Reworks Campaign CH slice CH2 per the REJECT-review findings doc
(docs/research/2026-08-09-ch2-review-findings.md).
BLOCKER 1 — SpewBoxController never rendered a line and leaked its
pending queue. LinesProvider only ran through UiText.OnDraw, which
gates on Visible — and the box started invisible, so the provider (the
sole caller of SpewBoxState.Tick) never ran. Gave the controller an
explicit per-frame Tick(now) driven by UiRoot's global-message-3
broadcast (a zero-size GlobalTimeSink child, the same pattern
VendorUiController.DragOverGlobalTimeSink already uses), matching
retail's gmSpewBoxUI::Update. LinesProvider now only returns the
cache. Tests rewritten to drive root.Tick(...) instead of calling the
provider directly, plus new coverage for visibility-without-a-draw,
queue-drain-without-a-draw, and bounded-queue-across-many-ticks.
BLOCKER 2 — re-derived the HandleFailureEvent routing table from the
PDB-paired binary instead of the pseudo-C's ~33-char string previews.
tools/pdb-extract/sweep_weenie_strings.py sweeps every push imm32 in
VA 0x571990-0x575480, dereferences into .rdata/.data, and decodes the
full UTF-16LE literal. Added the 5 ids dispatched via else-if (missed
by case-label enumeration), resolved 0x4F8 (previously excluded),
fixed 18 wrong strings (16 the review flagged + 2 more — 0x4E9 and
0x518 — an automated diff between every swept literal and the landed
table found). Every changed row cross-checked against ACE's
WeenieError/WeenieErrorWithString enum doc comments; both oracles
agreed on every row, including a case where the review's own proposed
text for the new 0x4E8 row was itself wrong (it was 0x4E9's text) —
corrected via the else-if block's own instruction address plus the ACE
cross-check. Pinned table count: 344 (338 + 5 + 0x4F8).
SHOULD-FIX 1 — RuntimeCommunicationState.ResetSpewBox was dead code;
folded into the ChatIdentity generation-reset stage (same lifetime
boundary), with a reset assertion added to the existing populated-reset
test.
SHOULD-FIX 2 — AddText trimmed only the trailing end and invented an
empty-string early return; retail's AddTextToScroll trims both ends
(trim(&str, 1, 1, ws)) and has no empty guard. Both retired.
SHOULD-FIX 3 — ShowWeenieError bypassed the AddText chokepoint via
ChatLog.OnWeenieError (hardcoded LogTextType 0x00); routed through
Communication.AddText(Resolve(code, param)) instead, and
ChatLog.OnWeenieError is deleted — GameEventWiring's legacy no-router
fallback now resolves + calls OnSystemMessage directly.
SHOULD-FIX 4 — retail's HandleFailureEvent switch has no default case;
an unmapped id now resolves to a null Text (silence toward the
player) instead of the invented "WeenieError 0xNNNN" hex fallback,
with a diagnostics-only console log line for the id.
NITs — AP-TBD placeholders corrected to their real register rows
(AP-178, not the unrelated AP-177 lifetime row); filed AP-180 for the
windowId dual-destination gap and corrected three stale "lands with
CH2" comments; extended SpewBoxLayoutDumpDiagnostic from dats.Portal
to dats.Local and found the SpewBox element for real — LayoutDesc
0x21000011, element 0x10000048, size 450x72, MaxConcurrentItems
(ListBox property 0x10000028) = 4, not retail's code default of 1.
AP-178 narrowed accordingly; SpewBoxState.MaxConcurrentItems and
SpewBoxController's extent/anchor/OneLine are now authored rather than
placeholder (absolute screen position and colour remain open); fixed
the "19 ids... lists 18" miscount by retiring the stale paragraph in
the class doc rewrite; aligned the UseDone handler's silent-status
check with the other two WeenieError handlers.
Full Release suite: 11,914 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed (build 0
errors).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cliff_slide arms are conformant in ACE, our port, and the bytes
(compare constant at 0x794610 verified 0.0), the round-1 slidn:edge
ratio (538:594) refutes a retail retry storm, and the user's
side-by-side speed observation fits alternation. Round-2 cdb script
now counts find_transitional_position; H-A (identical, retire AD-70)
vs H-B (within-tick yield) resolves on one ratio. The temporary
Scratch347 diagnostic test rides along until #347 closes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The synthetic fixtures reproduce our stuck fingerprint while faithfully
executing the documented control flow; ACE's independent port shows
EdgeSlide reachable only via the OK arm's step-down failure. Together
they force the sharper question: retail's insert returns OK per tick
where ours returns Adjusted. The round-2 cdb script (stack samples on
edge_slide/cliff_slide/step_down + a step_down counter round 1 never
had) carries falsifiable predictions written down BEFORE the capture.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
cdb on the PDB-paired retail client during the user's 45-degree glide:
edge_slide/cliff_slide 594 each in lockstep, set_sliding_normal 538,
step_up ZERO. Ours: 18 edge-family firings total, stuck ticks
dead-looping on insert retries. The divergent branch is
transitional_insert's handling of the refused steep walkable — retail
proceeds into the step-down-failed/edge path per tick, we retry from
scratch. The D0 code-reading's 'retries from scratch, retail-identical'
conclusion is corrected by the runtime evidence: the profile is what
the decomp reading could not see.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds tools/analyze_265_steep_slope_capture.py (segment miner for the
ACDREAM_CAPTURE_RESOLVE JSONL captures: uphill-jump-bounce and
lost-slide/edge-wedge signature scans) and
tests/AcDream.Core.Tests/Physics/Issue265SteepSlopeCaptureBisectTests.cs (a
synthetic single-polygon PhysicsEngine that replays the EXACT real captured
ballistic approach + landing from artifacts/matrix-session2-resolve.jsonl
records 3415-3434, driving PhysicsEngine.ResolveWithTransition directly at
the Core boundary).
Mining found two dramatic real "velocity annihilation + permanent freeze"
events (records 3153/3159 and 3433/3434): a high-speed fall lands on a
moderate roof slope (normal.Z=0.857, ABOVE PhysicsGlobals.FloorZ — walkable
by threshold), and the very next tick shows Velocity forced to exactly
(0,0,0) with the position frozen byte-identical for the rest of the capture
(12,292 ticks to EOF for the second event).
No production code changes. Full Core.Tests suite: 4070 passed / 2 skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user reported crystal shards hovering in the air above every Bind
Stone on Coldeve (setup 0x020010AC) that do not exist in the retail
client. The DAT truth, extracted with the new tools/SetupInspect probe:
the model authors SEVEN parts - pedestal, spinning column, inner
crystal, and four shard meshes parked in a static ring at Z=3.0 in the
placement frame and every frame of the idle cycle - and frame 0 of that
idle cycle fires four TransparentPartHooks (parts 3-6, start=end=1.0)
each loop. Retail hides the shards through those hooks; the model
simply ships with permanently-hooked-invisible parts.
acdream's hook chain was intact end to end - the static-animating
workset captures the hooks (RetailStaticAnimatingObjectScheduler ->
AnimationHookFrameQueue -> TranslucencyHookSink), and
TranslucencyFadeManager committed translucency 1.0 for parts 3-6 -
but BOTH dispatchers' bare-GfxObj branch read the fade with a
hard-coded part index 0 under a false #188-era assumption ("a bare
GfxObj entity has exactly one part"). Every live server object is a
FLATTENED multi-part entity in exactly that branch: SetupMesh.Flatten
emits one bare-GfxObj MeshRef per Setup.Parts[i], order preserved,
AnimPartChanges replacing in place - so the MeshRef ordinal IS the
retail CPartArray ordinal TransparentPartHook.PartIndex addresses.
The committed invisibility for parts 3-6 was never consulted and the
shards drew forever. Proof the ordinal was trustworthy all along:
click-selection in the same loops already publishes it as the part
identity (Slice 4 picking runs on it in production).
