Replace scheduler-quantized software sleeps with a reusable Windows high-resolution deadline timer, expose pacing in the frame profiler, and make shutdown wake every persistent mesh worker without losing the shared signal.
Preserve retail alpha order while using a stable radix, skip duplicate deferred-alpha SSBO packing, pack light sets, cache static selection descriptors, and retire historical material groups at the whole-frame boundary. The fixed dense-Caul sample improved from roughly 9-12 ms CPU to 5.3-6.2 ms without reducing visual quality.
Release build succeeds with zero warnings and all 6,300 tests pass with five intentional skips. Three independent retail, architecture, and adversarial reviews are clean; the post-review connected route remains pending because local ACE is offline.
Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>
Port retail's 25-second leave-visibility lifetime over canonical live records, retaining spatially resident and owned entities while using the conservative ACE visibility envelope for nonresident records. Route expiry through the normal generation-safe F747 teardown so animations, effects, physics, and render owners unwind symmetrically.
Replace the append-only modern mesh buffer with coalescing vertex/index ranges and upload each mesh's vertices once instead of once per material. Released zero-reference meshes can now reuse GPU ranges after portal and cache churn.
A connected five-region round trip returned animation ownership to baseline, recreated the starting region on revisit, and held normal FPS. Release build succeeds and all 5,927 tests pass with five intentional skips.
Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>
Queue translucent world GfxObj batches and scene particles in one stable far-to-near stream using transformed DAT sort centers, then drain it at retail's landscape and final-world boundaries. Preserve authored blend, cull, lighting, opacity, and adjacent-only batching so particles behind lifestones are composited through the crystal instead of overpainting it.
Release build succeeds and all 5,914 tests pass with five intentional skips.
Co-authored-by: OpenAI Codex <codex@openai.com>
Port the retail high/low material-lighting cadence for successful world clicks, keep it instance-scoped in the modern renderer, and restore authored lighting after 0.8 seconds. Correct the selection oracle and pin timing plus per-frame buffer lifecycle with tests.
Co-authored-by: Codex <codex@openai.com>
Add deterministic 96-owner lifecycle and renderer-resource stress gates plus an exact twelve-cycle recall/portal ownership gate. Prove zero retained records, projectiles, spatial buckets, script queues, particle/light owners, shadows, pending effects, and mesh references after churn, GUID reuse, deletion, and session reset.
Make logical teardown incarnation-specific and reentrancy-safe with lifetime epochs, atomic resource registration, generation-aware effect/teleport cleanup, projection mutation tokens, and failure-isolated visibility fan-out. Finish canonical spatial transactions before reporting observer failures and never discard superseded cleanup failures.
Synchronize architecture, roadmap, milestones, retail research, divergence bookkeeping, and durable memory. All three independent review tracks are clean; Release build and the full 5,454-pass/5-skip suite are green.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Carry one complete cell payload with each streaming completion and publish visibility, physics, and render state on the render thread. Remove the obsolete post-readiness login reload that triggered a duplicate dungeon build.
Co-Authored-By: Codex <noreply@openai.com>
Root cause (measured, not guessed): the OOM was a MANAGED Large-Object-Heap leak
(~5 GB in 6 min of roaming; working set 1.6 GB -> 7.6 GB), dominated by ~3.8 GB of
live System.Single[]. A heap-retention analysis of a captured gcdump traced 241 of
242 giant float arrays to a single List<float>: WbDrawDispatcher.InstanceGroup.Opacities.
#188 (2026-07-09, fading doors) added Opacities as a 5th per-instance parallel list
alongside Matrices/Slots/LightSets/IndoorFlags, but left it out of the per-frame
clear loop (WbDrawDispatcher.cs:959). So Opacities.Add(1.0f) fired once per drawn
instance per frame and the list never reset — growing forever; List<float> capacity
doubling produced the observed ~128 MB / ~512 MB power-of-two arrays and OOM after
~50 min. Hit both UI builds because it's core render, and started only recently
because Opacities did not exist before #188.
Fix: extract the per-frame reset into InstanceGroup.ClearPerInstanceData() (promoted
InstanceGroup private->internal) that clears ALL FIVE parallel lists in one place, so
a future 6th list can't silently drift out of the frame lifecycle again. Line 959 now
calls it. TDD: InstanceGroupClearTests asserts every parallel list resets (RED with
the old 4-list clear, GREEN after adding Opacities.Clear()).
Static-audit note: this is exactly why we measured before fixing — the audit ranked
GlobalMeshBuffer (GPU) #1 and the entity-dict leak #3; both were wrong about the
dominant cause. The dotnet-counters (managed vs native) + gcdump retention graph
named the real one-line culprit.
Secondary (NOT this commit): _groups dictionary is never pruned (bounded by distinct
group keys, empty groups are cheap) — filed as a follow-up, not the multi-GB driver.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Standing inside (or looking into) a windowed building like the Agent of
Arcanum, interior objects (furniture, NPCs, the player) were lit by the
directional sun because acdream's sun gate was per-FRAME (keyed on the
player being in a sealed cell), not per-DRAW as retail does it.
Retail's PView::DrawCells (0x005a4840) runs two stages per frame:
outdoor stage → useSunlightSet(1) (0x005a485a): sun ON
interior stage → useSunlightSet(0) (0x005a49f3): sun OFF
DrawMeshInternal (0x0059f398) then calls minimize_object_lighting only
when useSunlight==0, so indoor objects ALWAYS skip the sun regardless of
whether the player's cell is windowed or sealed.
Fix: add a per-instance uint SSBO (binding=6 instanceIndoor[]) whose value
is IndoorObjectReceivesTorches(ParentCellId) — the same predicate AP-43
already uses for the torch gate. In mesh_modern.vert, nest the sun loop
inside an additional `if (instanceIndoor[instanceIndex] == 0u)` check
inside the existing `if (uLightingMode == 0)` block. Indoor objects get
torches (unchanged) but now skip the sun; outdoor objects keep the sun and
still get no torches. The ambient regime (UpdateSunFromSky: 0.2 sealed /
sky otherwise) is untouched — it was already correct.
Mechanically: _currentEntityIndoor set once per entity in
ComputeEntityLightSet; appended to InstanceGroup.IndoorFlags in
AppendCurrentLightSet; grown/packed/uploaded in the same cursor loop as
_clipSlotData and _lightSetData; deleted in Dispose. Mode-1 draws
(EnvCellRenderer) never read binding=6 — the sun loop is inside the
uLightingMode==0 uniform-control-flow branch.
AP-43 divergence register updated: the sun half is now per-draw (no
longer a residual). Residual narrowed to the unaudited ebp_2 test in
CellManager::ChangePosition (no observed impact).
Tests: WbDrawDispatcherIndoorFlagTests pins IndoorObjectReceivesTorches
for the spec §5 representative ids: 0xA9B40172 (Agent of Arcanum EnvCell)
→ 1; 0xA9B40031 (land sub-cell) → 0; 0xA9B4FFFF (landblock) → 0; null
(outdoor shell) → 0; plus the boundary cases 0x0100/0x00FF.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Holtburg meeting-hall facade washed out warm/bright vs retail. The round-1
checkpoint blamed torch REACH (acdream Falloff 6×1.3=7.8m vs a supposed retail
Falloff 4). That theory is WRONG, and this commit fixes the real cause.
Empirical (HoltburgTorchFalloffProbeTests, headless dat dump via the production
LightInfoLoader): the orange entrance torch (setup 0x020005D8) is raw dat
Falloff 6 and acdream reads it FAITHFULLY — there is no Falloff-4 torch anywhere
in Holtburg. Both clients read the same dat float, so reach was never inflated.
Decomp (read verbatim + corroborated by an independent adversarial workflow):
retail's per-object torch binder minimize_object_lighting (0x0054d480) is gated
in RenderDeviceD3D::DrawMeshInternal (0x0059f398) by `if (Render::useSunlight == 0)`.
The outdoor landscape stage runs useSunlightSet(1) (PView::DrawCells 0x005a485a,
before LScape::draw), so the building EXTERIOR shell — drawn via
DrawBlock→DrawSortCell→DrawBuilding→CPhysicsPart::Draw→DrawMeshInternal — is lit
by SUN + ambient ONLY; torches are SKIPPED. The static bake
(SetStaticLightingVertexColors 0x0059cfe0) is EnvCell-only. So retail NEVER
torch-lights outdoor objects. This exactly explains the isolation test (object
point lights OFF → building matches retail).
