acdream/docs/plans/2026-07-24-modern-runtime-slice-e-cost-budgeted-streaming.md

Modern Runtime Slice E — Cost-budgeted streaming and retirement

Status: complete — E0/E1/E2/E3/E4/E5/E6 landed and gated 2026-07-24 Program: docs/plans/2026-07-24-modern-runtime-architecture.md Baseline: Slice D closeout commit 66690805 Behavior contract: no visual-quality or retail-behavior reduction

1. Outcome

Slice E removes whole-window portal publication and retirement transactions from a single update frame. It preserves the existing worker, canonical GpuWorldState, presentation owners, retry receipts, world-reveal barrier, and renderer resource owners.

The change is scheduling and lifecycle architecture:

• one immutable StreamingWorkBudget defines real per-frame limits;
• one single-writer scheduler admits and advances explicit work stages;
• destination-critical work receives reserved capacity across portal frames;
• old generations become unavailable and quiescent immediately;
• expensive owner/resource teardown resumes from exact cursors;
• publication advances through exact owner receipts under time, byte, entity, upload, and retirement-operation limits;
• the existing WorldRevealCoordinator remains the only reveal predicate.

No distance, texture, particle, cell, collision, or presentation quality is reduced.

2. Retail boundary

Retail teardown is synchronous:

• CLandBlock::destroy_static_objects @ 0x0052FA50;
• CLandBlock::Destroy @ 0x0052FAA0;
• CObjectMaint::DestroyObjects @ 0x00508C30.

Retail portal/cell blocking freezes object maintenance, physics, landscape, game time, and ambient sound while continuing scene/UI/event work: SmartBox::UseTime @ 0x00455410.

Acdream's async adaptation may defer physical cleanup, but may not leave a retired owner active. Full translation: ../research/2026-07-24-retail-streaming-retirement-pseudocode.md.

3. Existing-owner inventory

Concern	Current owner	Current behavior	Slice E action
Worker inbox/outbox	LandblockStreamer	unbounded channels; near jobs prioritized	retain worker; expose bounded, allocation-free single-consumer drain and backlog facts
Completion apply	StreamingController._deferredApply	retained List; count-budgeted loads; unload and priority ring bypass	replace with explicit generation/priority FIFO stage queues and exact retained-byte accounting
Full reload	BeginFullWindowRetirement	snapshots and begins every resident retirement synchronously	retain stable snapshot/cursor and advance admissions under budget
Origin recenter	OriginRecenterRetirement	has a cursor but drains it to completion in one call	make the cursor the canonical budgeted admission receipt
Logical/spatial detach	GpuWorldState.DetachLandblock/DetachNearLayer	exact immediate bucket withdrawal; captures entity receipt	preserve; add destination-generation quiesce before cursored detaches
Retirement ledger	LandblockRetirementCoordinator	retryable per-stage/per-entity state, but advances a complete ticket on begin/advance	expose one bounded atomic step at a time; stable FIFO
Retirement effects	LandblockPresentationRetirementOwner	lights, translucency, plugin, terrain, physics, cells/buildings	preserve order; each entity/stage consumes measured budget
Publication ledger	LandblockPresentationPipeline	retryable stage booleans, but Advance runs the complete transaction	convert booleans/cursors into resumable atomic publication steps
Render publication	LandblockRenderPublisher	terrain/visibility/AABB/buildings/EnvCells whole stages	retain receipts; meter GPU bytes and split iterable registries where needed
Physics publication	LandblockPhysicsPublisher	rebuilds terrain/cells/buildings/statics/reflood in one call	cursor cell/building/static preparation and commit at safe mutation boundaries
Static presentation	LandblockStaticPresentationPublisher	allocates dictionaries/sorts arrays, then loops prior/plugin entities	prepare stable ordered arrays once; cursor cleanup/light/plugin work
Mesh upload	ObjectMeshManager/WbMeshAdapter	existing per-frame renderer owner/budgets	report exact upload bytes/operations to the streaming meter; never move GL ownership
Reveal	WorldRevealCoordinator + WorldRevealReadinessBarrier	one correct login/portal predicate	add destination generation/readiness stage facts; never duplicate predicate
Portal wait cue	PortalTunnelPresentation	authored tunnel and centered wait notice port exists	hold tunnel past five seconds and publish diagnostic; never early reveal
Audio	OpenAlAudioEngine/AudioHookSink	one-shot owner is not retained in source slot	tag 3-D voices by owner; stop old-generation owners at quiesce