Fix: both the legacy classifier and the packed oracle now pass the
per-part ordinal (partIdx / packedPart.PartIndex) to the translucency
lookup. Single-part objects still read index 0; the #188 door fades
are unchanged; the Setup-expanded branch already indexed correctly.
Any other object hiding authored parts via idle-loop hooks gets its
retail appearance from the same change.
tools/SetupInspect is the new reusable DAT probe that cracked this:
dumps a Setup's parts, parent indices, GfxObj vertex bounds, placement
frames, motion-table default cycle, sampled animation frames, and all
animation hooks.
Closes task #32's code side; the connected visual gate (shards gone at
the Bind Stone, base crystals and spin retained) is the acceptance.
App Release suite 3,968 / 3 skips.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The review verified all three FAIL conditions absent (zero DROP_PCT=0
cost proven from code AND the decorator-absent baseline logs; the gate
fails explicitly on zero drops and zero recovery; teardown ordering
intact and ACE-safe) and reconciled the loss-ledger arithmetic packet by
packet. This acceptance folds in its two MEDIUM strengthenings: the
recovery assertion is now a per-direction conjunction (a one-direction
regression can no longer hide behind the other counter) and the three
keystream-health invariants (cksum-fail, sanity-drop, uncached-nak) are
asserted zero, turning the gate from "something recovered" into "loss
happened, both directions recovered, and the cipher ledger converged".
The unrecoverable-tail caveat now names the EnterWorldBody single-shot
alongside logoff/Disconnect and records ACE's gapped 1/s NAK trigger as
the mechanism. Script parse-validated; N6's gate run exercises it live.
N5 SHA 4e290f00 and its revert line recorded in the ledger.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Closes out the GL deletion by fixing the CI workflow and developer gate
scripts that still assumed a GL arm existed to compare against, build,
or select via ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND.
.github/workflows/headless-portability.yml: linux-graphical's "Verify
actionable unsupported-driver gate" step is deleted outright — it ran
the deleted `ui-studio` CLI verb (Studio was removed at Commit 1) to
prove the GL capability gate rejects Mesa's llvmpipe driver, and there
is no more GL capability gate for any driver to pass or fail. Its test
filter dropped two dead entries (GraphicalCapabilityRequirementsTests,
deleted at Commit 2; StudioWindowTests, already gone). Its package
contract check dropped the libcimgui.so assertion (ImGui's native
bridge, deleted at Commit 1). linux-vulkan's explanatory comment, which
described GL's rejection as the reason no cross-backend pixel diff runs
in CI, is rewritten to explain there is no GL arm left at all. Two dead
src/AcDream.UI.ImGui/** path triggers (that project no longer exists)
are removed from both the pull_request and push filters.
tools/run-backend-differential-gate.ps1 and its dedicated route file
tools/connected-backend-differential.route.txt are deleted: the whole
script's purpose was comparing a GL launch against a Vulkan launch of
the same route, and there is no second arm left to compare. Single-arm
regression checking already exists via run-offline-pixel-gate.ps1's
-Baseline mechanism.
tools/run-portal-churn-soak.ps1 is simplified rather than deleted: its
repeated-portal-churn methodology (within-arm capture comparison,
memory/entity/GPU trend analysis) has value independent of the
GL-versus-Vulkan question it was built to answer for issues #256/#257
before V11. -Backends now defaults to @('vulkan') alone; the doc
comments are rewritten from "step 0 discriminator, run before V11" to
an ongoing single-arm regression soak.
tools/run-offline-pixel-gate.ps1 drops its now-nonfunctional -Backend
parameter (ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND has read zero call sites since
RuntimeOptions.RenderBackend was removed at Commit 2 — passing -Backend
gl silently launched Vulkan anyway) along with its GL-escape-hatch
example and every comment that referenced the now-deleted differential
gate. tools/run-connected-world-lifecycle-gate.ps1,
tools/run-offline-vulkan-capture.ps1, and
tools/run-repeat-connected-gate.ps1 keep their (harmless, already
no-op) ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND set/clear lines but have their
now-inaccurate "escape hatch" / "GL run" comments corrected to state
plainly that the variable is unread and the line is kept only for the
historical record.
No .cs files touched; `dotnet build AcDream.slnx -c Release` unaffected
(0 warnings, 0 errors, matching the prior commit's build).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Issues #256 (server-spawned signs and portals go invisible after repeated
portal runs, while staying interactive) and #257 (working set grows to
~1.5 GB over the same session) were observed together in one long live
Vulkan session, and both filings demanded the same thing before V11 deletes
the OpenGL backend: run the churn on GL too. Vulkan-only growth or drift
would mean the new arm's resource lifecycle is broken, and deleting its only
reference implementation while that was true would be wrong even with the
cutover signed.
So the discriminator is built and run first, and it can stop the slice.
tools/run-portal-churn-soak.ps1 generates a route of N cycles over three
portal-bearing stops taken from the two existing connected routes, runs it
once per backend from one binary, and measures three things the existing
instruments do not measure together:
* working set and private bytes, sampled from the OS every two seconds and
joined to each checkpoint by timestamp -- the client's own snapshot has
no view of its own working set, which is exactly #257's quantity;
* the published-versus-live pair already in the checkpoint JSON, because
"alive in the object table, gone from the presentation" is #256's whole
symptom and a drift between those halves at the SAME stop across cycles
is what would show it;
* a within-arm capture comparison -- cycle 1 against cycles 10, 20 and 30
at a pinned viewpoint -- plus a difference map and a row histogram,
because a number cannot tell an absent object from a walking NPC and the
map can.
Every teleloc carries the identity quaternion so the heading repeats, and
the four determinism levers the differential gate forces are forced here for
the same reason: an unpinned sun would swamp the signal.
Result at 90 transits per arm, 91 checkpoints, zero errors, graceful exits:
neither arm reproduces either symptom. Working set means agree to 1 MiB
(GL 1864, VK 1863) and warm-half drift is NEGATIVE on both (-48.0, -27.0).
GPU accounting is exactly constant per arm. worldEntities holds 10,382 at
all thirty cycles on both. The difference maps show every building, the
portal, the statue and the treeline still drawn at cycle 30.
That refutes the one outcome that would have blocked V11, and it does not
identify the pre-existing bug -- so both issues stay OPEN with the negative
recorded, and the follow-up named: walked portal transits rather than
/teleloc, which do not take the same path into the transit state machine.
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 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 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>
THE ROUTE'S TIME PIN NEVER HELD, AND EVERY V7 NUMBER SO FAR WAS TAKEN THROUGH IT.
connected-backend-differential.route.txt opened by pressing
AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay three times, on the stated theory that the cycle walks
live -> 0.00 -> 0.25 -> 0.50 and lands on noon. The mechanism underneath is
WorldTimeService.SetDebugTime, and SyncFromServer clears it -- deliberately,
because that setter is the /time slash command and the command is meant to be a
look-at-dusk-for-a-moment affordance rather than a mode. There is even a test
pinning that behaviour: WorldTimeDebugTests.SyncFromServer_ClearsDebugOverride.
ACE sends TimeSync every few seconds. The clock was therefore un-pinned again
long before the route reached its first stop, on every run this campaign has
taken, including V6m's smoke pair.
The Dereth clock does not only move the sky. It moves the SUN, so it moves the
directional term of every lit surface in the scene.
MEASURED, rather than argued. A probe route captured each stop TWICE, 45 seconds
apart, in the same run on the same backend:
GL, Holtburg, capture 1 vs capture 2: 205,772 px 22.33%
Vulkan, Holtburg, capture 1 vs capture 2: 218,732 px 23.73%
GL, Facility Hub, capture 1 vs capture 2: 108,795 px 11.81%
Vulkan, Facility Hub, capture 1 vs capture 2: 130,206 px 14.13%
One backend, one stop, nothing moving, and a fifth of the frame changes while
you watch. No cross-backend number means anything against that noise floor, and
the cross-backend numbers taken during that probe run were duly absurd -- 56% at
Holtburg, where the two launches happened to be at different times of Dereth day.
