one word
ahead - the N2 desync class reintroduced through the reject path.
- Fix: on a VALIDATED cleartext reject, InboundSequenceTracker removes
the mis-park, shifts every later-drawn parked word down one position
(per-word draw ordinals; ascending wrap-safe id <=> ascending draw
order), and pools the excess word, consumed lowest-draw-order-first
ahead of fresh ISAAC draws. Exact for any number of interleaved
rejects in ANY arrival order - a plain reclaim FIFO is not: a reject
arriving after a higher encrypted arrival crosses the parked chain,
and two out-of-order rejects pool their excess words out of draw
order (both orderings pinned by tests).
- Reject BODY ids keep N2's discard: word-bearing server-side,
consumed-in-place. The pool is provably empty against retail servers.
N3 advisories folded (all five): honest transitional-state wording (the
empty N3 NAK branch could silently disconnect a loopback session at
ACE's 60 s timeout, witness [net-tick] acks/s=0), the
ReceiverData::SharedInit @ 0x00548EF0 (from Init @ 0x00548FA0)
citation, the FlowQueue::Empty pump-order wording (TransmitNaks ->
TransmitAcks -> TransmitNewPackets with the interval increment LAST @
0x00548A9D; our clock-first Sweep is cosmetic vs ACE), the
Time/Iteration rule above, and the stale WorldSession budget-break
comment rewritten to the sweep reality.
Tests: 737 Core.Net green (14 new in NakEmissionTests + updated N3
pins): strict-gate boundary, shared timestamp both directions,
NAK-xor-ack exclusivity, full wire-shape + 114-cap pins, model-served
retransmission round trip, five tracker reclaim proofs, the 130 s
virtual prune -> fresh-sequence reject system test (victim abandoned,
later traffic decodes, pool drains to zero), 10 s long-loss survival
(NAKs on the gate cadence, zero acks, heal inside the window), and the
capstone soak: 2% seeded bidirectional loss x 10,000 messages -> zero
message loss both ways, ACE crypto headroom 256 at convergence, every
ledger drained (cache at the single watermark entry - retail's Flush
prunes STRICTLY below the ack). Full solution Release: 9,758 passed /
5 skipped. Connected world-lifecycle gate PASS
(logs/connected-world-gate-20260729-150238); canonical nine-stop soak
PASS (logs/connected-r6-soak-20260729-150856).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign N slice N3. Retail never acks per packet: SharedNet::EnqueuePak
@ 0x00543B10 is the binary's only AckSequence (0x4000) construction site,
gated at >= 2.0 s on ReceiverData::timeStamp_ (@ +0x10), armed at
connection birth by ReceiverData::Init @ 0x00548EF0, and arbitrated
NAK-xor-ack per sweep by ClientNet::ProcessConnection @ 0x00545450
(m_SeqIDsWeNAKed non-empty -> EnqueueNaks, else EnqueuePak;
SharedNet::EnqueueNaks @ 0x00543BD0 shares the SAME timestamp -
campaign landmine #7).
- New Transport/AckNakScheduler: owns the one shared timestamp; a
non-empty NAK set suppresses the ack (N4 emits RequestRetransmit in
that branch; in N3 it emits nothing - a documented transitional state,
safe for exactly one slice on loopback), else ONE cleartext exact-flags
AckSequence carrying the tracker's HighestIdReceived, header sequence
borrowed from HighestIdSent without incrementing, 4-byte LE body.
Flags are an EQUALITY, never an OR (landmine #5 - ACE's dedup
exemption NetworkSession.cs:342-343 and watermark-skip :474-476 both
require the exact value).
- ReliableTransport.Sweep pump order per FlowQueue::Empty @ 0x00548A20:
interval clock, NAK/ack arbitration, pending resends, prune. The sweep
already runs in Tick and both handshake pump loops (landmine #8), so
cumulative acks flow during the character-list/enter-world floods at
ACE's own ~2 s cadence.
- WorldSession: the Phase 4.9 per-packet reflex ack in ProcessDatagram
and SendAck are DELETED; the [net-tick] acks/s probe now reads
Stats.AcksSent; new internal TransportClockSource seam drives the
2.0 s gate on virtual time in the conformance suite.
- N1 Fable-review advisory retired (Time-stamp fold-in): fresh reliable
sends now stamp Header.Time = the current interval id, matching retail
FlowQueue::TransmitNewPackets @ 0x00547A60 (header build at
0x00547A84); resends already re-stamped. ACE never reads inbound
Header.Time, so the wire stays compatible.
Tests: 723 Core.Net (7 new) - gate cadence + watermark-at-emission,
flags-equality pin + model acceptance at the reused sequence without a
watermark advance, NAK suppression and resume after the gap clears, a
50-packet CreateObject flood collapsing to ONE ack, the quiet-session
keepalive property across a 120 s virtual horizon (the reflex ack's
keepalive role, replaced and proven against ACE's 60 s TimeoutDeadline),
the Time fold-in, and a full FakeAceTransport lifecycle with zero
CRC/state/duplicate drops. Full solution Release: 9,744 passed /
5 skipped / 0 failed. Connected world-lifecycle gate PASS (capped +
uncapped-reconnect, graceful exits, 0 failures); canonical nine-stop
route PASS (0 failures).
Campaign section 9 N3 row updated (complete; SHA recorded at N4
kickoff).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign N Slice N2 (docs/plans/2026-07-29-network-transport-campaign.md
S2.2) - the second fatal #260 fix: the inbound keystream now aligns to
SEQUENCE order instead of arrival order. One lost S2C datagram no longer
desyncs the inbound cipher permanently - the missing id's pre-drawn key
parks in the NAK set, later packets keep decoding, and the retransmission
decodes with the parked key.
New src/AcDream.Core.Net/Transport/InboundSequenceTracker.cs - retail's
ReceiverData inbound half, ported rule for rule:
- Sanity window: drop when seq is wrap-safe newer than
highestIDReceived_ + 0x7FFF (SharedNet::SeqIDSanityCheck @ 0x00543A20;
the boundary itself is accepted).
- Duplicate/late arrival (encrypted, at/below the watermark): NAK-set
hit -> decrypt with the PARKED pre-drawn key; miss -> silent drop at
ZERO keystream cost (SharedNet::ProcessNewSeqNum @ 0x00544690, the
AVL::Remove branch) - the dup-word-burn and double-dispatch bugs close
together.
- Gap walk (SharedNet::ProcessNewestSeqNum @ 0x00541930): one inbound
ISAAC word per missing id, drawn IN SEQUENCE ORDER BEFORE the arriving
packet's own key (landmine #4), parked beside the id
(ReceiverData::AddNakked @ 0x00549240, idempotent; id 0 skipped per
retail's `if (esi_1 != 0)`). Cleartext walks to seq+1 - the borrowed
id itself gets NAKed, so the real encrypted packet at that id can
still decode later.
- Verify-failure re-park: a sequenced encrypted checksum failure parks
the consumed key back beside its id so the retransmission decodes
(SharedNet::ProcessPacket @ 0x00544790 tail, AddNakked(seq, &key)).
- Inbound RejectRetransmit -> silent NAK-set abandonment; parked keys
discarded, alignment holds because the words were already drawn
(SharedNet::HandleEmptyAck @ 0x005448F0).
- NAK set = SortedDictionary<uint,uint> seq -> parked key; ascending
raw-uint enumeration matches retail's AVL walk for N4's <=114-id NAK
emission (ReceiverData::GetNaks @ 0x005490C0).
PacketCodec split (campaign S4, retail's own factoring - the key is an
optional in/out of ReceiverData::Decrypt): TryParseBorrowed is the pure
parse + checksum-summand computation with NO keystream access anywhere;
VerifyChecksum(header, headerHash, payloadHash, uint? key) compares the
additive cleartext form (null) or headerHash + (key ^ payloadHash).
TryDecodeBorrowed(datagram, IsaacRandom?) - the consume-before-compare
site that WAS the bug - is deleted; the owned TryDecode stays
(test-only). RejectRetransmit ids are now exposed on both decoders
(borrowed RejectRetransmitBytes/Count like the Request pair; owned
RejectRetransmits list); the bytes were always inside the hashed span,
so parse-hash coverage is unchanged.
WorldSession: ProcessDatagram head is now parse -> sequence-0 split
(cleartext seq-0 = handshake/control, verified additively and processed
as before; encrypted seq-0 dropped before any keystream access, like
retail's ProcessPacket) -> tracker.Admit -> VerifyChecksum with the
admission key -> failure re-park -> unchanged flag handling, N1
transport consumption, reflex ack, and fragment loop. The
RejectRetransmit flag routes to the tracker beside the N1 NAK/ack
consumption. The handshake Connect loop moved to parse +
cleartext-verify (no tracker exists before ISAAC seeding; the
ConnectRequest is cleartext seq 0). ReliableTransport now takes both
Isaacs and exposes Inbound; the session's _inboundIsaac field is
deleted. No production caller constructed the N1 ctor outside
WorldSession, so no compatibility shape was kept.
TransportStats gains InboundDupsDropped, InboundSanityDrops,
ChecksumFailures, KeysParked (unconditional, like the N1 counters).
Watermark init = 1 is an ACE adaptation, register row AD-50 (watermark
INIT only, not a mechanism change; AD-49 stays reserved for the campaign
S5 blob-layer deferral): retail zero-inits ReceiverData, but ACE never
emits S2C sequence 1 - PacketSequence starts unprimed at uint.MaxValue,
the cleartext ConnectRequest takes NextValue 0, and the first ENCRYPTED
flush re-primes CurrentValue to 1 so the first encrypted sequenced
packet is 2 (ACE NetworkSession.cs:716-717 resolving to
UIntSequence(startingValue: 1), Sequence/UIntSequence.cs:9-13,30-41).
A zero-init watermark would gap-walk the permanent id-1 hole: one
spurious NAK, the first pre-drawn word mis-assigned to id 1, and the
keystream off by one from the first encrypted packet onward. holtburger
seeds the same value (crates/holtburger-session/src/session/api.rs:30,
last_server_seq: 1), mirroring ACE's own C2S-side
lastReceivedPacketSequence = 1 (NetworkSession.cs:57). The N0 model's
dance is pinned by the clean-lifecycle conformance test: min encrypted
S2C sequence == 2, zero NAKs, zero spurious drops.
Tests (+14; Core.Net 702 -> 716): the decisive gap test (10,11,13,14 -
13 and 14 decode with fresh words while 12's key parks with
KeysParked=1/NakCount=1, the late 12 decodes with the parked key, 15
takes the next fresh word - impossible pre-N2), zero-cost duplicate
drop (shadow ISAAC position unchanged), re-park -> byte-identical
retransmission decode, the cleartext borrowed-id rule, cleartext at the
watermark (no NAK/key/watermark change), sanity boundary +0x7FFF
accepted / +0x8000 dropped wrap-safe, skip-id-0 across the 32-bit wrap
with ascending NAK enumeration, RejectRetransmit abandonment with
alignment held, warm zero-alloc Admit; plus four real-WorldSession
conformance runs against the N0 ACE double: clean lifecycle (zero NAKs
at every stage), S2C loss of one packet of a Count=2 fragment set
(later packets STILL decode - the N2 win; late byte-identical
redelivery completes the split message intact), duplicate delivery
dropped BEFORE dispatch, and the seq-0 tracker bypass.
N3/N4 handoff notes are recorded in the campaign S9 N2 row: the interim
per-packet reflex ack acks the arriving sequence even while a gap is
parked (ACE prunes the lost id from its S2C cache before N4 could NAK
it - message recovery needs N3's retail NAK-xor-ack sweep), and ACE's
RejectRetransmit consumes a fresh CLEARTEXT sequence with no keystream
word, an ACE-vs-retail wrinkle N4's design must resolve.
