The owner measured 63% GPU at night vs 28% by day: the starfield
lattice was the whole difference. Three lossless cuts:
- one packed-multiply hash round per cell instead of ~9 chained PCG
rounds (position/presence bit-sliced from one result, brightness/tint
from a second);
- the 3x3x3 neighbourhood sweep becomes the 2x2x2 block around the
sample — a star's visible footprint (a few px) is far smaller than a
lattice cell on screen, so any star outside that block is over a full
cell (>=15 px) away and contributes nothing;
- background mottle drops its invisible third octave.
Same densities, sizes, colours, and look; star positions reshuffle
(procedural layout, not authored). sky.frag.spv re-pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rotation (user-directed): the procedural starfield rotates once per
Dereth day (~2 real hours - constellations visibly wheel through a
night) about a celestial pole ~41 deg above the northern horizon, plus
dayOfYear/360 of seasonal drift so the 360-day year changes the night
sky. One SkyParams float (272-byte block, layout test re-pinned)
carries dayFraction + dayOfYear/360 from the world clock; sky.frag
applies a Rodrigues rotation to the sample direction so stars and
mottle turn together. Impossible with retail's static stretched layer.
Fade rework (the 2026-08-23 two-screenshot gate finding): the
per-vertex vTint signal carried the sun-facing product and blanked
stars across the entire twilight half of the sky. The fade now reads
the UNIFORM ambient term - identical star visibility in every compass
direction, same dusk-to-dawn schedule - with one deliberate exception:
a thin suppression band hugging the low sky toward the sun's azimuth
while the sun term is strong, so stars still wash out inside the
actual twilight glow.
Guards updated (rotation anchor, uniform-fade anchor, 272-byte layout);
both sky SPIR-V hashes re-pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The enhanced sky multiplied the full 4-tier star lattice by a night
factor of 0.0 all day long. Early-out when the star layer's lighting
product says daytime, so the pack's night sky costs nothing outside
dusk-to-dawn. sky.frag.spv re-pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The first night-sky gate (2026-08-23 screenshot) showed three defects:
glowing beams along the cube-face boundaries (fwidth blowup where
adjacent pixels land on different faces lights every neighbourhood star
solid), diffraction-spiked standouts the user rejects ('that is in a
photo only, not in real sky'), and ellipse-stretched stars from scalar
length(fwidth) sizing at oblique view angles.
One rewrite removes all three: stars now live on a seamless 3D lattice
over the unit sphere (no faces, so no seams by construction), each star
resolved through an exact tangent-plane -> screen-pixel 2x2 solve of
the direction derivatives (perfectly round, true pixel sizing at every
view angle, sharper cores), spikes deleted in favour of a soft round
halo on the bright tiers. Guard test updated to pin the new anchors and
forbid both fwidth-face grids and spikes; sky.frag.spv re-pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
User-directed enhancement ('I want the night sky to look very good'):
retail's star layer is one small texture stretched over a 10-poly dome
cap, so stars smear regardless of source-image quality. With the
Atmospheric render pack active, sky.frag now renders the star layer
(GfxObj 0x010015EF, identical in all 20 Dereth day groups) as a fully
procedural sky computed from the view direction: hash-derived stars on
a cube-face grid in three density tiers plus sparse diffraction-spiked
standouts, sized in SCREEN pixels via derivatives so they stay crisp at
any resolution and FOV, over the user-approved 0.4-1.3% cool mottle
(gen_starfield2.py seed 11, approved 2026-08-23). The draw is forced
additive; the day/night fade rides the star layer's existing retail
lighting product so the schedule matches the authored keyframes. Pack
inactive = retail look byte-untouched.
EnhancedNightSkyRuleTests pins the uParamA gate, the exact star-layer
id, the forced-additive draw, and the pack-runtime wiring; sky shader
SPIR-V recompiled and re-pinned. Hermetic App suite green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two April stand-ins, neither registered, met at the horizon from altitude as
a hard line between the dome's rim and the fog-coloured clear:
1. sky.frag fogged every non-additive sky layer with a 0.2 floor. Retail's
GameSky::Draw @0x00506FF0 disables fixed-function fog around the whole
sky draw unless an AdminEnvirons fog override is active (SetFFFogEnable(
LScape::m_override_enabled ? 1 : 0)); additive layers stay unfogged via
SetFFFogAlphaDisabled(1) at D3DPolyRender::SetSurface 0x59c882. The sky
pass now sets ApplyFog only for (override active && !additive), with no
floor.
