History

Erik 392c1e22c1 fix(physics): bind a parented child to the parent's live incarnation (#319 ) A player-parented child never received a canonical cell. Its FullCellId stayed 0 for its whole attached lifetime, so it could not follow the player across a boundary. Scope was wider than the local player: every REMOTE player's equipment too. ROOT CAUSE. EquippedChildRenderController hardcoded ParentInstanceSequence: 0 for a parented CreateObject. Correct for creatures and statics, which really are sequence 0; wrong for players, whose ObjectInstance is Character.TotalLogins (ACE Player_Networking.cs:37). The relation filed under (playerGuid, 0) while the record carried TotalLogins, so both route-7 write sites — D1's attach re-cell and D2's propagation lookup — keyed on an incarnation that never matched. TryCommitParent did not validate the sequence, so the attach succeeded and printed normally. Silent. A ROUTE 7 REGRESSION (`cd3129e9`) that un-masked a latent bug: the TickChild call route 7 deleted was keyed on the child guid alone and was structurally immune to a wrong parent key. THE FIX IS TO STOP TREATING PLAYERS DIFFERENTLY, not to special-case them. Retail's attach path is guid-only end to end — PhysicsDesc::get_parent_id @0x00558a18 -> CObjectMaint::GetObjectA @0x00558a2d -> set_parent @0x00558a3e, with SetChildren @0x00509370 hash-walking by guid — and neither set_parent overload (@0x00515A90, @0x00515B50) nor enter_cell @0x00510ED0 contains any player test or instance-sequence read. Our player/non-player split was purely an artifact of keying relations by (guid, incarnation) against a wire message that carries no parent incarnation. Late-binding to whoever currently holds the guid is retail's own semantics. Fixed at BOTH producers: OnSpawn and OnCreateParentAccepted, the second carrying the byte-identical defect and not named in the contract's scope line. THE INVARIANT IS EQUALITY, NOT FRESHNESS. The contract rejected both framings I offered: every one of the 45 FullCellId liveness predicates excludes a committed child on a NON-cell clause first, so the child inherits only the parent record's existing staleness, which is already present today with no symptom. The key fix alone restores child-equals-parent for every parent class. TWO SITES GATED, inert only because the cell was zero and would have woken wrongly: the hydration candidate loop (a nonzero-cell child would take the legacy RebucketLiveEntity -> CommitRebucket, a second canonical writer — route 7's exact defect class) and RestoreShadow (would install a broadphase row for the weapon, the #184 shape, contradicting route 7's P4). Retail anchor: update_object's parent != 0 early-out @0x00515D40 — children are never independently re-placed. THREE MAJORS WERE FIXED BY DELETION. The first pass added a deferral queue for an unaddressable parent, carrying a missing child-freshness gate (A2), a sentinel-0 collision with the generation filters (A3), and unbounded accumulation (A5). Both reviewers then proved the deferred branch unreachable for BOTH producers — RegisterEntityCore defers the entire CreateObject one layer above, reading the same ?? chain, and CreateParentUpdate is produced only inside AcceptCreateCore, after that gate passes. The machinery was deleted rather than repaired, and the diff SHRANK to 76 added / 13 removed from 91/24 while gaining the A1 fix. Retail confirmed the deletion does not diverge: acdream's real port of retail's per-guid replay (QueueBlobForObject) is a different, untouched layer, and the deleted queue was a third redundant one downstream of it. THE GUARD MUST NOT TEAR WHAT IT PROTECTS. The first pass threw InvalidOperationException AFTER the canonical half had committed, so the one time it fired it left the child parented with no committed relation and a staged one blocking Resolve — a torn transaction, the exact outcome the contract pinned against. Now a pure CanCommitIncarnation precondition checked BEFORE the commit at both sites, with a logged refusal instead of a throw. Route 3's N3 principle (do not make a transient fatal on a host that must survive 30 sessions x 2 hours) reinforces it, but the tearing argument stands alone. TEST QUALITY, the recurring lesson in its most refined form. The A1 test initially passed sabotage FOR THE WRONG REASON: a mismatched ChildPositionSequence meant TryCommitParent's own gate refused in either ordering, so the three assertions carrying A1's meaning passed both ways and only an incidental staging assertion failed. It failed on stranding, not tearing. Corrected, the sabotage now names line 925 — Assert.Null(snapshot.ParentGuid), with the parent's guid in it — proving the canonical mutation happened before the catch. "Fails under sabotage" is necessary, not sufficient; WHICH assertion fails is the real question. The dual parent-class matrix (player 0x5… incarnation > 1 vs creature 0x8… incarnation 0, identical outcomes, sabotage-verified in both directions) is the structural fix for how this survived a full dual review and two connected sessions: every prior test and both captured gate logs used sequence-0 parents. Register: AP-142 clause (f); AP-132 amended to distinguish the two producers; new row AP-146 for the local player's coarse canonical cell (retail writes it per tick at SetPositionInternal @0x00515330 — which, per the retail review, ALSO walks this->children writing each child's objcell_id @0x005153AE-@0x005153D8, so retail's per-tick child propagation lives in the same function). That divergence had no row at all, a standing rule-1 violation now corrected. Follow-up #320 filed for making the player's cell track ordinary movement — deliberately excluded here: it touches the landblock-preserve contract, the Rebucketed cadence, route-2/4b-3 classification inputs AP-136/AP-138 spent four review rounds pinning, and the portal-space frozen-source-cell race. Two dual review rounds; 6 architecture MAJORs and 2 retail MAJORs closed. Diagnostic refusals are latched per child guid and the latch clears on Clear()/RemoveChild, so a recycled guid's next incarnation still logs rather than being silently suppressed. Complete Release suite MEASURED at 11,112 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed (baseline 11,090 at `52175aa1`, +22). Neither known flake fired. STILL OWED: the connected gate, with the CORRECTED positive criterion — assert the equipped child's FullCellId EQUALS the parent's after a crossing (a zero is a failure, not a silence), run with BOTH a player and a creature parent, plus the new step carrying an armed creature across a landblock unload/reload. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>		2026-08-05 11:56:31 +02:00
..
architecture	fix(physics): bind a parented child to the parent's live incarnation (#319 )	2026-08-05 11:56:31 +02:00
audit	docs: update audit — Sprint 1 items verified (sequence counters + scenery LCG)	2026-04-13 13:51:39 +02:00
plans	docs: close out C4 — all routes landed, with the four owed gates and the process findings	2026-08-05 04:13:08 +02:00
reference	docs(reference): preserve local ACE command catalog	2026-07-27 00:03:58 +02:00
reports	docs: the overnight consolidation report, open questions first	2026-07-29 03:54:43 +02:00
research	fix(physics): bind a parented child to the parent's live incarnation (#319 )	2026-08-05 11:56:31 +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	fix(physics): bind a parented child to the parent's live incarnation (#319 )	2026-08-05 11:56:31 +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:

plans/2026-05-12-milestones.md — the active playable outcome, freeze boundaries, and visual gates.
plans/2026-04-11-roadmap.md — strategic phase ledger: shipped, active, deferred, and future work.
ISSUES.md — tactical defects and small follow-ups. The status inside an issue is authoritative; physical order is not.
architecture/retail-divergence-register.md — every known place runtime behavior can differ from retail.
architecture/acdream-architecture.md and architecture/code-structure.md — ownership, dependency, update-thread, and extraction rules.
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.

README.md Unescape Escape