Gates: dotnet build green; AcDream.Core.Net.Tests 716/716;
full-solution Release 9,732 passed / 5 skipped / 0 failed; connected
world-lifecycle gate vs local ACE RESULT=PASS (zero failures, one
pre-existing expected world-edge landblock-miss warning); canonical
nine-stop connected route RESULT=PASS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign N Slice N1 (docs/plans/2026-07-29-network-transport-campaign.md
S2.1) - the direct #260 fix: every sent reliable packet is now cached and
re-emitted, header-rebuilt, when ACE NAKs a client-sequence gap. One lost
C2S datagram no longer voids every subsequent action for the session's
lifetime.
New src/AcDream.Core.Net/Transport/:
- TransportClock: injectable monotonic source + retail's 0.5 s interval
counter (ClientFlowQueue::IncrementLocalInterval @ 0x00547F10, tail
`intervalID_ += elapsed`; the same function's ~3 s TimeSync/Echo cadence
stays deferred per TS-58).
- SequenceMath: wrap-safe IsNewer/Max (TimeStampUtils::lhs_newer
@ 0x00543890, reduced to the signed-difference form).
- SentPacketStore: FIFO of ArrayPool-rented wire buffers; Add asserts
optionalLength == 0 (NetPacket::RemoveDisposableOptionalHeaders
@ 0x00549510 pinned as a no-op under standalone-control); FlushOlderThan
pops strictly-older wrap-safe (SentPacketStore::AddSentPacket
@ 0x0054AB00, Flush @ 0x0054ACD0).
- OutboundFlowQueue: owns the outbound ISAAC, highestIDSent (starts 1,
pre-increment, wrap 0xFFFFFFFF->1, never 0), the fragment sequence, the
store, the wrap-safe sorted dedup pending-resend list
(FlowQueue::EnqueueAcks @ 0x005488E0), and the flushNum_ ack watermark.
Cache commit happens AFTER a successful send
(FlowQueue::TransmitNewPackets @ 0x00547A60, commit site 0x00547C85).
NAK ids[0] folds into the watermark as retail's implicit cumulative ack
(RecipientData::ProcessNaks @ 0x00547010). A resend rebuilds ONLY the
20-byte header: flags Retransmission|EncryptedChecksum (|BlobFragments
with fragments), Time = current interval id, Sequence/Id/Iteration/
DataSize verbatim, checksum = fresh header hash + stored sealed checksum
(FlowQueue::TransmitAcks @ 0x005485B0, DequeueAck @ 0x005472F0). The
original ISAAC key rides inside the sealed value - no new keystream word
is ever drawn (CryptoSystem::EncryptData @ 0x0065FF40 non-null-key
path; landmines #1/#2). Resend only on explicit NAK (landmine #3).
- ReliableTransport: composition + Sweep() (interval clock, resends,
prune). The AckNakScheduler joins in N3/N4; ack behavior is untouched
this slice.
- TransportStats: unconditional counters (ResendsSent,
NakRequestsReceived, UncachedNakIds, AcksConsumed) + CacheDepth.
PacketCodec.FinalizeInPlace gains an overload returning (isaacKeyUsed,
sealedChecksum) where sealedChecksum is the pre-header-hash value -
payloadHash cleartext, isaacKey ^ payloadHash encrypted (retail
NetPacket::checksum_). The old signature forwards; encode bytes are
unchanged. Decode is untouched.
WorldSession integration is minimal: the transport is constructed at
ISAAC-seeding time (first reliable packet keeps sequence 2 / fragment 1,
byte-identical to pre-N1); SendGameMessage delegates (probe fseq/pseq now
read the transport); SendAck's borrowed sequence reads HighestIdSent
(identical value, behavior EXACTLY as-is this slice); ProcessDatagram
consumes RequestRetransmit + AckSequence BEFORE the unchanged reflex ack;
the sweep runs at the end of Tick() after the budget break AND inside
both blocking handshake pump loops (Connect step 4, EnterWorld
ServerReady - landmine #8), gated on _transportNegotiated; Dispose
returns the rented cache buffers.
Bookkeeping: TS-57 filed in the divergence register (uncached NAK ids
dropped silently + counted instead of retail's RejectRetransmit - ACE
no-ops the reject and the standalone unsequenced form would trip ACE's
watermark hole); TS-27 narrowed to the inbound direction in the same
commit; the stale WorldSession class-doc gap list corrected.
N0 fold-ins from the re-review: AceSessionModel.ProcessFragment split
into ACE's two literal branches (existing-buffer checks Complete,
NetworkSession.cs:495-507; new-buffer constructs + adds + TryAdds WITHOUT
checking Complete, :509-518), and the zero-count-fragment test now pins
the parked dead buffer (PartialFragmentBufferCount 0 -> 1). e3958610
recorded in the campaign ledger's N0 row.
Tests: 15 new in Transport/OutboundReliableTransportTests.cs - store
FIFO/strict/wrap-safe flush with rent/return balance via a counting
pool, interval-clock start/advance/wrap, resend header shape (flags
exactly 3 or 7, Time = interval, verbatim fields, checksum identity,
bit-identical body), resend-consumes-no-ISAAC-word, uncached-NAK
counting, ids[0] watermark fold + strict prune, wrap-safe ack max,
conformance resend verifying under AceCryptoModel with the ORIGINAL
parked key (Headroom 256, zero orphans, ordering restored), an
end-to-end FakeAceTransport lossy run (10 game actions, C2S #5 dropped,
all 10 dispatched in order, exactly one resend, session alive), and
zero-alloc steady-state SendGameMessage.
Gates: dotnet build green; AcDream.Core.Net.Tests 702/702; full-solution
Release 9,723 passed / 5 skipped / 0 failed; connected world-lifecycle
gate vs local ACE RESULT=PASS (0 failures, both sessions exit 0; one
pre-existing expected world-edge landblock-miss warning).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Addresses the N0 review findings against commit 7e9134b4. Test-only: no
production code changes.
F1 (blocking) - model Session.CheckState (Session.cs:93-110). A three-value
AceSessionState (AuthLoginRequest -> AuthConnectResponse -> AuthConnected)
advances on SendConnectRequest (AuthenticationHandler.cs:127, :232) and on the
accepted ConnectResponse (NetworkManager.cs:77). CheckState runs as the first
statement of Receive after TryParse - ahead of the ConnectResponse route and
ahead of VerifyCRC - so a LoginRequest out of state, a replayed
ConnectResponse, or any of AckSequence|TimeSync|EchoRequest|Flow during
AuthLoginRequest is dropped at zero keystream cost (ACE's PacketHeader.HasFlag
is ANY-of, PacketHeader.cs:70). New StateDropCount counter.
F2 - implement SendBundle faithfully (NetworkSession.cs:808-919). One
NetworkBundle per GameMessageGroup (NetworkBundle.cs:6-63), swapped out and
sent in ascending group order; the InvalidQueue bundle carries the ack /
TimeSync / EchoResponse optional headers. As many same-bundle fragments as fit
the 464-byte body budget now travel in ONE packet - one sequence, one keystream
word - and a message whose remaining data fills a packet splits across packets
with Count>1 fragments (:846-854, :874-888) via a port of ACE's server-side
MessageFragment (MessageFragment.cs:10-103). The old "one packet per message"
shortcut and its incorrect rationale are gone.
F3 - model the two-phase termination. Terminate arms PendingTermination with
the 2 s window (Session.cs:281-298, SessionTerminationDetails.cs:12); inbound
and outbound keep running through it (Session.cs:124-133), then the pump
completes the session work and releases the network resources
(NetworkManager.cs:366-369 -> Session.cs:300-334 -> NetworkSession.cs:958-974).
IsTerminated now means "termination armed"; IsReleased is the point of no
return.
F4 - port ACE's MessageBuffer exactly (MessageBuffer.cs:7-54): a List, not an
index-addressed array. An assembled stream under 4 bytes returns null and is
dropped WITHOUT advancing the fragment gate (:49-50 + NetworkSession.cs:504-506
removing the buffer either way), and a later fragment claiming a larger
Count/Index for the same sequence completes the message instead of throwing.
F5 - the C2S parse path now characterizes ACE: fragment parsing uses ACE's
complete validation (16 <= Size <= 464, ClientPacketFragment.cs:12-24) with no
Count==0 / Index>=Count rejection and with ReadBytes' short-read tolerance,
instead of inheriting acdream's stricter production layout check. The one
remaining strictness we inherit - the 1024-id cap on retransmit lists - is
documented as unreachable (ACE reads into a 1024-byte buffer, so a C2S datagram
can carry at most 250 ids).
F6 - class doc now states that C2S CRC verification reuses acdream's own
PacketHeaderOptional hashing, so the double is NOT an independent oracle on
optional-header wire layout, and names the two known asymmetries (ACE has no
inbound ConnectRequest parse; ACE hashes-but-does-not-advance on
LoginRequest / WorldLoginRequest / ConnectResponse).
F7 - hardened three weak tests: the NAK rate limit is probed at 0.9 s and at
exactly 1.0 s (both closed) before 1.1 s opens it; the session timeout is
probed at exactly 60 s after fixing the model's `>` to ACE's `>=`
(Session.cs:140); the cache prune pins that an entry exactly 120 s old survives
(:258 is strictly greater).
F9 - campaign doc section 9 ledger: N0 row marked complete.
Nine new tests; 687 Core.Net tests green in Release.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CLAUDE.md''s read-first list and the roadmap header now carry Campaign N
(retail reliable-transport port) as the active campaign and Campaign V
as the closed record.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The #260 investigation ended in a full root cause: acdream cannot
survive a single lost UDP packet in either direction. Outbound: the
server''s RequestRetransmit lists are parsed and consumed nowhere, and
no sent-packet cache exists - one lost C2S datagram permanently stalls
ACE''s ordered stream (actions void, position updates void, new areas
never stream: the whole #260/#256 symptom set). Inbound: the ISAAC
keystream is burned in arrival order, so one lost S2C datagram
permanently desyncs the cipher. Loopback ACE never drops packets,
which is why every historical gate passed.
The campaign doc pins the port target from the named retail decomp
(SentPacketStore/FlowQueue resend with reused ISAAC keys, the inbound
pre-drawn-key NAK set, the 2.0s cumulative ack / 0.6s NAK shared-gate
sweep, constants), the ACE constraint table Coldeve enforces (the
256-key crypto window, the exactly-AckSequence watermark rule, the
cleartext-NAK requirement), the Transport/ class design, slices N0-N6
with per-slice gates and Fable/Opus review assignments, the landmine
list, and eight divergence-register rows for the pieces that are
unsafe against ACE''s watermark hole.
#260 updated to point here; its memory half is closed as benign
(mapped-pak page residency + designed cache ceilings - measured, not
a leak).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Repeat connected gate 3/3 rendered on both witnesses, world-lifecycle route PASS with its one documented expected warning, resource snapshots banked. Every gate the campaign defined has now been executed and passed on the shipped tree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
SoundId was not a subset of retail's table, the way its comment claimed.
It was an invention: 23 acdream-local names on acdream-local values, and
the values were wrong in the way that matters. FootstepDefault = 0x02 is
retail's Random. SwingSword = 0x10 is retail's Death2. Death = 0x60 is
retail's Explode. Anyone who reached for one of those names to compare
against a wire or dat value would have got a different sound.
Nothing referenced any of them by name -- grep for `SoundId.` across src
and tests returns nothing -- so this was a trap rather than a live defect,
the same shape the enum campaign found in DamageType. All 22 invented names
are deleted and retail's 205 replace them.
Three oracles agree exactly, on every name and every value: retail
acclient.h:4569 enum SoundType, ACE's Sound, and DatReaderWriter's Sound.
The third matters most. AudioHookSink already resolves SoundTable lookups
through DatReaderWriter.Enums.Sound, so that is the enum acdream actually
reads at runtime; our catalog now agrees with the values already flowing
through the dat path, and a conformance test pins the two so they cannot
drift apart.