4. Work model

4.1 Immutable budget

The App-layer type is equivalent to:

public readonly record struct StreamingWorkBudget(
    TimeSpan MaxUpdateTime,
    int MaxCompletionAdmissions,
    long MaxAdoptedCpuBytes,
    int MaxEntityOperations,
    long MaxGpuUploadBytes,
    int MaxGlRetireOperations,
    float DestinationReserveFraction);

All fields are positive and validated as one profile. The initial High/default profile is evidence-tuned, not a reduction in quality:

• 2.0 ms update-thread streaming work;
• 64 completion admissions;
• 8 MiB retained CPU payload adoption;
• 256 entity operations;
• 8 MiB requested GPU upload;
• 64 logical GL-retirement admissions;
• 75% reserved for destination-critical work while a reveal is pending.

These are initial scheduling ceilings, not content ceilings. Work continues on later frames until exact convergence. Connected E gates may retune the profile as one atomic change.

The compatibility MaxCompletionsPerFrame setting maps to complete Low/Medium/ High/Ultra work profiles during migration. It does not remain an independent hidden second throttle.

4.2 Meter

StreamingWorkMeter is stack/frame scoped and single-thread owned. It records:

• start/deadline timestamp;
• admitted results and retained CPU bytes;
• entity operations;
• GPU bytes requested;
• GL retirement operations;
• stage completions, yields, overruns, failures, and oldest-work age.

Reservation is checked before an atomic operation using its conservative known cost. Elapsed time is checked after every atomic operation. A first operation may run when a dimension is otherwise empty so progress cannot deadlock; any single-operation overrun is named in diagnostics and becomes a required split site.

4.3 Cost estimation

LandblockStreamResultCost is computed once from immutable payloads:

• terrain vertex/index bytes;
• entity count;
• mesh-reference count;
• EnvCell visibility/shell count;
• physics cell/building/GfxObj counts;
• prepared payload arrays retained by the completion.

It never uses process working set as a scheduling unit and never counts the memory-mapped package's address space as adopted bytes.

5. Queue and ordering contract

One scheduler owns queues by (generation, priority, stage).

Priorities:

1. destination collision/required Near scene;
2. visible Near;
3. ordinary Near;
4. Far/speculative;
5. retirement cleanup after immediate quiesce.

Rules:

• FIFO is exact within one generation/priority.
• Generation supersession cancels stale unpublished work and releases its retained-byte charge.
• Destination reserve applies only while the canonical reveal generation is pending.
• Unreserved capacity is work-conserving: any queue may use it.
• At least one noncritical/retirement operation is admitted when capacity remains, preventing starvation during a slow destination.
• Failed stages retain their exact receipt and queue position.
• Callback reentrancy appends work; it never mutates the active cursor.
• _deferredApply, MaxDrainIterations, the eager priority-radius bypass, and count-only MaxCompletionsPerFrame execution disappear at cutover.

6. Immediate quiesce versus deferred release

At a hard destination-generation edge:

1. The old world generation is marked unavailable to normal world drawing, picking, radar, status targeting, and collision queries.
2. Object/static animation, PhysicsScript, particle emission, and ambient/ owner-tagged audio for that generation are frozen or silenced.
3. The portal tunnel/UI/event path continues, matching retail's blocking_for_cells branch.
4. Stable resident landblock IDs are captured once.
5. Per-landblock spatial detach and owner/resource release advance from cursors.

Quiesce is idempotent and generation-scoped. It does not destroy live server identity, replay Hidden/UnHide, or clear the replacement generation.

For ordinary Near→Far demotion outside a hard portal edge, the exact landblock detach remains the immediate visibility/collision boundary; only its expensive owner cleanup is deferred.

7. Publication contract

One accepted completion progresses through:

Admitted
  -> PreparedReceipt
  -> RenderPrefix
  -> PhysicsBase
  -> RenderCellsBuildings
  -> StaticEntityPresentationAndCollision
  -> SpatialCommit
  -> RenderPinsAndEnvCellReplay
  -> LiveProjectionRecovery
  -> Complete

Each transition owns a retry receipt and known cost. Mutation order remains the existing retail-rooted order. A stage cannot publish partial externally visible state unless its receipt describes and resumes that exact partial prefix.

Destination reveal consumes only Complete/renderer-upload facts belonging to the active destination generation. Far-ring work may continue after reveal.

