Contract amendment 1 of three, and V4e's content behind it. Plan section 5.5.16
recorded that both particle pipelines draw with per-instance VERTEX attributes
and that the pinned contract could express instanced DRAWING but not instanced
vertex INPUT: one stride, no divisor, one buffer at VertexInputRate.VERTEX. That
is what stopped V4e. This takes the reviewed option (i) - a second vertex
binding with a per-instance rate.
The amendment. GpuVertexLayout grows a per-binding notion (binding index,
stride, input rate) and GpuVertexAttribute names the binding it is fed from,
defaulting to 0; IGpuPassEncoder.BindVertexBuffer takes a binding index. Every
layout written before this slice keeps its exact meaning through
GpuVertexLayout.Interleaved, which is one vertex-rate binding 0 - and
GpuContractTests asserts that as a requirement rather than trusting it. Both
backends carry the rate natively and at no cost: VK_VERTEX_INPUT_RATE_INSTANCE
on the pipeline, glVertexAttribDivisor recorded once into the pipeline's VAO
where it survives every later attribute rebind.
GpuVertexFormat.UInt1 comes with it, and is necessary to it: particle.vert
declares `layout(location = 6) in uint aTextureIndex` and the amendment's whole
premise is that no shader is edited. Same kind-distinction UByte4UInt was added
for at V4d - GL needs glVertexAttribIPointer, Vulkan needs R32_UINT, and the
float path would reinterpret the value's bits rather than approximate them.
Options (ii) and (iii) were rejected on the record: all ten storage bindings are
spoken for and reusing binding 0 would have the GL particle draw clobber
WbDrawDispatcher's instance array mid-frame (section 5.5.8's hazard in its GL
form); CPU-expanding instances is 5x billboard bandwidth and does not scale to
mesh particles at all.
The arm. ParticleRenderer.Rhi.cs is a SECOND arm per section 5.5.6, not a
replacement - every GL statement in the sibling file is the one it always
issued. Five pipelines replace the imperative glBlendFunc switch (two billboard
blends, three mesh blends) because core Vulkan 1.3 does not make blend dynamic.
The per-flight VAO/VBO pool disappears because every ring allocation inside a
frame is already distinct memory that lives until the frame retires. The
binding-9 table is not bound at all - the device owns the table and the encoder
binds set 2. The pass is BORROWED from IWorldPassScope. Depth tests but does not
write, compare is Less and alpha-to-coverage is off, which is the ambient GL
state particles have always drawn under rather than a choice. Everything above
the submission seam - emitter iteration, retail distance ordering, the
deferred-alpha handoff, billboard axis construction, blend resolution - is the
same CPU code on both arms.
The first Vulkan particle frame threw rather than drew, which is the second
defect of the compiles-clean class this slice found by running:
TextureCache.AcquireParticleTexture is bindless-only, so the standalone particle
texture cache did not exist on a backend without GL. It exists on both arms now.
Everything about it that matters - sharing equivalent surfaces between emitter
owners, the bounded unowned LRU, retirement behind the frame-flight fence - is
already backend-neutral; only how one entry is created and destroyed differs,
which is what IStandaloneBindlessTextureBackend is for. The RHI arm creates the
image through IGpuDevice.CreateTexture with a real sampler and releases the
table slot before the image, which is the GL arm's order and for the same
reason. The composite cache stays GL-only: it serves entity appearance, not
particles.
The durability fix V6k earned. That slice found the sky declaring a 32-byte
stride against a 36-byte AcDream.Core.Terrain.Vertex - the record carries a
TerrainLayer no sky attribute names - and noted that every .Rhi.cs arm restates
a CPU record's footprint from memory while only sky had a test.
RhiVertexLayoutStrideTests is that test for the rest: world mesh, terrain, sky,
retained-UI sprite, debug line, and both particle bindings, each asserted
against the record or the producer's own float count, plus two sweeps over all
seven for attributes that reach past their stride or name an undeclared binding.
Four private layouts became internal to be assertable; nothing else about them
moved.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,121/3 skips (4,109 baseline plus three
contract tests and nine layout tests); complete Release suite 9,184/5. Strict GL
offline pixel gate against 08ffe141: 3.20e-05, 18 differing pixels of 563,200,
inside the documented 9-31 band. GL connected -Runs 3: 3/3 RENDERED on the
desktop witness and 3/3 on the client capture. One offline Vulkan run with
VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation proven inserted by the loader: zero validation
errors, zero warnings, a captured world frame that still draws terrain,
blending, roads, water, statics, scenery, sky and the complete retained UI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
V4f's content, landed as a SECOND arm per section 5.5.6: GL keeps its raw world
path through to V10 and the RHI world path ships on Vulkan. Every GL statement in
SkyRenderer is the one it always issued; the encoder arm lives in SkyRenderer.Rhi.cs
and runs only when there is no GL context.
