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>
Commit 2 deleted the GL rendering backend's implementations; this step
removes the package references and shader vocabulary they leave behind,
so nothing in the App project still spells Silk.NET.OpenGL.
Silk.NET.OpenGL and Silk.NET.OpenGL.Extensions.ARB are dropped from
AcDream.App.csproj. Chorizite.Core stays — the audit is NOT clean: its
Render.Enums (TextureFormat, BufferUsage) and Lib.BoundingBox types are
used directly and extensively across the Wb texture/mesh pipeline,
independent of the deleted GL IUniformBuffer implementers the package
comment used to cite. The stale comment is corrected in place.
IMeshPipelineDevice.Gl is removed along with the GL? gl parameter
threaded through WbMeshAdapter's four constructors, WorldRenderComposition's
CreateMeshAdapter, and VulkanMeshPipelineDevice's Gl => null
implementation — nothing read any of them once the legacy per-mesh
upload bodies were gone (confirmed by grep: the sole non-doc-comment hit
was a test assertion). While in WbMeshAdapter.Dispose(), found and fixed
a real bug along the way: its teardown still pattern-matched the deleted
GL GpuFrameFlightController to decide whether to wait for submitted work,
which VulkanFrameFlightController replaced at slice V6a without this site
being updated — so the wait had been silently dead on every Vulkan run
since then. Retargeted to VulkanFrameFlightController, which carries the
same WaitForSubmittedWork().
The GL pixel-format vocabulary (Silk.NET.OpenGL.PixelFormat/PixelType) that
WorldTextureArray/TextureFormatExtensions/TextureAtlasManager used for
upload validation is replaced by AcDream.Content's existing Silk.NET-free
UploadPixelFormat/UploadPixelType enums (added at MP1a to keep the bake
tool GL-free); two new members (Rgb, Red, Float) extend that enum with
their GL ABI constants to cover the full vocabulary WorldTextureArray
needs, since MP1a's original set only covered what the extractor itself
emits. ObjectMeshManager's App-boundary cast
`(Silk.NET.OpenGL.PixelFormat?)batch.UploadPixelFormat` becomes a direct
pass-through now that both sides share the type.
GpuBindingModel.StorageTextureTable (the GL-only binding=9 emulation of
the Vulkan texture table) is deleted and StorageBindingCount drops from
10 to 9; the descriptor-set-layout code that builds from that count
(VulkanPipelineLayouts, VulkanFrameBindings) is untouched and just
allocates one fewer always-dummy-seeded, always-unused binding.
Several fully dead GL-only classes came along for the ride, confirmed by
zero construction sites: SilkFramebufferViewportTarget
(NullFramebufferViewportTarget is the sole production
IFramebufferViewportTarget), SilkRenderGlStateReader
(NullRenderGlStateReader.Instance is the sole IRenderGlStateReader),
RuntimeRenderFrameClearPhase (VulkanRenderFrameClearPhase is the sole
IRenderFrameClearPhase, expressing the same atmosphere-clear logic as a
pass load-op instead), and GpuFrameTimer plus FrameProfiler's
GL-owning FrameBoundary(GL) overload and BeginGpuFrame/EndGpuFrame
bracket (RecordGpuSample is the only GPU-timing path any backend uses
now — the ACDREAM_WB_DIAG nested-query exclusion these existed for no
longer applies, since WbDrawDispatcher's own diagnostic GPU sampling
already moved to the device's Vulkan timer pool). GpuFrameFlightController
itself stays (never constructed with a real fence API in production, but
its retirement-ledger/serial-ring logic is backend-neutral and still
covered by its own unit tests) — only its GL-specific parts (the public
GL constructor overload, SilkGpuFenceApi) are deleted, since removing the
whole class would mean restructuring the frozen Slice-8 composition
shape's GpuFrameFlightController? threading, which is out of this
commit's scope. TextureParameters.cs and BufferUsageExtensions.cs
(zero callers each) are deleted outright.
common.glsl is deleted: nothing in the actual Vulkan .spv build reads
it. tools/ShaderCompiler/Program.cs compiles each .vert/.frag pair
directly and tools/ShaderCompiler/VulkanGlslPreamble.cs injects its own
complete self-contained preamble per file; common.glsl's textual
concatenation was exclusively Shader.cs's GL-only mechanism, deleted at
Commit 2. The five shader files that named it in comments
(mesh_modern.vert, particle.vert, particle.frag, sky.frag,
terrain_modern.frag) are corrected to point at VulkanGlslPreamble.cs
instead. mesh.vert/mesh.frag — the pre-N.5 legacy shader pair the
mandatory modern path already made unreachable, with zero C# consumers
and no compiled .spv — are deleted too. Regenerated via
tools/compile-shaders.ps1: 9/9 remaining shader pairs compile
(previously 9/10, with mesh the sole failure — the VulkanShaderManifestTests
doc comment's "nine of ten are not Vulkan-expressible" was already
stale before this commit).
Test fallout: dead-subject test methods/files are deleted rather than
patched (TextRendererFailureSafetyTests.cs, ClipFrameUploadTests.cs,
GpuResourceRetirementTransactionTests.cs's GL queue tests, one
WorldRenderDiagnosticsTests source-order test, one
RenderFrameResourceControllerTests clear-phase-order test); tests whose
subject moved or was renamed are updated in place rather than deleted
(GpuContractTests, VulkanCapabilityGateTests, MeshPipelineDeviceSeamTests'
pinned seven-member surface now reads six, ParticleBindlessInstanceTests'
cross-dialect check now covers the one surviving dialect,
WbMeshAdapterTests' misleadingly-named null-gl test — gpuDevice was
always the parameter that actually threw).
Build: `dotnet build AcDream.slnx -c Release` — 0 warnings, 0 errors,
with the Silk.NET.OpenGL/.Extensions.ARB package references physically
removed from the csproj (not just unreferenced in code).
Tests: full-solution `dotnet test` green across every project.
Zero remaining `using Silk.NET.OpenGL` anywhere in src/ or tests/.
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>
