The reviewer's offline pixel apparatus found a real design defect, not a
test artefact: foliage wind was welded to "directional shadows rendered
this frame." Evidence: offline High preset, sun-shadow-strength=0,
wind-strength 2 + lean/branch 1 m — wind-on vs wind-off at the same
pinned clock differed by only 49-65 px, inside the apparatus's own 22 px
run-to-run noise floor (no measurable motion). A CPU probe independently
confirmed ResolveFoliageWind was correct (first advance snaps to Clear
0.25/0.15, gate 1, one graph) — the correct uniform never reached the
world pass.
Root cause: DirectionalSunShadowRenderer.Render's two early-out paths
(!environment.ShouldRender, ResidentWindowUnavailable) left
_currentFrameBinding at its pure Disabled (no-buffer) default.
WbDrawDispatcher.PipelinesFor and TerrainModernRenderer's matching
selection logic only choose the atmospheric receiver pipeline
(mesh_atmospheric, the only pipeline that #includes foliage_wind.glsl)
when TryGetCurrentFrameBinding returns true; with no buffer it always
returned false, so the world pass silently fell back to the plain
mesh_modern pipeline, which has no wind code at all. Because the shadow
gate is ActiveDayGroupMultiplier = dayGroupPolicy x elevationResponse x
strength, this killed wind every night (elevation response -> 0), at
user sun-shadow-strength 0, and under the portal/login cover.
Fix (decouple, not patch): DirectionalShadowFrameBinding gained
IsBindableFor ("a real current-frame allocation exists") separate from
IsValidFor ("...and it is Enabled with real shadow content" -- kept
exactly as VolumetricShaftRenderer's own gate needs it).
TryGetCurrentFrameBinding now returns IsBindableFor. When the built-in
pack supplies an AtmosphericFrame binding (declared packs never do, so
their receiver shaders -- which never declare set 3 binding 5 -- are
unaffected), Render's two early-out paths call a new
PublishDisabledReceiverBinding: it allocates one real ring slice and
writes a DISABLED DirectionalShadowUniforms block -- every matrix
Identity, every control/bias term zero, TextureAndFlags all zero (bit 0
clear is exactly what directional_shadow_receiver.glsl's
acdreamDirectionalShadowVisibility already reads as "no shadow, full
visibility" via its existing early return 1.0), and a unit light
direction (0,0,1) so a fragment shader's normalize() can never produce
NaN. BindDirectionalShadowReceiver and TerrainModernRenderer's
shadow-buffer bind now check Buffer is not null instead of Enabled, so
the disabled block actually gets bound once it is selected.
PublishDisabledReceiverBinding is internal (not private) specifically so
it is testable without standing up a real WbDrawDispatcher/
TerrainModernRenderer pair -- no test in this suite constructs either.
New tests: (a)/(b) PublishDisabledReceiverBinding is bindable-not-valid
with a bound AtmosphericFrame and a genuine no-op with an unbound one;
(c) BindDirectionalShadowReceiver emits both UniformDirectionalShadow and
UniformAtmosphericFrame binds for a disabled binding; (d)
VolumetricShaftRenderer's gate still reports NoCurrentDirectionalShadow
for a disabled binding. ShouldSelectReceiverPipeline itself is untouched
and its existing tests (parametrized directly on bindingValid) remain
valid; no existing test asserted the old "disabled shadows -> plain
pipeline / no binding" behaviour in a way this fix invalidates -- every
existing caller either bypasses Render (calls RenderPrepared directly)
or uses a stale-serial binding IsBindableFor still correctly rejects.
Verify: Release build 0 warnings/0 errors. App hermetic-lane filter
6,050/0 failed. Core.Tests 4,695/0 failed. Full hermetic-filtered
solution: 15,278/0 failed across 15 projects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opus dual-lens review of the three VM6 commits (0930c35d, 39e8408c,
6cc5e183) found two blockers and two should-fix issues; all landed here
along with the review's nits and documentation corrections.
Blockers:
- A1: the procedural-scenery classifier tested bit 31 alone instead of
the full top nibble (0xF000_0000 == 0x8000_0000), so it also matched
LandblockStaticEntityIdAllocator's 0xC... namespace (fences/gates/
building shells with a cutout subset), the 0xDA11_D0xx paperdoll id,
and the 0xFFFF_FF01 portal-tunnel id as procedural scenery — all
three would have swayed. ProceduralSceneryIdAllocator.IsInNamespace
now does the exact top-nibble test; FoliageWindClassification
delegates to it.
- A2: GroupKey (the receiver's instance-batching key) did not carry
FoliageFlags while the caster's dedup key already did, so a scenery
instance and a non-scenery instance sharing a mesh subset coalesced
into one receiver InstanceGroup whose flags were last-writer-wins —
disagreeing with the correctly-keyed caster. GroupKey now carries
FoliageFlags, computed before key construction and set exactly once
at group creation; the imperative re-stamp is gone, and CachedBatch's
now-redundant FoliageFlags field is removed.
Should-fix:
- A3: the world receiver pass bound UniformAtmosphericFrame only by
accident (leftover from the caster pass, which runs first each
frame, since Vulkan binding state isn't reset between passes).
DirectionalShadowFrameBinding now carries the caster's exact
AtmosphericFrameBufferBinding and BindDirectionalShadowReceiver binds
it explicitly.
- A4: a Setup-composed tree's opaque trunk part never got the trunk
flag because HasCutoutSubset is cached per GfxObj part, not per
entity. FoliageWindClassification.ComputeEntityHasCutoutSubset now
ORs HasCutoutSubset across an entity's resolved sibling parts once
per entity, threaded into ClassifyBatches/AddDirectionalShadowBatches
via a new optional override parameter.
Nits: A5 hashes the per-vertex flutter seed relative to the instance
origin instead of absolute world XY (fp32 sin() precision loss at far
landblock corners), mirrored in both foliage_wind.glsl and
FoliageWindModel; A7 documents the max(maxHeight, 0.5) divide-guard as
a deliberate pseudocode divergence; A8 switches FoliageWindExclusions'
construction to ToFrozenSet() and softens the "never stale" doc
comment to "no slower than one frame behind."
Tests added: top-nibble classification (0xFFFFFFFFu now correctly
false), GroupKey inequality across entity-driven scenery/landblock-
static classification, a caster-batch test proving the same pairing
never coalesces, ComputeEntityHasCutoutSubset unit + end-to-end
two-part-Setup tests, the caster→receiver AtmosphericFrame binding
carry-through, flutter-hash translation invariance relative to
instance origin, and a Storm-wind mid-height displacement floor
guarding against a "no motion" regression.
Docs: plan VM6 body corrected to the five-row WeatherKind table, "bits
1 and 2", "all four" caster shaders, and top-nibble wording throughout;
the owner gate checklist's Rain/Storm step; the stale v1-only shader-
interface compatibility entry; semantic-bindings-v1.md's v2 members
folded into the main 192-byte block; the IA-25 register row's top-
nibble wording; AtmosphericFrameInputs.cs's ABI size reference.
foliage_wind.glsl's A5 change recompiled exactly the five shaders that
include it (mesh_atmospheric.vert, the four directional_shadow_world_*
casters) plus the manifest; no other .spv changed.
Verify: Release build 0 warnings/0 errors. App hermetic-lane filter
6,041/0 failed (no environment-specific failures this run).
RenderPackValidator 30/30. Full hermetic-filtered solution: 15,269/0
failed across 15 projects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik