# Campaign AR Stage 1 live gate

**Date:** 2026-08-22
**Verdict:** PASS — project-owner accepted; Stage 2 authorized

## Scope

This is the physical-display and desktop-performance stop that followed the
[Stage 1 automated gate](2026-08-22-atmospheric-stage1-automated-gate.md). It
records the project owner's live acceptance of the opt-in Atmospheric pack; it
is not final Campaign AR acceptance.

The owner exercised the Vulkan client against the local ACE server through the
Stage 1 correction rounds: visible authored sun and moon shadows, selection and
configuration persistence, temporal texture/shadow shimmer, frame pacing and
desktop responsiveness, world selection, fullscreen, and final exposure. After
the exposure correction the owner reported **“Looks good!”** and directed the
campaign to synchronize with main and proceed autonomously through Stage 2.

The opt-in Atmospheric exposure changed from `1.00` to `0.80`. The retail
renderer remains the default and authoritative path. Physics, collision,
gameplay, and network behavior are unchanged.

## Matched exposure evidence

The final comparison pinned time, day group, sky, weather, MSAA, route, and
camera framing. Its five screenshots and machine-readable metadata are under
[`artifacts/atmospheric-rendering/live-exposure-comparison-exposure080-20260822-125033/`](../../artifacts/atmospheric-rendering/live-exposure-comparison-exposure080-20260822-125033/).

| Scene/preset | Retail mean luminance | Atmospheric mean luminance | Delta | Atmospheric p95 delta | Saturation delta | Clipped pixels |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Outdoor / High | 0.1090 | 0.1003 | -8.0% | +6.8% | +29.8% | 0% |
| Interior / High | 0.2711 | 0.2813 | +3.8% | -3.5% | +5.2% | 0% |
| Outdoor / Low | 0.1090 | 0.1011 | -7.2% | +8.4% | +30.1% | 0% |

Before the correction, Atmospheric High measured +19.6% outdoors and +24.5%
indoors. The `0.80` correction removes that overexposure without clipping.
The final outdoor Atmospheric High capture reports 6,613 shadow casters, four
cascades, 95,260,912 resident GPU bytes, and 285 performance samples.

## Acceptance boundary

This gate does not fabricate evidence for a second connected remote player,
portal/reconnect or device-recreation lifecycle, external package flows,
long-run convergence, or unavailable physical GPU classes. Those remain Stage
2/closeout rows, followed by the final project-owner acceptance gate.