THE FIX IS A PIN THAT OUTRANKS THE SERVER CLOCK AND SURVIVES SYNC.
WorldTimeService.PinnedDayFraction is a nullable day fraction that wins over both
Calendar.DayFraction(NowTicks) and SetDebugTime, and that SyncFromServer does not
touch. ACDREAM_WORLD_TIME -> RuntimeOptions.PinnedWorldDayFraction ->
WorldEnvironmentController, which writes it once: the Runtime environment owner
and its clock are session-scoped, so one write outlives every teleport and every
reveal generation. Values outside [0, 1) are REJECTED rather than clamped -- a
day fraction of 12.5 is a typo, and silently pinning the world at it would be
worse than ignoring it.
Unset is the default and every ordinary run. The calendar DATE still advances,
which is intentional: the date drives day-group selection, and ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP
already pins that. The differential gate forces the pin at 0.5 -- noon, which is
what the three presses were aiming at -- on both launches, and the route's
presses are deleted rather than left in as decoration.
This is instrument determinism on the footing of ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP and V7's
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS, not a workaround: it is off by default, nothing in the
shipping client reads it, and the alternative was to keep measuring two backends
through a fifth of a frame of sunlight.
WHAT IT MOVED. The same three-stop route, same commit otherwise, before and after:
holtburg_town 9.05% -> 2.86% (83,438 -> 26,330 px)
facility_hub_interior 12.16% -> 0.78% (112,075 -> 7,176 px)
aerlinthe_island 23.09% -> 6.82% (212,824 -> 62,892 px)
The interior stop is the headline. V6m recorded it as a route defect on the
theory that the indoor spring-arm camera settles to different distances in two
runs; that theory is now refuted. The camera was fine. The interior was lit
differently because the sun had moved, and with the sun held still the stop drops
by a factor of 15 to 0.78% -- close enough to the 0.001 threshold that its
remaining population is worth naming rather than guessing at. No route change was
needed and none was made.
WHAT REMAINS, per the difference maps, all of it now attributable by eye:
the animated portal beside the Holtburg stop; distant scenery foliage; wandering
NPCs and a chimney smoke plume, which are animation and emitter phase; the vitals
readouts, whose stamina and mana genuinely regenerate at different rates across
two logins minutes apart; and, at Aerlinthe, a dense low-magnitude speckle in a
scene whose mean luminance is 28/255 -- half of its differing pixels are exactly
delta 3, one step over a tolerance that is absolute rather than relative.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,134 passed / 3 skipped (one new: the
day-fraction range check); AcDream.Core.Tests WorldTimeDebugTests 6/6, including
the two new ones that assert the pin survives a sync and outranks the transient
override. GL offline pixel gate against the pre-slice tree: 2.66e-05, 15 pixels
of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31 band -- GL did not move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two changes, one measurement. The V6m smoke pair put GL versus Vulkan at
Holtburg at 18.52% of the frame differing at tolerance 2 with MSAA off. The same
stop on the same instrument now measures 9.05%, and the two populations these
address are gone from the difference map rather than merely smaller.
1. THE WORLD ATLASES WERE SAMPLED WITHOUT ANISOTROPY ON VULKAN, AND WITH THE
DEVICE MAXIMUM ON GL.
RhiWorldTextureArray -- the backend-neutral shared object/material atlas, and
the only IWorldTextureArray the Vulkan arm ever constructs -- registered its
clamp and repeat slots with GpuSamplerDescription.WorldClamp/WorldRepeat as
written, which carry MaxAnisotropy 1. The GL arm asks for the driver's own
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY twice over: ManagedGLTextureArray sets
GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY on the image, and the two sampler objects its resident
bindless handles are built from (OpenGLGraphicsDevice.WrapSampler/ClampSampler)
set it again, which is the one that actually wins.
V6i-2 knew it was asking for 1 and said so in a comment -- "the world arm that
draws through these arrays is the next slice, and it is the one that can gate a
filtering change visually." That slice was V6j, the gate is V7, and this is it.
Retail settles the question rather than the GL arm settling it.
RenderDeviceD3D::SetDefaultD3DStates (0x005a3800) loops all sixteen sampler
stages and issues SetSamplerState(stage, 0xA, this->m_D3DCaps.MaxAnisotropy) at
0x005a4230. 0xA is D3DSAMP_MAXANISOTROPY and the argument is the device's
reported cap, not a setting -- so "as much anisotropy as this device has" is
retail's own rule, the GL arm is faithful to it, and asking for 1 diverged from
retail as well as from the shipping backend. No divergence-register row is owed
in either direction: this retires a Vulkan-only gap and lands on retail's value.
The fix asks for a ceiling rather than reading a limit back, because the pinned
RHI contract (plan section 3.3) carries no anisotropy field and is frozen. It
does not need one: VulkanGpuSampler already clamps MaxAnisotropy to
VkPhysicalDeviceLimits.maxSamplerAnisotropy, Vulkan guarantees that limit is at
least 16 wherever the samplerAnisotropy feature is supported -- which this
backend requires -- and 16 is where every desktop driver caps. The request and
the GL arm's read therefore land on the same number.
What it was worth, from the difference map at the same stop: the roof shingles
of both Holtburg cottages, which had been dense hatching across the whole
surface, and the stone courses of the near building are now black. Measured as
high-frequency energy (mean absolute neighbour difference, GL versus Vulkan) the
right-hand roof went from visibly blurred to a ratio of 0.999 and the wall to
1.023; every other textured region in the frame is between 0.99 and 1.02.
Grazing-angle surfaces are where anisotropy is the whole difference, which is
why a roof was the loudest thing in the frame.
2. THE SKY HAS TWO CLOCKS AND ONLY ONE OF THEM WAS PINNABLE.
ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP and the route's AcdreamCycleTimeOfDay presses pin the Dereth
date, which chooses the day group, the keyframe and the sun angle. The cloud
sheet does not read that clock: SkyRenderer accumulates TexVelocityX/Y against
DateTime.UtcNow minus its own construction time, by design, because retail's
clouds drift with real time regardless of the date. Two launches minutes apart
therefore cannot agree about where the clouds are no matter what the route does,
and the V6m smoke measured the cost -- 89% of its 18.52% sat in the top 240 rows.
ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS (RuntimeOptions.SkyAnimationPhaseSeconds ->
SkyRenderer.AnimationPhaseSecondsOverride) replaces that elapsed-seconds value
with a fixed one. Unset -- the default, and every ordinary run -- keeps the wall
clock, so nothing a user or the offline gate sees changes. The differential gate
forces it on both launches alongside MSAA and the day group; the offline gate
keeps its top-280 mask, because a same-commit GL pair still has the sun to
disagree about.
This is instrument determinism on the same footing as ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP, not a
workaround: it is one input to a UV offset, it is off by default, and no shipping
path reads it. The alternative on the table was -MaskTopPixels, which would have
permanently blinded the campaign's strictest instrument to the entire sky -- one
of the five surfaces the offline gate already cannot see. Rows 0-32 of the
Holtburg pair went from 23,090 differing pixels to 1,211, and what remains up
there is roof and portal rather than cloud.
WHAT THE SAME PAIR STILL SHOWS, unattributed and carried to the next commit: the
distant treeline, the player and the NPCs, and the animated portal. The portal is
phase and expected. The treeline is not filtering -- sharpness now matches within
5% and a shift search finds no sub-pixel offset -- and the two runs entered the
world at different last-logout positions (0xC95B0001 versus 0x09040008), so the
far-tier streaming history differed. That is the next thing to prove or refute.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,133 passed / 3 skipped against the
4,132/3 baseline (one new: the sky-phase parse). GL offline pixel gate against
the pre-change tree: 2.31e-05, 13 pixels of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31
band -- GL did not move. One offline Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation
proven inserted by the loader: zero validation errors, zero warnings. Full
three-stop differential recorded at artifacts/v7-diff-c1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tools/run-backend-differential-gate.ps1 is V7's instrument, plus the route it
runs. It executes the SAME connected route twice - ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=gl
then =vulkan - pairs the screenshots by name, compares each pair with
compare-screenshots at the plan's pinned tolerance 2 / fraction 0.001, and
prints one verdict table with a JSON report beside it.