What it produces. ACDREAM_RENDER_BACKEND=vulkan renders the sky: the dome
quadrants, the horizon band, the cloud sheet and the fog gradient, in the same
place and the same colours as the GL capture of the same scene (within a few
units on the channels sampled, which is the day-fraction drift between two
launches). Section 5.5.15's first V7 defect - "the sky is flat fog" - is closed.
Three things differ from the GL arm, each because Vulkan bakes what GL sets. The
per-submesh blend function becomes two PIPELINES, additive for sun/moon/stars and
straight alpha for everything else, because core Vulkan 1.3 does not make blend
dynamic. The SkyParams block becomes a ring slice taken per draw rather than one
buffer rewritten per draw, because a descriptor's contents are read at execution
time, not record time. And the pass is borrowed from IWorldPassScope, because the
frame's one backbuffer pass resolves and a second pass could not load what it
left.
The sky is the first Vulkan consumer of set 1 binding 4. Section 5.5.8 recorded
that UniformSkyParams was missing from the uniform set layout and V6i-2 added it;
until now nothing had ever bound it.
The stride bug, which is the fourth of its class this campaign. The first Vulkan
sky frame drew the dome as a field of blue-white noise. The RHI vertex layout
declared a 32-byte stride - position, normal, texcoord, exactly what sky.vert
reads - while AcDream.Core.Terrain.Vertex is 36 bytes: it carries a fourth
member, TerrainLayer, that no sky attribute names and that the GL arm never
described to a glVertexAttribPointer but did count, because it says
sizeof(Vertex). Nothing else in the frame looked wrong, no validation rule was
violated, and the offline pixel gate masks the sky band, so only a side-by-side
capture found it. SkyVertexLayoutTests now asserts the REQUIREMENT - the stride
is the uploaded record's footprint - rather than today's number.
The last interim handle table is gone. V4t retired the private
GlBindlessHandleTable in WbDrawDispatcher, EnvCellRenderer, TerrainModernRenderer
and ParticleRenderer and deliberately left the sky's, because the sky is the one
world path that mints its own resident handles from TextureCache's raw GL texture
names rather than interning someone else's. It now registers those handles
through V4t's RegisterWorldTextureHandle seam instead, which is the same
mechanical change the other four took, and the class and its tests are deleted
because nothing else ever used them.
TextureCache gains RegisterWorldSurface(surfaceId, repeat), the sky's RHI texture
source: the same DecodeFromDats the GL path uses, created through
IGpuDevice.CreateTexture and paired with a real sampler object rather than baked
into a bindless handle. Keyed by (surface, wrap) for the same reason the GL arm
keys its handles that way - a table entry is a combined image sampler, so the
dome sampled CLAMP_TO_EDGE and a scrolling cloud sheet sampled REPEAT are two
entries over one decoded texture.
Gates. Release build green. App tests 4,109 passed / 3 skipped - the 4,112
baseline less the six GlBindlessHandleTable tests that went with the class, plus
three vertex-layout tests. Strict GL offline pixel gate against 7ae796a1:
4.43e-05, 25 differing pixels of 563,200, inside the documented 9-31 band, with
maximumChannelDelta 48 in the same 46-52 range every control pair reports. GL
connected repeat gate at 3 runs: 3/3 RENDERED on the desktop witness and 3/3 on
the client capture. Seven-day-group before-and-after comparison on GL - the
method V6e used, because the pixel gate masks the sky band - matching in
gradient, cloud sheet, horizon band and fog on every group, including day group
2's salmon cloud band and day group 6's green band. One offline Vulkan run with
VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation proven inserted by the loader: zero validation
errors, zero warnings, a captured sky frame, graceful close.
Coverage gap, stated rather than assumed. The offline scene is a fixed outdoor
view at one time of day, so the sun, the moon and the rain cylinder are drawn by
neither arm's gate. They join the accumulated user-gate debt in plan section 5.1,
where V6e already filed them.
No divergence-register row: no retail-facing behaviour changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik