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Erik 22a157225c docs(render): Campaign V slice V8 - the perf gate, measured in three configurations 
The verdict splits, and not where anyone expected. Measured on one machine, one
build, one day, physical console, uncapped, 4x MSAA on both arms, validation off:

  Stationary LIGHT scene (6,675 entities, 780-870 FPS)
    CPU  p50   GL 1.127 ms   -> VK 1.294 ms    MISS  +14.8%
    CPU  p99   GL 1.407 ms   -> VK 1.531 ms    MISS   +8.8%
    GPU  p50   GL 0.651 ms   -> VK 0.160 ms    PASS  -75.4%
    Alloc/frm  GL 77,664 B   -> VK 11,440 B    PASS  -85.3%
    Working    GL 943.7 MiB  -> VK 877.1 MiB   PASS   -7.0%

  Stationary DENSE scene (21,024 entities, identical on both arms)
    CPU  p50   GL 5.934 ms   -> VK 5.775 ms    PASS   -2.7%
    CPU  p99   GL 8.867 ms   -> VK 7.354 ms    PASS  -17.1%
    GPU  p50   GL 1.673 ms   -> VK 0.909 ms    PASS  -45.7%
    Alloc/frm  GL 82,016 B   -> VK 15,752 B    PASS  -80.8%
    Process CPU GL 1.246 cores -> VK 1.016     PASS  -18.5%   (Windows, not ours)

  Canonical nine-stop route, identical world at all nine stops
    Frames     GL 30,378     -> VK 38,683      PASS  +27.3%
    CPU  p50   GL 11.718 ms  -> VK 9.166 ms    PASS  -21.8%
    GPU  p99   GL 2.325 ms   -> VK 1.193 ms    PASS  -48.7%

Vulkan loses two rows in exactly one configuration: a stationary field at a frame
rate no player will ever see. The reason is measured rather than argued. A
temporary probe on BOTH arms, now stripped, attributes 0.148 ms/frame to required
Vulkan WSI and synchronisation calls - vkQueuePresentKHR 0.070, vkQueueSubmit2
0.027, the timeline wait 0.026, vkAcquireNextImageKHR 0.025 - against roughly
0.014 ms for GL's whole SwapBuffers. That cost is FIXED per frame, so it is 12%
of a 1.13 ms frame, 2.5% of a 5.9 ms one and under 1% of a dense-town frame,
while the GPU and allocation savings scale with the work. The sign of the CPU
comparison flips as soon as the frame contains a town.

The campaign's named cost centre is closed rather than carried a fourth time.
Bindings 4, 6, 7 and 8 costing a descriptor write per draw - forward-carried
since V6i-3 as the thing to fix if CPU were short - measures 0.031 ms for ALL
~216 draws of the frame, about 140 ns each and 2.4% of it. No Vulkan code was
changed to chase the miss: every lever the V8 row named was already taken
(coherent rings, one submit per frame), irrelevant to p50 (pipeline pre-warm),
measured and small (descriptors), or would have traded real memory for nothing
(a fourth swapchain image, when acquire is call cost and not waiting).

The methodological finding is worth reading before the numbers. The R6 soak is
NOT the vehicle the founding numbers came from - the G5 production profile states
its own conditions and they exclude the probe, the artifact owner and the
screenshot oracle - and it is biased AGAINST Vulkan, because
VulkanGraphicsContext arms retainBackbufferCapture exactly when
ACDREAM_AUTOMATION_ARTIFACT_DIR is set, making every Vulkan frame copy the whole
swapchain image while GL reads on demand. On one binary in one hour the soak
reports CPU p50 7.3 ms and 2,531 KiB/frame where the ordinary profile reports
1.13 ms and 77 KiB. The route table above is therefore conservative in Vulkan's
favour: it wins on the vehicle that charges it extra.

Gates: Release build green; App tests 4,152 / 3 skipped, the pre-slice baseline,
no #250-family failure; strict GL offline pixel gate against 13c8733d at 1.95e-05
(11 px of 563,200), inside the 9-31 band, so GL did not move; one connected
Vulkan run with VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation proven inserted by the loader at zero
errors and zero warnings; and BOTH R6 soaks green - Vulkan 506.6 s and GL 506.8 s,
zero failures, graceful exits - which discharges the soak half of V7's
outstanding list. RenderDoc is not installed on this machine, so that capture
carries to V10 with a cause rather than as an omission.

The recommendation: proceed to V10 and amend the acceptance table rather than
waive it, naming the scene and pacing the floor is judged at. Two natural
candidates are already in the evidence and Vulkan passes both outright. The
opposite reading - that the light-scene rows disqualify the cutover - is
available and has been given the same measurement space. That call is the user's
and this slice does not make it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 21:35:16 +02:00
..
architecture docs(render): record V7 - the instrument was measuring itself, and AD-46 2026-07-28 19:44:33 +02:00
audit docs: update audit — Sprint 1 items verified (sequence counters + scenery LCG) 2026-04-13 13:51:39 +02:00
plans docs(render): Campaign V slice V8 - the perf gate, measured in three configurations 2026-07-28 21:35:16 +02:00
reference docs(reference): preserve local ACE command catalog 2026-07-27 00:03:58 +02:00
reports docs: publish the Campaign V report 2026-07-28 20:51:13 +02:00
research docs(linux): park Slice L at L1 checkpoint 2026-07-27 12:35:47 +02:00
superpowers fix(world): remove non-retail portal exit fade 2026-07-15 23:20:52 +02:00
bugs.md docs: reconcile project status and navigation 2026-07-20 13:00:41 +02:00
ISSUES.md docs: record the mid-campaign visual verdict and file #253 2026-07-28 20:21:30 +02:00
README.md docs: reconcile project state and refresh README 2026-07-27 12:53:31 +02:00

README.md

acdream documentation map

This page is the entry point for project documentation. It distinguishes current sources of truth from implementation history so an old plan or issue banner cannot silently override the current program state.

Current snapshot — 2026-07-27

  • Milestone state: M3, “Cast a spell,” landed 2026-07-21. M4, “Live in the world,” is active.
  • M4 gameplay program: resume the pre-M4 world-interaction completion program. Favorite-spell overflow, status Use/Assess, and the complete assessment surface are user-accepted. Equipped-child picking and vendor browse/transactions remain Slices 4–6.
  • Structural/runtime state: all eight GameWindow decomposition slices, Modern Runtime Slices A–J, and the connected visual/lifecycle gates are complete. GameWindow is a 1,622-line composition/callback shell. AcDream.Runtime.GameRuntime owns canonical session, entity/object, gameplay, movement, physics, projectile, environment, and portal state; graphical and no-window hosts borrow the same owner graph.
  • Headless state: Slice K is complete. AcDream.Headless is a presentation-free Windows/Linux host with deterministic commands/events, shared immutable content, multi-session isolation, reconnect, resource telemetry, and 1/5/10/30-session gates. The final two-account native-Linux soak completed ten minutes, logged out through ACE, and converged every ownership ledger.
  • Linux graphical state: Slice L0 and the L1 implementation checkpoint are complete at 66f114b2 and 11501d52. Native Windows passes the active modern-GL/audio/window smoke. WSLg X11/Wayland correctly reject their missing GL_ARB_bindless_texture. Physical-Linux validation and L2–L6 are explicitly deferred; resume at the supported AMD/NVIDIA L1 gate.
  • Completed gameplay gates: R6 locomotion/collision/projectile/teleport/ radar, two-client portal-out/materialization, indoor prepared collision, loot ordering, local/remote ground drops, and selection-marker lifetime.
  • Separate visual verification: issue #225, the shared-alpha lifestone/particle result; its connected resource-lifetime and performance routes pass.
  • Carried behaviour debt: issue #153 (far teleport onto an unstreamed edge), #116 (narrowed slide response), #235 (capped/RDP jump cadence), and the active temporary-stopgap rows in the divergence register.
  • Divergence audit: 189 active rows — IA 18, AD 38, AP 91, TS 38, and UN 4 — plus retained struck/retired historical rows such as TS-37.
  • Latest automated baseline: the Release build succeeds with the 17 test-project warnings tracked by issue #228; 8,826 tests pass and five are intentionally skipped. App passes 3,763 / 3 skips. The L1 Windows supported smoke and WSLg X11/Wayland negative-capability reports all end with zero window/GL/input/audio ownership.

Sources of truth

Read these in this order when deciding what to do next:

  1. plans/2026-05-12-milestones.md — the active playable outcome, freeze boundaries, and visual gates.
  2. plans/2026-04-11-roadmap.md — strategic phase ledger: shipped, active, deferred, and future work.
  3. ISSUES.md — tactical defects and small follow-ups. The status inside an issue is authoritative; physical order is not.
  4. architecture/retail-divergence-register.md — every known place runtime behavior can differ from retail.
  5. architecture/acdream-architecture.md and architecture/code-structure.md — ownership, dependency, update-thread, and extraction rules.
  6. architecture/worldbuilder-inventory.md — rendering/DAT code already owned in-tree versus mechanisms still ours to port.

If these disagree, milestones control the current outcome, the roadmap controls work ordering, the issue status controls the individual defect, and the architecture documents control implementation shape. Reconcile the stale document in the same change; do not leave both claims standing.

Research and implementation records

  • research/named-retail/ is the primary retail oracle: named pseudo-C, headers, symbols, and types from the Sept 2013 build.
  • research/decompiled/ is the older Ghidra fallback.
  • research/ contains focused pseudocode, traces, fixtures, and gate reports. A dated research note records evidence; it does not become a new roadmap.
  • superpowers/specs/ and superpowers/plans/ are per-slice design and execution records. Completed plans remain historical.
  • audit/ contains completion and conformance audits.
  • reference/ace-commands.md preserves the local ACE server's complete in-game command catalog and points to the authoritative per-command help surface.

Durable memory

  • ../claude-memory/MEMORY.md indexes the live subsystem memories and the render/physics digests. Read a domain digest before changing that subsystem, especially its DO-NOT-RETRY table.
  • ../memory/ contains stable engineering references such as the modern rendering pipeline, two-tier streaming, and toolchain notes.

Memory accelerates recall; it does not outrank the canonical documents above. When current truth changes, update the relevant canonical document and distill only the durable lesson into memory.

Historical and deprecated documents

  • bugs.md is the April 2026 bug snapshot. It is preserved for archaeology and is not an active ledger.
  • Dated plans and specs describe the decision at that time. Their completion wording is historical unless the current milestone/roadmap explicitly links the item as active.
  • Old R1→R8 architecture sequencing is superseded. Current execution comes from the milestones and strategic roadmap.

Documentation maintenance rules

  • Update milestone, roadmap, issue, divergence, architecture, and memory claims in the same commit when a shipped change affects them.
  • Keep one issue ID per defect. Narrow an issue in place; do not reuse another issue's number as a shorthand.
  • Mark automated, connected, and visual gates separately. An automated pass is not a visual acceptance, and an RDP throughput sample is not a local-display visual comparison.
  • Preserve research history, but remove stale “current/next” claims from living documents once the state advances.