ACDREAM_MSAA_SAMPLES=0 IS FORCED ON BOTH LAUNCHES. Plan section 5.5.16 measured
what leaving it on costs - 8.83% of the frame at 4x, essentially all of it
hugging foliage and silhouette edges, which is two drivers' sample patterns and
not a renderer divergence. Forcing it on one side only would be worse than
either. ACDREAM_DAY_GROUP is pinned on both, and the route additionally pins the
client-only time-of-day override so the Dereth clock cannot drift between two
launches minutes apart.
The desktop witness and its three guards are lifted from the repeat-run gate
rather than reinvented, because that gate learned them the hard way: a blank
frame reads back as a valid PNG (section 5.5.2), so a second instrument that
shares nothing with the renderer decides whether a run is worth comparing at
all; a locked screen or an overlapping window is caught by the grab's size; and
stray input into a foregrounded window moves the camera off the pinned stop, so
the client log is scanned for camera-affecting actions and the run is aborted
rather than reported. Both runs close through WM_CLOSE - a hard kill leaves ACE
holding the session about three minutes and the second launch is the one that
pays for it.
connected-backend-differential.route.txt is written for two-launch determinism,
which is stricter than either existing route needed to be: identity quaternions
on every teleloc so heading is pinned, no movement between arrival and capture,
and no checkpoint verb (the ownership ledger has its own gate). Three stops -
Holtburg town, an interior EnvCell at the Facility Hub, Aerlinthe's island and
water edge. The interior stop is the durable fix section 5.1 names for the
campaign's oldest coverage gap: no connected route has ever visited one, which
is why EnvCellRenderer had no automated coverage on either backend.
ONE SMOKE PAIR was run, on the first stop, and it is reported honestly rather
than tuned. GL versus Vulkan at Holtburg with MSAA off: 170,697 of 921,600
pixels differ, 18.52%, maximum channel delta 255. Attributed with a difference
map:
* 89% of it is in the top 240 rows. Masking the offline gate's top 280 rows
takes the pair to 11,480 of 563,200, 2.04%. That band is the scrolling
cloud sheet, which advances with WALL time and not with the pinned Dereth
clock, plus the treeline behind it.
* Masking the animated portal beside the character as well takes it to 6,190
of 529,450, 1.17%, mean channel delta 0.49. A portal's scrolling texture is
phase, like an emitter's age.
* What remains is thin outlines on silhouette edges throughout the frame,
plus the vitals readouts, whose stamina and mana genuinely advanced between
the two logins.
So the distance to V7's 0.001 is about 12x with the two known phase populations
removed, and V7 owns closing it. -MaskTopPixels exists for that conversation and
DEFAULTS TO 0: the gate is a strict identity check on the whole frame unless
someone deliberately asks otherwise, per section 7.1 rule 2.
Both files are ASCII with CRLF, matching the other tools. That is not cosmetic:
PowerShell 5.1 reads a BOM-less .ps1 as ANSI, so a UTF-8 em dash inside a
double-quoted string is a parse error, which is how the first version failed.
Gates. Release build green; App tests 4,132 / 3 skips. No product code changed,
so commit 1's pixel, connected and validation gates stand unchanged - and the
smoke run is this commit's own evidence, since it drove a complete connected
Vulkan session end to end with a graceful exit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The three world renderers' submission arms, both pass executors, and the
composition that reaches them. This is the unit three predecessors stopped at.
What it produces. ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan on the offline scene renders
terrain with blended textures and road overlays, the water edge, static world
meshes, procedural scenery, and the complete retained UI - the same frame the GL
pixel gate captures, from the same camera, minus the sky. artifacts/v6j-vk2.
The shape, and why it is not V4c's. Section 5.5.6 chose option (B) after NVIDIA
rendered the V4c binary 10/10 where AMD's GL stack did not: GL keeps its raw
world path through to V10 as a documented fork confined to the submission seam,
and the RHI world path ships on Vulkan. So V4c's and V4d-2's content returns as a
SECOND arm rather than a replacement. The GL arm issues the same GL statements in
the same order against the same objects; the encoder arm lives in three .Rhi.cs
partials and is entered by one branch per submission site.
Three differences from V4c, each because the tree moved under it. There is no
binding-9 texture table - V4t put the slot on the device and Vulkan binds set 2,
so the arm that used to intern bindless handles simply has nothing to do. The
pipelines carry the device's sample count rather than 1, because Vulkan requires
rasterizationSamples to match the pass and alpha-to-coverage is a no-op at one
sample. And no renderer opens a pass.
That last one is structural, not tidiness. Under MSAA the frame's one backbuffer
pass resolves into the swapchain image and stores DONT_CARE into the multisampled
scratch, so a second pass declaring Load would load undefined contents; the
backend also permits one open pass per frame. VulkanWorldScenePhase therefore
opens the pass, publishes the encoder on VulkanWorldPassScope for exactly the
span of the inner WorldSceneRenderer, and every renderer borrows it.
Three sections are frame-global on GL and cannot be on Vulkan: the SceneLighting
UBO, the per-cell clip regions, and the terrain clip block. GL binds each to a
global binding point and every consumer inherits it. Vulkan binds a descriptor
set per draw, and a renderer's own binds are what select the scope those sections
must land in - so their writers PUBLISH into WorldFrameSections and each renderer
binds them inside the pass, after its own binds. SceneLightingUboBinding's
per-flight-slot buffer pool disappears with it: a ring allocation is already
distinct memory that lives until the frame retires, which is the property the
pool existed to provide.
Both pass executors became backend-neutral rather than gaining twins. Everything
they do is delegation to a renderer except four concerns - the clip-frame
publication, the doorway scissor, gl_ClipDistance enablement, and retail's
interior depth clear - so those four move behind IWorldPassSurface and retail's
ordering, which is what these classes are actually for, is written once. The GL
implementation issues the statements the executors used to issue inline.
Clip distances are no-ops on the Vulkan arm, and that is safe rather than a
divergence: Vulkan activates every element the shader declares, and all three
world vertex shaders already write 1.0 into every slot past the active count.
The interior depth clear becomes vkCmdClearAttachments, reached through the scope
so the pinned contract stays frozen and the backend-only verb stays in the
backend. The hook for it was already committed at V6i-3 with a cref to a type
that did not exist yet; it exists now.
The collision-wireframe DebugLineRenderer is composed as null on the Vulkan arm.
DrawAndPublish flushes it INSIDE the world phase and it opens its own pass, which
the one-pass rule forbids. The toggle is DevTools-only and DevTools is not
composed there, so nothing is lost - composing it would throw on the first
wireframe frame rather than silently misdraw.
Two seams widened rather than invented. GameWindowGraphics answers whether the
backend has a world-pass seam, because the three composition phases that need it
already borrow that handle and "does this backend work that way" is what the type
exists to answer. And MeshSourceReady replaces the anyVao != 0 gate with the same
question in backend-neutral form - V6i-3 published HasStores for exactly this -
so the predicate evaluates identically on GL.
What is NOT here, and is expected. Sky and weather are still raw GL (V4f), so the
Vulkan frame's sky is the atmosphere fog clear. Particles (V4e), the paperdoll and
appraisal viewports and the portal depth mask (V4g) likewise. The executors
already accepted all of them as absent.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,112 passed / 3 skipped, the unchanged
baseline; complete Release suite 9,175 / 5. Strict GL offline pixel gate against
847f14ae: 5.50e-05, 31 differing pixels of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31
band and 18x under the threshold. Characterised rather than accepted, because 31
is the band's top: cross-commit pairs measured 21, 29 and 31 while same-commit
controls measured 12 and 20, and maximumChannelDelta is 46-52 in every comparison
INCLUDING the pure controls - so the few large-delta pixels are a property of the
capture, and a cross-commit pair at 21 against a same-commit pair at 20 is not
what a systematic shift looks like. GL connected repeat gate at 3 runs: 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
validation errors, zero warnings, a captured world frame, and a graceful close.
