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>
Narrow re-review of a82959f1: APPROVE, with follow-ups. All items landed.
N2 (structural): (a) extracted the ONE shared InstanceGroup-from-key
construction seam, WbDrawDispatcher.CreateGroupFromKey(key, registration,
frame) — before this there were two near-identical `new InstanceGroup
{ ... }` initializers (GetOrCreateInstanceGroup and GetOrCreatePackedGroup)
that had already drifted once (the round-2 F1 bug). Both routes call it now;
CreateGroupFromKey's own `new()` is the only production InstanceGroup
construction site repo-wide, same precedent as AppendPackedInstance. (b)
GroupKey.FoliageFlags lost its `= 0u` default and moved before CullMode in
the declaration (CullMode keeps its default, C# requires optional params to
trail required ones), so a `new GroupKey(...)` that omits it is a compile
error. Fixed every real construction site the reorder/requirement touched:
the 2 production sites, ToKey (a reconstruction from InstanceGroup the
review didn't count but the reorder broke), and 5 test sites (one more than
the review's "4" — InstanceGroupClearTests had a second, implicit
target-typed `MakeKey` factory the original count missed). Verified by a
full solution build.
N1: added CreateGroupFromKey_CopiesFoliageFlagsFromTheKey
(InstanceGroupClearTests) — a key carrying FoliageFlags 0x2 in, the created
group's FoliageFlags 0x2 out. That test plus N2b's required field are what
actually guard the round-2 F1 blocker; reworded PackedDispatcherOracleTests'
existing test comment to say what IT proves (the classification-to-
BuildIndirectArrays-to-BatchData.flags path), not that it guards the
classifier.
N3: corrected the plan's round-2 paragraph — folding FoliageFlags into the
G2/G3 digest is correct and symmetric, but CompareClassifiedOutput only
runs from RenderScenePViewFrameProductController.BuildAndCompare, which has
no production caller anywhere in src/AcDream.App/, and both of
RenderScenePViewFrameProductTests's own callers construct the controller
without the optional dispatcher argument — so the fold catches nothing
until that oracle is wired to an actual caller.
N4: the plan's F6 note now names both classification caches — the classic
route's EntityClassificationCache.EntityCacheEntry (self-heals per entity
on its own next eviction) and the packed route's
PackedProjectionClassificationEntry/PackedClassifiedBatch.Key
(PackedProjectionClassificationCache.BeginFrame clears its entire cache in
one shot on a RenderSceneGeneration change) — and notes neither mechanism
is keyed to a pack switch specifically.
N5: deleted the now-unused single-generic ComputeEntityHasCutoutSubset<T>
overload; its 4 test call sites now use the two-generic, zero-alloc
overload with an unused int context and a static (_, value) => value
lambda, so there is exactly one ComputeEntityHasCutoutSubset to keep
correct.
A6 (reviewer-filed): ResolveFoliageWind's _windMean/_windGust started at 0
and always eased toward the weather target by clock delta, with no
distinction for a graph's first-ever advance. A pinned clock
(ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS, the offline pixel gate's determinism pin) never
advances between calls, so the wind reached only whatever fraction the
first (1-second-clamped) step produced and sat there forever; live, the
first 10 s after a graph is constructed (pack selection / login) spun up
from dead calm even though the weather already IS what it is. Fixed at the
root: the first advance (_windFrameSerial == -1, the constructor sentinel)
now snaps _windMean/_windGust straight to the target; every later advance
eases over WeatherSystem.TransitionSeconds exactly as before. Added a
SetWindClockSecondsOverrideForTesting seam (_windClockSecondsOverride is no
longer readonly) so a hermetic test can advance the pinned clock by an
exact amount between two resolves without a real-time Thread.Sleep; two new
tests prove the first-advance snap is exact and a second advance still
eases at the normal rate. The three existing indoor/wind-disabled/amplitude
gate tests pass unchanged.
Verify: Release build 0 warnings/0 errors. App hermetic-lane filter
6,046/0 failed. Core.Tests 4,695/0 failed. Full hermetic-filtered solution:
15,274/0 failed across 15 projects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Narrow re-review of 43e3abed found every A1-A5/A7/A8 item resolved but
one new blocker in the production packed classifier.
F1 (BLOCKER): RetailPViewPassExecutor.DrawPackedProductionRoute — the
route production world geometry actually draws from — never computed
FoliageFlags at all. WbDrawDispatcher.PackedOracle.cs's
ClassifyPackedBatches built its GroupKey with the field defaulting to
0u, and GetOrCreatePackedGroup never copied it onto the created
InstanceGroup, so production BatchData.flags bits 1/2 were always zero
for every scenery entity: the world geometry never swayed even though
the independently-classified shadow caster did, so shadows visibly
swayed under rigid trees. Both classifier call sites now compute
FoliageFlags via the identical FoliageWindClassification.Classify call
and entity-scoped HasCutoutSubset OR the classic (non-packed) path
uses, and GetOrCreatePackedGroup copies it exactly like
GetOrCreateInstanceGroup always has. The G2/G3 classified-output
digest (AddOpaqueSubmissionGroup/BuildTransparentSubmissionDigest) now
also folds GroupKey.FoliageFlags into its hash — present in the key
since round 1 but never actually read by either digest function, so a
content-level (not just group-count-level) classic-vs-packed
divergence is now caught.
F2 (medium): the delayed-alpha replay path (PrepareDeferredAlphaDraws)
hardcoded Flags = 1, dropping bits 1/2 for any group replayed through
it — a trunk instance promoted into the alpha-blend group mid-fade
(the #188 translucency-promotion case) would stop swaying for the
duration of its fade. Now 1u | key.FoliageFlags.
F3 (nit): ComputeEntityHasCutoutSubset's three call sites (classic,
caster, and the newly-fixed packed classifier) each allocated a
closure over _meshAdapter per Setup entity per frame. A new
context-taking overload passes the mesh adapter as an explicit
argument to a static lambda instead, letting the compiler cache one
delegate for the method's lifetime rather than allocating fresh ones.
A3 test gap: WbDrawDispatcher.BindDirectionalShadowReceiver is now
internal so DirectionalShadowGpuTests can drive it directly with a
bare RecordingGpuDevice pass encoder, proving it emits
UniformAtmosphericFrame with the exact buffer/offset/size a
DirectionalShadowFrameBinding carries — paired with the existing test
proving that binding carries the caster's real bind forward untouched.
F1's missing test: PackedDispatcherOracleTests chains
FoliageWindClassification.Classify (called with the packed
classifier's exact argument shape) for a real 0x8... scenery entity id
through BuildIndirectArrays — the same shared, already-tested
production step both classic and packed group lists feed into BatchData —
proving the resulting flags word carries bit 0x2. Driving
ClassifyPackedBatches/GetOrCreatePackedGroup directly was not a "cheap
test": both are private instance methods reachable only through the
full RetailPViewPassExecutor route, which needs a real IGpuDevice,
world-pass scope, mesh manager, and compiled pipelines to construct —
no test anywhere in the App test project stands one up.
Nits: F4 corrects foliage_wind.glsl's header comment from "bit 31" to
the top-nibble test; F5 documents at the receiver bind site that the
caster's own AtmosphericFrameBufferBinding has its seven ABI v1
members zero/Identity by construction (only the two v2 wind members
are valid) — safe today because mesh_atmospheric.vert reads that
binding solely for wind displacement, flagged as a footgun for a
future v1-reading addition to that shader; F6 notes in the plan
(rather than fixes) that EntityCacheEntry does not proactively
invalidate when FoliageWindExclusions changes on a pack switch —
harmless with the pack off, self-heals on the entry's next natural
eviction.
foliage_wind.glsl's F4 comment-only change updated the SPIR-V
manifest's source hashes for the five includers (mesh_atmospheric.vert
+ four directional_shadow_world_* casters); the compiled .spv bytes
are byte-identical since comments do not affect bytecode.
Verify: Release build 0 warnings/0 errors. App hermetic-lane filter
6,043/0 failed. Core.Tests 4,695/0 failed. RenderPackValidator 30/30.
Full hermetic-filtered solution: 15,271/0 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>
Found at the VM6 spot-check; pre-existing from Campaign AR; values were
owner-accepted so it is filed for its own gate rather than changed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
FoliageWindByDayGroup / FoliageWindDayGroupPoint(int ActiveDayGroup, ...)
becomes FoliageWindByWeather / FoliageWindWeatherPoint(string WeatherKind,
...) in AtmospherePolicyDeclaration (Plugin.Abstractions is BCL-only, so
the key is the exact member name of AcDream.Core.World.WeatherKind rather
than the enum itself). The raw activeDayGroup index carries no weather
meaning by itself; WeatherState.cs already classifies each day group's
authored DAT name into one of five real weather kinds, and that fact was
already threaded through AtmosphericFrameInputs.Weather / uAtmosphereWeather.x
— this reuses it instead of guessing an index-to-category mapping.
Built-in table (BuiltInAtmosphericRenderPack.AtmospherePolicy()): Clear
0.25/0.15, Overcast 0.60/0.35, Rain 0.85/0.60, Snow 0.35/0.20, Storm
1.00/0.75 — all five WeatherKind members declared, the invented "Cloudy"
row dropped. RenderPackAtmospherePolicyEvaluation.FoliageWind now takes a
WeatherKind and matches by weather.ToString() (ordinal) against each
declared point's name; a kind absent from the table falls back to the
declared Clear row, then to (0,0) if Clear itself is undeclared. The
delta-seconds EMA interpolation (EaseTowardTarget) is unchanged.
AtmosphericPostProcessGraph.ResolveFoliageWind and its two callers
(RenderPostProcess via inputs.Weather; RenderDirectionalShadows via
foundation.Atmosphere.Kind) now pass WeatherKind instead of the day-group
int.
RenderPackValidation.ValidateAtmosphere (runs for every pack declaring an
AtmospherePolicy, not gated to Tier2/shadow packs) now rejects an unknown
or non-exact-case weather-kind name and a repeated kind, mirroring the
existing ActiveDayGroupMultiplier duplicate-key check.
Tests: RenderPackAtmospherePolicyEvaluationTests rewritten for the
kind-keyed API (all five kinds resolve to their declared row, an unlisted
kind falls back to Clear, ordinal exact-case matching, null-table
handling); RenderPackSpirvValidatorTests gains four descriptor-validation
cases (unknown name, wrong case, duplicate kind, the five-kind table
accepted); AtmosphericPostProcessGraphTests' three foliage-wind cases now
select WeatherKind.Storm via `with` instead of an assumed day-group index.
Spot-check (per the coordinator's ask, not changed here): yes —
ActiveDayGroupMultiplier / EvaluateDayGroupPolicy (pre-existing, Campaign
AR/VM3-era — BuiltInAtmosphericRenderPack.AtmospherePolicy()'s three rows
`new ActiveDayGroupMultiplier(0, 1.0), (1, 0.35), (2, 0.20)`) key the
sun-ray/shadow/volumetric day-group strength multiplier by the same raw
activeDayGroup index with an undocumented assumed meaning (0=brightest ...
2=dimmest), the identical class of issue this commit fixes for foliage
wind. Left unchanged per instruction; flagging for the coordinator to file.
Full solution Debug and Release builds green. App hermetic filter
6024/6026 — the same 2 pre-existing failures as VM6a/VM6b. Both were
re-run in isolation per the verification ask: both still fail alone (not
a load-flake in this environment) — confirmed via git stash earlier this
session that both already fail on the unmodified pre-VM6 baseline, so
they are pre-existing and unrelated to this change. Core.Tests hermetic
4697/4697. RenderPackValidator.Tests 30/30. No shader/spv changes in this
commit (pure C#/docs fix).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Procedural-scenery foliage (trees/bushes — entity ids in the
ProceduralSceneryIdAllocator's 0x8XXYYIII namespace) sways with weather in
mesh_atmospheric.vert and all four directional_shadow_world_* caster vertex
shaders, both calling the identical new foliage_wind.glsl include so the
shadow moves with the leaf by construction.
Classification (FoliageWindClassification, AcDream.App.Rendering.Wb): two
new BatchData.flags bits, computed once per (entity, subset) from four
inputs — entity id (bit 31 for procedural scenery), the pack's declared
FoliageExclusions membership, the subset's TranslucencyKind, and
ObjectRenderData.HasCutoutSubset (computed once per mesh at build time, not
per frame). Bit 1 marks an alpha-cutout leaf subset; bit 2 marks an opaque
trunk subset (only when its own mesh also owns a cutout subset, so rocks
stay still). WbDrawDispatcher.ClassifyBatches (world receiver) and
AddDirectionalShadowBatches (caster) call this with the same four inputs, so
casters and receivers classify identically without needing to share state.
Retail's mesh_modern/terrain_modern/mesh_detail pipelines never read these
bits, so pack-off output is unaffected.
Motion model (foliage_wind.glsl, mirrored bit-for-bit in the new
FoliageWindModel for hermetic CPU tests): height-squared-scaled slow lean
for every foliage subset, plus branch swing and per-vertex-hash-decorrelated
flutter for cutout subsets only. AtmosphericPostProcessGraph.ResolveFoliageWind
resolves the wind block once per frame.Serial — advanced by whichever of
RenderDirectionalShadows (which runs first) or RenderPostProcess is called
first that frame, with the second reading the already-advanced state, which
is what keeps the caster and receiver reading byte-identical clock/strength
values. The per-day-group mean/gust target (AtmospherePolicyDeclaration.
FoliageWindByDayGroup, keyed by the same day-group index convention
ActiveDayGroupMultipliers already established: Clear/Cloudy/Overcast/Rainy)
eases toward its target over WeatherSystem.TransitionSeconds (10s) so a
weather change never snaps; wind-enabled off or indoor instead gates the
OUTPUT to an exact zero (not an asymptotic approach) so a settings toggle or
cell transition is immediate. The wind clock is a Stopwatch started at graph
construction (monotonic, session-relative magnitude for GPU sin() accuracy),
overridable by the same ACDREAM_SKY_PHASE_SECONDS pin SkyRenderer already
uses, for deterministic offline gates.
New settings: wind-enabled, wind-strength, wind-direction-degrees (225°
default — no authored retail wind direction exists to read),
wind-lean-metres, wind-branch-metres, wind-flutter-metres (0 on Low),
wind-canopy-height-metres.
Register row IA-25 files this as an intentional, strictly opt-in divergence:
retail applies no per-vertex wind displacement to any geometry. Known,
accepted limitation: classification is per mesh-subset (one BatchData.flags
word per indirect-draw batch), not per entity instance, so the rare case of
one mesh subset being reachable from both a procedural-scenery and a
non-scenery placement would classify all of that subset's instances alike.
Tests: FoliageWindClassificationTests (the full classification matrix),
FoliageWindModelTests (identity on non-foliage/calm-wind/base-vertex,
canopy-top displacement bound, z-never-increases, trunk has no flutter
term), RenderPackAtmospherePolicyEvaluationTests (exact day-group lookup,
no interpolation across day-group ids, easing convergence without overshoot
or discontinuity), AtmosphericShaderAbiTests (each of the five shaders calls
acdreamFoliageDisplace exactly once; mesh_modern/terrain/mesh_detail call it
never), and four AtmosphericPostProcessGraphTests additions (indoor/disabled
exact-zero gating, settings-to-UBO wiring, same-frame-Serial idempotency —
the last proxies the caster/receiver agreement invariant without needing
this hermetic harness's WbDrawDispatcher/TerrainModernRenderer dependency
chain to exercise RenderDirectionalShadows directly).
App hermetic filter: 6015/6017 (the same 2 pre-existing failures as VM6a,
confirmed unrelated). Core.Tests hermetic: 4697/4697. RenderPackValidator.Tests:
30/30. Full solution Debug and Release builds green. Shader recompile
touched exactly the 5 edited files' .spv (plus manifest); the retail oracle
set and every other pack shader are byte-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AtmosphericFrame (set 3/binding 5) grows additively from 160 to 192 bytes:
two appended vec4 members, uAtmosphereClockWind and uAtmosphereWindAmplitude,
carry the foliage-wind clock/weather and amplitude inputs VM6b's shader
displacement will read. RenderPackShaderAbi renames the old constant to
AtmosphericFrameSizeBytesV1 (160), adds AtmosphericFrameSizeBytesV2 (192),
keeps AtmosphericFrameSizeBytes pointing at the current (v2) size, and adds
ShaderAbiVersion = 2. RenderPackSpirvValidator.ValidateAtmosphericFrame
accepts either the v1 (seven-member, 160-byte) or v2 (nine-member, 192-byte)
shape and rejects anything else naming both — this is why the frozen
external sample packs under samples/*/Shaders/*.spv, whose GLSL sources are
not in this tree, need no rebuild: a v1 shader bound to the 192-byte buffer
still reads correctly, since a bound range only needs to be >= the block's
own declared size.
DirectionalSunShadowRenderer's caster pass now binds AtmosphericFrame too
(both the multiview and per-cascade sites), through a new
AtmosphericFrameBufferBinding the graph owns and supplies via
DirectionalSunShadowRenderInput. AtmosphericPostProcessGraph.RenderDirectionalShadows
builds its own 192-byte ring allocation for this, separate from the world
receiver's frame block, because the caster pass runs before RenderPostProcess
constructs that block within the same frame. The four world caster pipeline
variants (opaque/cutout, base/multiview) are now allowed to declare binding
5 in the validator; terrain casters are untouched.
This commit is plumbing only: the two new members are always written but
never read by any shader yet (zero placeholders), so pack-on and pack-off
output are both pixel-identical to before. VM6b wires the real weather-driven
values and the shader-side displacement.
App hermetic filter: 5972/5974 (2 pre-existing failures unrelated to this
change, confirmed against the unmodified baseline). Core.Tests hermetic:
4697/4697. RenderPackValidator.Tests: 30/30. VulkanShaderManifestTests
(retail oracle set): 7/7, byte-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opus narrow re-review of 51178f7c: APPROVE. Residuals closed: the AR plan
no longer says '<=1 LSB' unqualified (99.99% of pixels; 95 foliage-
silhouette pixels up to 73 LSB, 58 isolated); the campaign doc says the
same; AtmosphericColorPipelineTests now read the SHIPPED exposure/vignette
defaults from BuiltInAtmosphericRenderPack.Descriptor and the graph's named
DefaultVignetteStrengthFallback instead of literals.
Measured for the gate (offline Holtburg hillside, High defaults vs pack
off): mean luminance -17% noon, -44% dusk, p95 unchanged, clip 0.06% both;
neutral High vs pack off: 110,561 px at |d|=1, 95 at >=5 (foliage edges).
Evidence images under docs/research/evidence/vm3/.
#422 filed: one High-default offline capture exited with
STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION after a clean managed shutdown; 1 in 8 runs, never
under validation layers. VM7 gate item.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fix round from Opus review of 87677f9c (APPROVE WITH FIXES):
1. (A1/A3) Hardened the atmospheric_filmic.frag / atmospheric_bloom_
downsample.frag shader-source pinning test: asserts the exact decode
call count (6 - three in lowFusedScene, three in main's non-fused
branch), that the 2.2 display-gamma exponent and 1/2.2 inverse in
atmospheric_common.glsl are formatted FROM AtmosphericColorPipeline
.DisplayGamma (so shader literal and CPU-tested value cannot drift),
that the 0.18 contrast pivot in atmospheric_filmic.frag is formatted
from AtmosphericColorPipeline.LinearMidGrey, and pins
AtmosphericPostProcessGraph.BloomKneeLinear/BloomThresholdLinear as
exact literals (0.73f / 1f). Also removed a stray trailing "()" from
an existing comment in atmospheric_filmic.frag that was inflating the
decode-call count to 7.
2. (B1) Re-derived the "vignette-strength" default for the linear-light
post stack. The vignette multiply now happens on linear colour before
the final encode, so a corner factor of (1 - strength) displays as
(1 - strength)^(1/2.2), not (1 - strength) directly. The accepted
look was strength 0.12 under the OLD gamma-space pipeline: a 12%
on-screen corner darkening. Under strength 0.12 in the new linear
pipeline that same 0.88 corner multiplier would only display as
0.88^(1/2.2) ~= 0.9435 (5.6% darkening - visibly weaker). Solving
(1 - strength)^(1/2.2) = 0.88 gives strength = 1 - 0.88^2.2 ~= 0.245,
which reproduces the accepted 12% corner darkening. Since
RenderPackSettingValueCodec requires every declared default to be
step-aligned from the minimum and 0.245 is not a multiple of the old
0.01 step, the step also moves to 0.005 (a finer slider, not
coarser) so the exact derived default is a valid grid point -
verified by running the ExternalTierTwoPackCanRenameEveryOwnedId
AndShaderAsset validation test, which failed with "invalid default
value" before this correction. Also updated the matching fallback in
AtmosphericPostProcessGraph.FromDescriptor (0.12f -> 0.245f) for
consistency, and added
AtmosphericColorPipelineTests.VignetteDefaultReproducesTheAccepted
TwelvePercentCornerDarkening pinning encode(1-0.245) ~= 0.88.
3. (A4) Renamed VolumetricShaftFrameParameters.LinearSunColor ->
AuthoredSunColor in VolumetricShaftQuality.cs (internal, 2 references,
both in that file - safe). Left LightSource.ColorLinear unrenamed:
grep shows 13 files depend on it (GlobalLightPacker, SceneLightingUbo,
LightBake, LightManager, EnvCellRenderer, RenderingDiagnostics, and
several Core tests) across the shared retail default-path lighting
UBO pipeline - renaming it is out of VM3's pack-only scope and would
touch the mandatory-unchanged default path. Added a pointer comment
on the field in LightSource.cs (and a one-line note at its
WorldRenderFrameBuilder.cs call site) documenting the same
display-space-not-linear fact and explaining why the rename is
deferred to its own default-path colour-space pass.
4. (B4) Added a citation beside acesFitted in both atmospheric_filmic
.frag and its C# mirror (AtmosphericColorPipeline.AcesFitted):
Krzysztof Narkowicz, "ACES Filmic Tone Mapping Curve" (2016). The fit
takes linear scene light in and returns linear display light in
[0,1] - it does not itself gamma-encode. Evidence: acesFitted(0.80 *
decode(0.46)) = 0.2064 un-encoded versus the accepted 0.51 on screen.
5. (B2) Rewrote the VM3 section of docs/plans/2026-08-22-visualmaster-
campaign.md with the shipped truth in place of the pre-implementation
guess: exposure stays 0.80 (at exposure 1.0 the linear pipeline maps
gamma-0.5 to 0.6017, essentially the same 0.6163 the owner called too
bright), bloom threshold stays 1.0 (a fixed point of both exponents),
knee moves 0.45 -> 0.73, vignette-strength moves 0.12 -> 0.245. Added
the old-vs-new curve table at exposure 0.80 across ten gamma inputs.
Replaced the acceptance criteria's "new automated test on the
recording RHI" with the CPU mirror + shader-source pins actually
used, and recorded that the real-frame masked capture WAS run
(retail vs High-with-every-effect-neutral, artifacts/vm3):
independently re-verified by re-running the pixel diff against the
checked-in screenshots - 110,561 px at |delta|=1 and exactly 95
pixels at |delta|>=5, confined to foliage-canopy silhouette edges
against sky with nothing on any ground/building/water surface. Noted
the Stage-1 luminance table re-capture is still owed at the owner
gate.
6. (B3) Corrected docs/plans/2026-08-21-atmospheric-rendering.md's VM3
summary sentence: the bloom intermediate is already linear after
extraction (no separate "bloom read" decode), and the neutral-preset
claim is now phrased as a measured numerical identity (<=1 LSB on a
real frame) rather than an unqualified "is" statement.
7. (A5) Corrected toolchain attribution: tools/compile-shaders.ps1 used
the managed Silk.NET.Shaderc path (shaderc_shared.dll) to compile in
both this round and the original VM3 commit - a Vulkan SDK glslc was
detected and its path recorded, but the managed compiler is what
actually ran. Regenerating this round only changed the atmospheric_
filmic frag stage's manifest hash (comment-only edits); the compiled
.spv bytes are unchanged, and every retail-oracle shader
(mesh_modern, terrain_modern, mesh_detail, etc.) remains untouched.
8. Replaced an invented motive in the atmospheric_filmic.frag contrast-
pivot comment ("rounded up for a stronger gamma-space contrast
feel") with the actual reason: the previous 0.5 was simply the [0,1]
midpoint of the standard contrast formula, not a deliberately chosen
value; in linear the perceptual mid-grey is 0.18.
Verify: Release build 0 warnings / 0 errors. App hermetic-filter tests:
5970 passed / 0 failed / 0 skipped. VulkanShaderManifestTests: 7/7 pass
(retail-oracle SPIR-V byte-identical; only the atmospheric_filmic frag
manifest hash changed, no .spv bytes changed).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Closes review finding F4 (docs/research/2026-08-22-campaign-ar-review.md):
retail's main-world colour, sun rays and volumetric shafts are all
gamma-encoded display-space values (the 2013 client has no linear
lighting pipeline), but bloom thresholding, ACES (Narkowicz fit),
Rec.709 luma saturation, the contrast pivot and the vignette were all
operating directly on those gamma values, then writing the result to
the UNORM swapchain without re-encoding.
- atmospheric_common.glsl gains acdreamDecodeDisplay/acdreamEncodeDisplay
(pow(c, 2.2) / pow(c, 1/2.2)). 2.2 is the retail-era CRT/early-LCD
display-gamma assumption, deliberately not the sRGB piecewise curve,
which would claim a precision retail's authoring pipeline never had.
uAtmosphereSunColor's comment is corrected from "authored linear rgb"
to "authored display-space rgb (retail has no linear pipeline)".
- atmospheric_bloom_downsample.frag, atmospheric_filmic.frag (both the
fused-Low and non-fused paths) decode every world/ray/volumetric read
before summing/thresholding; atmospheric_bloom_blur.frag is unchanged
(it already reads the now-linear bloom buffer); atmospheric_sun_rays.frag
and atmospheric_volumetric.frag are documented as writing display-space
colour that the consumers decode.
- The contrast pivot moves from 0.5 (a gamma-space midpoint) to 0.18
(linear mid-grey, the standard 18%-grey-card exposure convention).
The final filmic output is clamped in linear, then re-encoded before
the UNORM write.
- Bloom threshold/knee are re-derived for linear light: the pre-VM3
gamma-space pair was threshold 1.0 / knee 0.45, i.e. a soft range of
[0.55, 1.0] in gamma. Decoding both ends with the same 2.2 assumption
gives decode(1.0) = 1.0 (threshold unchanged) and
decode(0.55) = 0.55^2.2 ~= 0.27, so linear knee = 1.0 - 0.27 ~= 0.73.
Replaced the inline 0.45f literals with named constants
BloomThresholdLinear = 1f / BloomKneeLinear = 0.73f on
AtmosphericPostProcessGraph. bloom-strength's 0.65 default is
untouched.
- Exposure stays at its accepted 0.80 default: in linear,
encode(acesFitted(0.80 * decode(0.46))) ~= 0.50, reproducing the same
accepted midtone the old gamma-space pipeline produced as 0.51 for the
same 0.46 input (0.46 * 0.80 fed straight into acesFitted, no
decode/encode). Highlights now retain more (gamma 0.9 input moves from
~0.74 to ~0.85 through the full pipeline) and blacks deepen slightly
(gamma 0.1 moves from ~0.09 to ~0.05) — the owner's visual gate judges.
- Added AtmosphericColorPipeline, a CPU mirror of the GLSL decode/encode/
ACES/grade/filmic math (line-for-line, with a header comment requiring
it stay mirrored), and AtmosphericColorPipelineTests: neutral-preset
identity within half an 8-bit step for a 0..255 grey sweep (proving the
neutral preset is numerically the pack-off image), decode/encode
round-trip within 1e-6, monotonic-in-exposure, the pinned midtone/
highlight/shadow numbers above, and the bloom-knee derivation.
- Added a shader-source pinning test so a future edit cannot silently
drop the colour-space conversions: atmospheric_filmic.frag must
contain exactly one acdreamEncodeDisplay( call in main()'s output,
atmospheric_bloom_downsample.frag must contain at least three
acdreamDecodeDisplay( calls.
- Regenerated SPIR-V (tools/compile-shaders.ps1, glslc from the
installed Vulkan SDK). Only atmospheric_bloom_downsample.frag.spv and
atmospheric_filmic.frag.spv changed in bytes; every other pack shader
that includes atmospheric_common.glsl recompiled to a byte-identical
binary (the new decode/encode helpers are unreferenced dead code for
them). VulkanShaderManifestTests' retail-oracle SHA-256 set
(mesh_modern, terrain_modern, mesh_detail, etc.) is untouched and
still passes — the retail default path did not change.
- Docs: noted the linear-light move in the AR plan's Slice 1 section,
and added a "Colour space" section to the render-pack ABI doc
(docs/render-packs/semantic-bindings-v1.md) naming which inputs are
display-space and pointing at atmospheric_common.glsl as the
reference implementation. No ABI version bump — the binding layout
is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixed step-count volumetric ray marches (Low/Medium presets, e.g. 40 steps)
sample the same t values at every pixel, so a shadow-cascade edge crossing
lands at the same march step across a whole neighbourhood of pixels and
reads as visible concentric banding around light shafts. Offset each
pixel's march phase with interleaved gradient noise (Jimenez 2014,
fract(52.9829189 * fract(dot(gl_FragCoord.xy, vec2(0.06711056,
0.00583715))))) instead of the fixed 0.5 sub-step center: t = (step + ign)
/ steps. This decorrelates the step boundaries across pixels, turning the
banding into fine per-pixel noise that the existing quarter/half-res
upsample already averages away. Pack-on only — atmospheric_volumetric is
never used on the retail default path; extinction, colour, and early-outs
are unchanged.
Regenerated SPIR-V via tools/compile-shaders.ps1: only
atmospheric_volumetric.frag.spv and shaders.manifest.json's source hash
for that stage changed.
Also files #421 (docs/ISSUES.md) for Campaign AR review finding F7: the
directional-shadow pass's DirectionalShadowTransformBufferSet duplicates
the main pass's N.5 instance SSBO instead of binding it, to be resolved
once the planned GPU-culling step for shadow cascades lands. Updates the
VM5 ledger row and outcome note in
docs/plans/2026-08-22-visualmaster-campaign.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Dated 'VM4 correction' notes, not silent rewrites:
- AR plan: NoOpRenderPackProductionIntegrationTests is a 2x2 recording-
device fixture, not a production pin; the real invariance is VM0's.
Both '14,928/14,928 zero skips' totals qualified: hermetic lane filter.
- Stage-2 connected report: the dense-town CPU figures ran under the
automation observer (9.8 MB/frame alloc) and say nothing about the
owner's hitch on the product; clean numbers are VM0's.
- Track A report + findings doc: TerrainUtils.GetNormal only orients
scenery; the render normals were already smooth; A2 replaced central
differences with retail's incident-face average (the reviewer's own
premise error).
- Findings doc: 'retail brightens' is the fallback path only; real
hardware runs the single-pass lerp (VM2). LandscapeDetailTextures = 0
answers the landscape open question. VM0 production table added as the
baseline.
- Completion audit retail-path row and the review's F1/F2/F3/F5 headers
annotated with their closures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opus narrow re-review of ae651312: APPROVE. Closes its three residuals:
- AP-232 filed: retail's single-pass stage-1 OUTPUT alpha
(MODULATE(TEXTURE, CURRENT) @0x0059c549) is the blend weight for a
translucent subset; acdream's two-draw model is exact for opaque
subsets (fog identity pinned) and a bounded weight difference on
translucent ones. Distinct from AP-34 (queue order). Owed since
05970306.
- TerrainAtlas.DetailSamplerDescription names the production sampler
(WRAP/LINEAR x3 per ACRender::SetDetailSurfaceInternal @0x006b6280);
the test now asserts that constant's properties instead of a
test-local copy.
- Plan VM1 section: fragment now described as fogged; VM1 marked CLOSED
with the Holtburg measurement (+2.17/+0.57/+0.16 vs predicted
+2.2/+0.66/+0.16) and the detail-on cost (+0.3-0.5 ms CPU at Arwic).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opus dual-lens review of 05970306 + 388457a7 (APPROVE WITH FIXES). Four
items, all landed:
1. FOG (behavioural). Retail's D3D fixed-function fog stage runs AFTER the
texture-stage pipeline, so the detail contribution must be fogged, not
just the base. mesh_modern.frag already fogs the base colour
(applyFog(rgb, vWorldPos)) before mesh_detail's replay draws over it;
mesh_detail.frag previously emitted raw detail.rgb, understating fog by
f*a*(fog-detail). Fix: mesh_detail.vert now outputs vWorldPos (mirroring
mesh_modern.vert); mesh_detail.frag declares the identical SceneLighting
UBO and applyFog function (copied verbatim, same binding/std140/math) and
fogs detail.rgb before emitting it. This collapses algebraically to
retail's fog-after-combine order:
(1-a)*mix(base,fog,f) + a*mix(detail,fog,f) = mix(lerp(base,detail,a),fog,f)
RetailDetailTextureContract gains ExpectedFogged(base,detail,opacity,fog,
fogFactor); RetailDetailTextureContractTests pins the identity across 200
random samples within 1e-6.
2. EnvCellRenderer.Rhi.cs's DrawEnvCell-category comment still said "apply
the 10-50 m positive-view-depth fade" — a stale claim from before VM1
removed the fade. Replaced with the mip-chain attenuation statement that
mesh_detail.vert's header comment already carries.
3. Added the test the VM1 contract required but never had: TerrainAtlas
.TryCreateDetailTexture uploads a full mip chain (MipLevelCount ==
RhiWorldTextureArray.MipLevelsFor(w,h), GenerateMipChain called) and
registers with the repeat/linear world sampler, not single-level or
clamped. Drives the private method directly (reflection) against a
synthetic PFID_A8R8G8B8 RenderSurface through a minimal in-memory
IDatReaderWriter fake, so the lane stays hermetic (no installed DAT).
4. #226 pseudocode note: noted that retail's stage-1 OUTPUT alpha
(MODULATE(TEXTURE, CURRENT), 0x0059c549) — the framebuffer blend weight a
delayed-alpha subset composites with — is not modelled; acdream instead
draws a second pass weighted by detail.a*diffuseAlpha. Identical for
opaque subsets, a bounded difference on translucent building/EnvCell
subsets already covered by the existing AP-34 shared-alpha-queue
divergence row. Also qualified the tmpmaterial.Diffuse.a = 1f (0x0059cb99)
citation to name its exact branch (burnedInStaticLights < 0 &&
*(render_device+0x7e4) == 0); the other branch leaves diffuse FromVertex,
but the opaque->1 / fading->opacity mapping still holds either way.
Nit also folded in: EnvCellRendererTests' new SubmitRhi instance-alpha test
is now a [Theory] over WbRenderPass.Opaque and .Transparent, pinning the
bind-before-first-draw invariant on both passes.
Regenerated mesh_detail's committed SPIR-V and the shader manifest
(tools/compile-shaders.ps1); no other shader pair changed.
Verified: dotnet build AcDream.slnx -c Release (0 warnings, 0 errors);
dotnet test on AcDream.App.Tests (Release, hermetic lanes) green, including
the shader manifest tests explicitly; AcDream.Core.Tests unaffected/green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
VM2's live cdb read against the PDB-paired retail client (GUID
9e847e2f-777c-4bd9-886c-22256bb87f32) proved
m_caps.bCanDoSinglePassDetailing = 1 and trysinglepass = 1 on real hardware,
so D3DPolyRender::RenderMeshSubset (0x0059ca10) never falls back to the
two-pass framebuffer blend the earlier #226 port reproduced. Every loaded
CGfxObj sets use_built_mesh = 1 (CGfxObj::InitLoad 0x005346b0), so buildings
and EnvCells always take the single-pass texture-stage combine set up in
D3DPolyRender::SetSurface (0x0059c4d0):
result = lerp(base * diffuse, detail.rgb, detail.a * diffuse.a)
RenderMeshSubset lights opaque built-mesh subsets with
tmpmaterial.Diffuse.a = 1, so on the live Dereth category texture
0x06006D58 (mean rgb 0.165, mean alpha 0.132) the combine works out to
~0.868 * base + 0.022 — a mild darkening, the opposite sign of the fallback
DstColor blend's brightening.
Also removes the invented 10 m / 50 m distance fade. Retail's
ACRender::get_alpha_for_z (0x006b6230) is only evaluated in
D3DPolyRender::DrawPolyInternal (0x0059d7c0, the immediate-polygon path)
and only when the static noFadeDetail (0x00820e38, initialised to 1) is 0 —
unreachable for built meshes. Attenuation is the sampler's linear mip chain
converging to the texture mean, not a scripted ramp.
Changes:
- mesh_detail.vert/.frag: drop vDetailFade and its distance term; add
vDetailOpacity mirroring mesh_modern.vert's InstanceAlphaBuf (binding 7)
read, and output detail.rgb with alpha = detail.a * vDetailOpacity under
the corrected pipeline blend.
- VulkanViewportMapping.BlendFactorsOf / GpuEnums.GpuBlendMode.RetailDetail:
SrcAlpha + OneMinusSrcAlpha instead of DstColor + OneMinusSrcAlpha.
- RetailDetailTextureContract: replaced the distance-fade constants and
FramebufferFactor with Expected(base, detail, opacity) and IsNeutral,
matching the lerp; contract tests cover zero-alpha/zero-opacity no-ops,
the measured darkening on the live category texture, and full-alpha
replacement.
- Regenerated mesh_detail's committed SPIR-V and the shader manifest
(tools/compile-shaders.ps1); no other shader pair changed.
- Docs: #226's pseudocode note, the docs/ISSUES.md #226 entry, and the
retired TS-52 divergence-register row corrected from the two-pass
DESTCOLOR description to the single-pass path and the darkening
expectation, each citing the VM2 cdb note.
Verified: dotnet build AcDream.slnx -c Release (0 warnings, 0 errors);
dotnet test on AcDream.App.Tests and AcDream.Core.Tests (Release, hermetic
lanes) both green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Exact-pixel and production-perf comparison of 6c79d35c (+ only the A2
normal files, so no terrain mask is needed) against c51b07ef with no pack:
connected as +Acdream, visible window, one isolated config clone per
variant, pinned clocks. Open field: the only differences are idle pose,
mana digits and a passing flyer. Holtburg: same-binary-twice defines the
dynamic mask (9.8%); in the static 90% both self-diffs have ZERO pixels
with |d|>=8 while base+normals vs HEAD-off has 841/729 - all streaks inside
the animated lifestone. Buildings, ground, trees, sky and UI are clean.
Perf (uncapped Release, no automation observer, ACDREAM_FRAME_PROF=1):
Holtburg CPU p50 4.7 -> 4.1 ms, Arwic 6.0 -> 5.2 ms, GPU unchanged,
alloc/frame 574 KB -> 21 KB. No regression; F5b's '27.8 ms retail CPU' was
the observer.
Three false alarms recorded so nobody repeats them: the isolated gate
settings lack fieldOfView (90 vs the real 86.33 -> a 0.952 zoom); the real
%APPDATA% settings still selected acdream.atmospheric/low (pack ON); a
minimized GLFW window is throttled and never settles.
Tools: tools/vm0/capture-visible.ps1 (pre-campaign gate + -Exe/-Live/
-ConfigDir/-CharacterName/-PreCaptureCommand), tools/vm0/perf-run.sh,
and -BuildingDetailTextures on run-offline-pixel-gate.ps1. Baseline
patches under docs/research/evidence/vm0/.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Binding rule: when retail gates a mechanism behind a capability, preference,
or trysinglepass-style switch, the port is not done until the gate's live
value is cdb-read on the PDB-paired client and cited with the binary GUID.
Records that the owner's live 'too bright' was the pack-on gamma-space
tonemap (VM3), not the detail overlay (+3% fallback / -10% real path).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Live cdb read on the PDB-paired retail client (owner's AMD GPU):
m_caps.bCanDoSinglePassDetailing = 1, trysinglepass = 1,
MaxSimultaneousTextures = 8, bTexOpDotProduct3 = 1,
LandscapeDetailTextures = 0, EnvironmentDetailTextures = 1,
landscape/object detail surfaces null, building/environment non-null,
tiling 4 everywhere.
So retail's detail combine on modern hardware is the texture-stage path in
D3DPolyRender::SetSurface (stage0 alpha PREMODULATE, stage1 colour
BLENDCURRENTALPHA): lerp(base*diffuse, detail.rgb, detail.a*diffuse.a) -
a mild DARKENING (~-10% mid-tones with 0x06006D58), not the
DSTCOLOR+INVSRCALPHA brightening that Campaign AR ported and that the
2026-08-21 findings doc + AR review both analysed. Those described the
fallback for adapters without D3DTEXOPCAPS_PREMODULATE; the reviewer's
guess that consumer drivers rarely advertised it was wrong.
VM1 now carries the re-port (SRCALPHA+INVSRCALPHA, detail.rgb /
detail.a*diffuseAlpha, neutral at a==0) together with the fade removal.
No distance fade exists on either path. Scripts are read-only attaches
with no breakpoints.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds the independent Campaign AR review (docs/research/2026-08-22-campaign-
ar-review.md): architecture, technical correctness, performance, coverage.
Findings F1-F8; F1 (default-path invariance proven only on a 2x2 recording-
device oracle) blocks merge; F2 (10 m/50 m detail fade has no retail anchor);
F3 (the port is retail's two-pass fallback; single-pass stage path
undetermined); F4 (post stack runs in gamma space); F5 (four overclaiming
sentences, one premise error the reviewer owns).
Campaign VM plans the closure: VM0 masked pixel + production perf A/B vs
6c79d35c; VM1 removes the fade (retail attenuates by mips); VM2 one cdb read
of m_caps.bCanDoSinglePassDetailing; VM3 linear-light post stack with a
numerically neutral preset; VM4 truthful docs; VM5 volumetric jitter; VM6
weather-driven foliage wind - procedural-scenery (bit-31 id namespace) cutout
subsets only, three motions (lean/branch/flutter) with gusts and per-tree
phase, shadows share the displacement include; VM7 closeout + merge.
Roadmap gains the Campaign VM pointer beside Campaign AR.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The roadmap line read "122 EmoteType x 39 Trigger mini-VM", which is the
SERVER's job — the retail client stores no quest flag, evaluates no emote, and
is never told a flag changed. Reading that line as client work is what made
H.3 look far larger than it was; measuring what we already had narrowed the
remaining scope to the contract tracker alone.
That, plus the Journal notebook and its index, shipped user-accepted today. The
two stale "what you cannot do yet" rows are corrected: the quest tracker exists,
and NPC dialogue works — the user confirmed it mid-campaign, which is what
prompted measuring the scope in the first place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Journal panel is complete: contracts from the server, a per-character
notebook, and its searchable index.