8. Threading

• Worker threads build immutable LandblockBuild/prepared payloads and enqueue immutable completions only.
• The update/render thread is the sole scheduler, meter, world-state, publication, and retirement writer.
• GL upload/non-residency/deletion remains with renderer resource owners.
• No update operation waits for the worker, a GPU fence, file I/O, or a lock held by render work.
• Back-pressure never blocks the update thread. Worker-side bounded queues may wait/cancel; update-side admission is non-blocking.

9. Delivery checkpoints

E0 — Oracle, inventory, and contract

• Record named-retail teardown/blocking pseudocode.
• Inventory every current publication/retirement owner and bypass.
• Define budget dimensions, atomic work, queue ordering, quiesce, retries, threading, diagnostics, and acceptance.

Complete 2026-07-24.

E1 — Typed budgets, meter, cost model, and diagnostics

• Add validated StreamingWorkBudgetOptions to RuntimeOptions.
• Add pure StreamingWorkMeter and deterministic injected-clock tests.
• Add exact immutable completion-cost estimation.
• Publish per-stage backlog, bytes, oldest age, work/yield/overrun facts through lifecycle artifacts.
• Preserve current execution while measuring the would-yield decisions.

Complete 2026-07-24. RuntimeOptions now owns one validated scheduling profile (time, admissions, retained CPU bytes, entity operations, requested GPU bytes, GL retire operations, and destination reserve). The single-thread meter has a deterministic clock seam, first-operation progress rule, explicit yield/oversize/failure/overrun facts, and no effect on legacy execution at this checkpoint. Immutable completion payloads receive deterministic charges for their exact array data and logical retained entries; this is deliberately not misreported as CLR heap size. Lifecycle JSON now includes last-frame work, deferred retained bytes/age, and pending publication/retirement counts.

Validation: complete App suite 3,643 passed / 3 skipped; complete solution 8,124 passed / 5 skipped; Release solution build green. Existing priority, retry, stale-generation, and deferred-compaction tests remain green.

E2 — Explicit admission queues

• Replace _deferredApply with stable generation/priority queues.
• Bound result admission by count and CPU bytes.
• Remove MaxDrainIterations.
• Preserve exact retry position and stale-generation rejection.
• Keep current publication atomic until E4, but execute only work admitted by the typed meter.

Complete 2026-07-24. Production now consumes the worker channel through one allocation-free TryPeek/TryRead source, prices the exact immutable result before adoption, and admits it through the typed completion-count and retained-CPU dimensions. Accepted work lives in reusable stable FIFOs for destination, control, unload, Near, and Far classes. FIFO order is exact inside each class, a blocked publication head does not reorder its tail, callback appends cannot invalidate an active receipt, and exact-reference compaction cannot conflate equal records or GUID/landblock reuse.

_deferredApply, MaxDrainIterations, direct priority hunting, and the unload budget bypass are gone. Destination and unload work win queue order but consume the same execution meter. One indivisible publication may make progress after admission work, but that privilege is granted only once per frame and every oversize/overrun remains named. Stale generations consume a bounded admission without retaining their payload. The old completion-count quality setting now selects a complete scaled time/count/byte/operation profile rather than acting as a hidden second throttle.

Validation: 240 focused App streaming tests and 58 focused Core streamer/ controller tests passed; the complete App suite passed 3,656 / 3 skipped, the complete solution passed 8,138 / 5 skipped, and the Release solution build was clean. Physical connected and visual gates are intentionally deferred until E6; the active desktop was RDP and is not valid performance evidence.

E3 — Quiesce and budgeted retirement

• Add destination-generation world quiesce.
• Tag/stop owner audio at the immediate edge.
• Make full-window and recenter retirement admission cursor/time/entity bounded.
• Make each retirement ticket advance by bounded atomic entity/stage work.
• Prove no old generation ticks, emits, collides, targets, or renders while its retained memory converges.

Complete 2026-07-24. WorldGenerationQuiescence now publishes the hard login/portal edge through one generation-scoped availability state owned by WorldRevealCoordinator. The edge withdraws world drawing, picking/radar spatial queries, target selection, object/static animation, PhysicsScript time, particle/effect progression, liveness, spatial reconciliation, and owner-tagged 3-D audio while network/event/command, portal presentation, UI, streaming, and destination readiness continue. A superseding reveal remains continuously quiescent and only its exact generation can reopen the world; canonical live records and readiness state remain retained, so the mechanism does not synthesize Hidden/UnHide or rebuild server identity.