Coverage gap, stated rather than assumed. The offline scene is a fixed outdoor
view, so EnvCellRenderer's Vulkan arm draws nothing in it - dungeon interiors are
half of this slice and are unproven by anything automated, exactly as they were
for V4c. The deferred-alpha path and the doorway scissor are likewise untouched
by this scene. They join the accumulated user-gate debt in plan section 5.1.
No divergence-register row: no retail-facing behaviour changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign V slice V6e, first of three. mesh_modern is the shader every world
static, every piece of scenery and every EnvCell surface draws through, and it
was one of the four production pairs the SPIR-V toolchain still refused.
The blocker was a varying. Since V2 the vertex stage looked a batch's table slot
up in the binding=9 handle table and forwarded the resulting 64-bit
GL_ARB_bindless_texture handle to the fragment stage as a `flat uvec2`. That
works on GL because a bindless handle is just a number a shader may carry
anywhere. It cannot work on Vulkan at all: the equivalent object is a descriptor
in set 2, and a descriptor is not a value a stage can hand to another stage. So
what travels between the stages is now the SLOT — a `flat uint` — and the
fragment stage does the lookup at the point of sampling.
That relocation needs one shared idea, because the two backends disagree about
what the lookup IS. `ACDREAM_SAMPLE_ARRAY(slot, uvw)` asks the dialect-neutral
question — "sample table slot N" — and expands to
`texture(sampler2DArray(gTextureTable[slot]), uvw)` under GL and to
`texture(uTextures[nonuniformEXT(slot)], uvw)` under Vulkan. It is deliberately
a SAMPLING macro rather than a sampler-returning one: `nonuniformEXT` belongs on
the indexing expression itself, and binding the result to a local
`sampler2DArray` first is exactly where an implementation is free to drop it.
That is the same shape V6d already used for the retained UI's 2-D reads, and it
now covers the array reads the world path needs.
`ACDREAM_TEXTURE_NONE` lands alongside it, unused here and used by the next
commit. GL can ask "does this slot hold a texture" of the payload, because an
unregistered slot holds the null handle; Vulkan cannot, because set 2 is opaque
and reading an unwritten element of a partially-bound array is undefined rather
than zero. The sentinel moves that answer into the index, where both dialects
test it identically.
On GL nothing about the sampled result changes — the same slot resolves to the
same handle to the same texel. The SSBO read simply happens one stage later,
and `flat` keeps it one scalar load per primitive rather than per fragment.
Also: RenderBootstrap has been loading mesh_modern without common.glsl since V2,
which cannot have linked — `ACDREAM_UBO_SET` sits inside a layout qualifier
there. The UI Studio path is the only caller. One argument, same pair, same way
WorldRenderComposition has always loaded it.
Gates: Release build clean; App tests 4,057 passed / 3 skipped (baseline);
offline pixel gate against 95f8c25f differing fraction 3.37e-05 (~19 px of
563,200), inside the documented 15–23 px same-commit noise band and ~30x under
the 0.001 threshold. mesh_modern is the shader that gate covers most heavily,
so this is the strongest automated evidence any V6e commit gets.
Manifest: 4/9 pairs compile (debug_line, mesh_modern, ui_text, vk_probe).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign V slice V6d, commit 2 of 3. TextRenderer and DebugLineRenderer were the only two renderers speaking the RHI, and both refused any device that was not a GlGpuDevice. They now refuse nothing: this is the first production rendering acdream can do on Vulkan.
Three things had to go.
The loose uniforms. debug_line declared uView and uProjection separately and DebugLineRenderer set them straight against the compiled GL program, because the pinned push-constant block carries one combined matrix and IGpuPassEncoder has no verb for arbitrary named uniforms. That was never portable — Vulkan has no default uniform block at all — so the shader converged on uViewProjection and Flush multiplies on the CPU. System.Numerics is row-vector convention while GLSL reads the floats column-major, which transposes, so the CPU equivalent of the old per-vertex uProjection * uView is view * projection. The product now rounds once per frame rather than once per vertex; these lines only draw when collision wireframes are switched on, so the offline gate sees nothing of it. ui_text's uScreenSize became the block's two spare scalars, uParamA and uParamB, with the same two divisions and the same NDC mapping around them.
The sampling mode. uUseTexture selected between font coverage, RGBA modulate and flat colour, and no field of the 96-byte block means that. It did not need one: which of the two texture-table slots is assigned IS the mode. uTextureIndexB assigned means a single-channel coverage source, uTextureIndexA assigned means an RGBA colour source, neither assigned means the vertex colour alone. GpuTextureSlot.Unassigned is already a loud sentinel for exactly this kind of question, and both branches guard so it never reaches a sampler. That also retired the 1x1 white fill texture: DrawFill routed solid quads through the sprite bucket relying on white times colour, and the untextured branch produces the same value with no texture at all. Multiplying by 1.0 changes no bits, and the gate agrees.
The texture binding. The classic glActiveTexture/glBindTexture path survived V4a because DrawSprite takes an arbitrary texture from sixty-odd widget call sites. But TextureCache had already registered every one of those into the device's table — the classic path was consuming the raw GL name that registration also produced. The UI's currency is now UiTextureTableHandle, a one-based table index whose zero is the same "no texture" every widget already guards on; a raw slot index would have turned all of those guards into silent false negatives, since slot 0 is perfectly valid. One-based rather than the slot itself because GpuTextureSlot is internal to the pinned contract while UiRenderContext.DrawSprite, TextureCache.GetOrUploadRenderSurface and a dozen widget properties are public, and neither publishing a contract type nor converting the retained UI to internal belongs in this slice.
Two consequences worth stating. The two backends disagree about what a 2-D table entry is — GL reconstructs a sampler2D from the bindless handle, Vulkan reads layer 0 of its sampler2DArray descriptor array — and ACDREAM_SAMPLE_2D is the one place that lives. Keeping GL on sampler2D is what leaves the UI's textures exactly as they are, including the paperdoll/appraisal FBO colour texture, which is an externally-owned GL_TEXTURE_2D from the §7.1 transitional seam and cannot become an array before V4g. On the Vulkan side, sampled views are now always layered, which also removes a latent invalid usage V6c shipped: it registered a Type2D offscreen view into a descriptor array whose element type is sampler2DArray.
And one real fix. Sampling through the table means a bound sampler object overrides the texture's own parameters. Nearest-requested UI art used to get its point filtering from a glTexParameter applied before the bindless handle went resident, so registering it with the stock WorldRepeat sampler would have made every retail icon and dat-font glyph silently bilinear. Those now register with a nearest-and-repeat sampler.
Supporting moves: GlGpuDevice.CreatePipeline splices common.glsl the same way Shader does, since an RHI shader that reads the table needs the table declared; GlGpuPassEncoder binds the device's table with the pipeline, which is the GL analogue of Vulkan binding descriptor set 2 per draw, and has to be per-bind because every raw-GL world renderer puts its own privately-numbered table at that binding; and the encoder derives GL_MULTISAMPLE from the pass's SampleCount, which is where the retained UI's hand-rolled glDisable belonged all along. TextRenderGlStateScope is deleted — the encoder's ambient capture restored a strict superset of it — and its failure-safety test follows the guarantee to GlAmbientCapabilityState, which gains a fakeable seam and, with it, the multisample-dimension coverage #249 recorded as missing.
App tests 4,057 passed / 3 skipped, unchanged from commit 1. Offline pixel gate against 871c406b: differing fraction 2.31e-05, 13 pixels of 563,200 compared — below the documented 15-23 pixel same-commit noise band, on a change that redraws every pixel of the retained UI through a different sampling path. The capture was inspected: vitals, spell bar, radar, toolbar icons and slot digits, chat window and Send button all present and correctly placed. Both new .spv pairs compile; the manifest records ui_text and debug_line as Vulkan-ready, leaving six pairs blocked on the world-renderer slices.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The last of V6's three commits, and the one that makes the backend render.
Plan sections: 4.5 (pipelines and the persisted cache), 4.6 (shaders and the
committed .spv), 4.7 and 3.3 (clip space, the Y flip and winding), 4.9 and 4.10
(swapchain format and the scissor convention), 4.11 (the probe shader V5
deferred), 5.4 (Target: null means the swapchain image, literally).
WHAT RUNS. ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan now renders a real scene through the
whole RHI on the RX 9070 XT: 60,000-plus frames per twelve-second run, 4x MSAA
resolving into a B8G8R8A8_UNORM swapchain, GPU timer scopes resolving, a
screenshot taken through IGpuDevice.CaptureBackbuffer, and a clean
CloseMainWindow exit with the allocator reporting three device-memory objects.
WHAT IT DRAWS, AND WHY IT IS NOT THE GAME. V6's milestone is "a full game frame
on Vulkan" and on this branch that cannot be the game's own frame. V4c and V4d
are parked by 5.5.5 so the world renderers are still raw GL; and the two
renderers that DO speak the RHI - TextRenderer and DebugLineRenderer, ported at
V4a - both throw for any device that is not a GlGpuDevice, because their loose
uniforms and their classic texture-unit sprite binding have no home in the
pinned contract yet. Converting them is a V4-class change with its own GL pixel
gate, outside this slice's file list.
So the backend is exercised through the contract by a scene of our own, and it
is not a toy. It uses a device-local mesh arena filled through the staging ring,
instance and batch data written straight into mapped ring memory, an offscreen
render target whose colour is registered into the global texture table and
sampled by a later pass, a BC1 texture with a CPU-built mip chain beside an
uncompressed one with a vkCmdBlitImage chain, one multi-draw-indirect covering
five quads with gl_DrawID selecting per-draw batch data, a second pipeline with
line-list topology bound mid-pass, dynamic cull/front-face/depth-write, push
constants, timer scopes, and an MSAA colour attachment resolving into the
swapchain image.
ORIENTATION, BY INSPECTION. Slice V5's screenshot was a uniform clear and its
orientation was right "by construction" - which a uniform clear cannot show. The
scene is therefore deliberately asymmetric in both axes: a quadrant card that is
red top-left, green top-right, blue bottom-left and white bottom-right, four
differently tinted markers at four different corners, and an open L of lines
whose short stub rises at its right end. The captured PNG reads correctly in
every one of those, including a miniature of the same card in the bottom-right
whose own quadrants are also the right way up. The negative viewport height, the
front-face inversion and the capture path agree.
THE SHADER TOOLCHAIN, AND WHAT IT FOUND. tools/compile-shaders.ps1 drives
tools/ShaderCompiler, a small out-of-solution .NET tool over Silk.NET.Shaderc -
the same shaderc glslc is built on, through the already-pinned Silk 2.23.0
family. glslc is preferred when a Vulkan SDK is present and reported when it is;
neither this machine nor CI has one, and requiring a 500 MB manual install
between a contributor and a working checkout is not a reasonable price for a
build step. The GLSL sources stay the single source of truth: the Vulkan dialect
arrives as a preamble injected after the #version line - ACDREAM_UBO_SET becomes
"set = 1,", the texture table becomes a set-2 descriptor array with a required
nonuniformEXT accessor, and the shared 96-byte push block is declared with each
loose uniform name defined onto its member. The only edits to a shader BODY are
mechanical and dialect-level: dropping default-block uniform declarations, which
Vulkan GLSL has no such thing as, and assigning explicit varying locations BY
NAME across a pair, because ordinal assignment would look identical today and
silently swap varyings the first time an author reordered a line.
Run over the eight production pairs, exactly one thing happened: none of them
compiled, and every failure is a specific source-level fact belonging to a
renderer-port slice that has not landed. debug_line needs uView/uProjection
converged into one uViewProjection - two matrices are 128 bytes and the shared
block is 96. mesh_modern and particle still pass a uvec2 bindless handle as a
varying, which is V4t's GpuTextureSlot retype. sky has ten loose uniforms and
wants a UBO. ui_text needs uScreenSize/uUseTexture/uTex. particle_mesh needs
uTextureIndex to become uTextureIndexA. terrain_modern needs V4d-1's matrix
convergence. mesh is the legacy pair with no RHI consumer at all. That inventory
is committed as shaders.manifest.json, with each source's SHA-256 and the
compiler's own message, and a test re-hashes it so an edited shader that never
got recompiled fails a build rather than shipping a stale binary.
vk_probe is the pair that does compile, and it is the shader 4.11 already asked
for: V5 recorded "build one real pipeline from the committed .spv" as its single
deliberate deviation because no toolchain existed. It is Vulkan-dialect only and
no GL renderer draws with it, so it forks nothing; it retires when the ported
world renderers become the backend's own proof.
DESCRIPTORS. Sets 0 and 1 are DYNAMIC buffer descriptors bound per flight slot,
so a per-draw range change costs a dynamic offset in vkCmdBindDescriptorSets
rather than a vkUpdateDescriptorSets in the hot path - which is what keeps 4.4's
zero-writes-per-frame property true for buffers as well as for textures. Ten
dynamic storage descriptors is above Vulkan's guaranteed minimum of four, so it
is a real requirement rather than a free choice, it fails loudly at layout
creation on a device that cannot serve it, and V9's lavapipe row must confirm
it. Unused bindings point at a shared dummy range so there is ONE set layout and
one pipeline layout; that is why binding a second pipeline mid-pass costs
nothing and disturbs neither the descriptors nor the push constants.
THE ONE MAPPING FUNCTION. VulkanViewportMapping holds the whole coordinate
reconciliation: negative viewport height, the front-face inversion that pairs
with it, and - separately - the scissor flip, which the viewport sign does NOT
perform. The V3 audit flagged that as a concrete V6 acceptance item and it is
the subtle one: vkCmdSetScissor is always top-left-origin, NdcScissorRect emits
GL bottom-left rectangles, and getting it wrong clips a doorway aperture from
the wrong edge in a scene that has one. Clip space needs nothing, as 4.7
concluded: the cameras already build [0,1]-convention projections.
CONTRACT GAP, RECORDED NOT PAPERED OVER. GpuPipelineDescription cannot name its
colour-attachment format, and Vulkan bakes that into a pipeline. Offscreen
targets therefore adopt the swapchain's B8G8R8A8_UNORM rather than a literal
RGBA order - invisible above the API, because an image is sampled through its
format's component mapping and the one CPU readback swizzles explicitly. The
honest fix is a colour-format field added in a reviewed contract commit, exactly
as GpuBlendMode.InverseAlpha and GpuVertexFormat.UByte4UInt were added when V4c
and V4d met the same wall. It is documented at
VulkanTextureFormatMapping.CanonicalColorAttachmentFormat.
The pipeline cache is persisted to the cache directory and validated by its
32-byte header against this device's vendor, device and cache UUID before use.
Drivers are required to ignore incompatible blobs, but "required to" is a poor
foundation for something that runs before anything else in the process, and the
check costs 32 bytes of comparison. Two consecutive launches report "cold" then
"reused".
Gates: Release build clean; App suite 4056 passed / 3 skipped (4037 at V6b plus
19 new); offline pixel gate PASS at a differing fraction of 5.15e-05 with a
same-commit control immediately after it at 2.84e-05 - 29 and 16 pixels of
563,200, the same class of ambient variation the campaign's 15-23 band records,
and roughly 19x under the 0.001 threshold on a commit that changes no GL code
path.
Validation layers could not be run: this machine has no Vulkan SDK, no
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Khronos\Vulkan\ExplicitLayers key, no VK_LAYER_PATH and no
VkLayer_khronos_validation.json anywhere on disk. Plan 7 already requires one
validation-clean run at V7; it needs the SDK installed first and is reported
rather than assumed here.
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>
Investigating the V4c connected blank-world failure needed two things the tree
did not have: a way to tell whether a blank run is caused by the binary under
test, and a way to see GL state at the end of the world phase rather than only
at the frame clear. Both are apparatus only - no production behaviour changes,
and the new probe emits nothing unless ACDREAM_PROBE_GLSTATE=1.
run-blank-world-ab-probe.ps1 interleaves two client builds over the repeat
gate's exact connected route and reports the blank rate per arm. This exists
because the blank rate is not stable across blocks: the same V4c binary
measured 3/10 in one block and 7/10 in another an hour later, so a block of A
followed by a block of B confounds the change with whatever else moved on the
machine in between. Strict alternation shares that drift between both arms.
Run against V4c and its parent it reported 4/5 versus 0/5 (Fisher exact
p~0.024), which is what established the defect follows the binary.
run-blank-world-surface-probe.ps1 grabs the composited window off the desktop
with CopyFromScreen at the same moment the client writes its own screenshot.
No instrument inside the GL context can separate "the renderer drew nothing"
from "the read did not return what the renderer drew", because both live on
the same side of the readback; an independent witness can. It is what showed
the two disagree - see below.
EmitPostWorldGlStateIfChanged is a second sample of the existing [gl-state]
snapshot, taken at the end of the normal-world phase. The existing tripwire
samples just after the clear phase's RestoreFrameDefaults, so it can only
observe state that survives from one frame into the next, and the draw
framebuffer is restored by no frame-global path. A binding established during
the world phase and put back before the next clear was therefore invisible to
it. Sampling at both ends brackets the phase.
What the apparatus established, recorded here rather than in the campaign doc
because no fix landed and the doc's re-land conditions are unchanged:
* The world draw path is not what is missing from the frame. On a blank run
the desktop grab shows the atmosphere clear over the whole viewport and the
complete retained UI - chat, radar, toolbar, vitals - in their normal
places, with every 3-D surface absent. Terrain and sky are still raw GL and
V4c does not touch them, so whatever V4c disturbs is shared, not per-
renderer.
* The CPU issues the same work either way. With ACDREAM_PROBE_FLAP=1 the
render signature is identical between blank and rendered runs: same
RetailPViewInside branch, same resolved root, terrain drawn, 3,331 outdoor
statics and 6 live dynamics dispatched.
* Both GL-state samples read fbo=0, full 1280x720 viewport, scissor off and
err=0x0, byte-identical between blank and rendered runs.
* The client's own capture disagrees with the screen. glReadPixels returns
uniformly RGBA(0,0,0,0) on a frame the desktop grab shows as fog plus UI.
The default framebuffer is 4x multisampled (SampleBuffers=1, Samples=4 in
the capability report) and glReadPixels against a multisampled read
framebuffer is undefined per the GL spec, so the gate's blank-versus-
rendered verdict rests on undefined behaviour in both directions.
Baseline App tests 3,864 passed / 3 skipped, unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The V4c blank-world regression was intermittent - roughly one launch in three at the worst location, zero in seven at the parent - so a single connected capture passes the broken binary most of the time and gates nothing. The new gate runs N full connect-teleloc-render-screenshot cycles with graceful logout and a per-run verdict by screenshot content size, refuses to start if a client is already using the shared test account, and pins the teleloc because the failure rate is location-sensitive. Ten clean runs bound a one-in-three defect below roughly four percent.
Campaign doc 5.5 records the revert evidence and the binding re-land conditions: the GL ring write path moves to mapped unsynchronized writes, and V4c/V4d re-land only at 10/10 rendered plus a passing offline gate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The offline capture window is minimised but still focusable, so a scroll or key press from whoever is at the keyboard can move the camera mid-capture. That yields two screenshots of the same scene from different camera positions and an enormous, entirely spurious pixel difference - which happened during slice V4b and was correctly discarded rather than interpreted. The gate now detects camera-affecting input in the client log and exits 2, so a perturbed run cannot be mistaken for a rendering regression in either direction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Seven of the campaign slices (V2, V4a-V4g) are renderer ports whose entire
acceptance criterion is that no pixel changed, and the existing connected
lifecycle route needs both a live ACE server and the user watching. That would
have made the campaign advance only when someone is at the keyboard.
The client renders the world from the DATs without ACDREAM_LIVE, so the existing
UI automation probe can capture a settled frame with no session created and no
ACE state to disturb. The gate wraps that: capture at the parent commit, capture
at slice HEAD, compare through the existing compare-screenshots CLI at the
project's pinned tolerance 2 / 0.001.
Determinism was measured rather than assumed, and the first measurement failed:
two captures at the same commit differed in 0.29% of pixels. The differences
were confined to the top ~180 rows, which is correct behavior rather than a bug
- the sky animates and the Dereth clock advances with wall time, so two launches
cannot agree there. Below the horizon everything was stable. Masking the top 280
rows brings two independent same-commit pairs to 15 and 17 differing pixels out
of 563,200 compared, a ~33x margin under the threshold. Masking the animated
band keeps the rest a strict identity check; relaxing the tolerance instead
would have hidden real regressions everywhere else.
Covers terrain and blending, scenery, static meshes, water, fog, and the whole
retained UI. Does not cover sky (masked), EnvCell interiors, particles, or the
paperdoll viewports, since the offline scene is a fixed outdoor view - so V4e,
V4f and V4g keep a user visual gate on top of this one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Carry one immutable prepared collision closure with each accepted near-tier generation and install graph plus flat views through the same retained publication receipt. Apply the same strict package-only rule to live entities, add exact sampled graph-authoritative comparison artifacts and lifecycle counters, and prove cancellation, demotion, rehydrate, revisit, teardown, reconnect, and the nine-stop route with 14,064 zero-mismatch samples.
Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>
Record route-lifetime streaming overruns and maximum operation costs, require canonical reveal/resource convergence at every connected checkpoint, and keep recenter semantics independent of the production wall-clock budget.
Co-authored-by: Erik Nilsson <erikn@users.noreply.github.com>
Starting dotnet-counters in the process-creation race can suspend the CLR before the graphical host creates its window. Wait for the guaranteed in-world boundary, then attach counters and contention tracing during the route's warm-up interval.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Free-running sleeps could label a sample as the old scene exactly when automation began the next teleport. Give every route stop an explicit post-input liveness dwell and post-checkpoint hold, then capture process and frame facts only after its named canonical barrier.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
The first-player-position line is emitted only when initial streaming must recenter. Treating it as a required login event made a valid same-landblock login time out while route automation was already running. Gate on in-world and the route's authoritative materialization barriers instead.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Correct whole-frame GPU timestamps so they bracket only the accepted render transaction and associate delayed query results with the owning CPU frame. Add route-wide frame-history summaries, fixed-camera screenshot comparison, process counters, contention traces, a pinned Arwic workload, and credential-safe launch disclosure.
The reference hardware/display contract now keeps local and RDP populations separate and defines the screenshot and re-baseline rules needed by later prepared-content gates.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
An adversarial performance review found our own instruments cannot
measure the project's own performance gates:
- FrameProfiler aggregated CPU/GPU/alloc/stage samples into ~5-second
windows and reset the ring buffers after each report, so route-wide
p50/p95/p99 distributions across a whole soak could not be
reconstructed after the fact. ACDREAM_FRAME_HISTORY=<path> now opts
into a separate per-frame history (one record per frame, ~72
bytes/record, accumulated in memory with zero frame-thread I/O) that
a shutdown-only Dispose() writes as CSV. The aggregated [frame-prof]
report format and its existing metrics are unchanged.
- The canonical checkpoint JSON tracked cache residency (entry/byte
counts) but never LOH size/fragmentation, process-wide allocated
bytes, or cache hit/miss/eviction traffic — a committed audit JSON
showed 65% LOH fragmentation that no tracked instrument recorded,
and "does a revisit portal hit or miss the caches" was unanswerable
from an artifact alone. WorldLifecycleResourceSnapshot now carries
loh_size_bytes/loh_fragmentation_bytes (GCMemoryInfo.GenerationInfo
index 3), process_total_allocated_bytes (GC.GetTotalAllocatedBytes),
and Interlocked hit/miss/eviction counters for the CPU mesh cache,
decoded-texture cache, and the four bounded DAT-object caches
(portal/cell/highRes/language, aggregated).