On the "206 sounds" figure: retail's block holds 207 entries, being 205
sounds followed by NUM_SOUND_TYPES = 0xCD and FORCE_SoundType_32_BIT. The
first is a count and the second a width pin. Counting the former is where
206 came from. Neither is a member here, matching how the campaign treated
NUM_ATTACK_HEIGHTS and Num_HoldKeys -- a count is not a value the wire can
carry.
Behaviour is unchanged and could not be otherwise: the enum had no
consumers. IAudioEngine's three SoundId overloads are no-op stubs and the
live path takes wave ids and DatReaderWriter values.
The user's separate report that sound is "not working that good" is a
triggering, selection and attenuation question rather than a catalog one,
and is filed as its own Bucket B row in the post-Vulkan intake.
Also in this commit, by user decision: AC2D is retired as a reference. Its
clone and directory are gone and it must not be re-cloned. Everything we
took from it still stands and is written down -- the FSplitNESW terrain
split constants, the 0xF61C movement packet layout, the finding that a
client need not compute terrain Z itself -- so CLAUDE.md's reference list,
its hierarchy table, and the architecture doc's protocol row now point at
docs/research/2026-04-12-movement-deep-dive.md rather than erasing the
history. The reference count drops from six to five.
Core tests 3907 passed / 2 skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The WSI wedge cleared on its own and the armed tripwire caught the recovery. The offline pixel gate ran within minutes: post-deletion self-differential 13 px, and post-deletion versus the pre-deletion baseline also 13 px - removing 27,670 lines of OpenGL altered nothing about the Vulkan frame. Phase 1 of the overnight goal is complete as written; the connected-route reruns remain on the morning list as the goal's honesty hatch provided. #259 reclassified as transient and self-clearing, tripwire pattern recorded as the remedy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The #259 refinement (session-transition diagnosis, third gate attempt, cheapest-first morning remediation) as before - now without the 423 MB of session capture artifacts a git add -A accidentally swept into the previous tip commit. artifacts/ enters .gitignore so the mistake class is structurally impossible; the accidental commit is replaced via force-with-lease before anything consumed it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tried the offline Vulkan self-differential once more at consolidated HEAD before conceding the night: the client still cannot create a window (same #259 signature - the fault vulkaninfo reproduces without our code). The shell is unelevated so a driver restart is unavailable, and a reboot would kill the session executing the goal. The negative is recorded with a timestamp so the morning rerun starts from evidence, not a re-bisect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Brings `github/overnight/enums` (`c19680fd`) forward onto the V11 tree. The
branch was cut at `b70b9832`, before the OpenGL deletion, and the two lines of
work turned out to be disjoint: the enum campaign lives entirely in
`AcDream.Core` and its tests, while V11 emptied `AcDream.App`. The merge is
clean — no conflicting file on either side.
What it carries: names for AC's seven property tables verified against two
oracles, a correction to `DamageType`'s rotated bits and `ItemType`'s shifted
craft ladder, the retail members the equipment and physics enums were missing,
and names for `AmmoType`, `CombatUse` and `ItemUseable`. Five commits, seventeen
files, +3,767 / -27 lines.
Verified on the merge result rather than on the branch: Release build 0 errors,
no new warning attributable to any file the branch touches, and
`AcDream.Core.Tests` at 3,893 passed / 2 skipped / 3,895. The campaign's
claimed +597 is exact — the `Properties` namespace alone runs 597 tests, all
passing.
The campaign's open decision items — whether to adopt `WeenieError` wholesale,
whether the `SoundId` subset is the right cut, and the re-clone of the ACE and
Chorizite references that `references/` no longer holds — are not settled here.
They are carried into the morning report as questions for the user.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records what V11 actually achieved and, more importantly, what it did not.
The deletion landed: 204 files, +1,870 / -27,607 lines across five commits.
Section 5.5.24 keeps the three findings that outlive the diff.
* Chorizite could NOT be dropped, and not for the reason section 6 predicted.
The risk register assumed the package survived only because the ManagedGL
types implemented IUniformBuffer from it. The audit found TextureFormat in
the IWorldTextureArray signature the VULKAN path implements, and
BoundingBox serialized into the pak format. Dropping it is a slice that
touches the on-disk format, not a V11 cleanup.
* Two traps the V11 row did not know about. Studio/SampleData.cs is
production code behind the character sheet's fallback, so it moved rather
than died; ACDREAM_DEVTOOLS also gates Vulkan debug-utils, so the flag
survives and now says out loud that its UI is gone.
* Deleting GL surfaced a real bug: WbMeshAdapter.Dispose() was still
pattern-matching the GpuFrameFlightController that V6a replaced, so its
wait for submitted GPU work had been silently dead on every Vulkan run
since. Removing the type turned a no-op into a compile error.
The runtime gates did not run, and the honest reason is written down rather
than smoothed over. The client dies at vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceCapabilitiesKHR
in files V11 never touched. Bisecting put the failure at the PRE-V11 commit
whose Vulkan soak had passed 91 checkpoints three hours earlier, and
`vulkaninfo --summary` -- a Khronos tool with none of our code -- fails at the
same call. Win32 surface creation is broken machine-wide; Vulkan itself is
fine. That is issue #259, with the one-line diagnosis at the top so the next
person checks the machine before bisecting the tree.
So the row reads DELETED AND STATICALLY GREEN, RUNTIME GATES BLOCKED. Release
build is 0/0 and the complete Release suite is 8,999 / 5 skipped (-218 against
V10, every one a test that lost its subject). Nothing was relaxed to
manufacture a pass: section 7.1 rule 2 cuts both ways, and a gate that could
not run is not a gate that passed. The rerun list is in 5.5.24, and the
pre-deletion pixel baseline was captured BEFORE the deletion, so the
self-differential is still available whenever a window can be made again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ledger the campaign owed: which oracles were actually available, what each
family's end state is, what got fixed and why, and - the part that matters most
for whoever picks this up - the twelve things that could not be settled from an
oracle and are therefore recorded as open questions rather than guessed.
Two findings deserve to survive past the morning report.
The first is that five of the six vendored reference repos named in CLAUDE.md are
empty directories in this environment. ACE, Chorizite, holtburger, ACViewer, AC2D
and DatReaderWriter contain nothing, so the campaign re-anchored on the retail
header itself - which CLAUDE.md ranks above ACE anyway - with the UtilityBelt
enum catalog and the 38,985-file ACE weenie corpus as cross-checks. That turned
out to be the more rigorous arrangement rather than a compromise, because of the
second finding: the catalog is wrong about CraftFletchingBase, where retail and
acdream agree. Trusting any single source, including the one the brief nominated,
would have introduced a bug. Retail's header decided every disagreement and the
weenie corpus broke ties.
Also recorded: the 2026-06-04 property-enum divergence note that this work was
supposed to build on does not exist - not in the tree, not under any ref, not in
the memory directory, which has no research/ subfolder at all. The MEMORY.md index
points at both it and a magic-number audit that is equally absent. The sweep was
regenerated from scratch instead, and landed on 864 property members against the
missing note's remembered 929. Someone should repoint those index entries.
The Bucket B intake row is marked done and points here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Twelve user-provided forward items sorted into three buckets: three land on already-staged work (equipped-child picking and vendor slices are the world-interaction program's own next steps; the Settings tab is the filed V11 dev-panels follow-up), three are verification campaigns whose research already exists (property-enum divergence doc, wire-message catalog, the retail physics workflow - starting with the observed long-jump landing bounce), and six are new feature bodies for milestone sequencing (login/char creation, summoning, fellowship/allegiance tabs, in-game map, chat color/text fidelity from the cdb-captured retail values, missing slash commands). Intake ledger only; sequencing happens in the roadmap after V11 closes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THIS CUTOVER AWAITS THE USER'S VISUAL SIGN-OFF. It is not complete. Section 7
of the campaign plan names the V10 sign-off as the only required user stop
besides gate failures, and it has not been given. This commit flips the default
and runs the battery so that the sign-off has evidence in front of it.
ROLLBACK, one line: `git revert` of this commit. It restores the GL default,
the pre-V10 escape-hatch polarity and the gate scripts' inherited backend
together; nothing else has to move with it.
An unset, empty or unrecognised ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND now yields
RenderBackendKind.Vulkan. Only `gl` or `opengl`, case-insensitive, selects
OpenGL. The polarity of the typo case flipped with the default and on purpose:
before V10 an unrecognised token had to land on GL because Vulkan was dark and a
typo must never silently start a backend that cannot draw; after V10 it has to
land on Vulkan for the same reason read the other way, because GL is the backend
V11 deletes. `opengl` is honoured beside `gl` because an escape hatch exists to
be found.
Three gate scripts follow the flip. run-offline-pixel-gate.ps1 gains -Backend
(default vulkan) and now FORCES all four determinism levers — backend, day
group, world day fraction, sky phase — plus ACDREAM_MSAA_SAMPLES=0, instead of
inheriting any of them. run-repeat-connected-gate.ps1 and
run-connected-world-lifecycle-gate.ps1 CLEAR ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND rather than
setting it, so what they exercise is the process default and an ambient override
in a caller's shell cannot make a GL run wear the default's report.
TEST PIN UPDATED, flagged as required: RenderBackend_DefaultsToGl becomes
RenderBackend_DefaultsToVulkan, and RenderBackend_AnythingElseStaysOnGl splits
into RenderBackend_SelectsGlOnlyForTheEscapeHatchTokens and
RenderBackend_AnythingElseStaysOnVulkan. Five cases replace two. No other test
is touched, weakened or deleted.
AD-46's divergence-register row moves from "dormant until the V10 cutover" to
live, in this commit, per the same-commit register rule.
Battery, all on the new default:
complete Release suite 9,222 passed / 5 skipped / 0 failed (9 projects)
+5 against the pre-flip 9,217; the +5 are this
slice's own escape-hatch cases
#250 family, singly 4/4 pass (none failed in the whole-suite run)
repeat connected gate PASS 3/3 on both columns
world-lifecycle route PASS, 0 failures, both sessions graceful at exit 0
validation layer inserted at instance AND device level by the loader,
zero errors and zero warnings, real frame captured
GL escape hatch verified by two offline launches: 4.3.0 Core Profile
Context, bindless present, exit 0
Every connected launch in the battery reached Vulkan with no environment
variable set, which is the flip itself under test rather than an assertion
about it.
THE PIXEL GATE IS NOT MET, AND WAS NOT RELAXED. Vulkan against a GL-era capture
taken at this commit through the escape hatch, MSAA off and both clocks pinned:
1.099e-03 masked / 3.764e-02 whole-frame, against a 0.001 threshold. 97.9% of
the difference is in the treeline band, and the masked residual of 619 px — set
against a same-backend control of 10 px — sits entirely on the silhouettes of
distant alpha-blended scenery. That is AD-46's registered population; section
5.5.19 measured the same quantity at 497 px / 8.8e-04. Below the band the two
backends are photometrically identical: mean luminance differs by 0.01 of 255.
No baseline was regenerated and no mask or tolerance was widened.
Two instrument findings are recorded in section 5.5.23. The offline gate's sky
mask is still load-bearing — this slice tried retiring it on the reasoning that
V7's clock pins had made it obsolete, and the control refuted that: two launches
of the same binary still differ by 1,011 px on GL and 482 px on Vulkan, almost
all of it in the band. The default went back to 280 with the measurement written
into the script's help. And the repeat gate's desktop witness needs an
uncontested primary monitor: a first attempt reported 1/3, and the two failing
grabs turn out to be a web browser and Discord composited over the client rect,
not a blank frame — the client's Vulkan capture rendered in all six runs.
Nothing GL, ImGui or Studio is deleted. That is V11's scope and it is untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The fork at 5.5.5 dissolved V4h: the Vulkan arm got real declared passes at V6h/V6i-3/V6m, the frame plumbing crossed at V4a/V6g/V8, and the GL spine deliberately keeps its legacy shape until V11 deletes it. What is left - OpenGLGraphicsDevice retirement, the Chorizite audit, the architecture test that goes vacuous at deletion - was always V11 work. Closing the row stops the slice table implying outstanding seam work that no longer exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The row has been carrying "implemented, first CI run pending" since the
slice landed, because a job that has never run is not evidence of
anything. Run 30393357552 is that evidence: all four jobs green, lavapipe
reporting llvmpipe (Cpu) at Vulkan 1.4.318 on Mesa 25.2.8, a 1280x720
35,594-byte captured frame, and the freshness step printing "all
committed .spv match a fresh compile" on the second operating system.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixing the two failures that were stopping portable-headless earlier let
the job reach AcDream.Content.Tests for the first time on either
operating system - the test loop exits on the first failing project, so
the windows leg had never got past the apt step and the ubuntu leg had
never got past Core.Net. Two RetailDatLoaderTests cases were waiting
there, and they failed on both.
Both assert on RawDatabase.MaxConcurrentReads after issuing two Task.Run
reads that each block 40 ms in Thread.Sleep. A pair of pool work items is
not a guarantee of two workers in flight: on a low-core or saturated pool
the second queues behind the first, the reads run back to back,
MaxConcurrentReads stays 1, and the assertion fails for a reason that has
nothing to do with the loader. Pinning the suite to two CPUs on Ubuntu
reproduces it 5 times in 6; Windows is clean 6 of 6 at sixteen cores,
which is why nobody had seen it.
The pairs now start with TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning on the default
scheduler, which asks for a thread each. No assertion is changed - they
still fail if the loader serialises. The two coalescing cases moved onto
the same helper on purpose: two callers genuinely in flight is the
situation coalescing exists for, and a sequential pair was only ever
exercising a cache hit. Ten of ten clean under the same pin.
Release build green. App tests 4,152 / 3 skipped. Content 124 / 124.
Filed as #255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The lavapipe job did the thing it was built to do on its first attempt.
It accepted a Cpu device at API 1.4, created a device and read pixels
back, captured a real frame, and exited 4 when a feature was forced
unsupported. Three other things were red, and none of them were the
Vulkan backend.
The shader-freshness step aborted for two separate Linux faults in the
compiler tool. Disposing the Silk.NET API container unloads the native
module, and dlclose-ing libshaderc_shared.so leaves glslang's
process-level teardown running against unmapped code. Bisected with a
four-mode probe on Ubuntu 24.04: GetApi, CompilerInitialize and
CompilerRelease each exit 0, and adding only the container Dispose turns
the exit into SIGSEGV. That is the 134 CI reported. shaderc's own handles
are still released; the container is not, because the module's lifetime
is the process's and the process is one statement from returning.
Separately, a portable dotnet build leaves the native under
runtimes/linux-x64/native/ and makes reaching it Silk.NET's probing
problem, which it solved on a local Ubuntu 24.04 and did not solve on the
runner. The script now publishes the tool for the host RID, so the native
sits beside the assembly where AppContext.BaseDirectory finds it, and
checks for it by name so a regression says which file is missing rather
than which names failed.
With both fixed, the question section 5.5.20 left open has an answer:
Linux shaderc and Windows shaderc agree byte-for-byte at the pinned Silk
2.23.0. Eighteen of eighteen .spv identical, manifest identical. The byte
comparison stays a byte comparison.
The Windows leg of portable-headless was running sudo apt-get. That step
is older than this campaign - it is red in the 2026-07-27 main run too -
and it was misplaced rather than mis-conditioned. Nothing in that job
opens a display or links GL, and the graphical jobs that do call xvfb-run
take it from the runner image, so the step is deleted rather than
guarded. Every remaining step in the two-operating-system matrix is pwsh;
every bash step now lives in an ubuntu-only job.
The last failure was ours in a quieter way. WaitForCharacterLogOff-
Confirmation expressed its deadline only as a CancellationTokenSource,
whose timeout is published from a thread-pool timer callback, so on a
saturated pool the token stays unsignalled past the deadline while the
loop keeps draining items that are already queued. That is the case the
method exists to bound. Reproduced by pinning the suite to two CPUs on
Linux, which failed 2 of 6 where four CPUs and sixteen were clean, and
where CI failed 3 of 3. The drain now reads the deadline off the
monotonic clock as well; the token still bounds the asynchronous wait.
Ten of ten clean under the same pin. The test is untouched. Filed as
Release build green. App tests 4,152 / 3 skipped against the same 4,152 /
3 measured at base 32f9bcfa. Core.Net 600 / 600.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The verdict splits, and not where anyone expected. Measured on one machine, one
build, one day, physical console, uncapped, 4x MSAA on both arms, validation off:
Stationary LIGHT scene (6,675 entities, 780-870 FPS)
CPU p50 GL 1.127 ms -> VK 1.294 ms MISS +14.8%
CPU p99 GL 1.407 ms -> VK 1.531 ms MISS +8.8%
GPU p50 GL 0.651 ms -> VK 0.160 ms PASS -75.4%
Alloc/frm GL 77,664 B -> VK 11,440 B PASS -85.3%
Working GL 943.7 MiB -> VK 877.1 MiB PASS -7.0%
Stationary DENSE scene (21,024 entities, identical on both arms)
CPU p50 GL 5.934 ms -> VK 5.775 ms PASS -2.7%
CPU p99 GL 8.867 ms -> VK 7.354 ms PASS -17.1%
GPU p50 GL 1.673 ms -> VK 0.909 ms PASS -45.7%
Alloc/frm GL 82,016 B -> VK 15,752 B PASS -80.8%
Process CPU GL 1.246 cores -> VK 1.016 PASS -18.5% (Windows, not ours)
Canonical nine-stop route, identical world at all nine stops
Frames GL 30,378 -> VK 38,683 PASS +27.3%
CPU p50 GL 11.718 ms -> VK 9.166 ms PASS -21.8%
GPU p99 GL 2.325 ms -> VK 1.193 ms PASS -48.7%
Vulkan loses two rows in exactly one configuration: a stationary field at a frame
rate no player will ever see. The reason is measured rather than argued. A
temporary probe on BOTH arms, now stripped, attributes 0.148 ms/frame to required
Vulkan WSI and synchronisation calls - vkQueuePresentKHR 0.070, vkQueueSubmit2
0.027, the timeline wait 0.026, vkAcquireNextImageKHR 0.025 - against roughly
0.014 ms for GL's whole SwapBuffers. That cost is FIXED per frame, so it is 12%
of a 1.13 ms frame, 2.5% of a 5.9 ms one and under 1% of a dense-town frame,
while the GPU and allocation savings scale with the work. The sign of the CPU
comparison flips as soon as the frame contains a town.
The campaign's named cost centre is closed rather than carried a fourth time.
Bindings 4, 6, 7 and 8 costing a descriptor write per draw - forward-carried
since V6i-3 as the thing to fix if CPU were short - measures 0.031 ms for ALL
~216 draws of the frame, about 140 ns each and 2.4% of it. No Vulkan code was
changed to chase the miss: every lever the V8 row named was already taken
(coherent rings, one submit per frame), irrelevant to p50 (pipeline pre-warm),
measured and small (descriptors), or would have traded real memory for nothing
(a fourth swapchain image, when acquire is call cost and not waiting).
The methodological finding is worth reading before the numbers. The R6 soak is
NOT the vehicle the founding numbers came from - the G5 production profile states
its own conditions and they exclude the probe, the artifact owner and the
screenshot oracle - and it is biased AGAINST Vulkan, because
VulkanGraphicsContext arms retainBackbufferCapture exactly when
ACDREAM_AUTOMATION_ARTIFACT_DIR is set, making every Vulkan frame copy the whole
swapchain image while GL reads on demand. On one binary in one hour the soak
reports CPU p50 7.3 ms and 2,531 KiB/frame where the ordinary profile reports
1.13 ms and 77 KiB. The route table above is therefore conservative in Vulkan's
favour: it wins on the vehicle that charges it extra.
Gates: Release build green; App tests 4,152 / 3 skipped, the pre-slice baseline,
no #250-family failure; strict GL offline pixel gate against 13c8733d at 1.95e-05
(11 px of 563,200), inside the 9-31 band, so GL did not move; one connected
Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation proven inserted by the loader at zero
errors and zero warnings; and BOTH R6 soaks green - Vulkan 506.6 s and GL 506.8 s,
zero failures, graceful exits - which discharges the soak half of V7's
outstanding list. RenderDoc is not installed on this machine, so that capture
carries to V10 with a cause rather than as an omission.
The recommendation: proceed to V10 and amend the acceptance table rather than
waive it, naming the scene and pacing the floor is judged at. Two natural
candidates are already in the evidence and Vulkan passes both outright. The
opposite reading - that the light-scene rows disqualify the cutover - is
available and has been given the same measurement space. That call is the user's
and this slice does not make it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The first CI job in this project's history that renders a frame.
The whole row rests on a decision V6g already made and paid for. When
section 5.5.8 cut set 0 from ten dynamic storage descriptors to four, four
was not merely under the RX 9070 XT's eight - it is Vulkan's guaranteed
minimum, so no conformant device can fail the layout. That is what makes a
software-device row possible at all. Every other requirement was then
checked against Mesa's lvp_device.c rather than assumed, and all seventeen
features the gate demands are true on lavapipe - including
samplerAnisotropy, which V7 made load-bearing eight commits ago and which a
software rasterizer would have been entirely within its rights to decline.
Three things had to exist before the job could:
1. The harness could not stop. VulkanBringUpHost presents until its window
closes, which is right at a desk and impossible in CI, where nothing ever
closes a window. ACDREAM_VULKAN_PROBE_FRAMES gives it a budget; unset or
malformed is zero, which keeps the interactive behaviour, so no existing
invocation changes. The budget never cuts the capture short - the loop
stays open until the screenshot has been attempted - because a run whose
entire product is a PNG must not be able to exit green with an empty
artifact directory. The decision is a pure static method, tested without
a window or a driver.
2. tools/compile-shaders.ps1 was Windows-only and nobody had noticed,
because nothing had ever run it anywhere else. It built its paths from
embedded 'src\AcDream.App\...' literals; a backslash is a separator on
Windows and an ordinary filename character everywhere else, so on Linux
that is one long nonexistent file name.
3. The report's jq paths were invisible to the compiler. Renaming a record
property or swapping the enum converter would have left every test green
and turned CI red on someone else's branch days later, with a failure
that reads like a driver problem. VulkanCapabilityReportContractTests
pins the exact strings the job greps and pins its packed-version
arithmetic against VulkanApiVersion's own unpacking.
The job, eleven steps: install lavapipe and Xvfb; record vulkaninfo as
evidence; publish linux-x64; run the Gpu.Vk tests on a second operating
system; probe the gate under a 24-bit Xvfb screen (the default is 8-bit,
which leaves the X11 WSI without a usable visual) and assert an accepting
verdict on a Cpu device at API >= 1.3 with a clean active probe; assert the
captured PNG is a real frame by IHDR dimensions and byte count; re-run with
ACDREAM_VULKAN_FORCE_UNSUPPORTED=timelineSemaphore and assert exit 4 with an
actionable refusal; recompile the shaders and compare. Artifacts upload on
always(), so a red run ships its own diagnosis.
The .spv step is what ties the committed binaries to their sources. The
existing App test hashes GLSL against the manifest, which catches "edited a
shader, forgot to recompile"; nothing caught a stale or hand-edited .spv.
Verified on Windows before shipping: 19/19 artifacts byte-identical to a
fresh compile, zero drift.
No GL-versus-Vulkan pixel compare, for two independent reasons recorded in
section 5.5.20: linux-graphical asserts exit 4, so there is no left-hand
side, and the probe renders synthetic scenes rather than the DAT world CI
cannot have. The two jobs now say something sharper than a pixel diff would
have - on the same software Mesa stack, GL is refused and Vulkan is accepted
and draws. Physical Linux GPU and Wayland rows stay deferred on the Slice L
precedent; no hosted runner offers either.