Fix: WbDrawDispatcher.ComputeEntityLightSet gates per-object torch selection on
the object being INDOOR (ParentCellId is an EnvCell, (id&0xFFFF)>=0x0100) via the
pure predicate IndoorObjectReceivesTorches. Outdoor objects (building shells with
null ParentCellId, outdoor scenery, outdoor creatures) keep the all-(-1) light
set ⇒ sun + ambient only = retail. The indoor "no sun" half is already handled by
the global sun-kill when the player is inside a cell (UpdateSunFromSky). No
dungeon regression: EnvCell statics get ParentCellId set (keep torches).
Divergence register: AP-37 (residual: acdream keys sun/torch on the object's own
cell + a per-frame player-inside sun-kill, vs retail's per-draw-stage useSunlight;
only matters for through-doorway look-ins). The round-1 CHECKPOINT got a RESOLVED
banner correcting the reach theory.
Tests: WbDrawDispatcherTorchGateTests (7), HoltburgTorchFalloffProbeTests (dat
dump). App 280/1skip, Core 1486/2skip green. Held at the visual gate — not merged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Checkpoint of the unified retail-faithful indoor render. The two-week HANG/grey is fixed and the
interior seals (live-verified by the user). Commits the session render-rewrite foundation together
with the fixes that made it functional.
- HANG fix: PortalVisibilityBuilder.Build portal flood did not terminate (the faithful ProjectToClip
near-side clip drifts per round, defeating the CellView dedup; the BFS had no bound after U.2a removed
MaxReprocessPerCell). Fix = drift-tolerant snapped/canonical CellView.Add dedup (PortalView.cs) plus
restored MaxReprocessPerCell=16 bounded re-enqueue (PortalVisibilityBuilder.cs). Re-enqueue is kept
(load-bearing for late-slice propagation, Build_ViewGrowthAfterDoneCell_PropagatesNewSlicesToExit);
only its count is capped. CellViewDedupTests added.
- Seal (DrawCells Task 2): RetailPViewRenderer.DrawEnvCellShells draws EVERY visible cell via
IndoorDrawPlan.ShellPass (was gated on the ClipFrameAssembler slot filter, leaving slot-less cells grey).
- Look-in FPS: GameWindow exterior look-in candidates limited to the player landblock +-1 (was all ~81
loaded LBs iterated every outdoor frame). No behaviour change (far cells were >48m, already culled).
Remaining dominant issue = the FLAP at transitions: viewer-cell metastability (render roots at the
camera-eye cell, which oscillates outdoor-indoor as the 3rd-person boom drifts across the doorway,
confirmed in render-sig). SEPARATE fix, NOT the DrawCells port. Full handoff + flap fix plan + tracked
follow-ups (#78 terrain, look-in-from-inside, look-in FPS, L-spotlight):
docs/research/2026-06-07-indoor-render-session-handoff.md.
Baselines: build 0 err; App.Tests 210/210; Core.Tests 1331 pass / 4 fail (pre-existing) / 1 skip.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Code review flagged the gate-critical per-instance slot resolution as untested.
Add RED→GREEN cases (live=unclipped slot 0, cell-static→cell slot, non-visible→cull,
outdoor-stab→OutsideView/cull, routing-inactive→all slot 0). Note the full-cell-id-space
invariant at ResolveEntitySlot; fix a stale RenderInsideOut comment in EnvCellRenderer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Code review caught a CRITICAL under-inclusion: ApplyReciprocalClip scanned for the
first OtherCellId match, so a cell with two portals to the same neighbour clipped both
near-side openings against the FIRST reciprocal polygon — hiding geometry through the
second opening (real on Holtburg cellar cells 0x148<->0x149). Plumb the dat's
OtherPortalId back-link through CellPortalInfo + BuildLoadedCell and index the reciprocal
directly (retail arg2->other_portal_id, 433557). Skip (degrade to over-include) when the
index is unresolvable — never clip against a guessed polygon. Adds a disjoint two-back-
portal regression test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lands the working A8 indoor-rendering and streaming fixes accumulated this
session. User has verified these visually to some degree (e.g. lifestone /
translucent meshes confirmed fine under the FrontFace flip; bridge / wall /
collision regressions confirmed fixed after travel); not every path has been
exhaustively gated. The cellar-flap defect remains OPEN and will be solved
the retail-faithful way via a dedicated brainstorm (see handoff docs).
Rendering core (reviewed, high confidence):
- EnvCellRenderer SSBO stride fix: upload packed Matrix4x4[] (64B) instead of
the 80B CPU InstanceData struct the shader never expected — fixes the
transform/texture "explosion" for any draw with >1 instance (cells that
dedupe to a shared cellGeomId). Real root cause.
- WB-style global FrontFace(CW) + per-batch CullMode carried through the MDI
layout (GroupKey + BuildIndirectArrays + DrawIndirectRange split into
same-cull runs with absolute uDrawIDOffset per run).
- EntitySet partitioning (IndoorPass / OutdoorScenery / LiveDynamic) +
WorldEntity.BuildingShellAnchorCellId so building shells scope to their
dat-derived building cell instead of rendering everywhere.
- RenderOutsideInAcdream (look into buildings from outside) +
CollectVisiblePortalBuildings frustum cull of portal bounds.
- Sky-when-inside-building + per-cell audit probe + GL-state probe.
Streaming / perf (test-covered; not independently code-reviewed this session):
- Near/far priority queues so near work wins over far; PromoteToNear carries
full landblock + mesh data; LandblockEntriesWithoutAnimatedIndex avoids
rebuilding the animated-lookup dict in the hot draw path. Fixes the
bridge-not-appearing / missing-walls / broken-collision-after-travel
regressions and improves post-transition FPS.
Tooling + docs:
- tools/A8CellAudit: offline dat cell/portal/building dumper (portals +
buildings modes) — reproduces the cellar-flap investigation with no launch.
- docs/research cellar-flap root-cause + option-2 handoff (the didInsideStencil
double-duty finding + the WB-recursive design decision + brainstorm prompt),
entity-taxonomy, replan, issue-78 visibility investigation.
Diagnostics retained on purpose: ACDREAM_A8_DIAG_* gates, portal_stencil.vert
provisional pos.w clamp, and the probe families are kept (env-var gated, zero
cost when off) because the pending option-2 cellar-flap brainstorm needs them.
Strip in the option-2 ship commit.
Indoor branch stays behind ACDREAM_A8_INDOOR_BRANCH=1 (default off = pre-A8
visual). Build green; App tests + Core (streaming/dispatcher/loader) tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The post-Wave-5 indoor branch chaos (flickering, missing walls, GPU 100%,
~10 FPS) is caused by two interconnected pool-management bugs in
EnvCellRenderer that line-by-line WB comparison surfaced in 30 minutes.
Neither was found by the five post-Wave-5 speculative fixes because none
of them inspected the pool path.
Bug #1 — GetPooledList missing list.Clear():
The reuse branch returned pool lists with prior-frame data still inside.
PrepareRenderBatches' merge phase pattern `gfxDict[k] = list; list.AddRange(...)`
assumes empty lists. Without Clear(), lists grow unbounded each frame, GPU
draws cumulative instance counts, and per-instance transforms become a stew
of past + present data. Mirrors WB ObjectRenderManagerBase.cs:1221-1233.
Bug #2 — Render uses snapshot.BatchedByCell.Count instead of PostPreparePoolIndex:
The snapshot author dropped WB's PostPreparePoolIndex field calling it
"scenery-only," then "compensated" in Render by setting _poolIndex to the
cell count. The cell count has no relation to the pool — Prepare may have
used 50+ pool lists for an 18-cell scene. Render's filter-path GetPooledList
then returns lists that ARE in snapshot.BatchedByCell, corrupting the snapshot
mid-Render. Restoring PostPreparePoolIndex (WB VisibilitySnapshot.cs:31)
correctly places Render's pool cursor past the snapshot's owned region.
Bug #3 (minor) — PopulateRecursive hardcoded isSetup:false for nested parts:
Setup IDs use high-byte 0x02 (per retail). WB ObjectRenderManagerBase.cs:813
checks `(partId >> 24) == 0x02` to detect nested Setups. Our port always
passed isSetup:false, silently dropping any nested Setup (its TryGetRenderData
returns IsSetup=true, Render's `!IsSetup` guard skips the draw). Probably
rare in EnvCells but fixed for completeness.