- run-connected-r6-soak.ps1 unconditionally forced
ACDREAM_UNCAPPED_RENDER=1 with no capped mode, while its sibling
lifecycle-gate script correctly gated it behind a switch. Added
-Uncapped (default capped, matching the sibling script's pattern),
fixed the stationary dwell (12s -> 26s, past the 25s
LiveEntityLivenessController deadline the adjacent comment already
cited), and now write an env-disclosure.json into the automation
artifact directory before every launch listing every ACDREAM_* var
the script sets plus -Uncapped, since the prior audit could only see
ACDREAM_DUMP_MOVE_TRUTH and nothing else was ever recorded anywhere.
Cache counters are wired via the existing composition path
(ObjectMeshManager already owns the CPU mesh cache and the mesh
extractor directly; content.Dats is threaded into
WorldLifecycleResourceSnapshotSource the same way every other
composition consumer receives it). The DAT-object cache lives behind
IDatReaderWriter, a third-party interface from the DatReaderWriter
package that cannot be extended; RuntimeDatCollection (the one
production implementation) exposes the aggregate stats directly and a
pattern match reads them, degrading to zero for any test double —
no new static registry was introduced (GpuMemoryTracker remains the
one precedented process-wide static).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
(cherry picked from commit 1da2c33c875b41fa383dd79694ee2765f0e21896)
Pin every ACE teleloc to an explicit starting quaternion and distinguish stable-workload owner growth from legitimate authoritative population, visibility, and cache-retirement changes. Preserve the original process residency and frame-cost limits while making canonical deltas actionable.
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Make scripted lifecycle checkpoints acknowledged post-diagnostics render barriers, capture the exact frame outcome beside canonical resource ownership, and harden the nine-stop route with ordered same-location cache and lifetime gates without weakening process residency thresholds.
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Keep one-item endpoint and checkpoint results as arrays under PowerShell strict mode so the uncapped reconnect session is validated by the same gate as the multi-checkpoint capped route.
Send the active character id, drain until the authoritative server confirmation, then emit retail's zero-sequence connection disconnect with the negotiated receiver iteration. The connected gate now waits for ACE to remove the exact UDP session before reconnecting, eliminating fixed-delay races.
Drive turn, movement, jump, and combat through the production InputDispatcher so connected Release testing works without an interactive Windows desktop. Track held automation actions through normal completion and every shutdown path.
Add a seven-destination ACE route with post-liveness memory, allocation, update, fatal-log, outbound-movement, and graceful-close gates. Record dynamic ACE population changes as context instead of a false lifetime oracle, and document the accepted rebaseline.
Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>
Replace the incomplete package path with one DatCollection-backed compatibility seam for PhysicsScripts and Animations. Preserve CreateBlockingParticle's inherited payload and following cursor, route every production and audit consumer through the corrected loaders, and apply retail's post-UnPack StartTime ordering.
Add exact stored-order PhysicsScriptTable upper-threshold resolution, high-byte DID and embedded-ID validation, plus live effect profiles with Setup-to-PhysicsDesc precedence across top-level and attached entity lifetimes. Keep blocking execution deferred and narrow TS-11 accordingly.
Pin synthetic malformed/cursor/order fixtures, installed-DAT blocking and recall audits, high-index IDs, IEEE boundaries, profile teardown, and ordinary decoder parity; synchronize architecture, inventory, milestones, roadmap, research, and memory.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Establish the executable-backed PhysicsDesc, sequence-gate, PhysicsScript, CreateBlocking, particle-anchor, projectile, and Hidden-state behavior before changing runtime code. Correct stale blocking/threshold claims and synchronize the project instructions with the current UI architecture and matching retail binary.
Add copyright-safe packet and DAT-container fixtures plus a failing installed-DAT conformance audit for projectile shapes, typed tables, recall motion, default scripts, and raw CreateBlocking inventory.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Preserve the authored gray track, trained-Recklessness range, live bright charge meter, and independent desired-power thumb while keeping Speed and Power over gray side regions. Correct retail text justification value 2 to left alignment and retain direct RenderSurface decoding in the texture inspection tool used to verify the assets.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <codex@openai.com>
The indoor GREY flap at a top-floor connecting room. The render portal side-cull
reconstructed each doorway's "interior side" (PortalClipPlane.InsideSide) from the
cell's AABB CENTROID. For a THIN connector cell (0xF6820118, 5 render polys), the
bounding-box center falls on the WRONG side of the 0118->0116 doorway, so the eye
read as a back-portal and the forward room 0116 was culled -> the aperture showed
the fog clear color = grey.
Retail's PView::InitCell (0x005a4b70) and acdream's own PHYSICS path
(CellTransit.cs:190) both read the explicit dat PortalSide bit ((Flags&2)==0)
instead of guessing from geometry. Port the render path (GameWindow.BuildLoadedCell)
to the same bit.
Proven by a live retail cdb trace (retail draws 0116 from the 0118 root at the grey
pose; tools/cdb/issue186-connector-decider.cdb) + an offline dat diagnostic
(Issue186...PortalSide_CentroidVsDatBit_AtGreyEye): the dat bit matches the old
centroid on every portal of these cells EXCEPT the one #186 breaks, so the switch is
surgical. Full regression green (App 741 / Core 2631); the CornerFlood + Issue113
dat-loading helpers updated to the same bit confirm every real Holtburg/tower/hall
cell floods identically. Touches neither PortalSideEpsilon nor the deleted
EyeInsidePortalOpening rescue (the two DO-NOT-RETRY traps).
Live-gated: user-confirmed no grey at any camera angle; probe shows 216 root=0118
frames, 0 still grey (0118->0116 now TRV, vis=4).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Slice 0 of the #182 verbatim rebuild. The classifier reproduces the design
baseline off acdream-crowd-resolve.jsonl (2883 move-intent resolves:
52.8% OK / 25.1% partial / 22.1% stuck / 107 airborne-stuck) — the A/B
'before' the rebuild measures against (retail target ~78% OK, 0 airborne-stuck).
The plan refines the design spec's §7: the airborne-stuck bleed is the
frames_stationary_fall counter (validate_transition increments; handle_all_collisions
zeros velocity at fsf>1), NOT the cached_velocity field (a separate reporting value).
Slices reorder accordingly; calc_friction (retail 0.25 vs acdream 0.0) is an
orthogonal L.3c divergence kept out of scope.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The #182 CSphere port (96ae2740) failed its visual gate and introduced an
airborne "stuck in the falling animation" regression. A player-attributed retail
cdb trace (tools/cdb/retail-crowd-jump3.cdb) proved retail's LOCAL client fully
runs player-vs-creature collision (76 land_on_sphere, 188 COLLIDED, 130 SLID,
~78% OK, glides across) -- NOT server-authoritative (an earlier unfiltered
land_on_sphere=0 read was a false lead the attributed trace refuted).
acdream's same-repro capture: 50.9% OK, 22.4% stuck, 115 airborne-stuck. Root
divergence: retail CPhysicsObj::UpdateObjectInternal (0x005156b0, pc:283688) sets
cached_velocity = (resolved - old)/dt -- velocity from ACTUAL movement, so a
blocked jump collapses to ~0 -> gravity -> the player falls/glides. acdream
integrates velocity + reflects on collision (PlayerMovementController ~:1008-1069),
so the jump velocity (~18) persists against the creature -> hang.
Fix = verbatim rebuild of the per-frame player-physics loop (UpdateObjectInternal
chain), velocity model first, transition internals kept. Full design +
retail function inventory + the capture apparatus + retail target numbers:
docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-07-player-physics-update-verbatim-rebuild-design.md.
Implementation deferred to a fresh session (user decision). Also files #183
(floating distant scenery, observed during testing). #182 stays as the base.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