Gates: Release build green, zero errors. App tests 4,152 / 3 skipped against
a 4,134 / 3 baseline at this branch's base (9b7f4343) - eighteen new, all
from this slice. Workflow validated by a real YAML parse plus an Actions
schema check and bash -n over all nine extracted run blocks; no actionlint
was available locally and none was downloaded. The job itself has not run:
its first execution is the CI run this commit triggers, and the V9 row stays
partial until that is green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Plan section 5.5.19, the V7 slice row, two rows in the section 5.1 uncovered
table, and one divergence-register row. No product code changes.
WHAT V7 TURNED OUT TO BE. Three of V6m's four numbers were taken through an
instrument that was not holding the world still. The route pinned the Dereth
clock by pressing AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay, whose mechanism is the transient
/time override that SyncFromServer clears -- so ACE un-pinned it seconds into
every run this campaign has taken. Two captures 45 s apart at ONE stop on ONE
backend differ in 22.3% of the frame because the sun keeps moving. Pinning it
(commit 2) took the interior stop from 12.16% to 0.78% on its own.
THE THREE LEADS, ANSWERED.
Lead 3 was WRONG and the section says so. V6m recorded the interior stop as a
route defect on the theory that the indoor spring-arm camera settles to different
distances in two runs. It does not. The interior was lit differently because the
sun had moved. With the sun held still the stop drops by a factor of fifteen and
its entire remaining difference map is the player character -- the EnvCell's
walls, floor, doorway and per-cell ambient are black. EnvCellRenderer's Vulkan arm
has its numeric pair, V6m's defect-list item 2 is discharged, and no route change
was needed or made.
Lead 2 is closed by pinning the cloud phase rather than masking the band, so the
gate keeps the sky under strict comparison.
Lead 1 is half fix, half finding. The residual was predominantly the anisotropy
gap (commit 1). What survives is one population -- dense alpha-blended distant
scenery -- and isolating it needed a better instrument than the connected route.
THE INSTRUMENT V7 RECOMMENDS FORWARD. An offline GL-versus-Vulkan pair, which is
just the two existing capture scripts run with ACDREAM_WORLD_TIME and
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS set in the invoking shell. No session, no server, no
entities, no camera settle, no wandering NPCs, and unattended:
GL vs GL same commit (control) 1,966 px 2.13e-03
VK vs VK same commit (control) 1,039 px 1.13e-03
GL vs VK whole frame 28,807 px 3.13e-02
GL vs VK everything below the tree band (rows 280+) 497 px 8.82e-04
Terrain, blending, roads, the water edge, fog, statics, scenery below the horizon
and the entire retained UI are at parity, inside the campaign's 0.001 threshold.
AD-46, FILED WITH ITS REFUTATIONS RATHER THAN ITS THEORY. The treeline band is an
anisotropic tap-pattern divergence between AMD's GL and Vulkan drivers. Three
competing explanations were tested and refuted, and section 4.7's predicted class
is one of them:
- not a sub-pixel offset -- an integer shift search finds (0, 0);
- not sharpness or LOD scale -- high-frequency energy matches within 5%;
- NOT DEPTH PRECISION. Forcing the Vulkan viewport's window-depth range to
[0.5, 1.0], which reproduces GL's compressed mapping exactly, moved the
whole-frame number by 3% (28,807 -> 27,852). The experiment was reverted. The
one pre-approved divergence class is not what this is, and the row says so
rather than borrowing its approval.
- It IS anisotropy, and there is no knob left: 41,509 differing pixels in the
band at anisotropy 1, 22,266 at 16, which is GL's value and retail's.
THE VERDICT TABLE. Full route, both backends, tolerance 2, MSAA off, day group 0,
world time 0.5, sky phase 0 (artifacts/v7-diff-c2):
holtburg_town 26,330 px 2.86e-02 EXCEPTION -- phase + AD-46
facility_hub_interior 7,176 px 7.79e-03 EXCEPTION -- phase
aerlinthe_island 62,892 px 6.82e-02 EXCEPTION -- AD-46 + dark floor
No stop passes and none of the three exceptions is a renderer defect; each is
named individually in the section, because "phase" is not an excuse unless it is
specific. Aerlinthe's is partly the instrument rather than either renderer: the
scene's mean luminance is 28/255 and half its differing pixels are exactly delta
3, one step over a tolerance that is absolute rather than relative. Changing that
tolerance is not V7's call.
CARRIED FORWARD, recorded in the section 5.1 table and the V7 row: a passing
connected stop needs authored per-stop masks that the gate script does not have
(it still has only the global -MaskTopPixels, deliberately defaulted to 0); the
portal depth mask has now gone three slices without drawing a pixel in an
automated run, and HouseExitWalkReplayTests names the cheapest target for it
(the Holtburg corner building, cell 0xA9B40170); whether AD-46 is visible to a
human is a user-stop question nobody has asked yet; and the R6 soak and RenderDoc
capture on Vulkan were not run.
Gates for this commit: docs only, so the code gates of commits 1 and 2 stand.
Complete Release suite 9,195 passed / 5 skipped with zero failures, and the GL
connected repeat gate at 3/3 RENDERED on both the desktop witness and the client
capture, both taken at this tree.
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>
Adds section 5.5.18, a V6m row to the slice table and to section 5.1's
user-gate-debt table, and corrects section 5.1's "no connected route visits a
dungeon" claim - which was wrong in two directions.
connected-world-lifecycle.route.txt has carried a Facility Hub stop all along,
so the lifecycle gate did reach an interior even though nothing compared its
pixels; and reaching one turns out not to be the same as being able to compare
it.
The V7 list moves in three ways. Item 1 closes: every production renderer draws
on both arms. The appraisal-viewport half-discharge that V6k opened and V6l
carried closes too - the view was driven on both backends and inspected. And a
new item 7 opens, which is the honest result of firing the instrument once: with
the sky band and the animated portal masked, the smoke pair still differs in
1.17% of the frame, about 12x the pinned threshold, while the chat panel on its
own differs in 42 pixels of 106,560 - inside the threshold. So the 2-D retained
UI is already at parity and the residual lives in the 3-D pass, at silhouette
edges. That is a better starting position for V7 than a single aggregate number
would have been, and it is why the smoke was attributed rather than just
reported.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Section 5.5.17 records the slice: the instanced-vertex-input amendment and
particles (b1ad1d48), the stencil dimension and the portal mask (eced67d0), and
the offscreen viewports (2e8b8b91). The V4e row is no longer blocked and the V4g
row is no longer half-landed; the slice table gains a V6l row and section 5.1's
accumulated-debt table gains one for the two connected captures the offline gate
cannot reach.
Four defects are recorded as found by RUNNING rather than by validation, which
is the pattern this campaign keeps paying for: the standalone particle texture
cache and the entity-appearance composite cache were both bindless-only, so the
Vulkan arm could draw neither a textured particle nor any entity with a palette
override; a pipeline bakes one depth/stencil format, so an offscreen target's
depth had to take the device's; and the paperdoll rendered upside down because a
GL framebuffer's origin is bottom-left and a Vulkan image's is not.
The V7 list is rewritten. Nothing on it is blocked on a contract decision any
more. What is left is one absent renderer (PortalTunnelPresentation has no
Vulkan arm), EnvCellRenderer's arm narrowed from unproven to proven-by-one-frame
after a Marketplace interior rendered on Vulkan, the MSAA-off requirement, the
per-draw descriptor writes, the portal mask's two shader sources, and the
appraisal viewport's carried-forward half-discharge.
AP-92 is narrowed rather than retired: the private viewports are backend-neutral
targets on both arms and the blit's V origin is derived rather than assumed, so
the origin half of that row's risk column is closed. The rest of it - retail
renders each CreatureMode directly against a cloned CPhysicsObj - is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Section 5.5.16 reports both landed commits and the one that did not land.
The sky: V4f's content as a Vulkan arm, and the fourth defect of the
compiles-clean class - a 32-byte vertex stride declared for a 36-byte record,
found by capture rather than by validation, because AcDream.Core.Terrain.Vertex
carries a TerrainLayer member no sky attribute names. The generalisation is
written down: every .Rhi.cs arm restates a CPU record's footprint from memory and
only one of them now has a test.
Section 5.4 is marked DISCHARGED, with the distinction it turns on spelled out.
The divergence it describes has not been on the tree since the V4c revert took
that hunk with it; what the revert did not undo was the reason it existed, and
that is what V6k commit 2 closed. V7 is no longer blocked on it.
Particles are recorded as BLOCKED rather than deferred, with the measurement
behind it: GpuVertexLayout has one stride and no divisor and BindVertexBuffer
binds one buffer at vertex rate, so the contract can express instanced drawing
but not instanced vertex input - which is what both particle pipelines are built
on. Three ways out are stated, two of them contract changes and the third a
five-fold bandwidth amplification that does not scale to mesh particles. The
choice belongs to whoever owns section 3.3.
The V7 defect list is rewritten around what is now true, including two items the
slice found rather than inherited: PortalDepthMaskRenderer cannot be expressed
without a stencil dimension in GpuPipelineDescription, and a Vulkan viewport needs
sample-count pipeline variants as well as the layered sampled view the section
5.5.7 re-check turned into a loud precondition. The MSAA item stops being a
prediction and becomes a measurement: 8.83% of the frame at 4x, essentially all of
it alpha-to-coverage edges on foliage, with rows 300-720 contributing 980 of
81,359 differing pixels.
Section 5.1's debt table gains a V6k row saying which uncovered surfaces were
checked - the sky band across seven day groups, the paperdoll through a connected
inventory capture - and which two remain: the appraisal viewport, and the sun,
moon and rain cylinder a fixed outdoor camera cannot see.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Section 5.5.15 and the slice-table row. Three things worth having written down
rather than rediscovered.
The winding inversion V6c wrote was wrong and had never been asked a question:
every Vulkan consumer through V6i sets Cull = None, so the mapping had not decided
a fragment until the world arm arrived. That makes three defects this campaign has
found in a path that compiled, validated clean, and had a test - the descriptor
layouts and the TerrainClip set were the first two - and all three share the shape
of a test that asserts the behaviour rather than the requirement.
The A8 CullMode.Landblock override, which sections 5.5.13 and 5.5.14 both flagged
as due for an answer the moment world materials drew on a second backend, has one:
it carried over verbatim and is still load-bearing, so it is now a divergence with
two consumers rather than one. The dungeon pass in section 5.1's checklist is what
settles it, not this slice.
And the V7 defect list, so the differential is not run against a target that
cannot pass it: section 5.4's null-target divergence is still live on GL,
EnvCellRenderer's Vulkan arm and the deferred-alpha and doorway-scissor paths are
unexercised by the offline scene, and MSAA must come off.
The pixel-gate figures are recorded as a distribution rather than a number,
because 31 differing pixels sits at the documented band's top and a single value
there is not evidence either way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The slice brief was a Dereth PNG on Vulkan. There is not one, and §5.5.14 says
so in its first paragraph rather than at the end. What landed is the two
prerequisites — the mesh pipeline running on both arms, and the frame having a
world pass to record into — plus the seven measured findings the world arm needs
and that are cheaper to read than to re-derive.
Three of those correct earlier text rather than extending it, which is the part
worth reading:
- §5.5.8 offered to promote bindings 6-8 back to dynamic and said there were
"four unused dynamic slots to promote into". There are not. Vulkan's
guaranteed maxDescriptorSetStorageBuffersDynamic is 4, which is exactly what
V6g already spends, so the four bindings the world arm re-points per draw cost
a descriptor write each. That is bounded and correct, and it is why commit 2's
draw-time descriptor bind matters: without it the cost is ten scopes per draw
rather than one.