2. WorldRenderFrameBuilder overwrote the authored fog range with one derived
from the streaming window (538..2189 m always). Retail sets FOGSTART/
FOGEND straight from the keyframe's MinWorldFog/MaxWorldFog
(SkyDesc::GetWorldFog @0x00500CE0 -> SetFFFogProperties @0x005A2F70) with
no draw-distance scaling; zfar is a constant 4000 m. The builder now
leaves SceneLightingUbo.Build's values alone; ACDREAM_FOG_START_MULT /
_END_MULT are deleted from RuntimeOptions.
Guards: SkyFogRuleTests (source-level, the sky renderer has no hermetic
harness); sky.frag.spv re-pinned in VulkanShaderManifestTests with the
reason. Research note 2026-04-23-sky-fog.md carries a correction banner.
App hermetic 6,070/0, Core 4,707/0 (Release). Owner look gate owed: night
and rain fog are now retail's shorter authored ranges.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both OP4 reviews converged on one headline bug (Character-tab rows never
re-read live server truth after their pre-login constructor-word seed) plus
overlapping MUST-FIXes. All ten converged/consolidated findings land here:
MUST-FIX:
- BoolOptionRow.SaveCurrentValue now re-reads its live binding (retail's
GetValue()-into-SaveCurrentValue) on every OnShown — panel open, tab
switch in, initial activation — instead of trusting the pre-login
constructor word it was built with. Reset/tab-switch can now only
restore values that were actually live at the last show. LockUI's
host.Root.UiLocked one-shot mount seed now also converges on every
PlayerDescription via the existing OnCharacterOptionsChanged hook.
- Apply/Reset are wired to OptionPage.OnOptionChanged in production
(Ghosted when nothing changed, Normal when dirty, run once at bind so
both start disabled per retail's PostInit); Defaults stays ungated.
- The Combat panel's three LEDs (Repeat Attacks/Auto Target/Keep in View)
now read/write the same RuntimeCharacterOptionsState seam the Character
tab uses instead of a disconnected client-local GameplaySettings copy —
closes the "two writable copies" divergence. The three now-orphaned
GameplaySettings fields and RuntimeSettingsController's mirror
properties/SetCombatGameplay are deleted outright; the headless host's
hardcoded AutoRepeatAttack/AutoTarget now read the live option bit.
- RuntimeSettingsController.SetUiLocked's convergence guard now compares
against the last value actually applied to the runtime target instead
of the persisted GameplaySettings.LockUI snapshot, which could already
match a server-derived request without ever having been pushed.
SHOULD-FIX:
- DisplayTimeStamps now prefixes every chat producer (ChatLog.Append is
the one seam all of them funnel through), not just AddText's own
callers — heard speech, emotes, Turbine channels, and combat text were
previously missed. The prefix format escapes its colons and forces
InvariantCulture instead of the culture-dependent TimeSeparator
placeholder.
- sky.frag now honors uFogParams.w (fog mode) like the mesh/terrain
shaders, so Disable Distance Fog stops the sky dome's horizon band from
blending toward fog color too.
- Corrected the "byte-verified" overclaim on the timestamp format string
doc comment (BN-sourced, wire doc U6) and the AP-194 anchor-column
class-name typo; the RunAsDefaultMovement doc comments now cite retail's
actual acclient.h enumerator name.
- Added: DispatcherMovementInputSource's option x modifier truth table
(incl. || AutoRunActive with the option off), the per-page Apply/Reset
enable-gate tests, a real checkbox.OnClick/ToggleBehavior-driven click
test, and hash-pins for the six header string keys.
- Gate script step 8 corrected for the logout-flush false-failure
(closing the panel before relogging is load-bearing); a new step
documents the enable-gate sequence and the Combat-panel/Character-tab
cross-check.
Register: AP-196 (the Group-C default-source change + GameplaySettings
retirement) and AP-197 (the ignored per-character timestamp format
override) filed in this commit.
Full Release suite: 13,044 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed (was 13,008/4/0;
net +36 tests from new coverage and legitimate assertion updates from the
GameplaySettings retirement).
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>
