acdream/docs/research/2026-07-25-slice-g4-production-cutover-automated-gate.md

Slice G4 Production Cutover — Automated Gate

Date: 2026-07-25

Production cutover: ef1d263337997bb030eadb7b8e71d73dc659907a

Gated source: 03b10183e95985c658e5975d2cc1a082a589738d

Result: automated gate accepted; user visual gate pending

Purpose

G4 makes the retained, scene-built RenderFrameView the production entity source at the five existing retail PView stages. Terrain, buildings, EnvCells, particles, alpha ordering, selection, lighting, mesh/texture ownership, and GL execution retain their established owners. The old route is still built only as a diagnostic referee while lifecycle automation is enabled; it is not drawn.

Cutover shape

• RetailPViewRenderer borrows the exact generation/frame-stamped product.
• RetailPViewPassExecutor expands its ordered route ranges at the same five PView stages used before the cutover.
• WbDrawDispatcher classifies and draws packed candidates through the established shader, texture, light, alpha, and selection owners.
• Unchanged static classifications and ordered scene indices persist across frames; only dirty records refresh.
• Full-scene digests and old/new comparisons are consumer-gated and absent from an ordinary launch.
• Production does not require or call the current-path referee.

Corrections made before and during the gate

The first implementation pass found and corrected four integration costs before the cutover commit:

1. ordinary runtime composition incorrectly required the optional comparison observer;
2. selection geometry was constructed twice;
3. a diagnostic scene digest sorted the full scene every production frame;
4. outdoor/dynamic indices were copied and sorted every frame despite stable membership.

The first exact nine-stop run then exposed an independent reveal-readiness weakness. Composite warmup used the same 128-item limit for cheap candidate discovery and expensive mesh/texture preparation. Caul's roughly 21,000 retained objects could exhaust the portal reveal window before discovery finished. 129dd77d separates those budgets.

A second run proved that a late membership edge could still restart the whole-world follow-up scan. 03b10183 adds a stable destination-neighborhood source over GpuWorldState's canonical published buckets. Warmup now reads only the 3×3 reveal neighborhood, including static and live projections while the generation is deliberately quiesced. Both corrections apply equally to the old and retained draw paths; neither changes the visual rollback boundary.

Exact physical evidence

Route	Report	Product comparisons	Final rebuild / cross-frame reuse	Result
Capped nine-stop	logs/connected-r6-soak-20260725-043955.report.json	20,502	1 / 6,109	pass
Uncapped nine-stop	logs/connected-r6-soak-20260725-044923.report.json	24,463	2 / 6,037	pass
Uncapped dense Arwic	logs/connected-dense-town-20260725-045805.report.json	1,634	2 / 3,833	pass

Every route used a Release binary whose embedded commit exactly matched 03b10183e95985c658e5975d2cc1a082a589738d, exited with code zero through the graceful logout path, and recorded:

• zero product/referee candidate mismatch;
• zero reveal invariant failure;
• every canonical reveal ready;
• zero composite warmup items at every stable checkpoint;
• zero pending render-journal operations or rejected scene deltas;
• retained-classification reuse across returns;
• fixed-camera PNG artifacts for every checkpoint.

Dense Arwic exercised 15,530 resident objects and 111 active animated statics. Its final frame retained 4,949,760 bytes of packed classification and reused 3,833 unchanged visible projections.

Performance interpretation

The connected G4 gate intentionally keeps the complete old route and field-level referee enabled on every sampled frame. Dense Arwic therefore reported 29.3 ms CPU p50 and roughly 10 MiB of diagnostic allocation per frame while GPU p50 remained 1.8 ms. These are comparison-mode costs, not the production-only result. An ordinary development launch after consumer-gating measured roughly 8 ms with about 90 KiB frame-thread allocation in a dense scene. The authoritative production-only performance matrix belongs to G5, after the user visual gate permits deletion of the old route and transition diagnostics.

Deterministic gate

• Production composition succeeds without a comparison observer.
• The product routes in exact PView stage order.
• Transform-only scene updates preserve index revision and refresh only the dirty record.
• Membership/sort changes advance index revision and rebuild ordered indices.
• A 21,025-record warmup discovery completes independently of the conservative 128-entity preparation/upload budget.
• Readiness snapshots include destination static/live projections even while ordinary gameplay visibility is quiesced.
• App Release: 3,775 passed / 3 skipped.
• Complete Release solution: 8,259 passed / 5 skipped.
• Release build: zero errors; the complete test build retains 16 pre-existing test warnings.

Visual gate and rollback

The user must still inspect login, outdoor/dungeon portal transitions, selection, alpha/translucency, animated/equipped objects, particles, radar, and repeated destination returns before G4 can delete the old referee.

If that visual gate fails, the exact surgical command is:

git revert ef1d263337997bb030eadb7b8e71d73dc659907a

Do not reset the branch and do not revert G3 (6a026c5a). The two reveal-readiness corrections are valid on both draw paths and remain after the cutover revert.