The gate ledger is recorded rather than smoothed over, because the pattern is
the point — four rounds, and every defect was one mistake wearing different
clothes: an element bound as the wrong thing, or a binding never tested. One
reported failure was not a defect at all; the character was indoors, where
retail records nothing either.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three fixes from the first connected round.
The location readout is authored EDITABLE (0x16), so it builds as a UiField —
not the UiText its "00.0S, 00.0W" placeholder suggests. The controller resolved
it as text, got null, and threw every write away in silence: Record reached the
model and reached the FILE, and never reached the screen. That is exactly what
was reported, and it is a whole class of bug, so the sweep that found it is now
a test over every element all three controllers bind.
The handlers mutated the model and left redrawing to the next frame's Tick.
Retail's ListenToElementMessage @0x004968D0 ends every one of them in Update()
instead — at the moment of the click. The deferred version happened to work in
the client and made the behaviour untestable and a frame late; the notes-page
tests I had not written until now fail against it.
Abandon is wired. "Retail's abandon path is a contract-registry command we have
not ported" was wrong — it is game action 0x0316 with a single contract id, and
ACE replies with the 0x0315 delete QT3 already handles. Nothing is removed
locally, so a refusal leaves the quest visibly intact rather than vanishing it
optimistically and having it reappear on the next full table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reported symptom: Abandon, New, Record, Start, First and Last all unclickable.
That Abandon was in the list is what identified it — Abandon is deliberately
unwired, so if it behaved the same as the others the cause could not be wiring.
UiButton read authored property 0x0D as "starts disabled" (Enabled = !0x0D).
It was the one property read in that file with no citation, and it was wrong.
Every button on the Journal panel authors 0x0D, so every one built disabled:
visible, because drawing never consults Enabled, and unclickable, because
UiElement.HitTest skips disabled elements. Exactly the reported shape.
The evidence is a sweep of every installed layout (LayoutDump gained --ghosted
for it): 85 elements author 0x0D and ALL 85 author it TRUE — not one False
anywhere in the client — and no panel ever clears it, the only four
SetAttribute_Bool(.., 0xd, ..) sites in the binary being chargen appearance,
the keymap option and the barber. A flag that is only ever true, never cleared,
and sits on New, Record, Start, Delete and Reset cannot mean "dead button";
under the old reading 85 elements were permanently dead in a shipping game.
It is not a pure ghosted LOOK either, which is why this ignores it rather than
moving it to appearance: the same 85 mix live buttons with inert column headers
("Contract", "Status", "Title", "Timer", "Label", "#"), and one appearance
cannot be right for both. Registered as QJ-2 with the measurement, so the open
question is recorded rather than quietly decided.
The test that asserted the old behaviour carried no citation either — it
encoded the same assumption. It now asserts the evidenced behaviour, with a
companion test proving the state machine's own Ghosted transition still
suppresses a click: that mechanism is separate and did not change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Journal panel now has all three tabs working: contracts from the server,
and a per-character notebook with its searchable index.
Two ported details that a reimplementation would get wrong in a way nobody
notices until they lose work:
Every navigation button commits the current page FIRST. Retail's
ListenToElementMessage @0x004968D0 calls SaveThisPage on the way out of all
five of them, which is why paging away never eats what you just typed. And the
file is written when the notes page is HIDDEN, not only at exit — a crash then
costs at most the page in front of you.
The search is CASE-SENSITIVE across label, title and notes: retail compares
with wcsstr and lowercases neither side. Making it insensitive would be
friendlier and would be a divergence, so it is ported as-is with a test naming
the reason. The double-click window is a full SECOND (m_LastClickTime + 1.0,
@0x00493158) rather than the 500 ms the item-interaction path uses, and firing
it clears the tracker so a third click does not re-open.
Two unlabelled buttons on the notes page turned out to be prev/next: retail
switches on (idElement - 0x10000565), which names them without a caption. The
running-timer readout is authored at the same x as the three day/hour/minute
boxes, so the strip is one or the other — that overlap is the data form of
ShowEditableTimer versus ShowRunningTimer, not a layout bug.
DeltaTimeToString moved out of the contract code into AcDream.Core.Ui. It is
ClientUISystem's, not gmContractsUI's — the journal timer and the contract
repeat countdown both call it, and it only lived under Quests because that was
its first caller. A bridge class to reach it across features would have been
the wrong answer to the same observation.
The journal file lives in the client's data directory rather than beside the
executable, for the same reason the chat log does. Register QJ-1.
Campaign QJ slices 3, 4 and 5 of 5 — code-complete, connected gate owed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Journal tab is not a quest feature at all: it is a per-character notebook,
entirely client-side, with no wire and no dat content. Each page holds a label,
a title, notes, a recorded location and a countdown timer, and the Page List
tab is a searchable index over them. It shares the panel with Contracts and
nothing else — retail's own naming, not a mix-up here.
The file format is recovered whole, including the detail that a journal file
which does not open with <NEWP> is REFUSED with its own error string, and the
authored max lengths (16 label / 32 title / 2048 notes) that the edit boxes
enforce.
One authored fact worth recording before anyone reads the layout as a bug: the
running-timer readout shares x=84 with the three day/hour/minute fields. That
overlap is the data form of ShowEditableTimer versus ShowRunningTimer — the
strip is either three editable numbers or one running readout, never both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The last piece of QT6's own scope: r10-quest-dialogs.md §11.6's contract half.
IGameState.Contracts exposes what the client structurally knows about quests,
which — per that same research — is the tracker and nothing else. The rest of
§11.6 (chat stream, tells, give, use, confirmations) is other features and
stays out of this campaign.
A pull-through source rather than a pushed mirror. Contracts change rarely and
are already owned canonically, so a second copy would only be a thing to keep
in step; reading through means a plugin cannot observe a stale list.
Both hosts implement it. The headless one carries contract id, stage and
progress but no names — a bot has no dat access — because losing the TEXT is
expected while losing the QUEST would leave a bot silently unable to see what
it is on. Same rule covers a contract the installed dat has never heard of: it
still projects, with empty text and a correct status, rather than vanishing.
The interface member is defaulted so a host predating this campaign still
satisfies IGameState.
Two lazy catalog loads exist (the panel's and this one) rather than one shared
instance. That is deliberate: threading a shared ContractCatalog through three
composition records to avoid reading a 322-row immutable table at most twice
per session would be plumbing for no correctness or performance gain, and the
comment at the call site says so.
Campaign QT is complete; the connected user gate is owed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The quest log is on screen. Rows come from the live tracker joined to the
authored catalog, the Status column runs QT4's port of FillProgressString, and
the detail pane shows contact, locations, description and the other timer.
Two things measured rather than assumed, each now pinned by an installed-DAT
test rather than left to the commit message:
The tab pairing is read from the authored 0x2E table, not inferred from
x-order — the FA campaign had to correct exactly that mistake, and Contracts
turns out to be the authored DEFAULT tab (0x32 = True), so opening on the
wrong one would have looked like an empty panel.
The open path needed no keybind at all. Toolbar button 0x1000055A authors
0x10000029 = 0x19 and has been sitting in ToolbarController.PanelButtonIds
since the toolbar was ported — it just had no panel behind it, so clicking it
did nothing. Registering slot 25 finished a wiring that was already
three-quarters present.
The list rebuild is revision-gated while the repeat countdown is not: nothing
on the wire changes as a cooldown runs down, so a rebuild-gated timer would
freeze on screen, and a per-frame rebuild would reset the player's scroll under
them. Both directions have a test.
Deliberately inert: the Abandon button (retail's abandon path is a
contract-registry command this campaign did not port — authored and visible,
but wiring a no-op handler would look responsive and lie), and the Journal
notes and Page List tabs, which are their own feature.
Campaign QT slices 5 and 6 of 6 — code-complete, connected gate owed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measured, not theorised. Records for the next session:
- #226 detail overlay is NOT implemented at 255b0aae, and the
BuildingDetailTextures Options checkbox is wired to NOTHING (settings +
UI exist; no consumer in Rendering/). The port must consume that
existing setting.
- Retail authors detail per terrain entry; Dereth has 33 entries but only
3 distinct detail textures, one 64x64 backing 88% of them.
- The detail pass is a framebuffer blend, not DOT3: environment uses
DSTCOLOR+INVSRCALPHA under BLENDOP_ADD, landscape uses SRCALPHA. Decoded
texture means give factors 1.03-1.20, so retail's own pass BRIGHTENS
rather than roughens - a real design decision for the port.
- EnvironmentDetailTextures gates buildings+interiors, NOT landscape
(ChangeRegion passes landscape=0).
- Refuted and recorded so nobody re-chases: highres is NOT an override dat
(20,684/2,294 ids, zero overlap - we already use it); the detail
textures are NOT normal maps (24%/8%/15% unit-length); but the engine
DOES have BumpMap/DotProduct3 machinery.
- Terrain normals are flat per-face with no averaging - whether retail
smooths is the open parity question.
- Atmospheric rendering want captured: opt-in shader packs, tier table,
and the shadow constraints (alpha-tested casters, animated casters via
the N.5 SSBO, indoor gating, streaming-bounded cascades, the #129 bias
trap, and the shadow_objects naming trap).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measuring the host layout rather than assuming changed what this slice is.
gmContractsUI is not a panel of its own: it is tab 1 of a THREE-tab "Journal"
panel at gmPanelUI slot 25, beside a notes page and a page list. Building it as
a standalone window would have produced something retail does not have, and
the mistake would only have surfaced at a visual gate.
The other two tabs are out of scope, so the expected intermediate state is a
panel with two dead tabs — recorded here so it is not filed as a defect.
Everything else the page needs is now measured out of the dats: every authored
label, the per-row child ids RefreshContractListbox writes, and the list's
scrollbar link. The list is a UiTemplateListBox, the widget OP2 already built,
so the page is binding work rather than new widget work.
LayoutDump --props now resolves StringInfo through DatStringResolver instead of
printing the type name, which is how the labels were read at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
H.3's roadmap line ("122 EmoteType x 39 Trigger mini-VM") describes the
SERVER's job. The retail client never stores a quest flag, never evaluates an
emote, and is never told a flag changed — so most of H.3 was never client work
at all. Measuring what we already have narrows the remaining scope to one
thing: the contract tracker, the only structured view of quest state a client
ever gets. The user confirmed NPC dialogue works live.
LayoutDump could only dump a layout you already knew the id of, but the decomp
hands you a CLASS id with no layout attached (UIElement::RegisterElementClass),
so the gap between the two was crossed by guessing. --find closes it, and it
searches the element's TYPE as well as its id because registration keys on
Type — searching only the id finds a real element with the same number and
quietly answers the wrong question, which is exactly what it did on the first
run here.
The plan records the wire layout, the panel's authored children, and
FillProgressString in full, including the three things a reimplementation
would get wrong: TimeWhenDone is never read, the countdown anchor is not on
the wire, and DescriptionProgress is a printf format rather than a string.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CT-B4 was filed as "the plain-text session chat log, path and rotation
UNKNOWN, needs a live check." Both unknowns dissolve once you read the
handler: there is no automatic session log. Retail's @log is a COMMAND.
DoSetOutput @0x0057E4F0 takes a filename, StartCopyOutputToFile @0x0057C8A0
does the fopen(name, "a+"), and running it again with no argument closes it.
Nothing rotates because it appends forever, and nothing has a fixed path
because the player names the file.
The path question that DOES exist — where a bare name lands — was answered
all along by retail's own help text, which CH4 extracted verbatim into our
help table a fortnight ago and nobody read: "a log file named Aclog.txt in
your Asheron's Call directory." A blocked question sat on top of a committed
answer.
We cannot use the install directory: the launcher replaces it atomically on
update, so a log written there is wiped by the next update or blocks it. The
client's own log directory is the equivalent that survives. Rooted paths are
honoured verbatim, as retail's fopen would. Register CT-5.
The verb was registered in the help table but NOT in the command catalog, so
/log printed help and did nothing — and the CH4 conformance registry recorded
it as a "server passthrough" precisely because that shape is indistinguishable
from an unimplemented client command. It never went on the wire at all. Both
are corrected, with the totals moved in the same commit rather than left to
drift.
Moving it into the catalog also moves which help table answers for it, so
retail's real text moved to the catalog-verb table in the same change. Without
that, /help log would have silently started printing acdream's own invented
one-line summary — caught by the coverage test, and now pinned by a test that
names the text.
All five replies are byte-decoded from the PDB-paired binary rather than read
off Binary Ninja's previews, which truncate at ~33 characters and would have
lost the second half of every one of them (including the two spaces retail
puts after "Copying chat to %s.").
The writer attaches on OPEN, not at startup — retail's help is explicit that
only what appears after the command is copied — and detaches from the
transcript it actually attached to, so a session teardown cannot leave a live
handler writing into a file the player believes is closed. What gets written
is the composed display line with the shared timestamp, because retail's
fprintf sits inside AddTextToScroll: downstream of composition, upstream of
glyph layout. Logging the raw entry text would have produced a file of bare
fragments with no speakers.
acdream's logs carry no inline tag markup where retail's do, since tags live
beside the text as spans here rather than inside it. Registered as CT-6 rather
than reconstructed purely to write it to a file.
Register: CT-5, CT-6.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The blink is not code. It is data, and we were throwing it away.
A retail UI state's media is a small program: images interleaved with timed
pauses, branches, and a terminal hand-off to another state. Our importer kept
the FIRST image per state and dropped the rest, so nothing authored could ever
animate — the indicator was correct in every other respect and simply sat
still.
Measured from the installed dats (LayoutDump --media 0x1000048C), the chat
unseen-text indicator's Normal state authors thirteen steps: two frames
alternating every half second, three times, then `State 13` — Ghosted, whose
authored 0x3B is Invisible.
So retail's indicator is a three-second attention FLASH that hides itself, not
a badge that stays lit until you scroll to the bottom. Nobody would guess that
from the code, because there is no blink code anywhere; the behaviour lives
entirely in the authored sequence. Our shipped version stayed lit, which is
the one thing the data says it must not do.
Sampling is a pure function of (steps, elapsed) rather than a playback object
holding a cursor, so an element only has to remember WHEN its state began and
the whole thing is testable without a clock, a GPU or a frame loop. One shared
UiMediaClock is advanced once per frame by RetailUiRuntime; a UI element has
no tick of its own.
The controller change is the other half: it starts the flash on the rising
edge ONLY. Re-setting Normal every frame would pin the sequence on frame zero
and it would never blink at all — which is the failure mode the second new
test exists to catch, and which no "is it visible?" assertion would notice.
When the sequence reaches its terminal step the controller follows it down
instead of re-lighting it.
Two guesses are refused rather than made, and both are registered: a Pause's
max duration (every sequence measured sets min == max, and what the range MEANS
is not in the decomp) and a sub-1 branch probability (falls through, the
direction where a malformed sequence stops rather than animates forever).
A jump-cycle with no elapsed time is bounded so a bad sequence cannot spin
inside a frame.
Kept `Other` steps in the list rather than filtering them, so a jump's authored
index still lands on the entry it names.
Register: CT-3, CT-4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign CT Group D, closing the campaign.
D1. The ImGui-era ChatPanel has not been constructed anywhere in src/ since
Campaign V deleted AcDream.UI.ImGui. Verified that directly rather than on the
audit's word, then removed it with its three panel-only test files. Those tests
passed, which is exactly the problem: they made the real input surface look
better covered than it is.
ChatVMCombatTests was KEPT — three of its four tests are genuine ChatVM
coverage and only one exercised ChatPanel, so just that method went. Deleting
the file would have quietly dropped real coverage along with the dead kind.
Three doc comments referencing the deleted type were rewritten rather than left
as dangling crefs.
D2. docs/ISSUES.md turned out to be ACCURATE already — #358 and #363 are
recorded CLOSED there, contrary to the audit's summary. What was stale was the
chat DIGEST's "Open" section, which still named four closed issues and claimed
Campaign CH's connected gate was owed. Corrected against ISSUES: genuinely open
are #359, #360, #361 and #366.
The digest also gained a Campaign CT section (the tag mechanism, the MEASURED
tag colour, and what shipped) and three DO-NOT-RETRY rows earned this session:
- Do not model authored state media with one image per state — the unseen
indicator's Normal state carries SIX frames and that IS retail's blink.
- Do not read an element's role from a Binary Ninja field NAME — the names in
ChatInterface's binder are shifted badly enough to assign a UIElement* into
a float field.
- Do not assume our side has a gap because retail has a mechanism. That cost
this campaign twice in one session: the transcript was claimed unbounded
when ChatLog has always capped at 500 entries, and C1's auto-scroll was
planned as a port when UiScrollable already did it.
CT-C4 is deferred and marked so: pure test coverage over behaviour the audit
confirmed already works, changing nothing a user can see.
Solution builds clean; full hermetic gate green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"I do not want any censoring." Recording it as a KNOWING divergence (register
row CT-2) rather than leaving it as an implicit gap, because retail does filter
and someone reading the code later would otherwise read our silence as an
oversight.
The option itself stays: FilterLanguage still stores and ships its bit to the
server exactly as retail does, so anything the SERVER gates on it behaves
normally. What acdream does not do is substitute words in the transcript.
The attempt before the decision is kept in the plan, since it establishes two
things that would otherwise be rediscovered:
- The taboo table's dat id is not readable from the decomp —
TabooTableAdaptor::CheckCensorsW @0x00682A30 reaches it through
DBObj::GetByEnum with the arguments elided by Binary Ninja. Measured the
portal master enum map (0x25000000) instead: 22 categories, with category 3
(0x0E010001 / 0x0E010002) and single-entry categories 8 and 11 as the
plausible candidates.
- Chorizite.DatReaderWriter declares a TabooTable DBObj type but does not
decode it: only DBObjType and HeaderFlags. The format would need decoding
here first.
Also sharpened CT-B4's status to research-blocked — the chat log file's path
and rotation are not in the decomp either.
Group B therefore ships B1 and B2 and is complete as scoped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Campaign CT slice B1.
CORRECTION TO THE PLAN: this slice was written as "the transcript grows for the
life of the session — a slow leak". That was wrong, and the plan said it
because I read the retail-side finding and inferred our side without checking.
ChatLog has always been bounded (ConcurrentQueue, maxEntries default 500, with
a dequeue loop in Append). There was no leak.
The real gap is the UNIT. Retail bounds the rendered transcript by CHARACTERS —
0x2710, beheaded toward 0x1D4C at a newline boundary — while we bounded the
model by messages. Two different things: a window of 500 messages is far more
scrollback than 10,000 characters, and the message cap is a safety limit on the
log rather than a display rule.
So the budget is applied where retail applies it: on the rendered window, not
the model. ChatLog's entry cap stays as the model-level bound.
Two deliberate simplifications, both registered as CT-1 rather than left
implicit:
- ONE threshold, not retail's two. The hysteresis exists to stop retail
re-trimming an accumulating buffer on every append; we rebuild the visible
list each time, so there is nothing to damp, and a second threshold would
only make the oldest visible line jump around as messages arrive.
- Whole-line cutting rather than a newline search near an offset — our unit
already IS the line, which is what retail's newline preference is for.
Filtered-out lines deliberately do not consume budget: a line this window
filters out is not in retail's buffer at all, so counting it would mean turning
a filter OFF silently shortened the visible history.
Solution builds clean; full hermetic gate green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user set the goal: complete retail parity for the chat system AND the chat
GUI, not just the green clickable name that started the review. Plan restated
around that bar, with a definition of done — every retail behaviour either
implemented or carrying a divergence-register row, every user-visible surface
covered by a test, and the digest/ISSUES describing reality.
Slices regrouped into A (the tagged-text capability, a strict chain where
nothing is visible until A4), B (system behaviours), C (GUI), D (hygiene), plus
the research still owed before specific slices and what is deliberately out of
scope.
Four items joined the plan that the original six lanes did not own, because
they fell between lanes:
- the /r, /t, /tell text-replacement macro (the commands work; retail's
VISIBLE expansion to "@tell {LastTeller}, " does not exist)
- FilterLanguage, which is a decorative toggle: we store it, ship the bit and
show it in Options, and never actually filter anything
- the plain-text session chat log retail writes and we do not
- the option-gated timestamp prefix
Also corrects the CH3 command-registry research note. Its "acdream status"
columns are from before slice CH4 and list 13 verbs as MISSING that have all
since been added — cg, soc, o, co-vassals, fellows, group, party, vassal, ab,
guild, ct, clfg, crp — and its DIVERGENT row for /g is likewise stale: acdream
maps /g to Fellowship, matching retail, confirmed against the live client
today. The retail side of that document is still the authority; only the
columns describing us were wrong. They misled this session's investigation,
which is exactly why the banner says to verify against ChatInputParser.cs.
Nothing implemented.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six parallel research lanes on retail's chat text and window behaviour, plus a
plan. The headline: the green clickable speaker name is not a chat feature and
not a colour, it is a missing capability in the TEXT stack.
Retail's client sprintfs literal tag markup into the chat line, and the text
element parses the brackets while appending, attaching a ref-counted tag PER
GLYPH. A tagged run is emergent: adjacent glyphs whose tag pointers are equal.
A glyph takes the tag colour (property 0x1D) only when a tag is open and its
type is 0x10000001; otherwise the ordinary line colour (0x1B).
The colour itself was the one thing the decomp could not settle — it is
authored, not runtime-built — so it was MEASURED out of the installed dats
rather than assumed from a screenshot: P0x1D = RGB(0,178,0). That also exposed
a trap: the tag colour is per-ELEMENT and authored while the line colour on the
same element comes from the runtime chat table, so filing "tag green" into the
LogTextType table would put it in the wrong place.
Our own audit found the gap is narrower than feared. UiText ALREADY draws
multi-coloured runs (the character stat panel uses it); the path is just gated
to single-line elements. The draw path needs no renderer work, and HitChar
already resolves a click to line+column. The real blocker is that sender
identity is destroyed before it reaches the renderer: ChatEntry carries
Sender/SenderGuid the whole way, and ChatVM.RecentLinesDetailed drops both.
Two findings beyond the original question. Retail BOUNDS its transcript
(10,000 chars, trimmed to ~7,500 at a newline) and splits auto-scroll from an
unread indicator by sampling "was at bottom" before the line lands — a naive
port auto-scrolls forever and leaks for the life of a session. And the chat-UI
audit turned up an untracked bug: Escape in the chat input does nothing at all,
because UiField has no Escape case and a focused field also suppresses the
input dispatcher's fallback.
Every lane was instructed to write "UNKNOWN — needs X" rather than guess, and
they did; the carried unknowns are listed in the plan rather than papered over.
Seven slices proposed, nothing implemented yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chat deep-dive proved the MECHANISM behind retail's green clickable
speaker name — a glyph tag coloured from property 0x1D rather than the line's
own 0x1B — but not the colour itself: BuildChatColorLookupTable @0x004F31C0
builds only the 0x1B array, so the value is authored rather than runtime-built
and the research correctly returned "UNKNOWN" instead of assuming the green in
a screenshot.
--colors prints the 0x1B/0x1D arrays of every element in a layout, which
measures it out of the installed dats:
chat 0x2100006F, transcript 0x10000011
P0x1B [0x00] R=204 G=204 B=204
P0x1D [0x00] R= 0 G=178 B= 0 <- the green
Recorded in the research note, including the trap it exposes: the tag colour is
per-ELEMENT and authored, while the line colour on that same element comes from
the runtime chat table. Filing "tag green" into the LogTextType colour table
would put it in the wrong place entirely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The requirements research from 2026-07-29 was nearly lost: it lives in a
session titled "graphics" because it was one strand of a session about
something else, and could not be found again by any search. The research
itself was committed (6077ce4d) and survived; this makes it findable and
usable by a session picking the work up cold.
Contents: reading order, the architectural conclusion not to relitigate
(VTank's meta FSM, expressions and loot engine are plugin-land, not
host-land; the K2 headless triad is already the right substrate), the
five dependency-ordered steps, every relevant file path, and the project
rules that bind the work.
Two things the handoff adds beyond relaying the research. First, a
changed-since section: three of the research's "gap" rows have closed —
vendor landed 2026-08-08, fellowship 2026-08-12, secure trade 2026-08-14 —
so step 4's substrate is materially stronger than when the plan was
written, and §3's gap table is the part that has aged. Second, every path
is verified against the live tree as of today rather than copied forward:
WorldEntitySnapshot is still exactly four fields, IPluginHost is unchanged,
there is still no enchantment-enumerating view and no point-goal movement
primitive, and IHeadlessBotPolicy is internal to AcDream.Headless so step 1
mirrors its shape rather than re-exporting the type.
All 30 path references were checked programmatically. Also records that
claude-memory/ is a junction that resolves in the main checkout but not
inside a worktree, which would otherwise read as a broken pointer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ten slices, six planned and four the gate rounds added, all shipped through CI
and accepted live: the update flow "works, it updates as it should", launcher
self-update "pass", the client's exit back to the character selector "pass".
The plan now records what the gate rounds found that the plan could not, since
every one of the four was invisible to the automated suite:
- headless play and character refresh had never run once — the launcher passed
the graphical host's argument shape to the headless host, which reads
arguments[0] as a command;
- refresh was harmful as well as broken, opening a second connection the server
treats as a new login;
- Stop WAS the ungraceful exit, killing the client five seconds in;
- Play was below the fold behind the settings form.
And three findings worth keeping: the verification cache cannot see a same-size
same-timestamp change (measured — the CI runner's /tmp is ZFS, 141 of 200
same-size rewrites kept an identical mtime), testing the launcher exercises the
INSTALLED client rather than your source, and a locally built launcher stamps
1.0.0 and therefore can never be offered an update.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All six slices are committed locally with the full solution green at 14,370
tests. Records the one thing a gate tester will hit that is NOT a Campaign LU
defect: the installed client predates the #420 character-select crash fix, so
Play still dies until a release carrying it is published.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>