- V4c created every world pipeline with SampleCount = 1 because the GL backend
ignores it. Vulkan requires the pipeline to match the pass, and
alpha-to-coverage requires MSAA at all.
- The world renderers cannot each open their own pass on Vulkan, which is the
shape difference from V4c and follows directly from the MSAA resolve.
The slice table gains its V6i-3 row with the gate numbers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The three measurements were recorded out of order. Commit 1 measured 3.02e-05
(17 px), commit 2 measured 3.20e-05 (18 px) and commit 3 measured 1.60e-05
(9 px) — not the ascending sequence §5.5.13 listed. The band and the verdicts are
unchanged; what was wrong is which commit each number belongs to, which is
exactly what the figures exist to say.
Also records the suite totals in the V6i row.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Plan §5.5.10 recorded the blocker as a fact about types: "WbMeshAdapter owns an
OpenGLGraphicsDevice, so it is not constructible on Vulkan until slice V4t" —
which is the entire reason NullWbMeshAdapter exists. §5.5.12 item 6 then measured
how wide that dependency really is, and the answer is seven members out of a
760-line class: a GL context, the retirement queue, the shared instance VBO, and
two capability flags.
IMeshPipelineDevice is exactly that surface. OpenGLGraphicsDevice declares it and
every member already existed under a GL-specific name, so the shipping backend
executes not one changed statement — these are aliases, not behaviour.
Two casts moved, and they are what actually blocked construction:
- ObjectMeshManager downcast IGpuDevice to GlGpuDevice in its CONSTRUCTOR, so a
Vulkan-composed pipeline threw before running a statement. V4t put it there
because the class registered bindless handles itself; commit 2 moved that into
the array, leaving the field a pass-through for the raw-GL renderers' handle
table. The cast now lives on that one property and names the backend it was
composed against instead of reporting a failed cast.
- The atlas array factory is selected by IWorldTextureArrayFactory.For, which is
the one place the texture stack branches on a backend.
MeshPipelineDeviceSeamTests proves the decoupling rather than describing it: it
builds ObjectMeshManager against a device whose Gl is null, asserts it constructs,
asserts construction built no GL object, asserts the handle table refuses by name,
and asserts the factory picks the RHI arm. A reflection test pins the seam's
member set so a later slice cannot quietly widen it back out — the whole value
here is that it is narrow.
What this does NOT claim: the mesh pipeline does not RUN on Vulkan. Its upload
bodies are still raw GL — GlobalMeshBuffer, the VAO/IBO construction, the layer
transfers — and they now fail through one RequireGl() accessor that names the
slice that owns porting them, instead of failing at construction. WbMeshAdapter
still creates an OpenGLGraphicsDevice in its GL constructor, because there is no
second implementation to create yet. Those bodies are items 3–5 of §5.5.12's
remainder list, along with RetailPViewPassExecutor and the three world renderers'
submission arms.
§5.5.13 reports the whole of V6i-2 and the slice table gains its V6i row.
Gates: Release build; App tests 4,109 / 3 skips (the 4,086 baseline plus 23 across
the three commits); complete Release suite 9,172 / 5; strict GL offline pixel gate
vs 0ca802cd 1.60e-05 (9 px of 563,200 — the low end of the documented 9–31 px
control band, and fewer than a same-commit control has measured); GL connected
tools/run-repeat-connected-gate.ps1 -Runs 3 at 3/3 RENDERED on the desktop witness
and 3/3 on the client capture; one Vulkan composition-host run with
VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation proven inserted by the loader at zero errors, zero
warnings, no [shutdown] diagnostic, and a captured frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Slice V6i-1 recorded terrain_modern.vert's TerrainClip block as landing in the
wrong descriptor set under the Vulkan dialect. That was reasoning from the
missing ACDREAM_UBO_SET macro; it is now measured. Disassembling the committed
spv/terrain_modern.vert.spv shows the block as OpVariable ... Uniform decorated
DescriptorSet 0 / Binding 2, where set 0's layout declares a storage buffer.
The audit the section asked for is also done rather than deferred. Every
compiled .spv was disassembled: mesh_modern.vert's nine set-0 entries are all
StorageBuffer, correctly, and every other uniform block in every other shader
already carries the macro. terrain_modern.vert is the only one. sky.vert is the
precedent - it declares the SAME shared clip block as ACDREAM_UBO_SET binding =
2 - so there is no numbering question for the world arm to settle, only a
one-word omission to fix, plus declaring set 1 bindings 2 and 4 in the uniform
set layout. Binding 4 is section 5.5.8's still-open UniformSkyParams, which
sky.vert and sky.frag both declare.
Documentation only; no source, shader or .spv is touched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Plan section 5.5.8 recorded, and deliberately did not fix, that pointing one
binding at a second buffer within a frame silently corrupts the draws already
recorded against it: the backend rewrote the descriptor in place, and a
descriptor set's contents are read when the command buffer EXECUTES, not when it
was recorded. Nothing fired it while the Vulkan frame held only the retained UI.
Section 5.5.11 handed it forward as the first thing the world arm would hit,
because WbDrawDispatcher, EnvCellRenderer and TerrainModernRenderer each own
their own instance, batch and indirect buffers and all three bind set 0 in one
frame.
It is closed here, as its own commit and BEFORE the world arm, so that a blank or
corrupt first Vulkan world frame cannot be this defect wearing another face. That
sequencing is the point: sections 5.5.1 to 5.5.3 cost this campaign three days
because an instrument that was "usually right" sat underneath the thing being
measured.
What changed. There is no longer one (set 0, set 1) pair per flight slot; there
is an arena of them. VulkanBindingScopeArena - pure bookkeeping, no Vulkan
handles, nine unit tests - answers two questions per bind: which pair, and do its
descriptors need writing. VulkanFrameBindings keeps the Vulkan half: allocating
pairs from a growable pool list and writing the twelve descriptors when told to.
The scope key is the descriptor state itself - the ten storage buffer identities
and ranges, the plain bindings' offsets, and the two uniform buffer identities
and ranges. Deriving it is a decision, not an economy. The pinned contract has
nowhere to name a scope: BindStorageBuffer takes a buffer, an offset and a size,
and section 3.3 is frozen. Deriving also gives two properties a declared scope
would not: a renderer cannot forget to declare one, and two renderers that
genuinely share every buffer correctly share one pair rather than being told to
differ. A renderer's buffers are stable for its lifetime, so "distinct descriptor
state" is exactly "renderer scope".
Dynamic offsets stay free. A ring allocation moving between draws rides
vkCmdBindDescriptorSets's dynamic-offset array, so it costs neither a new pair
nor a descriptor write - section 4.4's "zero descriptor writes per frame"
property survives a frame having more than one binding state in it. Entries are
not invalidated at BeginFrame either, because the slot's previous submission has
retired and its descriptors still say what this frame is about to say; a steady
frame therefore rewrites nothing at all. An entry matched from the previous frame
is swapped below the live cursor so the rest of the frame cannot take it for a
different state - the ordering property the sixth test pins, where two renderers
swap submission order between frames.
What this does NOT do is draw a world. The captured Vulkan frame is still V6h's
retained UI over the fog clear, so the arena's multi-scope path is exercised by
its tests and not yet by a frame. That is recorded in the plan rather than
implied.
The plan's section 5.5.12 also records two blockers measured while scoping the
world arm and not fixed here: terrain_modern.vert declares TerrainClip without
ACDREAM_UBO_SET, so under the Vulkan dialect it lands at set 0 binding 2 where
the layout declares a storage buffer - the same class of gap 5.5.8 recorded for
UniformSkyParams, invisible until a terrain pipeline is created; and the offline
gate's scene takes the retail PView path rather than the flat safety path,
because ClipRoot falls back to Buildings.OutdoorNode, which puts
RetailPViewPassExecutor on the critical path to the first Vulkan Dereth frame and
makes the "terrain only" intermediate no cheaper than the whole arm.
Gates. Strict GL offline pixel gate against b9ab5890: 1.60e-05, 9 differing
pixels of 563,200, at the low end of the documented 9-31 px band and 62x under
the threshold - expected, since no GL file is touched. GL connected
run-repeat-connected-gate.ps1 -Runs 3: 3/3 RENDERED on the desktop witness and
3/3 on the client capture. One offline Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation
proven inserted by the loader: zero errors, zero warnings, captured frame, no
[shutdown] diagnostic on either stream. App tests 4,086 / 3 skips (baseline 4,077
plus nine); complete Release suite 9,149 / 5. Issue #250's
SurfaceOverrideFingerprint_DictionaryHotPathAllocatesNothing failed once in a
whole-suite run and passed run alone, as that issue documents.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Marks V4t done in the slice table with its two commits and per-commit gate
numbers, adds §5.5.11, and ticks off step 3 of §5.5.9's corrected sequence.
§5.5.11 records four things the world arm needs and one it should not
re-derive: why §5.2's "the device's table is unreachable" argument expired
rather than being worked around (its premise was that V4c would move the world
renderers onto the encoder; §5.5.6 closed that, so the block became
indefinite); that V4t landed narrower than §5.3 sized it, keeping texture
creation and residency with the caches and moving only the table entry, with
`IGpuTexture` creation deferred to the world arm that actually cannot use a GL
handle; why `GroupKey`'s ordering survives a retype of one of its fields; and
the pixel-gate control measurement, because one capture read 5.50e-05 against a
documented 15–23 px band and the honest response to that is a control, not a
paragraph. The decisive number is the 9-px difference between captures at the
two V4t commits — two different commits, fewer differing pixels than the
same-commit control.
`GlBindlessHandleTable`'s own doc comment claimed four renderers own instances.
Three of them no longer do. It now names its one remaining owner, `SkyRenderer`,
says why that one is different (its textures come from the raw GL-name path V4t
did not retype), and names V4f as the slice that deletes both the table and the
class.
`common.glsl`'s binding-9 comment carries the same stale list. It is left alone
deliberately: the file is a shader source with compiled `.spv` artifacts and a
V9 freshness gate, so a comment-only edit there is not free, and what the
comment says about what binding 9 IS remains correct.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The strict GL offline pixel gate re-run at b16f8206 measures 1.78e-05 (10 of
563,200 pixels) against 46d893f7, and the Vulkan validation run at that exact
tree is clean with an empty stderr and a UI frame identical to the pre-commit
capture. Also records a pre-existing test-isolation defect found while gating:
StreamingControllerPriorityApplyTests.DungeonCollapseBeforePromotionBase_RetiresProvisionalTerrainAndPendingStatics
fails alone under --filter and passes with its project, identically at the parent
commit, so it is an order dependency in the test rather than a regression.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan now runs the real GameWindow composition rather
than a second main(). All nine phases execute: DAT load, streaming, camera,
entity table, session, and the real retained UiHost drawing through the RHI.
No world renderers — they are raw GL until V4t and the world arm behind it.
The offline log is the client's own (acdream.pak opened, 6266 spells, Region
0x13000000, "loading world view centered on 0xA9B4FFFF", fourteen retail
LayoutDesc lines, streaming radii), and the captured frame is the retail
retained UI: vitals, combat/spell bar with DAT scarab icons, the nine-slot
toolbar, chat with tabs and Send, radar/compass with dat-font glyphs. Sampled
against the GL capture the widgets agree — chat interior RGBA (25,24,27,158)
vs (22,21,23,158), vitals bar (117,1,0) and toolbar slot (0,11,17) identical.
Three seams, as §5.5.9 specified:
1. Platform acquisition — already generic — publishes GameWindowGraphics
instead of a bare GL. Phases that still speak raw GL read Graphics.Gl and
take their Vulkan arm when it is null; each branch names the slice that
removes it.
2. VulkanHostInputCameraCompositionFactory is a new file and the whole of the
Phase-1 fork: four graphics members differ, input/camera/pointer delegate.
The default factory is chosen inside the phase from the platform result.
