acdream/docs

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 — 2026-07-24

• Milestone state: M3, “Cast a spell,” landed 2026-07-21. M4, “Live in the world,” is active.
• M4 gameplay program (paused while the authorized performance program executes): the pre-M4 world-interaction completion program in plans/2026-07-23-world-interaction-completion.md. The eight-slice GameWindow decomposition and its connected visual matrix are complete.
• Current active engineering program: Slices A–D and Slice E0–E5 of plans/2026-07-24-modern-runtime-architecture.md are complete. Production world-mesh streaming consumes the validated prepared package, typed residency is bounded/accounted, and streaming now has typed admission plus immediate old-generation quiescence, metered retirement, and retained cursor-budgeted publication across render, physics, statics, building registries, collision/reflood, and EnvCells. The canonical reveal generation now owns an exact destination reservation across every typed budget dimension; incomplete destinations remain in portal space and receive retail's centered wait cue instead of forced early reveal. The physical console is available for E6 deterministic/connected closeout. See the Slice D residency report.
• Completed gates: R6 locomotion/collision/projectile/teleport/radar and the final two-client portal-out/materialization observer comparison (#218).
• Separate visual verification: the shared-alpha lifestone/particle result in #225; its connected resource-lifetime and performance routes pass.
• Carried behavior debt: #153 (far teleport onto an unstreamed edge), #116 (two narrowed slide-response cases), and divergence rows TS-50/TS-51.
• Deferred engineering tracks: render ECS/MP3 remains behind its explicit user decision gate; Linux/headless automation (Track LH) remains future work.
• Divergence audit: 178 active rows — IA 17, AD 37, AP 85, TS 34, and UN 5 — plus the retained retired TS-37 history note.
• Latest automated baseline: Release build succeeds; 8,158 tests pass and five are intentionally skipped. The capped, uncapped, and dense-Arwic physical prepared-asset routes all completed their portal/input/lifetime assertions and disconnected gracefully.

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.

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.