Regression coverage:
- GetPooledList_ReusedList_IsClearedBeforeReturn — would have failed pre-fix
- GetPooledList_FreshList_IsAlwaysEmpty — sanity check
- Snapshot_PostPreparePoolIndex_IsInitSettable — compile-time guarantee
- Snapshot_PostPreparePoolIndex_DefaultsToZero — defensive default
86/86 App tests pass. Build green. The fix is the audit's primary
deliverable; the GL state probe option-1 apparatus follows in a separate
commit as defense-in-depth for any unidentified residual issue.
Full audit + WB cross-reference in
docs/research/2026-05-28-a8-env-cell-renderer-audit-findings.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The core port. 1013 LOC of WB-faithful rendering algorithm:
- GetEnvCellGeomId : WB EnvCellRenderManager.cs:94-103 verbatim
- PrepareRenderBatches : WB EnvCellRenderManager.cs:247-373 verbatim
(parallel frustum-cull, per-cell slow path,
ThreadLocal merge, atomic snapshot swap)
- Render(filter:) : WB EnvCellRenderManager.cs:395-511 verbatim
(filter-driven gfxObj group + draw call build)
- RenderModernMDIInternal : WB BaseObjectRenderManager.cs:709-848
(single-slot variant; resize buffers,
group by cull mode + additive, MDI draw)
- PopulatePartGroups : WB EnvCellRenderManager.cs:572-580 verbatim
(Setup part recursion via PopulateRecursive)
- RegisterCell / FinalizeLandblock / RemoveLandblock — streaming seam
(no WB analog; bridges acdream's existing StreamingController +
LandblockStreamer to the renderer's per-cell instance store)
Documented deviations from WB:
- Drop _useModernRendering branch (Phase N.5 mandatory modern path)
- Drop SelectedInstance/HoveredInstance highlights (no editor state)
- _activeSnapshotGlobalGroups/GfxObjIds as sibling fields on the class
rather than on the snapshot (EnvCellVisibilitySnapshot per Task 4 spec
only carries BatchedByCell + VisibleLandblocks; global groups only
used in the unfiltered Render(pass) path which we don't take)
- ConcurrentDictionary<uint, EnvCellLandblock> keyed by full 32-bit
landblock id (WB uses ushort packed key; acdream uses full id throughout)
10 unit tests (GetEnvCellGeomId determinism + bit-33 dedup flag +
NeedsPrepare + dispose semantics + RemoveLandblock idempotence). Build
green; 23/23 Wave 1+2 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
LoadedCell.BuildingId (init + internal setter) — set exactly once at
landblock load time by BuildingLoader; null when the cell isn't
part of any building (outdoor surface cells; dungeon cells not
enumerated in LandBlockInfo.Buildings).
GameWindow landblock-load path: builds BuildingRegistry from
LandBlockInfo.Buildings; stamps each cell's BuildingId; stores the
registry on _buildingRegistries[landblockId] (GameWindow-level dict)
for render-frame lookups. Note: LoadedLandblock is AcDream.Core.World
(a sealed record) — adding an App-type field there would violate
Code Structure Rule #2, so the registry is stored in a new
GameWindow-level dictionary instead. Cleanup wired in both
removeTerrain lambdas (OnLoad + OnResize paths).
drainedCells dict: the existing _pendingCells drain loop is extended
to also build a local CellId→LoadedCell dict; BuildingLoader.Build
uses this dict for the stamping pass so no second iteration is needed.
New BuildingLoaderTest verifies the stamping path. 5 BuildingLoader
tests total (4 from RR3 + 1 new).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
New per-landblock data model for WB-style per-building cell scoping:
Building — BuildingId, EnvCellIds, ExitPortalPolygons,
occlusion-query state (Step 5 lifecycle)
BuildingRegistry — two-way indexed (by cellId + by buildingId);
single source of truth per landblock
BuildingLoader — static factory from LandBlockInfo.Buildings;
walks interior portals to expand cell sets;
collects exit portal polygons in world space
10 new unit tests cover data invariants + registry indexing + loader
mapping per the algorithm resolved in RR2 findings.
LoadedCell.BuildingId stamping wired in RR4. Render-time consumption
arrives in RR7 (Steps 1-4) + RR9 (Step 5) + RR11 (RenderOutsideIn).
Design: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-26-phase-a8-wb-full-port-design.md
Spike: docs/research/2026-05-26-a8-buildings-data-shape.md
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