HostInputCameraResult gained backend-neutral Retirement and FrameSlots.
3. The frame root forks on one condition. The GL world-scene assembly is
unchanged, wrapped in `if (gl is not null)`; the Vulkan arm's graph is one
backbuffer clear pass computing the same RenderFrameFoundation from the same
clock and weather owners, then private presentation over it.
§5.5.9's three TextureCache couplings are unpicked: the constructor takes GL?
and rejects bindless without one, world entry points route through a Gl
property that throws naming V4t, and the (GlGpuTexture) VRAM-accounting cast
became a backend test. That cast's stated reason — DrawSprite's texture-unit
binding — was already stale, deleted at V6d.
VulkanBringUpHost is reduced to the capability-probe harness it is named for:
the instance/surface/device/swapchain sequence moved into VulkanGraphicsContext,
which the composition host and the harness now share. It is reached only with
ACDREAM_VULKAN_PROBE=1.
One latent Vulkan defect surfaced and is fixed here. The first composition-host
frame died with ErrorDeviceLost; validation named VUID-vkCmdDraw-None-08600 —
descriptor set 2 never bound. VulkanGpuPassEncoder bound sets 0/1/2 only as a
side effect of BindStorageBuffer/BindUniformBuffer, so a pass sampling the
texture table while binding no buffer — every retained-UI and debug-line pass —
drew with the table unbound. It survived V6c-V6g because the bring-up host
always drew VulkanRhiScene first and the UI pass inherited its binds; the
composition host has no 3-D scene. The fix is one line in the encoder's
constructor beside the viewport and scissor defaults, which exist for exactly
the same reason: a pass opens with complete binding state rather than depending
on what preceded it.
Gates: strict GL offline pixel gate against 46d893f7 measures 1.24e-05 (7 of
563,200 pixels), inside the documented 15-23 px / 4.1e-05 band, so GL behaviour
did not move. App tests 4,075/3 skips; complete Release suite 9,138/5 skips.
One full Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation: zero errors, zero
warnings. Both Vulkan runs converged the ownership ledger — no [shutdown]
diagnostic on either stream. The reduced probe harness presented 34,811
validation-clean frames.
No divergence-register row: GL is the shipping backend and the pixel gate proves
it unmoved; the Vulkan arm is not a retail deviation but a backend under
construction.
Next is V4t, the texture stack, which the world arm cannot be written without.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
§5.5.7 asked for "a Vulkan composition host — a slice the plan has never
scoped." This scopes it and stops there, for the same reason V6f stopped short
of the world fork: the honest measurement is worth more than a half-built second
path, and §3.1 and §7.1 rule 3 exist to prevent exactly the unexercised arm this
would otherwise have landed.
Three findings, all verified against source rather than inferred.
The fork seam mostly already exists. GameWindowPlatformResult<TGraphics, TInput>
is fully generic — only its call sites pin GL — and the host phase already has
IHostInputCameraCompositionFactory with a single Retail implementation, so the
Vulkan device arm is a new file rather than a modification. What does not exist
is a Vulkan frame root: FrameRootComposition assembles the clear phase, both
pass executors and the GPU profiler measurement from a GL handle plus six raw-GL
world renderers, none of which exist on Vulkan. That second assembly is the
slice's centre of gravity, and it is most of V4h.
The retained UI is NOT blocked on V4t. V6f wrote that the retail widget tree's
chrome comes from a GL-only TextureCache, which is true of the type but not of
the path: V4a and V6d already moved UploadUiTexture onto IGpuDevice, and the
public UploadRgba8 that IconComposer composes retail icons with routes into it.
The raw-_gl uploads that remain are the world's Texture2D/Texture2DArray paths,
which no UI draw reaches. Three small things stand in the way — a non-null GL in
TextureCache's constructor, one ((GlGpuTexture)texture).GlName cast for VRAM
accounting, and the UI-probe screenshot controller — and none of them is V4t.
So V4t is a hard prerequisite for the WORLD arm, not for the host, which moves
the host ahead of it in the sequence rather than behind.
That reordering is the point of the commit. The corrected sequence puts the
composition host at step 2, before V4t, because its acceptance criterion — the
real UI renders — makes it the first frame acdream draws on Vulkan that is the
client's own frame rather than a scene written to prove the backend.
Also records the argument for keeping VulkanBringUpHost as a capability-probe
harness: its window/instance/surface/device/swapchain sequence is what the
composition arm needs, and deleting it would mean writing that twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
V6f ran the bring-up host once under VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation and found
seven VUIDs, every one of them on the path any world frame takes (plan
§5.5.7). This closes all of them, plus a fourth defect in the same log that
§5.5.7 did not call out. The host now runs validation-clean: zero errors and
zero warnings over 39,855 frames.
Nothing outside Gpu/Vk/ is touched, so the GL backend executes not one changed
statement. The offline pixel gate says so too — 4.08e-05 differing fraction
against f8dbe2ee, which is exactly the value the campaign recorded as its own
same-commit control (§5.1's 15–23 pixel band).
The dynamic-descriptor limit was a decision, not a patch. V6b declared all ten
of set 0's bindings STORAGE_BUFFER_DYNAMIC on the reasoning that the contract
lets a renderer bind any range per draw. That is true and still cost nothing to
honour for four of them: a dynamic descriptor buys exactly one thing, the
ability to address the SAME buffer at a DIFFERENT offset without a descriptor
write, which is the shape of a ring allocation and of nothing else. So the
ring-fed bindings — instances, batches, clip slots, instance light sets — stay
dynamic, and the ones pointing at a long-lived buffer written whole and bound
once per pass carry their offset in the descriptor instead. Binding 9 is the
clearest of those: it is the GL-only uvec2 handle table, which the Vulkan
backend never binds at all.
That lands on four dynamic storage descriptors. The RX 9070 XT allows eight, so
eight would have worked here — but four is Vulkan's GUARANTEED minimum, which
means no conformant device can fail this layout, and V9's lavapipe row and the
deferred physical Linux row both depend on that. The count is asserted against
maxDescriptorSetStorageBuffersDynamic in the capability record, so a device that
cannot serve it is rejected at startup in the report under the same exit-code-4
contract as every other requirement, rather than failing silently at
vkCreatePipelineLayout the way this one did.
Depth-off pipelines were malformed in any pass that has depth. Dynamic rendering
bakes the depth/stencil attachment format into the pipeline and requires it to
equal the pass's; V6c set it only when the pipeline itself tested or wrote
depth. Debug lines, the retained UI and the sky are all depth-off and all
composite over the main pass, so this was not an edge case. The same
GpuPipelineDescription is legitimately used both ways — ui-text opens its own
depth-less pass — so the description cannot answer the question and the backend
builds both variants, binding whichever matches what vkCmdBeginRendering was
actually handed rather than what the pass asked for. Both are built at startup
against the persisted cache, so no frame compiles one. A slice entitled to
change the contract should add a depth-format field the way V6d added
ColorFormat; this is the honest expression of the gap until then.
vk-backbuffer-depth and vk-backbuffer-msaa-color were created UNDEFINED and
never moved. Both now barrier on every backbuffer pass — from UNDEFINED on the
first use after Configure, from attachment-optimal with a write-after-write
dependency thereafter. The dependency matters on its own account, not just the
layout: two passes in one frame write both images and so does the next frame,
and Vulkan orders nothing between render-pass instances.
The fourth defect is the one worth reading twice. CaptureBackbuffer transitioned
the LAST PRESENTED swapchain image to TRANSFER_SRC and copied out of it. After
vkQueuePresentKHR that image belongs to the presentation engine and its contents
are not ours to read — and the pixels were usually right, which is precisely the
problem. This campaign spent three sections of its own plan (§5.5.1–§5.5.3)
discovering how much a capture instrument that is "usually right" can cost, and
shipping that shape on the new backend would have made every Vulkan PNG, and the
V7 differential built on them, formally undefined. The frame now copies its own
output into a host-readable buffer while it still owns the image, and the
capture reads that. Retention is opt-in, armed when an artifact directory
exists: one full-resolution copy per frame is worth nothing to a player and is
the entire instrument to a gate. The old one-shot command pool, device-idle wait
and per-capture readback buffer go with it.
Two gaps found and recorded in §5.5.8 rather than fixed, both outside this
slice's brief. UniformSkyParams (set 1, binding 4) is not in the uniform set
layout, so whoever first draws sky on Vulkan must add it. And a binding pointed
at two different buffers within one frame silently corrupts the earlier draws,
on dynamic and plain descriptors alike, because descriptor contents are read at
execution time — no consumer does that today, but WbDrawDispatcher and
EnvCellRenderer each own their own instance and batch buffers and both bind
bindings 0, 1, 3, 4 and 5 in one frame, so the Vulkan world arm has to know
before it is written.
Gates: Release build; App tests 4,075 passed / 3 skipped (baseline 4,073 + the
two new capability cases); GL offline pixel gate PASS at 4.08e-05; one
validation-layer Vulkan run, clean, with the captured PNG inspected and correct
in orientation, colour and glyph coverage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things to write down after slice V6f.
The obligation §5 recorded against V6e is discharged. terrain_modern was "the one
production pair still not Vulkan-expressible"; its three blockers - the two loose
matrices, the loose tiling array, and the GL-only sampler-from-handle
construction - are gone, and 8/9 pairs now compile. The ninth is `mesh`, which
the plan already records as having no consumer at all, so every shader acdream
actually draws with is Vulkan-expressible. V6f gets its own slice row and its own
line in the user-gate debt table: terrain through a doorway clip region is the
one terrain path the offline gate cannot see, and it now has a second UBO binding
beside the clip block, so a bind-order mistake would surface exactly there.
The larger entry is §5.5.7, which records a measurement rather than an opinion.
§5.5.6 selected option (B) - V4c/V4d's content returning as the Vulkan world path
behind a fork at the thin submission seam - and V6f set out to build that fork.
It cannot be built yet, for a reason the plan had not stated: the Vulkan path
constructs no game state at all. GameWindow.Run returns at :695, before
Window.Create and therefore before OnLoad, which is the only caller of the
composition pipeline. A capture confirms it (artifacts/vk-world/): what the
Vulkan backend draws today is V6c's verification scene and V6d's generated UI
sprite, correctly and completely, and nothing else. A backend-selected fork would
therefore have a GL arm that runs and a Vulkan arm nothing can reach - the
unexercised second path §3.1 and §7.1 exist to prevent.
Worse for sequencing, the parked V4c/V4d code could not drive Vulkan even if it
were reached: it binds GL bindless handles as a storage buffer because §5.3
deferred the real port to V4t, and GroupKey carries the raw ulong. V4t is a hard
prerequisite, and it rewrites exactly the code the fork's Vulkan arm would
contain. Landing the fork first means writing that arm twice.
One validation-layer run is recorded with it, and it found two defects that
outlive the slice, both pre-existing and both on the path any world frame takes.
The pipeline layout declares all ten storage bindings as STORAGE_BUFFER_DYNAMIC
against a device limit of eight - the pinned binding model meeting a real limit,
wanting a decision rather than a patch. And any depth-off pipeline in a pass that
carries depth declares VK_FORMAT_UNDEFINED where the attachment's real format is
required. Also noted: the render-target-view-in-table usage V6f was told to
expect did NOT fire, so it should be re-checked rather than carried forward as
known-and-accepted.
The section closes with the recommended order - composition host, the validation
defects, V4t, then the fork - and with a cheaper intermediate milestone worth
considering: terrain, water and sky only, for which V6f's work is the whole
shader prerequisite.
Also: the roadmap's Campaign V paragraph gains a shipped-so-far line, and #250
gains a third test of the same class. One full App run during this slice reported
2,752 bytes against an expected 0 in
CurrentRenderSceneOracleTests.SurfaceOverrideFingerprint_DictionaryHotPathAllocatesNothing,
on a diff that touches only GLSL and terrain's uniform plumbing; it passed alone
and in four other full runs of the same binary.