Full-window and shared-origin retirement are now retained frame transactions. Generation invalidation, worker-inbox clearing, accepted-payload release, region clearing, stable resident capture, and landblock detachment all resume from exact cursors through the frame's single StreamingWorkMeter. LandblockRetirementCoordinator preserves stable FIFO order and advances one entity or one owner stage per reservation across scripts, classifications, lighting, translucency, plugin projection, terrain, physics, cell visibility, building registries, and environment cells. Failures retry the exact unfinished entity/stage without replaying committed work. A landblock detach remains one named indivisible spatial boundary; its complete entity count is charged before the operation.

Validation: 51 focused reveal/quiescence/retirement tests passed; the complete App suite passed 3,666 / 3 skipped; the complete solution passed 8,148 / 5 skipped; Release solution build green. The physical connected performance and visual gate remains deferred to E6 because the active desktop is RDP and is not valid GPU/FPS evidence.

E4 — Cursor-budgeted publication

• Move stable ordered arrays/cost facts into retained receipts.
• Cursor static cleanup, static light/collision/plugin publication, physics cell/building work, and environment-cell publication at safe boundaries.
• Feed GPU requested-byte and retirement-operation facts from renderer owners.
• Prove every failure resumes the exact unfinished operation without replay.

Complete 2026-07-24. One accepted completion now remains at the exact queue head while LandblockPresentationPipeline advances retained render, physics, and static receipts through the frame's single meter. Stable entity/Gfx/building and prior-owner arrays are captured once. Terrain upload bytes are charged at the render owner; physics cells/buildings, static collision/light/plugin work, prior static teardown, shadow reflood, building-registry construction, and EnvCell shell construction advance one bounded operation at a time. Building and EnvCell replacements are prepared off-side and become visible only when complete. Failures retain the unfinished cursor and never replay a committed prefix. Settings/native callbacks can defer policy changes but cannot drain publication outside StreamingController.Tick.

The final GpuWorldState.MutationBatch remains one deliberate observer-atomic operation: bucket mutation, render-id ownership, activation, and the outer visibility notification cannot span frames without exposing a partial spatial identity. It is time-metered and named for E6 overrun evidence; all iterable owner work now occurs before it.

Validation: focused render/building/publication/controller tests passed; the complete App suite passed 3,669 / 3 skipped; the complete Release solution passed 8,152 / 5 skipped; Release solution build green. Physical connected performance and visual evidence remains an E6 gate.

E5 — Destination reservation and reveal generation

• Replace eager PriorityRadius execution with destination reservations.
• Join scheduler destination generation to the existing reveal coordinator.
• Keep the tunnel animating and surface the retail wait cue/diagnostic beyond five seconds.
• Remove the last count-only execution/bypass paths.

Complete 2026-07-24. WorldRevealCoordinator now owns one exact generation/cell/radius reservation from login or portal begin through complete or cancel. StreamingController no longer exposes a mutable priority landblock/radius pair: accepted work records the reveal generation that classified it, stale completion cannot consume a replacement generation's reserved lane, and stale teardown cannot clear the replacement reservation. The frame meter records destination and non-destination use independently and, while a reveal is active, protects the configured destination share across wall time, completion admissions, adopted CPU bytes, entity operations, requested GPU bytes, and GL-retirement admissions. Destination work still uses the same global ceilings and the existing first-indivisible-operation progress diagnostic; it does not regain a budget bypass.

The former ten-second forced materialization path is deleted. An incomplete destination remains in the authored portal scene until the canonical render, composite, and collision predicate is true. After five seconds the retained gameplay UI displays retail's centered "In Portal Space - Please Wait..." notice and lifecycle telemetry records the cue once; the tunnel continues its DAT animation and repeats the notice on the retail camera-rotation cadence. Login completion now ends its reveal reservation/quiescence at the same auto-entry edge that exposes the ready world.

Validation: 91 focused reservation/reveal/teleport/UI tests passed; the complete App suite passed 3,674 / 3 skipped; the complete Release solution passed 8,158 / 5 skipped; Release solution build green with zero warnings. The physical-local routes and final performance/resource assertions remain E6, not E5.

E6 — Gates and closeout

• Deterministic pressure, reentrancy, failure, cancellation, stale-generation, GUID reuse, dungeon, outdoor, and session-reset suites.
• Release build and full solution tests.
• Physical-local capped/uncapped nine-stop and pinned dense-Arwic routes.
• Compare portal p99 and maximum single-frame allocation to Slice A and Slice C.
• Require zero viewport-before-ready, zero stranded old generation, staged upload, collision, effect, audio, or GPU owner.
• Fixed-camera screenshots and subjective visual gate only if pixels change.
• Update architecture, inventory, issues, roadmap, divergence register, and durable memory.

Complete 2026-07-24. Deterministic budget, pressure, cancellation, stale-generation, retry, callback-reentrancy, GUID-reuse, quiescence, and resource-ownership gates pass. The Release solution builds and the complete suite passes 8,164 tests with 5 intentional skips.

The exact 91e82c3c6850fcedbf20322b2ecf4fdcd11a2b2a Release binary passed capped and uncapped nine-stop routes plus pinned dense Arwic on the physical local AMD display. Every destination materialized only after the canonical render/composite/collision predicate, every client exited gracefully, and every canonical checkpoint ended with zero pending publication, retirement, worker/destination/class backlog, staged upload, composite warmup, residency staging/requested-GPU, or retiring bytes.

The gate found and corrected two connected-only ownership defects. CPU mesh-cache hits now stage only for a live exact owner, preventing evicted work from recreating stale uploads. Loaded spatial residency is now distinct from world availability, allowing quiesced destination live objects to prepare their render projection without becoming drawable, collidable, pickable, targetable, audible, or simulated before reveal.

Relative to Slice A, capped/uncapped CPU p99 improved 34.7%/30.4% and largest frame allocation fell 84.7%/82.2%. Relative to Slice C, CPU p99 improved 21.4%/16.1% and largest frame allocation fell 33.5%/9.7%. Full evidence: ../research/2026-07-24-slice-e-cost-budgeted-streaming-report.md.

Post-closeout portal regression correction — 2026-07-25

The first retained-scene visual pass exposed four scheduling/ownership defects that the original E6 route did not isolate:

• a 25x25 shared-origin window admitted 625 detach operations over many frames even though no intermediate old spatial subset was observable;
• destination publication could sit behind an unrelated retirement receipt, small-mesh upload count, or composite upload count while most byte budget remained unused;
• private paperdoll/appraisal meshes borrowed world ownership and the paperdoll discarded its private object during temporary player unavailability;
• ACE could retain an expired GUID in KnownObjects, omit CreateObject on revisit, and leave doors, signs, portals, and NPCs permanently absent.

The correction atomically swaps the old spatial generation into exact deferred receipts, advances only the destination's same-key receipt out of order, and orders destination worker/publication work first. A reveal-generation render profile raises only the small-object mesh count from 8 to 64 and composite count from 16 to 64; all 8 MiB byte/array/buffer/mipmap ceilings remain unchanged. Ordinary work still advances when no destination completion exists. Private viewports now own independent mesh leases and the paperdoll survives temporary SmartBox absence. DormantLiveEntityStore retains only cold accepted spawn data after active teardown so an ACE revisit can hydrate through the ordinary generation-safe transaction.

The world-availability edge now ends at retail's portal/world viewport swap; the one-second WorldFadeIn protocol tail still sends LoginComplete and closes teleport state later. The user confirmed faster portal transit, continuous paperdoll presentation, and persistent server-spawned objects after repeated portal travel. Full evidence: ../research/2026-07-25-portal-regression-closeout.md.

10. Acceptance

Slice E closes only when:

1. No priority or unload path bypasses all work budgets.
2. No frame admits another operation after a configured count/byte/entity dimension is exhausted. The documented first-indivisible-operation rule is the sole oversize path and remains named.
3. Every wall-time overrun names one indivisible operation and the scheduler admits no later operation after its deadline. Because the meter uses elapsed wall time on a non-real-time OS, thread preemption can make an otherwise bounded atomic operation observe more than 2 ms; the physical gate therefore also requires materially improved route/portal p99 and no repeatable algorithmic tail.
4. Old generations become unavailable, tick-frozen, and audio-silent at the hard transition edge.
5. Retirement/publication retries resume exact cursors without replay.
6. Deferred retained CPU bytes stay within their queue budget.
7. Reveal is possible only for the active destination generation and the existing readiness predicate.
8. Portal-window p99 and largest frame allocation materially improve over the post-Slice-A physical baseline.
9. Complete connected routes end with zero pending publication, retirement, upload, effect, collision, audio, and stale-generation owners.
10. Visual output/range/quality and retail gameplay behavior are unchanged.