Documentation only - no code, no gates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign V slice V6e, last of three. Sky was the hardest of the four pairs
because it was the only one that still worked the way a 2004 shader works: a
dozen loose uniforms pushed one glUniform call at a time, and a texture bound to
unit 0 with a sampler object chosen per submesh. Vulkan GLSL has neither a
default uniform block nor a way to declare a bare sampler, so both had to move —
and the second one had a sting in it.
The uniforms go into a `SkyParams` std140 block at uniform binding 4, the new
pre-authorized constant in GpuBindingModel (1, 2 and 3 are SceneLighting, the
terrain clip block and terrain tiling; the contract test now proves the three
constants and that literal 2 do not collide). Three matrices are 192 bytes on
their own, so the 96-byte push-constant block was never in the running. The
block's member order IS its layout: std140 aligns a vec3 to 16 bytes while using
12, so each of the three lighting vectors is followed by the float that rides in
its pad word, which is why colours and per-surface scalars interleave rather
than grouping by meaning. SkyParamsLayoutTests asserts all twelve offsets and
the 256-byte size, because getting one member wrong would read the sun direction
as a colour with no compile error, no link error and no GL error to say so.
The texture is the interesting half. sky.frag now reads through the shared table
(ACDREAM_SAMPLE_2D), and a bindless handle BAKES its sampler — so the
per-submesh Repeat-versus-ClampToEdge choice, which used to be a glBindSampler
on unit 0, becomes which slot the submesh asks for. SkyRenderer interns one
handle per (texture, wrap) pair, exactly as ManagedGLTextureArray has done since
the world path went bindless, and exactly the shape Vulkan's table has, where an
entry is a combined image sampler. Same two SamplerCache objects, same wrap
behaviour, consulted once at interning instead of once per draw. A pleasant
consequence: the sky no longer touches texture unit 0, so the load-bearing
`BindSampler(0, 0)` restore at the end of the pass — there because the binding
was global state that would otherwise force ClampToEdge on the next renderer —
has nothing left to undo and is gone.
Gates. Release build clean; App tests 4,072 passed / 3 skipped (4,057 baseline,
plus the sentinel guard from the previous commit and fourteen sky-layout
assertions). Offline pixel gate against 95f8c25f: 18 px of 563,200 compared
(3.20e-05), inside the documented 15–23 px band.
That gate masks the sky for determinism, so it proves nothing about this commit
and the sky renderer has no automated pixel coverage at all. What was done
instead: a base-versus-head offline capture at ALL SEVEN day groups, built by
stashing the change and rebuilding so the two runs differ only in this commit.
Every pair matches in gradient, cloud sheet, horizon band and fog — including
day group 2's salmon cloud band and day group 6's green one, which between them
exercise texture sampling, per-vertex tint, blend mode and fog. Then 3/3
RENDERED on the desktop-witness repeat-connected gate.
That bounds the risk; it does not close it. The offline camera is fixed and
looks down, so a thin band of dome is all it ever sees: the sun and moon
(additive, high) and the rain cylinder (the one sky mesh that surrounds the
camera, and the one whose REPEAT wrap is most visible) remain unproven. Recorded
as user-gate debt in §5.1 alongside V2c's and V4e's particles — check it by
standing outside at dawn or dusk, and by standing in rain.
Manifest: 8/9 pairs compile. `terrain_modern` is the last production pair, and
it is blocked on V4d's content rather than on dialect — details in §5.5's slice
table. `mesh` has no consumer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign V slice V6d, commit 3 of 3 — the evidence commit, which turned out to also be a bug-fix commit.
VulkanBringUpHost now builds a real UiHost and DebugLineRenderer on the Vulkan device and draws them after the V6c verification scene, in their own single-sampled load/store passes against the backbuffer — the same shape the GL client's HUD phase has. Nothing in the retained stack is backend-aware: UiRoot walks a real widget tree, each widget draws through UiRenderContext, and UiHost.Draw brackets it with TextRenderer.Begin/Flush. What it cannot be is the game's own UI, because the retail tree is built from LayoutDesc and DAT chrome by TextureCache, which stays a GL type until V4t; the sprites here are generated instead. The widget rectangles are authored at known pixel offsets from the top-left and nothing is mirror-symmetric, so a wrong Y flip would put the title bar at the bottom.
The frame this produced was wrong, and usefully so. Whole runs of the debug-line figure were missing. Vulkan's rasterization-order guarantees are scoped to one render-pass instance; between two instances writing the same attachment there is no implicit ordering, and that includes a multisample RESOLVE, which is part of the render pass and therefore equally unordered against what follows. TransitionBackbufferForRendering emitted its acquire barrier once per frame and returned for every pass after the first, so the second and third passes raced the first one's resolve. V6c's frame had exactly one backbuffer pass and could not see this; V6d's has three. A later backbuffer pass now gets a colour-attachment dependency instead of nothing, and keeps ColorAttachmentOptimal as its old layout rather than Undefined, which would have licensed discarding everything drawn so far. Every line renders continuously afterwards.
Inspection of artifacts/vk-ui/vulkan-bringup.png against the authored layout, by pixel probe:
The header panel is authored at (24,18), 420x96. Its tiled chrome fills exactly x 24..443 and y 18..113 — one pixel outside on any edge is the clear colour. The tile's lit edge appears at the top and left of every cell, so texture row 0 lands at the top and the V axis is not flipped. Both labels read left to right, right side up, through the font-coverage branch. The nested panel's border samples exactly (153,191,255) against an authored (0.6,0.75,1.0), unblended — the untextured branch is bit-exact. The badge sprite is authored at (460,58), 64x64, and its gradient starts at x=460 with the clear colour at 455 — the RGBA-modulate branch, sampling a table slot. The two debug-line segments land on their computed screen coordinates. All three fragment branches, the pixel-to-NDC mapping, the top-left origin, straight-alpha blending and table sampling are therefore all confirmed on Vulkan, which is everything the offline GL gate confirms about the same code on GL.
The plan's V6 milestone is amended rather than claimed: "full game frame on Vulkan" is not reachable while V4c/V4d are parked and the world renderers and TextureCache are still raw GL, so V6 delivers the backend plus the two renderers that can use it today. The accumulated user-gate table gains a V6d row for the paperdoll/appraisal viewport sprite — the one retained-UI texture the offline scene never draws, on a slice that changed how every UI texture is sampled.
App tests 4,057 passed / 3 skipped, unchanged. Offline pixel gate against f6f58a12: differing fraction 3.20e-05, 18 pixels of 563,200, inside the documented 15-23 pixel noise band — as expected, since this commit touches only Vulkan files and the campaign doc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The exact V4c binary - verified by its embedded wb-mesh pipeline literals - rendered ten of ten repeat-gate cycles on a separate NVIDIA PC against the same ACE, same scene, same account, while the AMD box fails 30%+ of identical runs with the defect pinned to this binary at p=0.024. Two GL drivers, one failure. Option B is adopted: GL keeps the legacy world path to V10, the RHI world path ships on Vulkan, and the V4c/V4d GL re-land is closed rather than parked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the decision that §5.5.4 recommended and the V5 bring-up now makes
actionable: option (C). No further GL-side attempt is made to re-land V4c or V4d
until the same ported world path has been measured on Vulkan.
The grounds are the three investigation sections read together. A blank run
rasterizes its first world frame correctly - frame 43's occlusion counters,
1,692,830 terrain and 317,561 entity samples, byte-match the parent build - and
then one irreversible event kills every GPU→CPU return channel at once:
readbacks come back RGBA(0,0,0,0) over UI pixels the desktop witness shows on
screen, a guarded glGetQueryObject deadlocks the render thread inside the
driver, and a GPU-timeline query-buffer write never lands on its sentinel.
Present and fences keep running at 5.5 ms throughout, on NO_ERROR from
glGetError and a clean glGetGraphicsResetStatus across 1,814 samples. Five
mechanisms are falsified and four independent instrument faults have turned up,
all of them below the API, all on one driver on one GPU.
That is not a shape any further GL-side bisect is well placed to resolve, so the
document now states the decision rule rather than leaving option (C) as a
recommendation. If the identical RHI world path renders correctly on Vulkan on
this GPU, the driver defect is proven and option (B) is adopted deliberately:
GL keeps the legacy world path through V10 as a documented, scoped exception to
§3.1's no-fork rule, confined to the thin submission seam. If it fails on Vulkan
too, the trigger is in code we own and the hunt resumes against a much smaller
haystack.
Two knock-on edits keep the plan self-consistent rather than leaving the reorder
stated in one place and contradicted in another. The slice table marks V4c and
V4d parked, V4t and V4e-V4h re-sequenced pending the verdict, and V5 shipped.
§5.4's sequencing invariants no longer claim V0→V4h is strictly sequential, and
they now carry the consequence that matters: V6 arrives before V4g and V4h, so
the Vulkan backend honours the contract's literal null target while GL still
carries the transitional inheritance. That makes §5.4's two removal obligations
more binding, not less, and V7's differential must not run until the removal has
happened - otherwise it would surface the divergence as a viewport rendering to
the wrong surface, which post-decision is indistinguishable from the fork option
(B) permits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Runs the instrument section 5.5.2 asked for, on a V4c tree staged from
`git revert --no-commit 543bc79f` and never committed: GL_SAMPLES_PASSED around
the raw-GL terrain draw, the dispatcher's entity draws, and the retained-UI
flush, collected outside the frame that issued them, with the desktop witness as
the verdict. All probe code is stripped; what survives here is the two gate
scripts and section 5.5.3/5.5.4.
Building it found a fourth instrument fault. Reading a query result on the CPU
timeline - glGetQueryObject guarded by RESULT_AVAILABLE, one frame late -
deadlocks V4c at the first frame that draws the world: 4/4 runs, and five
dotnet-stack samples four seconds apart all show the render thread inside the
driver in that call. Not a probe defect - the same probe ran 4,420 clean frames
on the V4c parent, and instrumenting only the UI flush reproduces the wedge while
creating the query objects and never beginning one does not.
Routing the result into a persistently-mapped GL_QUERY_BUFFER instead - the
driver writes it on the GPU timeline, so no client wait is possible, and a
sentinel separates "reported zero" from "never reached" - does not wedge, and
gives the answer. On blank runs no query result is ever produced at any site for
the whole run, including the UI, in the same frames where the desktop grab plainly
shows the UI on screen. On the rendered run of the same binary, 1,068 frames, not
one missing result.
So the mission's fork resolves to "never completes", but not as a stall: frame
time holds at 5.5 ms for ~3,700 frames, the frame-flight fences keep retiring,
and present keeps working. Every channel that carries a result back from the GPU
is dead - pixel readback, CPU query read, GPU-timeline query write - and every
channel that carries none is fine. The transition is one sharp event at the first
world frame and never reverses, and that frame rasterizes correctly: 1,692,830
terrain and 317,561 entity samples, the same two numbers the parent reports for
its own first world frame.
Section 5.5.4 lays out the three options with their costs and recommends (C):
bring Vulkan up first and decide V4c afterwards, because running the identical
ported world path on the Vulkan backend on this GPU is both the cheapest test of
the driver-defect reading and work the campaign owes anyway. (B), accepting the
GL-side fork, is probably the right conclusion but should be adopted on a
measurement rather than an inference. No fix was attempted and V4c is not
re-landed.
Apparatus: run-repeat-connected-gate.ps1 and run-blank-world-ab-probe.ps1 now
assert on the desktop grab and record the client's own capture as a second
column, which is the re-arming section 5.5.2 required before re-land condition 2
can mean anything. Both verified end-to-end.
Gates: Release build clean; App tests 3,866 passed / 3 skipped; offline pixel
gate PASS at 3.37e-05 differing fraction (19 px of 563,200), inside the
documented 15-23 px band.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik