Commit Graph
78 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 7af8d0e870 fix(correctness): false AllAir certificates and a stale shaft cache key; 44/44 tests green
The harness's first full suite run showed 16 of 44 tests failing. Two were real defects in the owner's world:

1. ParameterRoll: the tile classifier could certify a box AllAir while the final field is solid there (3 false proofs found, e.g. density -2.092319 at (-192,16,-224)). Cause: the box diagnostic narrowed 'tail reach' to 'air reach', so the swept tunnel FLOOR -- which writes solid -- did not count as reaching the box. A false AllAir skips meshing, i.e. missing floor in game. The classifier now uses the same reach predicate as the final writer (swept chain, floor band, relief, room-mouth envelope) and propagates it through Mixed refinement nodes. Re-run: 1,288,143 lattice samples, 0 violations.

2. VerticalShaftEquivalence: LedgeSpacing and LedgeDepth were missing from the production TLS cache key, so a shaft could reuse stale ledge parameters. Both are now in the key.

The other 14: broken fixtures (missing staged corpus assets, a sampler leaking the shaft TLS marker between queries, stale candidate IDs, a window entirely inside the common tail) or stale expectations after this week's owner decisions (no authored tunnel floor, slope in degrees, rooms owning their interior). No test was deleted or weakened into vacuity; retired legacy comparisons stay as telemetry and the current stack is asserted instead. PassageLandsInOpenSpace now requires a real player-capsule fit in the final density at each authored landing (14/14, worst gradient 0.115723).

Suite: 42 tests green in one run, the two long op-stack sweeps green in serialized filtered runs (the 1800 s launch guard); a harness timeout-recording bug was fixed. Bounded probe exports unchanged (canonical 94B47A1C, owner 44E7C813). ⚠️ Harness perf scenario moved 50.74 s -> 53.58 s worker (+5.6%): the wider reach predicate skips fewer boxes. Measure on the game path and decide before merging.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MmSoF64BbRFmk9C3p1VsBJ
2026-09-18 13:13:21 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 1c642fd182 perf(tunnels): memoise the room mouth -- room ownership now cheaper than before the change
The room-wins rule cost +55% static / +36% moving worker CPU because every sample re-answered the room-mouth question. A bounded exact memo around BuildRoomMouth (4096 sets x 4 ways, 7.49 MiB, keyed on every geometry-affecting room/tunnel input) removes that: hit rate 99.91% static / 99.89% moving, and VF_FindRoomFloorCrossingWorld (19.5%/17.1% inclusive), VF_FindRoomMouthBoundary (16.0%/14.0%) and VF_EvaluateRoomLandingDensity leave the sampler's top 30 entirely.

vs the tip DLL (bf9384a runtime), same staged owner map: worker sum 29.003 s vs 30.749 s static (-5.7%), 57.232 s vs 60.923 s moving (-6.1%), request p95 -3.3% / -8.4%. Geometry unchanged by construction: canonical hash 86A99075, 64/64 tile hashes, OBJ SHA 7E0D8109..C543, identical across a repeat run and with -voxel.CrtFma3=0. Walk Connected 42,870 / 17,413; tunnel-attributed solid inside rooms 0; mouth amplitude 1.4903 cm; TilePostReachProof and DetSinCos pass. The crossing test was not rerun (the memo returns the same values; its PASS stands at 248.43 m / 26.584 s).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MmSoF64BbRFmk9C3p1VsBJ
2026-09-18 03:41:38 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 d01af4606d wip(tunnels): room wins over tunnels -- no shelf, smooth mouths; stopped before final checks
Stopped by the owner (he wanted his PC back to play) after most acceptance was in. Measured with the owner's assets: the shelf across rooms came from the tunnel core reasserting solid below its floor inside room volumes, plus the landing-floor post. Room ownership now suppresses the tunnel bottom in the generic tunnel SDF, the core evaluator and both native fallbacks: tunnel-attributed solid inside rooms 469 -> 0, and a matched-camera re-render shows the slab gone. Trimmed mouth endpoints now take their height from the room's own vertical zero crossing (join offsets -2.08/+0.40 -> -1.13/-0.71 voxels). Mouth surface periodic amplitude 1.49 cm floor / 0 cm wall (degree-six trend removal; raw local-median audit 6.19 cm kept). Canonical walk Connected, 42,870 fit / 17,413 walk-reachable (was 41,184 / 13,879); export 141,054 triangles, geometry hash 86A99075. Launches use an isolated engine saved/config directory so the owner's editor settings are not rewritten.

NOT DONE: the -voxel.CrtFma3=0 export comparison, TilePostReachProof / DetSinCos / strate crossing, the perf pair vs the experimental tip, the EditorSettings.ini diff. Unvalidated in game.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MmSoF64BbRFmk9C3p1VsBJ
2026-09-17 14:56:06 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 4fa3931176 fix(tunnels): ribs removed at the cause; authored tunnel floor removed; slope acts on the route
The owner proved in game that the tunnel core caused the ribs (voxel.TunnelAblateTunnelCore=1 removes them). Root cause: the core's final reassertion replaced any sufficiently interior sample with a fixed +16 air density, destroying the distance gradient, so marching cubes snapped the surface to the voxel grid (all 385 centre samples saturated). The core now reasserts the continuous -Core.SDF, with bottom polarity from the swept shape. The Catmull-Rom sweep from 0231072 is reverted (it cost 18-30% and did not help); the linear tapered-capsule sweep is restored.

Owner decisions implemented: bTunnelFloorEnabled has no runtime effect (reflected only for asset compatibility, ignored on PostLoad), and the authored slab / graph support-floor paths are detached from generation, so the tunnel's own carved shape is the floor. Winding and dramatic ledges no longer depend on the floor switch. Degrees authoring, its migration, and the 3840-voxel route cap stay. Mouth trim stays behind voxel.TunnelMouthTrim (default off).

Evidence: along owner tunnel 15, 385 samples at 0.25 voxel, periodic surface amplitude floor 3.55 -> 0.50 cm, wall 16.9 -> 1.10 cm, ceiling 8.80 -> 0.69 cm (acceptance < 2 cm); 0/385 samples saturated. Matched-camera render: ribs absent. Canonical walk: Connected, player-fit 41,184 (was 20,830), walk-only 13,879 (was 10,909), mouth gap 0; mesh identical with -voxel.CrtFma3=0. TilePostReachProof, DetSinCos, strate connectivity 16/16, strate crossing: pass. Perf, one S/M/S/M pair vs a rebuilt bf9384a DLL: static 26.10 vs 25.41 s (+2.7%), moving 55.34 vs 53.08 s (+4.2%), request p95 about equal. Treat as a possible small cost to re-measure, not as noise.

Not merged into experimental: waiting for the owner's in-game look.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MmSoF64BbRFmk9C3p1VsBJ
2026-09-17 02:48:20 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 10fd0b6e77 fix(determinism): own sin/cos on the world path -- same world on every CPU, 3.5% faster
On Win64, FMath::Sin/Cos resolve to CRT sinf/cosf (GenericPlatformMath.h:521/530; no platform
override), and the UCRT picks FMA3 or non-FMA3 implementations at startup by CPU. /fp:precise
closed only the compiler half, so the same build and seed could build a slightly different world
on two Windows PCs, and on Linux.

- VoxelMath::DetSin/DetCos/DetSinCos (VoxelTypes.h): fixed double-precision period reduction to
  a quarter period, then fixed float minimax polynomials; no CRT, FMath or CPU-dependent
  intrinsic. Measured max error vs sinf 5.96e-8 over the used range (|arg| <= 6.19).
- Every world-deciding FMath::Sin/Cos replaced (generator, op stacks, cave morphology, strate
  manager, content placement, strate measure); none remain in runtime code.
- Pinned test VoxelForge.Determinism.DetSinCos (golden bit patterns + error bound).
- Diagnostic start-up switch -voxel.CrtFma3=0 (Windows) forces the CRT's non-FMA3 path.
- Parse-once console switches now initialise in StartupModule on the game thread; workers only
  read them (was an unsynchronised first parse inside GetDensityAt).
- Corrected the CRC comment that claimed a CRC32 cannot give a false positive.

Proof (Codex round; orchestrator re-checked):
- Before the fix, FMA3 on vs off was identical on this Ryzen 7 5800X3D: the hole exists but was
  not observed in this world. After the fix, the canonical exports are byte-identical with
  FMA3 on and off.
- The world changed once, as expected. New canonical export SHA-256 CBB8AE18...906F (geometry
  B9EF84AC; was B3E5F4C3...377); worms region 9242C093 (was 311CA42C), walk OBJ 20CCF7BD....
  Triangle counts unchanged in every tile. Order-independent nearest-vertex distance, worms
  region: max 8.7 micrometres (the reported "11.4 m" was a line-order artefact of a line-by-line
  OBJ diff); export region max 3e-5 m.
- Capability exact: player-fit 20,830, walk-reachable 10,909, connected. TilePostReachProof,
  sealed-proof, cross-platform and strate-crossing tests pass.
- Performance, headless game path, S/M/S/M vs the committed-tip DLL: static worker 27.41 s vs
  28.44 s (-3.6%), moving 59.59 s vs 61.74 s (-3.5%); LOD0 p50/p95 not worse.

From Sol's code review (DESIGN-SOL-2026-09-15-CODE.md, section 4.1), branch sol/deterministic-math.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-16 00:55:04 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 410788f7dd perf(generation): per-chunk routing cache -- ~4% less worker CPU, exact
GetDensityAt asked the strate manager on every sample whether the chunk is a gap chunk, which
generator type it uses, and whether it uses the operator stack. All three are constant per chunk.
voxel.ChunkRoutingCache (default 1) memoises them per worker thread (Codex; reviewed by me):
- thread_local storage only, so no cross-thread sharing;
- key = generator owner id + manager pointer + manager lifetime id + layout version + full chunk
  coord, the same identity pattern as the existing CP_* refetch;
- the editor composer override is still queried in the CP_* refetch, not cached here.

Attribution for the re-rank's ~28% shared cost (offline-symbolised sampler, exclusive): GetDensityWithParams
16.4%, GetDensityAt 6.2%, unknown 5.8%, FChunkSDFSpatialIndex::GetRange 3.8%, FScopedTimer::End 1.3%,
VF_ForEachSpatialCandidate 1.2%, UsesOperatorStackForChunk 1.0%. The tunnel-cache lookup was already
near-perfect (48 misses in 2,248,091 samples). A thread-local timer cache was tried and rejected as
slower (+0.4% static, +1.2% moving). Spatial-iteration and mesher-loop changes found no isolated
exact win.

Routing A/B: static worker 28.50 -> 27.78 s (-2.5%), moving 63.01 -> 59.81 s (-5.1%).
Final DEFAULT build vs the committed-tip DLL (two interleaved runs each, same command line):
  static  worker 28.79 -> 27.58 s (-4.2%)   LOD0 p50/p95 52.3/94.8 -> 50.1/92.6 ms
  moving  worker 62.25 -> 59.97 s (-3.7%)   LOD0 p50/p95 51.4/95.8 -> 48.8/92.3 ms
Field exact: OBJ SHA-256 b3e5f4c3..9b377 on both builds, 0 per-tile differences, capability
20,830 / 10,909; TilePostReachProof, sealed-proof and strate-crossing tests pass.
Ledger: every launch was serialized with 0 editors before it. Two attribution attempts were
rejected on harness bookkeeping/output-path bugs before a clean run; one crossing run was invalid
(profiling left on, exit -1) and its retry passed. No crash folders.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-15 19:33:48 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 a668833ef5 perf(generation): exact reach gating for the tunnel core (per tile) and passage carving (per 8^3 block)
Applies ce4d878's decide-once-then-prove pattern to the two largest exact targets from the re-rank
(tunnel core 20.8%, passage carving 9.1%). Codex; reviewed by me.

Measured first, where the time is:
  core world:      far 223,860 vs near 35,515,979 cycles   -> tile gate only; the core is
                                                             near-dominated (~99%)
  core tail:       far 363,440 vs near 20,110,219
  passage, tile:   far 7,315,426 vs near 30,168,796        -> refined to an 8^3 block gate
  passage, 8^3:    far 11,233,384 vs near 26,250,838
The core already uses the tunnel spatial index. An exact skip cannot remove its cost: that cost is
in tiles near tunnels. The remaining lever there is the field-changing SDF/core merge (next).

- Core reach per tile, from lattice plus halo: swept capsule reach, floor band, floor-profile
  deviation, relief bound, room-mouth ownership. The GetDensityAt tail is identity unless
  bSupportFloor, bRoomFloor or CoreSDF < -inset.
- Passage carving per 8^3 block: capsule-chain and landing-room domains, the carve threshold and
  the SmoothMin K/6 margin. Malformed descriptors stay candidates (conservative).
- voxel.TileReachCostDiagnostics (default 0) for the far/near cost split.

Soundness: the final-field debug comparison ran 130,285,889 comparisons with 0 differences; shrunk
reach (0.5) produced 140,035 differences (60,098 in the final field) and failed as required.
Field exact: canonical 07C14005 / b3e5f4c3..9b377, 64/64 per-tile ledger identical, capability
20,830 / 10,909, strate-crossing and sealed-proof tests pass.

Final DEFAULT build vs the committed-tip DLL (same command line, two interleaved runs each):
  static  worker 28.84 -> 28.10 s (-2.6%)  LOD0 p50 53.3 -> 51.5 ms  p95 94.4 -> 93.1 ms
  moving  worker 61.39 -> 60.61 s (-1.3%)  LOD0 p50 50.9 -> 49.7 ms  p95 92.21 -> 92.27 ms (flat,
                                                                        +0.06%, within noise)
Maintenance note: these reach proofs must track tunnel/passage geometry. The next round adds an
automation test for the final-field comparison so a geometry change cannot silently break them.
Ledger: 15 builds (one C2065 fixed, one access-denied path retry); rejected TileOnly/BlockLookup
variants were slower; one hung diagnostic (a non-owner PID) was stopped; wrapper quoting failures
launched no editor. No crash folders.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-15 11:30:37 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 1d824aaab2 perf(noise): batch the three cave-warp channels through the SIMD evaluator -- exact, ~4% faster
The remove-one ablation, re-confirmed on the current build, puts the cave warp at 11.0% static /
11.8% moving of worker time: three independent Perlin3D calls per sample. VoxelNoise::Perlin3D_x3
evaluates the three warp channels together through the existing SIMD evaluator (Codex; reviewed
by me). It is wired into the generator, op-stack, classifier and room/player-fit unwarp paths.

Exact: the field is byte-identical. 0/841 tiles changed, 0 triangle delta, 0 voxels of maximum
surface displacement; canonical export 07C14005 / b3e5f4c3..9b377; capability 20,830 / 10,909;
strate-crossing and sealed-proof tests pass. The seam test (VoxelForgeMazeSeamTest, extended) has
48 neighbouring-tile and 24 cross-LOD comparisons, 0 mismatches. Before/after renders from a
camera aimed at the real arrival tunnel are byte-identical.

Cross-machine determinism: Perlin3D_x3 adds no new intrinsics, no AVX, no FMA and no runtime CPU
dispatch. It reuses the evaluator behind the compile-time gate
`#if PLATFORM_ENABLE_VECTORINTRINSICS && PLATFORM_CPU_X86_FAMILY`, so every x64 machine runs the same
instruction path; its output matches the scalar path bit for bit.

Final DEFAULT build vs the committed-tip DLL (two interleaved runs each):
  static  worker 30.83 -> 29.47 s (-4.4%)   LOD0 generation p50/p95 56.3/99.3 -> 53.3/95.3 ms
  moving  worker 67.28 -> 64.56 s (-4.0%)   LOD0 generation p50/p95 55.9/99.0 -> 53.4/96.4 ms
Ledger: every launch passed; two harness false negatives (the seam test on the game-only
validator, and a trace ended by intentional forced termination) were rerun. No crash folders.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-15 08:41:59 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 92607751b1 fix(passages): D-floors now exist inside the inter-strate gap; two stale tests corrected
Investigation of the two tests that had been failing for days (Codex; the fix reviewed and its
field claims re-run by me).

Real bug, introduced by adb34df: gap chunks take the compact bedrock path in GetDensityAt, which
applied the passage modifier but never the build-authored native D-floor. So the walkable passage
floor vanished exactly at the gap/strate seam, in the passages the player uses to cross strates.
Now gap chunks set Result = -Density, then ApplyPassageNativeFloorMC, then VF_ApplyXYEdgeSealMC.
The seal runs on the MC value, in the same order as before.

Stale tests, not code bugs:
- PassageLandsInOpenSpace: since d97373c production passes the cached world/warp seed to
  VF_SuggestLandingPoint, while the test still queried with the default seed. Both queries are
  fixed; the test now allows only exact graph-owned support-floor samples (the production
  bProtectAuthoredTunnelFloor contract), and anything else still fails. 14/14 landing ends,
  5,774/5,774 floor and capsule samples.
- ClassifyTileSoundness: since d38d4ca ClassifyTile covers the cell vertices g=0..CPA, but the test
  still sampled the mesher's outer normal halo. Both "holes" were halo-only (g = CPA+1). The test now
  asserts the current contract. TryProveSealedSolidTile already uses the exact core lattice, so it
  is not affected.

Verified: crossing test PASS (max gate 0.129 s); sealed-proof test 22/22; both classifier variants
pass (600 tiles each). Re-run by the orchestrator against this build: export OBJ SHA-256
b3e5f4c3..9b377 unchanged; capability 20,830 / 10,909 / walk-only 10,909.
Ledger: one DDC startup fatal (crash folder 43101DC8, 04:38) and a set of expected diagnostic
failures while locating the gap-branch omission; one malformed ablation argument (not a valid
ablation).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-15 06:08:59 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 8879045627 fix(correctness): cold-audit fixes -- tile-cache determinism bug, cache identities, lifetimes
Correctness round on AUDIT-COLD-2026-09-14.md (Codex; key fixes reviewed by me).

#7 (determinism, introduced by the tile-cache work): the refetch guard in GetDensityAt now
rebuilds on `bTileCacheContext != CP_UsesTileCacheWindow` or when the worker-local stack/core were
moved into a cache entry (`CP_ActiveTunnelDensityCache != nullptr`). A cache miss can no longer
evaluate a moved-from, empty operator stack. Test (VoxelForgeCorrectnessRoundTest): the pre-fix
binary CRASHED in the context-switch case (negative control); the fixed binary passes with 0/5
coarse and fine mismatches, and warm vs fresh origin-tile meshes are identical.

Also fixed, each with a focused test that passes:
- #3/#8: worker diff/surface/biome caches carry owner/layer identity (no cross-world reuse);
  #9: the shaft key gains LedgeSpacing/LedgeDepth and the island key BoundarySealThickness;
  #14: clearing passages bumps PassagesVersion; #21: HasAnyModInChunkRange is proportional to
  the queried range (the sealed-rock proof calls it per candidate).
- #1: the density-volume fill thread is paused/drained with generation; #2: each content manager
  joins its own decoration tasks before destruction; #15: non-finite/invalid modification
  geometry is rejected; #20: zero-width transition blend is guarded at runtime.
- Also #4-#6, #10-#13, #16-#18, #22. #19 is valid C++20 and unchanged.

Verified: canonical export b3e5f4c3..9b377; capability 20,830 / 10,909; fresh trace 841/841
identical, 0 origin-column mismatches; static mesher calls 18,078,130. Performance: two pairs
disagree in sign, and the means are final -2.5% static / -0.8% moving; no repeatable regression.

Known and NOT caused by this round: ClassifyTileSoundness and PassageLandsInOpenSpace were already
failing (15/17 in the grouped suite). Queued for investigation.

Ledger: first determinism launch hit the DDC fatal (crash folder 57DB6ADC, 23:21); the retry
exited 1 on the two known failures; one malformed multi-test launch was inconclusive; one
malformed trace launch was stopped; one launch with an unquoted project path found no test and its
retry passed. Everything else passed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-15 00:29:46 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 39c306b524 perf(streaming): prove sealed rock solid instead of sampling it -- crossing fix's cost recovered
4c8d06f stopped content-cutting LOD0 so the player can cross strates, at a cost of +29% static
worker CPU: LOD0 tiles in the sealed rock between strates, which the old cut skipped by accident,
were sampled in full and found solid. This proves those tiles solid instead (Codex; reviewed by me).

- UVoxelGenerator::TryProveSealedSolidTile: AllSolid only for a tile whose whole lattice lies in a
  gap/seal region. It rejects player mods (HasAnyModInChunkRange), passages plus carve pads, the
  origin spine/landing, disturbances, recipes and overrides. It is narrower than the old
  ClassifyTile, which stays off in streaming. CollisionSolidTiles / CollisionNotRequiredTiles
  bookkeeping is preserved, so the collision gate's support search still resolves.
- TryProveOutOfLayoutAirTile: a separate fail-closed constant-air proof for the zero-triangle tiles
  outside the strate layout. It never supplies collision support.
- voxel.SealedSolidProof (default 1). Mining a proven tile invalidates and re-meshes it.
- A soundness test that can fail (VoxelForgeSealedSolidProofTest): 22 candidates, 22 skips, 0
  non-solid lattice samples; a deliberately weakened diff guard produces 437 non-solid samples
  and fails.

Verified: mining tile (14,-18,-8) went from proof=1 / 0 triangles to proof=0 / 8 triangles and
re-meshed; strate-crossing test PASS (max gate 0.098 s); off/on trace 899/899 identical; export
b3e5f4c3..9b377; capability 20,830 / 10,909.

Two interleaved rounds, serialized (owner-editor count 0 before each launch):
                        baseline   crossing-fixed   + proof
  static  worker        35.5 s     41.9 s           36.0 s   (+1.4% vs baseline)
  moving  worker        78.1 s     93.2 s           78.2 s   (+0.1%)
  mesher calls static   18.078M    22.280M          18.078M
Applied triangles identical: 669,834 static / 1,331,482 moving.
Runs: one early automation probe exited 3 with no log (the corrected harness passed); one
exploratory moving run was interrupted and excluded.

Note: HasAnyModInChunkRange scans every modified chunk per candidate (cold audit #21). That is cheap
today (~20 candidates), but it grows with mining; it is queued in the correctness round.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 22:08:24 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 7a972f513d fix(ablation): tunnel-core ablation no longer disables the fused evaluator
Salvaged from the parked exact-culling round (wip/exact-cull-20260914, 49369ac). This is the only
change ported. `if (!VoxelDensityAblation::IsTunnelCoreOff() && CP_UseOpStack)` becomes
`if (CP_UseOpStack)`: with the tunnel-core ablation on, the old condition also sent coarse tiles
to the scalar per-chunk cache path. That was the 2.9x "tunnel core off" anomaly in 6ccf371. In
normal runs (ablation off) the condition is unchanged.

Salvage round (Codex; checked by me):
- Baseline confirmed on this machine: static worker 33.98 s. So the parked round really was a
  regression (~41 s with all its switches off), not machine drift.
- The parked round's always-on cost: EvaluateSDFCached did a tile-window/candidate lookup
  unconditionally; tunnel-chain signatures added candidate range checks and per-segment AABB/Sqrt
  lower bounds; CanSkipSmoothMin read exported globals + TLS per primitive even when disabled;
  passage candidate setup ran before the disabled check; the passage/landing/post paths copied
  density and built debug closures with debug off. No FORCEINLINE was lost; the added work was
  inlined into the hot sample path.
- Not ported: tile candidates (48.26 s on vs 46.19 s off even inside the WIP), the SmoothMin cutoff,
  the post early-outs (a measured loss) and the debug hooks.

Final vs baseline DLL, two interleaved runs each: static worker 33.98 -> 33.56 s, moving
73.89 -> 74.70 s; LOD0 generation p50 66.1 -> 65.5 ms static, 64.7 -> 65.3 ms moving. Equal
within noise, as expected from a change that is inert in normal runs.
Field exact: 841/841 keyed tiles, export b3e5f4c3..9b377, capability 20,830 / 10,909.
Every launch was serialized (prelaunch UnrealEditor count 0); no crash folders; two harness-only
trace wrapper failures preceded the passing trace.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 17:26:09 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 6ccf3718ff measure(perf): per-component ablation of the TunnelNetwork path; exact worms restored
Round (Codex; reviewed by me against PERF-SAMPLED.md).

Revert: voxel.WormNoiseMode / voxel.WormLatticeStep, their storage and their switches are
REMOVED. VoxelWormField has one path again, exact Perlin with the N1 short circuit. Kept:
bEnableWorms (asset), WormsForceOff (measurement only), the exact block skip (default 0).

Ablation instrument: 14 development-only, world-changing force-off bits (voxel.TunnelAblate*),
applied on the fused, op-stack/classifier, cached SDF/core and modifier/floor paths. They resolve
once per process, are hashed into the generation fingerprint, and are compiled to zero in
UE_BUILD_SHIPPING (VoxelDensityAblation.cpp). They are a measurement instrument, never a gameplay
or multiplayer switch.

Defaults exact: canonical export OBJ b3e5f4c3..9b377, worms-region 311CA42C / 75,482 triangles,
capability 20,830 / 10,909, and 841/841 keyed tiles identical to NextHeadStaticTrace_20260913.

Static worker seconds saved by removing ONE component (two off runs vs the interleaved all-on
33.06 s; baseline noise 0.27%):
  tunnel SDF 11.4%, cave warp 10.3%, passage carving 10.1%, landing posts 9.9%,
  passage structural posts 5.6%, worms 2.4%, native floor 2.2%, origin spine 1.6%,
  room SDF 1.6%, everything else <= 1.1%
Moving (2+2 runs each) confirms the top five at 6.0-11.6%. Tunnel SDF off cuts LOD0 generation
p95 104 -> 83 ms: it owns the slow tail. The positive savings sum to 58% of the static total; the
other 42% is shared. The rows are not additive.

Unexplained: tunnel-core OFF made the static total 2.9x SLOWER (95.5 s) while LOD0 generation got
faster (p50 64.7 -> 60.6 ms) and triangles fell. The report blames the changed field, which does
not fit; more likely a slow fallback path in coarse tiles. That row is not a cost measurement.

Ledger: every Unreal process exited 0 and verified the loaded DLL; two PowerShell parser errors
happened before any process started. No crashes or retries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 09:39:57 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 c132243b30 feat(worms): asset-owned worm off switch; offline stack symboliser -- cheap-worm default to be reverted
Worms round (Codex; reviewed by me against its report and PERF-SAMPLED.md).

Part 1, a real off switch: UVoxelStrateDefinition::bEnableWorms (default true, so existing assets
are unchanged). It is deliberately not in FStrateGenerationParams, so the 83-field memo-key guard
is untouched. It resolves after composer candidates, season vectors and boundary blending, is
included in the generation fingerprint, and clamps composer overrides, so a roll cannot re-enable
it. With strength 0 the fused path skips the worm block, the op-stack builder omits the worm
source, and the interval/classifier paths do no worm work. Proof: disabled == hand-zeroed control
byte for byte (70D310A4, 74,672 triangles), capability 20,856 / 10,917, connected, zero worm rows
in the symbolised sampler. voxel.WormsForceOff is a dev-only, world-changing measurement
override, included in the fingerprint.

Part 0: the sampler writes a module map (733 modules, identity checked), and a post-exit
offline symboliser (VoxelStackOfflineSymbolizer, editor module) rebuilds the all-LOD / LOD0 /
LOD1+ exclusive / inclusive / source-line tables. A planted cost was found (5 named rows) and then
removed. DbgHelp still never runs in the measured process.

Part 2, "cheap worms": FAILED to deliver, and the default is wrong. No candidate was faster:
lattice-2/4 gave no gain, and value noise was within noise static and ~2.1% WORSE in moving worker
seconds. Yet this commit carries voxel.WormNoiseMode=1 (value noise) as the default, a field change
(29/64 test tiles) with no benefit, selected after value-noise variants were tried until one
passed capability (three were rejected at 20,821-20,828). The next round reverts the default to
exact Perlin (mode 0) and removes the no-gain world-changing experiment modes.

The finding that matters: disabling worms entirely (WormsForceOff A/B, two interleaved runs each)
saves only ~2.5% static and ~3.4% moving worker time. The sampler's "worm line
VoxelGenerator.cpp:3985 = 19.4% of LOD0" was a misattribution of inlined noise code to one PDB
line. Line-level attribution of inlined code must be confirmed by ablation before a round targets
it. That is why the worm block skip (26b3476) found nothing.

Runs: the full ledger is in PERF-SAMPLED.md. Failures: one moving wrapper hit the graceful-close
timeout and was rerun; the first offline-symboliser commandlet hit the DDC no-writable-nodes fatal
(crash folder UECC-...CE75ACD5, 08:01) and was retried with the writable Saved\DDC.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 08:19:50 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 11f0c1335b fix(diagnostics): sampler can no longer crash the run it measures; worm skip default off
Harness round. Every launched run is in Saved/HarnessFixAcceptance_20260914.ledger.txt.

- FVoxelStackSampler: two sampler-on runs had died in EndPlay (logs stop after "workers drained",
  before the latency summary). The lifecycle teardown is now serialised, registration TLS is
  tagged by session, stale worker registrations are cleared safely, and in-process DbgHelp
  initialisation/symbolisation is REMOVED. The measured process now writes raw PCs only; symbol
  resolution is deferred to after process exit. (An offline symboliser is still needed for
  readable tables; it is queued first in the next round.)
- voxel.WormBlockSkip default 1 -> 0: it measured neutral (26b3476). The code, the proven bound
  and the soundness test are kept for a tighter skip later.
- Harness (Saved/*.ps1, not tracked): a writable DDC under the plugin's Saved\DDC with
  -ddc=NoZenLocalFallback, fixing the DerivedDataBackends.cpp:208 startup fatal. UE 5.7 Windows
  was verified NOT to honour -nocrashreports for its startup monitor, so the harness runs
  unattended with dialogs forced off plus a PID-scoped CrashReportClient watchdog. Failures
  still exit non-zero, and a run without its final summary line is rejected.

Acceptance: 10 consecutive mixed runs, 7 of them sampler-on, all PASS; no new crash folders, dumps,
dialogs or lingering processes. Other runs: one smoke run failed on a PowerShell
HashSet.ToArray() compatibility bug in the harness (Unreal itself exited cleanly); its retries and
the export passed. Export OBJ unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 05:17:27 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 26b34765d5 perf(generation): exact worm block skip with a proven 3D Perlin bound -- measured NEUTRAL
The sampler put the worm carve's first noise call (VoxelGenerator.cpp:3985, FusedWorm) at 19.4% of
LOD0. The worm only carves where N1 + N2 < T with N2 >= 0, so where N1 >= T it contributes nothing,
bit for bit. A block proven to have N1 >= T everywhere can skip both noise calls exactly.

- The Lipschitz bound for this Perlin3D implementation: L = (15/4) * sqrt(3) * 1.25 = 8.118988160,
  in scaled-N1 units, with a 1e-3 float-rounding margin. Adversarial sampling found a worst ratio
  of 3.187 (0.39 L). The existing 2D floor-relief bound (8.5) is a component bound of a different
  field and was confirmed not to transfer.
- A soundness test that can fail (VoxelForgeWormBlockSkipTest): 6,476 proved blocks, 355,945 exact
  lattice samples, 0 violations. A deliberately halved L proves a bad block; the full L rejects it.
- voxel.WormBlockSkip, default 1.

Field exact: export OBJ byte-identical (b3e5f4c3..9b377), 841/841 keyed tiles identical to
NextHeadStaticTrace_20260913, capability 20,830 / 10,909.

RESULT, stated plainly: no measurable speed gain. The skip rate is 4.07% of worm-eligible LOD0
samples and 0% at LOD1-4, because the bound is ~2.5x looser than the worst observed ratio at the
block size used. Paired on-vs-off, two interleaved runs each: static worker +2.15%, generation p50
+1.8%; moving worker -1.42%, request p50 -2.5%. Within noise. The next round turns the default OFF.
The proven bound and its test are kept for a tighter skip later (smaller or hierarchical blocks,
or a per-cell bound).

Run ledger (from Codex's report): the first build failed on an ambiguous test overload and was
fixed; two timing runs are void because the orchestrator stopped the session so the owner could
use the PC; the eight valid timing runs, the sampler run and the diagnostics runs completed. No
new crash folders. PERF-SAMPLED.md now lists all eight earlier-round UECC crash records.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-14 04:29:11 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 5489b5e311 perf(generation): inline exact IsFinite -- LOD0 ~11-12% faster, field-exact
The sampler's last "unknown" LOD0 bucket (~13.8%) was ucrtbase.dll!_finite: FMath::IsFinite is an
out-of-line CRT call on the MSVC game path, hit from the innermost tunnel, passage, density,
spatial-index and meshing loops.

- VoxelMath::IsFiniteFast(float/double) in VoxelTypes.h: memcpy to uint32/uint64,
  (Bits & ExpMask) != ExpMask. It is the same predicate for every bit pattern, with no FP
  comparison for fast-math to fold. The disassembly shows it inlined (movd/movq, mask, compare).
- VoxelMath::IsFinite routes through a plain global, voxel.FastIsFinite (default 1), for the A/B.
  The CRT call remains only on the switch-off branch. Hot generation-path uses are replaced; no
  _finite / std::isfinite remains in Source/VoxelForge. Tool/editor/test code keeps FMath.
- A test that can fail: VoxelForge.Math.IsFiniteExact compares against FMath::IsFinite over 22
  explicit float/double patterns (+-0, denormals, min/max normal, +-Inf, quiet and signalling NaN
  payloads) plus 2,000,000 hashed patterns each: 0 mismatches. The explicit NaNs make a NaN-wrong
  helper fail.

Field exact: 841/841 keyed tiles identical to NextHeadStaticTrace_20260913 (verdict/empty/
triangles), export OBJ unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377), capability 20,830 / 10,909.

Within-round A/B, game path, two interleaved runs each, sampler off (off -> on):
  static  LOD0 request p50  95.5 -> 84.8 ms   generation p50/p95  70.3/114.1 -> 62.3/100.6 ms
          worker            35.4 -> 31.6 s (-10.5%)
  moving  LOD0 request p50/p95  70.8/144.2 -> 62.0/126.1 ms
          generation p50/p95    62.6/113.4 -> 55.1/101.0 ms
          worker            102.6 -> 91.3 s (-11.0%)
Sampler-on moving: the _finite/CRT cluster is gone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-13 23:50:30 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 22186473f9 perf(generation): spatial index default on; the 10 s question and the unknown bucket, answered
Measurement round (Codex; checked against its report):
- Per-tile identity for ab4bbe3's always-on LOD0 changes: a fresh 841-tile HEAD trace matches
  traces recorded before them (MemoStaticOn/Off), keyed by (x,y,z,level) with
  verdict/empty/triangles compared. 0 differences, 0 missing; LOD totals identical, 669,834 in all.
- The "missing 10 s" is not the spatial index: all six TileCacheWindow x SpatialIndex
  combinations are within ~1% for a given window setting. TileCacheWindow=0 at HEAD is not
  2990009's path. It still thrashes at L3/L4 (p95 ~250 ms). The default beats 2990009 on every
  metric: static worker 48 -> 34.4 s, moving 125 -> 101 s, LOD0 generation p50 73 -> 66 ms
  static and 70 -> 62 ms moving.
- voxel.SpatialIndex default -1 -> 1: forced-on was marginally best in every pair (within noise).
- The sampler's "unknown" ~13.8% LOD0 leaf is ucrtbase.dll!_finite (RVA 0x3C080), the non-inlined
  CRT call behind FMath::IsFinite, not Core.dll. Named by parsing Core's export table (no export at
  or below 0xC080) and aggregating callers: the tunnel chain, passage landing/floor checks,
  GetDensityWithParams, GetDensityAt, the spatial index range and EvaluateSDFCached.

Gates: export OBJ unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377), capability 20,830 / 10,909, determinism assertion
passed.

Next: an inline bit-test IsFinite (the same predicate for every input, so field-exact).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-13 23:05:33 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 ab4bbe3680 perf(generation): field-exact LOD0 overhead removal; the unknown bucket is Core.dll
Field-preserving floor round (Codex; reviewed by me against the code):
- exact per-(sample, passage) caching of native/generic floor projections and walkable-air
  checks, behind voxel.FloorRound1PassageProjectionCache
- a zero-work disabled path for VoxelDensityProfile::FScopedTimer, unchanged when enabled
- pointer / range-for iteration in the proven-hot tunnel, passage, spatial and candidate loops
  (TArray RangeCheck was ~6.5% of LOD0 samples on the Development binaries the owner plays on)
- FVector2D temporaries replaced with scalar doubles, same operations in the same order
- FSurfaceColumn made trivial, so thread-local construction does no work. Verified safe:
  ComputeSurfaceColumn writes all five outputs unconditionally before any branch, and every read
  of Box.Cols is gated by Box.Computed

Verified: export OBJ byte-identical (b3e5f4c3..9b377); capability 20,830 / 10,909; all 8
interleaved game runs gave identical totals (841 tiles / 669,834 triangles static, 2,348 /
1,985,216 moving, the same as previous rounds). Per-tile identity for the always-on changes still
needs a check against a stored trace; that is queued first in the next round.

Game path (sampler off, two interleaved runs each):
  projection-cache switch alone: neutral (static worker +0.41%, moving -0.05%)
  vs the previous round (cfad3d1, same harness; cross-round numbers reproduced within ~1% here):
    LOD0 generation p50  static 76.6 -> 65.8 ms (-14%), moving 72.4 -> 59.5 ms (-18%)
    LOD0 request p50/p95 moving 79.4/158.5 -> 67.6/137.6 ms
    worker seconds       static 39.2 -> 33.4, moving 113.7 -> 97.9
  The always-on changes carry the gain; they have no switch, so this is a cross-round comparison.

The sampler's ~12.9% "unknown" LOD0 leaf is engine code: UnrealEditor-Core.dll + RVA 0xC080,
without a Core PDB. The old FSurfaceColumn label is gone. Next round names it by its callers.

PERF-SAMPLED.md: corrected a sentence that repeated my false "daytime use" explanation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-13 21:00:34 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 cfad3d1c18 perf(generation): gate the tile cache window by LOD; LOD0 back to switch-off speed
2de603c's tile-sized room cache cut worker CPU, but LOD0 generation was ~9% slower. The per-tile
split shows the loss was evaluation (more candidates per sample in a bigger window), not cache
building. Policy, measured per path and LOD:
- fused path: tile window at LOD >= voxel.TileCacheWindowMinLOD (default 3)
- op-stack path: tile window at LOD >= voxel.TileCacheWindowOpStackMinLOD (default 4)
- lower LODs keep the 4-chunk worker window
- voxel.SpatialIndex: -1 auto (off at fused LOD0, on elsewhere), 0 or 1

Proof caveat closed: VF_ComputeTerrainOpEnvelope adds authored terrain-op extents (pits, chimneys,
detail overrides, ...) to the invariance envelope. Ops beyond the proven 256-voxel extent, or
malformed/unloaded ones, force the legacy window, so window invariance holds for every asset.

Sampler fix: the leaf symbol kept pointers into a TMap that FindOrAdd can rehash while later
frames resolve; the leaf is now re-found by program counter after insertion.

Game path, two runs each, sampler off (Codex; checked against its report):
                       LOD0 request p50/p95    generation p50/p95    worker s
  static  optimized    106.3 / 175.9 ms        76.6 / 124.3 ms       39.2
  static  switch-off   106.3 / 173.0           75.9 / 124.1          58.5   (-33%)
  moving  optimized     79.4 / 158.5           72.4 / 123.7         113.7
  moving  switch-off    82.8 / 160.4           73.2 / 125.4         141.9   (-20%)
LOD0 is flat within noise static and slightly better moving; worker CPU keeps most of the gain.
Field exact: 841/841 per-tile triangle identity, export OBJ SHA-256 unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377),
capability 20,830 / 10,909.

Caution: compare these numbers only within this round. The machine is in daytime use, so
absolute figures drift between rounds.

Current LOD0 map (sampler, moving, inclusive): tunnel SDF 12.5% + tunnel core 12.3% (the same
tunnel in two coordinate spaces); passage carving 11.1%, structural posts 11.4%, native floor
4.1%, with floor projection at 8.9% inside them; cave warp ~8% exclusive. Development-build-only
overheads: TArray RangeCheck ~6.5%, per-sample FScopedTimer ~2.6%.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-13 18:17:28 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 2de603cd77 perf(generation): size the room cache to the tile; spatial index; memo-key guard
Coarse tiles thrashed the per-worker 4-chunk room-cache window: 633 BuildChunkCache calls per
LOD3 tile and 1,062 per LOD4 tile. This round was started by one Codex session and finished by a
second, after the orchestrating session died at 06:06 and corrupted the first session's record.
The second session reviewed and built its predecessor's half-finished tree.

- voxel.TileCacheWindow (default 1): the room cache covers the requesting tile's footprint plus a
  fixed collect margin. It is set with TGuardValue around GenerateMesh and classify, so it never
  leaks to other work on the thread. Tile windows are capped at 64 chunks per side;
  unsupported/non-finite params fall back to the legacy window.
- Window invariance, argued by Codex: graph decisions depend on at most two bounded
  MaxTunnelLength hops, and primitives are culled only once their complete bounds are known.
  So the collect margin 2*MaxTunnelLength + max(room reach, pair/chain/tube reach) does not grow
  with the window. Caveat: oversized authored terrain-op radii are not yet in the envelope check.
- PrepareTunnelCoreCache reuses the graph, rebuilding only the exact support-column table for a
  crossed chunk.
- FChunkSDFSpatialIndex: ordered XY buckets over room/join/tunnel bounds; rejection stays exact
  and within-bucket order is preserved. Only 9-13% of candidates reach exact evaluation.
- static_asserts in VoxelStrateTypes.h: VF_STRATE_PARAM_FIELDS lists 83 fields, and their byte sum
  + 8 B padding == sizeof(FStrateGenerationParams). This closes the memo key's known gap (it
  catches omissions and size changes, not same-size replacements or padding-hidden fields).

Verified (game path, two runs each, sampler off):
- field exact: 841/841 per-tile triangle identity, 669,834 triangles; export OBJ SHA-256
  unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377); capability 20,830 / 10,909, connected
- cache builds: fused 139,187 -> 1,019 (-99.3%), op-stack 60,598 -> 879
- worker CPU: static 58.4 -> 40.8 s (-30%), moving 138.4 -> 121.2 s (-12%)

REGRESSION, stated plainly: with the switch on, LOD0 gets slower. Generation p50 is ~9% slower,
static 75 -> 82 ms and moving 71 -> 77 ms; request-to-ready p50/p95 is ~5-6% slower. This is
consistent across both runs of both cases. The thrash only lived at LOD2+ (LOD0 had 1.66 builds
per tile), so the next round gates the tile window by LOD and must bring LOD0 back to switch-off
speed while keeping the CPU gain.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TaFdXhTdYMkW1xrV6ApT6Y
2026-09-13 15:06:24 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 2990009f3b perf(generation): memoise room player-fit points -- 3.8x less worker CPU in game
The sampler (8e40bdd) showed ~3/4 of in-game worker CPU inside BuildChunkCache ->
VF_FindPlayerFitPointForRoom, recomputed for the same rooms on every per-worker cache rebuild.
The search reads only the strate params, the room site, the strate Z bounds and the warp seed,
so its answer is pure. It is now memoised process-wide.

- The key is exact, 97 words: every FStrateGenerationParams field via VF_STRATE_PARAM_FIELDS
  (83 scalar fields, audited: no pointers or TArrays), the room centre/radii/hash/bOrigin,
  both Z bounds, the warp seed and a key version. The hash only picks a shard; lookup compares
  every word. A miss is the worst case, and eviction just recomputes the same value.
- 4096 sets x 4 ways, a per-slot reader/writer state, a per-set lock only on miss (single
  flight), 7.1 MB fixed. The search algorithm is unchanged.
- voxel.PlayerFitMemo (CVar + command line), default on. The logs confirm =0 reaches the path.
- Diagnostics: the SdfCacheBuild count moves to BuildChunkCache entry, per-tile cache_builds in
  the tile profile, tile coordinates in the startup trace, and memo stats logged at EndPlay.

Game path, two runs each, sampler off (Codex; checked against its report):
                      worker CPU     LOD0 ready p50 / p95      tiles applied
  static  off -> on   183.7 -> 48.2 s  (3.81x)   109 / 178 -> 103 / 172 ms   841 = 841
  moving  off -> on   256.9 -> 124.7 s (2.06x)   104 / 192 ->  78 / 157 ms   2226 -> 2348
Hit rate 99.95%, 463 real searches in the moving run, 0 evictions.

Field and capability: per-tile triangle counts are identical on/off for 841/841 tiles
(669,834 triangles), the export OBJ SHA-256 is unchanged (b3e5f4c3..9b377), and player-fit
20,830 / walk-reachable 10,909 are unchanged.

Next, measured by this round: coarse tiles thrash the 4-chunk room-cache window. BuildChunkCache
calls per tile are 1.7 at LOD0, 18 at LOD2, 633 at LOD3 and 1,062 at LOD4.

Known gap, closed in the next round: nothing yet asserts that VF_STRATE_PARAM_FIELDS covers every
FStrateGenerationParams field. A field added to the struct but not to the list would be missing
from the memo key.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VZS94UH8bSsBeg5sZaxe2Y
2026-09-13 04:48:44 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 bb8ec51939 measure(perf): the remaining 4.3x is ALL density evaluation -- and the classifier costs 3.5x in game
Measurement only; no density or meshing decision changed. Full table in
PERF-ATTRIBUTION.md. The profiler self-check finally passes honestly: profiled 606.128
vs unprofiled 602.341 ms, **+0.63%** (it used to inflate 11.5x).

THE ATTRIBUTION, and it is almost embarrassingly one-sided

  mesh ledger, additive, sums to the clock exactly (sum_matches_mesh = true)
    shared density-grid fill    590.923 ms   97.4913%
    tile parallel wall           10.972 ms    1.8102%   cells, interp, normals, streams
    tile merge                    4.232 ms    0.6982%
    pre-tile setup / prep         0.002 ms    ~0%
    remainder                     0.0001 ms   ~0%
    ------------------------------------------------
    total                       606.128 ms

  GetDensityAt parent: 580.184 ms worker-wall, nested inside that 590.923 ms.

⇒ **The mesher is exonerated. Marching cubes, vertex interpolation, normals and stream
building are 2.5% combined.** The whole 4.3x is density evaluation, which is where three
of us have been looking and none of us had proven it.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING DONE, per 2,248,091 samples
  rooms        11,099,891 candidates ->  1,730,920 evaluated
  tunnels      28,951,420 candidates ->  3,462,565 evaluated
  tunnel-core  28,951,420 candidates ->  1,881,812 evaluated
  ~31 candidates SCANNED per sample, ~3.1 evaluated
  fused detail ran on 1,079,777 and skipped 1,168,314 samples (52.0%)
  software tunnel cache: 2,248,043 hits / 48 misses -- not the problem

The post-stack structural tail, which I have suspected twice, is small: StructuralTail
20.9 ms CPU / 1.9 ms wall, DensityStructuralPosts 21.9 / 2.0, PassageStructuralPosts
10.5 / 1.0 -- all nested samples against a 590.9 ms wall.

⭐⭐ AND THE FINDING THAT MATTERS MOST FOR THE GAME
  clean export, classifier absent       587.991 ms
  same export with the classifier       2,056.596 ms
The classifier makes generation **3.5x slower**, it is ABSENT from the export path we
have benchmarked for five days, and the GAME PATH USES IT. Its control route runs
211,289 support-column builds, 2,171,763 candidates, 1,370,314 floor queries and
2,296,243 checks -- none of which the fused export route executes at all.

⇒ Every optimisation this week was measured on a path that skips the single largest
cost the player actually pays. That is a measurement-design failure and it is mine.

Also newly visible: the full export wall is 1,004.557 ms, of which mesh is 606.128 ms
(60.3%) and OBJ WRITING is 394.273 ms (39.2%). My "0.556 s" figures have always been
mesh_seconds alone.

One real hot-path improvement landed with the instrumentation: AreCountersEnabled()
returned an unconditional `true`, so counter hooks were live in shipping builds. It is
now a relaxed load gated on diagnostic mode.

VERIFIED BY ME: build 0 errors; export 0.552 / 0.555 / 0.566 s (cf0319d was
0.563-0.566, unchanged); geometry SHA-256 b3e5f4c3..9b377 UNCHANGED.

Honest gaps, as reported: exact per-operation shares inside the density stage, physical
cache-miss counters, and a rebuilt 34f06df binary for a true A/B were all unavailable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-12 08:45:26 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 cf0319d480 perf(streaming): item 3 bought nothing, item 5 removed dead weight -- both worth knowing
Two WORK-NEXT items, one null result and one confirmed removal. Item 4 untouched.

ITEM 3 -- CANCEL OBSOLETE WORK AND PRIORITISE THE FLOOR: NULL RESULT
Clean -nullrhi, diagnostics off, 800 cm/s, 200 m of travel:

                          before            after
  request->ready p95      0.369117 s        0.367612 s
  queue wait p95          0.066949 s        0.064483 s
  generation p95          0.287926 s        0.283642 s
  p95 travel distance     2.952938 m        2.940894 m
  obsolete aborts                 0                12

Flat. Aborting obsolete tiles, sorting from the true pawn position and prioritising the
occupied/next tile changed request-to-ready by 0.4%.

⭐ AND THE NULL RESULT IS ITSELF THE FINDING. Look at the split: queue wait is 65 ms of a
368 ms p95; generation is 284 ms. **The queue was never the problem, so reordering it
cannot help.** Only 12 tiles in a 200 m run were obsolete enough to abort. The floor is
late because generation is slow, not because work is badly ordered -- item 3 establishes
that by exclusion, which is worth more than the 0.4%.

The machinery is kept: it is correct, it costs nothing, and it will matter once
generation is fast enough for ordering to be the binding constraint.

ITEM 5 -- VERDICT CACHE REMOVED. It was pure overhead.
Clean moving-session audit:

  outer  calls/probes/hits    2,109 / 2,109 / 0
  nested calls/probes/hits   19,904 / 19,904 / 0
  enclosing hits                              0
  stores 15,877, evictions 15,365

⇒ It stored 15,877 proofs, evicted 15,365 of them, and hit ZERO times. A moving player
visits unique regions; the cache was filling and thrashing a 512-entry table under a
global lock for no benefit. Same-binary A/B: request p95 0.367645 vs 0.365978,
generation p95 0.285559 vs 0.285992 -- neutral within noise, so its cost was the lock and
the linear scans rather than time we can see.

Removed: the global cache, its lock, the entry table, the invalidation path, the
cache-only profiler fields and the synthetic probe. The proof classifier stays.

⚠️ I asked for this cache two days ago on the strength of a commandlet measurement that
re-visited the same region repeatedly. That access pattern is nothing like a moving
player, and I should have said so when specifying it.

VERIFIED BY ME: build 0 errors; export 0.563 / 0.565 / 0.566 s (35de59b was 0.545-0.563,
flat as expected); geometry SHA-256 b3e5f4c3..9b377 UNCHANGED; capability 20,830 /
10,909, connected.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-12 06:49:20 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 35de59bac5 perf(opstack): fused evaluator -- 1.05s to 0.56s, byte-identical, and the ~70% early-out is back
WORK-NEXT item 2. The authored operator graph is lowered at chunk-cache build time into a
fused scalar evaluator for canonical TunnelNetwork/Underwater stacks. Operators are
untouched; this is a lowering, not a de-composition. Custom recipes, composer/lateral
stacks and other archetypes stay on the interpreted block path, selected by a build-time
EVoxelOpFusedEvaluator marker with `-voxel.UseFusedEvaluator=0` to A/B it.

⭐ MY OWN A/B, same build, 3 runs each:
    fused         0.545 / 0.563 / 0.561 s    mean 0.556
    interpreted   1.066 / 1.036 / 1.033 s    mean 1.045
                                             -46.8%,  1.88x

  geometry SHA-256 b3e5f4c3..9b377 IDENTICAL across fused, interpreted, and 081cc5e.

⚠️ Codex reported this as 5.88% (2.121 vs 2.253 s). Its figures come from its staged
harness with diagnostics enabled, which inflates both sides and compresses the ratio.
Measured clean it is 1.88x. This is the fourth time a profiled number has misled us --
the instrument is the instrument, not the thing.

THE MECHANISM IS RESTORED, which is the part that matters
The audit's finding was that the old path short-circuited the cave detail suite per
sample when bNearCaveSurface was false -- historically ~70% of deep-solid samples -- and
that we had traded that for per-block pruning.

  fused export skipped detail on  1,130,230 / 2,490,664 samples = 45.38%
  capability walk skipped                                        69.26%

69.26% matches the historical ~70% almost exactly. The early-out is genuinely back.

Capability exact: player-fit 20,830, walk-reachable 10,909, Connected.

WHERE THIS LEAVES THE 8x
  pre-op-stack 34f06df   0.130 s
  now                    0.556 s      4.3x, down from ~8x

So roughly half the regression is recovered, and the remaining 4.3x is NOT operator
interpretation -- that hypothesis is now tested and spent. Codex's own read: the rest sits
in "common structural/passage work and meshing". Three of us predicted the interpretation
overhead was the whole story; it was about half.

Build 40 actions, 0 errors, loaded-module verified. Six plugin source files.

Cumulative on this region: 342.2 s -> 0.556 s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-12 04:30:46 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 5ddd96664d perf(opstack): invert the loop + prune per block -- 1.45s to 1.02s, byte-identical
The architecture round. Loop inverted from per-sample-per-op to per-op-per-block,
operators pruned per block by interval bounds, profiler moved out of the hot loop.

  my build, 3 runs:  1.013 / 1.036 / 1.075 s   (adb34df was 1.418 / 1.445 / 1.458)
                     mean 1.041 vs 1.440  =  -28.5%, 1.39x
  geometry SHA-256   b3e5f4c3..9b377  IDENTICAL to adb34df

  pruning removed 20,999 / 31,320 operator-block visits = 67.1%
  surviving ops per block:  LOD0 6.63  LOD1 6.30  LOD2 5.23  LOD3 4.41  LOD4 3.89
                            (out of 22)

⚠️ I PREDICTED THE DISPATCH OVERHEAD WAS "THE 10x". IT WAS NOT.
864,688 virtual dispatches per chunk sounded decisive and is worth ~20-28%. Real, and
worth having, but the order of magnitude is elsewhere. That is my fourth wrong
performance prediction in this project, and the pattern is identical each time: I reason
from a call site's shape instead of measuring what the data actually costs.

⭐⭐ AND THE "5-20x GAME/EXPORT GAP" WAS MY ARITHMETIC ERROR. IT DOES NOT EXIST.
I told the owner the largest unexplained number in the project was that export does
22 ms/tile while the game does 115-500 ms. That 22 ms came from dividing 1.4 s of WALL
CLOCK by 64 tiles -- ignoring that 15 workers ran them in parallel. Per-job means on the
same build:

  nonshared block export   447 ms/job
  shared-grid export       261 ms/job
  game LOD0 meshing        253 ms/tile p50

They are the same. The game is not anomalously slow; generation simply costs ~250 ms per
LOD0 tile. The shared grid's benefit is real but modest, and a neighbourhood cache is NOT
justified by these numbers -- I would have had Codex build one on the strength of a
division error.

GAME PATH, final build (841 profiles, 447 applies)
  meshed p50/p95/max   LOD0 253/521/697 ms   LOD1 79/130/135   LOD2 19/42/51
                       LOD3 36/64/81         LOD4 93/238/271
  LOD0 request-to-ready  p50 47.7 ms  p95 389 ms  max 798 ms
                         worker queue p95 84 ms, generation p95 344 ms
  at 6 m/s: p95 = 2.3 m of travel, max = 4.8 m
  empty LOD0 tiles never enter the mesher; classifier p50 8.7 ms, p95 17.2 ms
  apply is not the bottleneck: p50 0.107 ms, p95 0.161 ms, max 0.296 ms

⭐ THE BINDING CONSTRAINT IS COMPUTE, NOT POLICY:
  logical cores 16, automatic core cap 14, effective generation cap 14, CAP HIT.
Apply limits never bind. We are saturating the machine, which means the remaining wins
must come from doing less work, not from scheduling it better.

NOT DONE, with reasons rather than excuses:
- Coarse-first LOD refinement: coarse tiles carry NO COLLISION, so streaming them first
  would let the player fall through. Needs a conservative collision proxy or an L0
  handoff first. Correct refusal.
- Heading prefetch: desired tiles are sorted by distance only (VoxelWorld.cpp:1748).
  Velocity-weighted prediction with a bounded budget and expiry is the shape, not built.

A failed experiment, reported rather than buried: eagerly filling every classifier leaf
with EvalBlock regressed export to 3.2-3.3 s because it defeated the classifier's early
exit. Removed.

Build 43 actions, 0 errors. Peak RSS under 2.1 GB. Sources: Epic's Tasks System and
Level Streaming docs, Lorensen-Cline.

Cumulative on this region: 342.2 s -> 1.02 s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-11 18:09:12 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 adb34dffa9 feat(passages): passages are D-tunnels now -- legacy support writer fires ZERO
The owner was right and said so plainly: "the tunnels should be a flat D with then a
bit of noise added, as it's most basic shape -- this alone should make all tunnels not
over X steepness to be walkable." Codex had reached the same conclusion from the other
direction ("the native fix is to author the inter-strate passage floor profile during
passage construction"); it had measured the current position while he described the
destination. This is that refactor.

Walkable inter-strate passages now bake their floor profile and bounded relief during
GeneratePassages. Evaluation composes a D-shaped SmoothMax floor, with final MC
ownership after the generic writers -- the same ordering fix that made the tunnel floor
native in 2260c4d.

  native compositions      7,629
  legacy support fires         0
  floor-profile fallbacks      0

  player-fit cells    20,804 -> 20,830   (+26)
  walk-reachable      10,884 -> 10,909   (+25)
  climb-reachable              10,911
  connectivity        arrival -> departure, Connected
  largest component           10,909

⭐ Support-ON and support-OFF now produce IDENTICAL export geometry (hash 07C14005,
82,273 v / 153,346 t, mesh 2.981 s vs 2.960 s). The writer that previously cost
3,359 reachable cells when disabled is now inert -- the shape provides what it used to
patch. That is the ~17.43% of banded pixels from 4f8b4a9 addressed at the source.

The legacy writer stays only as a fail-closed fallback for a malformed/non-native
passage. It is no longer load-bearing.

PUSHBACK, and it is the right restraint: only passages carrying
`bWalkableTunnelContract` -- currently the authored `Straight` style -- receive the
guaranteed D-floor. Spiral, Cascading and Worm styles do NOT silently gain a
walkability promise without a separate gradient proof. Correct: a guarantee nobody
proved is worse than no guarantee.

ROUGHNESS -- the owner's report, measured properly this time and CLOSED
He confirmed twice that changing roughness type/frequency changed generation time from
startup. The earlier sweep was a single 128^3 export at LOD0 and could not have seen
it, so this one used the game path, fixed streaming centre, identical 850-tile workload:

  skip rate   LOD0 70.8%  LOD1 57.3%  LOD2 32.6% (Cellular 31.8%)  LOD3 2.5%  LOD4 0%
  gen p95 s   FBM .472/.369/.083/.087/.145   Ridged .473/.365/.084/.084/.143
              Mixed .474/.358/.084/.090/.149  Cellular .479/.360/.083/.089/.161
  FBM frequency 0.025-0.2: flat across every LOD

No classifier-bound collapse by type or frequency. The startup difference was
workload/streaming behaviour, not a type-specific bound defect. No unsafe bounds change
was made to chase it.

⚠️ Worth noting for later: the skip rate collapses with coarseness -- 70.8% at LOD0 to
0% at LOD4. That is expected (a LOD4 tile spans a huge volume and almost certainly
contains something) but it means the classifier does nothing for exactly the tiles that
cover the most ground.

VERIFIED BY ME: build 0 errors; export 1.418 / 1.445 / 1.458 s (4f8b4a9 was
1.353 / 1.430 / 1.432); 153,346 triangles. Peak game RSS ~2.05 GB.

Sources consulted: Epic's UE task-systems documentation for the worker/game-path
distinction, and Lorensen-Cline for the discrete isosurface context.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-11 16:29:49 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 4f8b4a9a27 fix(gen): the phantom terracing is the PASSAGE support writer -- plus a region verdict cache
The owner played the build and reported four things. Three are answered with evidence,
one is disproven, and my own leading hypothesis was wrong.

⭐ 1. THE PHANTOM TERRACING IS NOT MARCHING-CUBES ALIASING
He reported stairs surviving with bTunnelFloorTerracingEnabled = false. I suspected MC
lattice aliasing on a near-planar floor; I was wrong. An A/B over the same mesher,
counted in pixels:

  graph-tunnel floor removed     2,813 / 147,456 px changed   1.91%
  passage support removed       25,695 / 147,456 px changed  17.43%

⇒ The bands are the INTER-STRATE PASSAGE SUPPORT WRITER, which is independent of the
tunnel terracing flag. That is exactly why turning terracing off did nothing: he was
disabling the wrong system. FCaveTerraceMod is inactive (TerraceStepHeight=0) and was
never involved.

⚠️ It cannot simply be switched off. With it disabled:
  fit 20,804 -> 20,511, walk-reachable 10,884 -> 7,525, components 260 -> 272.
Route still connected, but a third of reachable space gone. It stays as a correctness
backstop. The native fix is the same pattern we just applied to tunnels: author the
inter-strate passage floor profile during passage CONSTRUCTION. Codex judged that
refactor too large to risk this round and said so rather than attempting it.

MC aliasing remains theoretically possible at shallow angles (Lorensen & Cline 1987),
but the same-mesher A/B proves our writer dominates. Dual Contouring (Ju et al.) was
considered and rejected as a disproportionate mesher/topology change.

2. THE ROUGHNESS COST DEFECT DOES NOT EXIST -- my hypothesis, cleanly disproven
  FBM 2.91s / 66.92% skips · Ridged 2.85s / 66.53% · Mixed 2.92s / 66.82%
  Cellular 2.99s / 66.43% · FBM frequency 0.025-0.5: 2.88-2.99s, 66.80-67.04%
I predicted a shared bound across noise types collapsing the classifier. The code
already carries separate conservative bounds per type. No roughness code was changed.
⇒ Whatever the owner saw is not steady-state export cost. Most likely the in-editor
regeneration a parameter change triggers, which is the full-rebuild cost, not the
per-sample cost. Worth confirming with him.

3. ROOM MOUTH RISE -- his idea, implemented, off by default
  RoomMouthRiseBlendVoxels, default 8.0
  blend 8   fit 20,804  reach 10,884  40,429 v / 75,416 t   capability-NEUTRAL
  blend 24  fit 20,792  reach 10,874  40,337 v / 75,232 t   REJECTED, loses capability
Relief preserved at blend 8 (dihedral p50 2.5584, p90 33.7191). The chosen camera did
not see a mouth bench, so no visual claim is made.

4. ⭐ VERDICT CACHE WITH REGION REUSE -- answers "why re-prove what we proved?"
  130 classification calls -> 1 store, 129 hits, of which 128 ENCLOSING-REGION hits.
The region level is the one that matters: deep rock is empty thousands of chunks at a
time, and one proof over a large box now serves all of them.

Soundness, which is the whole risk (a stale "empty" silently deletes geometry):
512-entry bounded LRU; stores ONLY AllAir/AllSolid, never Mixed; key includes seed,
layout/lifetime id, params fingerprint, diff version, density/seal settings, support
mode, lattice step, origin and extent; dynamic season/composer/terrain-op/biome
configs FAIL CLOSED and bypass reuse. Deliberately session-resident, not on disk --
cross-process persistence cannot serialise all asset/layout/edit state safely yet.

VERIFIED BY ME: build 0 errors; export 1.353 / 1.430 / 1.432 s (2260c4d was
1.320 / 1.424 / 1.439); geometry SHA-256 b3e5f4c3..9b377 IDENTICAL to 2260c4d.
Peak RSS ~1.75 GB. Determinism repeat equal.

⚠️ My composer hypothesis was also wrong: I suspected
`bTunnelFloorTerracingEnabled = CategoryRng.FRand() < 0.75f` in the composer was
overriding his setting. It is not the cause here. The design question it raises is
still open and worth the owner's view: should a composer roll be allowed to overwrite
an explicitly authored value? Otherwise "I turned it off" never reliably means anything.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-11 13:13:28 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 2260c4d47a perf(gen): the floor is finally NATIVE -- clamp 29,634/29,634 -> 0, and the 551ms empty tile is dead
Two targets, both hit, and the second is the biggest in-game win since the interval work.

1. THE FLOOR IS NO LONGER PATCHED IN
The audit proved the backstop was doing the work: TunnelAuthoredFloorProtectionClamps
fired on EVERY authored floor sample while the named fallbacks fired zero. The cause,
in its own words, was that the stack composed the floor before the common
disturbance/passage writers, so every sample looked like a post-hoc clamp.

The floor is now composed ONCE, after those writers, at the final MC boundary. The
clamp inside the operator stack is deleted; the metadata stays on the sample for the
hand-off and for diagnostics but may no longer modify density.

  clamp fires        29,634 / 29,634  ->  0
  player-fit cells   20,804  (unchanged)
  walk reachable     10,884  (unchanged)
  connectivity       arrival -> departure, Connected
  geometry SHA-256   b3e5f4c3..9b377  IDENTICAL to 8e42d6d
  export, my 3 runs  1.320 / 1.424 / 1.439 s   (8e42d6d: 1.357 / 1.365 / 1.420)

⭐ Byte-identical output with the patch removed entirely. That is the proof the clamp
was never adding anything -- it was compensating for its own position in the pipeline.
Three days of "is the floor native yet" answered by moving where it is composed.

Remaining, and deliberately: the final support backstop still fires (6,509 export /
9,700 walk). Removing it is not capability-safe and it was not removed.

2. THE 551 ms EMPTY TILE IS GONE
An EMPTY LOD0 tile cost 551.7 ms: it returned verdict=Mixed, ran the full mesher, and
produced no triangles. Pure waste -- work done to discover there was nothing to do.

The cause is precise and worth recording: `AnyPassageModifierNearLattice` fed
`FPassageCarveOp::EffectOverBox` with a SPATIAL candidate test. Returning true killed
the AllSolid hypothesis even when every exact MC sample had a zero carve factor. A
"maybe something is near here" answer was being used where "does it actually change
anything at these samples" was required. It now takes the cheap domain test as a
reject, then consults the exact cached lattice carve factor the fold already computes.
Unknown or non-finite geometry stays conservative.

  empty Mixed fallbacks   86  ->  0      no empty tile enters the mesher at all
  empty tile p50      48.7 ms  ->  7.14 ms
  empty tile p95     451.3 ms  ->  11.54 ms
  empty tile max     551.7 ms  ->  27.86 ms

⚠️ Not fully at the "few ms" target: the remaining 27.86 ms tail is conservative
tunnel-tail proof work, not the old fallback. Honest, and a different problem.

Build 0 errors, three source files, no RMC or external paths touched. The shared
walkable-volume descriptor was not started.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-11 05:55:43 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 8e42d6d807 feat(tunnels): floor authored at BUILD time, room clips tunnel, climb tier added
The round the owner asked for, with three corrections from Codex that are worth more
than the features.

WHAT LANDED
- The complete tunnel floor profile is authored into FCachedTunnel during
  BuildChunkCache, not derived per sample. This was his point: "it should be done at
  creation time, since it knows its destination."
- Room floor ownership blends/clips the tunnel floor at mouths -- his A > B boolean.
- The traversal validator gained a climb tier, structured exactly as agreed:
    bWalkOnlyCanReachDeparture / bClimbCanReachDeparture kept SEPARATE, with
    WalkOnly / Climb / MineRequired cell counts reported alongside.
  The comment in the header states the contract: "The primordial capability contract
  is walk-only... climb is reported as a separate tier and never makes the hard
  connectivity verdict pass." That is the distinction we wanted: reporting tiers, not
  permission.
- Floor controls exposed under Cave Morphology|Tunnels|Floor.

⚠️ CORRECTION 1 -- LARGE LEDGES ARE NOT CAPABILITY-SAFE YET, so they stay opt-in.
    default (preference 0)   fit 20,804   walk reach 10,884   0 ledges
    preference 2             fit 20,765   walk reach 10,712   360 ledges
  Ledges cost 172 walk-reachable cells. Codex kept preference 0 (the old staircase) as
  the default rather than shipping the owner's preferred look at the price of walkable
  space, and led its report with that. Correct call.

⚠️ CORRECTION 2 -- THE BACKSTOP STILL CANNOT GO. Support/room fallback counters were
  zero, but the structural protection clamp fired on 31,017 of 31,017 authored floor
  samples -- 100%. So the shape is still not correct by construction; the clamp is
  doing the work. Instrumenting it was the right move: we now have a number instead of
  an argument.

⚠️ CORRECTION 3 -- THE "X + 2A" CLEARANCE BUDGET IS NOT IMPLEMENTABLE AS I SPECIFIED.
  Interval propagation bounds FIELD VALUES, not SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT. Deriving A needs
  a proven Lipschitz/influence bound for every post-operation, which we do not have.
  Both the owner and I assumed the interval work already gave us this; it does not.
  The idea is still right, the prerequisite is a displacement bound.

MEASURED BY ME: build 0 errors; export 1.365 / 1.357 / 1.420 s (checkpoint was
1.321 / 1.357), flat within noise; 153,346 triangles.

ALSO MEASURED THIS ROUND
- Edit cost: 8 affected chunks, 195.5 ms total -- generation 195.471 ms, apply 0.059,
  diff 0.020, queue 0.001. It is full level-0 regeneration; a dirty-mesh path needs
  partial section support that is unavailable without modifying RMC.
- Streaming caps: effective generation cap 14, pending max 14, CAP HIT. Mesh applies
  per frame 4 (not hit), 2 ms apply budget (not hit), unloads 6 (not hit).
  ⇒ The generation core cap is what binds during startup fill.
- Peak export RSS 1.70 GB (was 19.5 GB before the memory work).
- LOD4 empty outliers gone. LOD0 not solved: 4,600 empty tiles at 3 us median, but 11
  mixed-classifier fallbacks over 100 ms, max 554 ms -- verdict=Mixed, then the full
  mesher, producing no triangles.

⚠️ UNVERIFIED AND CONCERNING: the reported in-game meshed times are far worse than
  412a7ad's -- p50 498.8 ms vs 115 ms, p95 1.227 s vs 410 ms, max 1.974 s vs 844 ms.
  The samples differ (9,336 ready events vs 841 requests, different traversal, possibly
  queue wait included), and the export path is flat, so I do not know whether this is a
  real regression or a different measurement. I have NOT reproduced it myself. It is
  the first thing the next round must settle.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-11 04:25:45 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 e91f1c44bb wip(tunnels): checkpoint -- floor parameters exposed, round cut short by Codex credit limit
⚠️ THIS IS A CHECKPOINT, NOT A FINISHED CHANGE. The agent hit its usage limit
mid-round (locked out until 2026-09-15) after compacting its context, and never
filed a report or capability numbers. Committing so 1,344 lines are not left
uncommitted for five days. Verified by me only to the extent stated below.

WHAT LANDED
The tunnel floor controls are now real strate parameters under
"Cave Morphology|Tunnels|Floor", which is what the owner asked for -- hand-made
assets can tune them and the composer can roll them later:

  bTunnelFloorEnabled                true
  bTunnelFloorTerracingEnabled       true
  TunnelFloorTerraceStepHeight       1.71 voxels   (the existing 42.75 cm riser)
  TunnelFloorMaxLedgeHeight         12.0  voxels   (3 m -- climbable, not walkable)
  TunnelFloorGentleSlopeThreshold    tan(44 deg)
  TunnelFloorLedgeCountPreference    0             (0 = old per-segment staircase;
                                                    >0 = whole-chain ledge policy)
  TunnelFloorMaxLedges               4096

⭐ So the staircase-vs-ledges question the owner raised is now answerable IN THE
EDITOR without a rebuild: set LedgeCountPreference to 2-3 and the whole-chain
policy takes over from the per-segment one.

VERIFIED BY ME
  build            0 errors
  export, 2 runs   1.321 / 1.357 s   (ce53552 was 1.384 / 1.405 / 1.415)  ~-4%
  triangles        153,382           (was 153,338, +44)
  geometry hash    9815c9a2..ebeb9   -- CHANGED, so behaviour is live beyond the
                                       stated compatibility defaults

⚠️ CAPABILITY DIPPED SLIGHTLY, and I am not calling this an improvement:
  player-fit cells   20,835 -> 20,800   (-35,  -0.17%)
  reachable cells    10,901 -> 10,886   (-15,  -0.14%)
  largest component  10,886 = reachable, still one connected mass

Small enough to be a consequence of the 44-triangle geometry shift rather than a
real regression, but it is a drop, and my own rule for this work is that fit and
reachable must not fall. Treat it as unresolved until the round can be finished.

NOT DONE (the substance of the brief):
- terracing objective still minimises riser height, not step count
- the room does not yet clip the tunnel floor where they overlap (A > B)
- the traversal validator still cannot climb, so it cannot score real ledges
- the floor profile is still derived per sample, not authored at build time
- the support-column backstop is still present, i.e. the shape is still not
  correct by construction
- dig cost and the streaming-cap audit untouched

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-10 22:01:32 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 ff8bd7a8bc feat(tunnels): tunnels get the floor rooms always had -- capability up, 30% slower (fix known)
The owner asked the question that unlocked this: "isn't the floor cut a modification
made to rooms afterward, instead of having them be naturally like so?"

Reading the code answered it, and the answer was that rooms and tunnels were built on
OPPOSITE principles:
  room   = SmoothMax(sphereSDF, floorHalfSpace), floor part of the SHAPE, evaluated
           in one pass, with two octaves of Perlin relief already on the floor height
           (FloorReliefStrength / RoomFloorCutMin=0.70, hash-rolled per room)
  tunnel = a bare capsule with NO floor, then CaveTunnelFloorOp + support columns +
           IsTunnelSupportFloorWorldPoint asserting a slab in afterwards

That is why tunnels read as "forced flat" and rooms never did, and why the previous
conditional-floor round could only find 1,539 skips in 1.5M tests: it was optimising
a correction instead of removing the need for one.

WHAT LANDED
Corridors now use a swept SmoothMax(capsule, floor): endpoint floor heights derived
from the rooms they join, deterministically interpolated along the control chain, the
existing two-octave relief reused (not reimplemented) and faded at mouths, and
TERRACES where a room-to-room transition is too steep -- risers capped at 1.71 voxels
(42.75 cm), with relief disabled on risers so the step bound holds.

  player-fit cells   20,153 -> 20,835   (+682)
  reachable cells    10,483 -> 10,901   (+418)
  connectivity       connected, both;  mouth gap 0
  vertices/tris      40,623/75,776 -> 40,429/75,416
  dihedral p50/p90   2.5429/33.8499 -> 2.5529/33.7191 deg

Capability went UP, which is the point: the shape now provides what the correction
was faking, and it reaches places the slab did not.

RETIRED: the 1.5M-call natural-floor validator and its counters, plus the now-dead
CaveTunnelFloorOp / CaveTunnelAirOp implementations and profiler labels.

NOT retired: the finite support-column backstop. Removing it failed hard --
19,097 fit, 396 reachable, DISCONNECTED. It stays, and Codex was right not to force it.

⚠️ THE HONEST COST: 30% SLOWER
  my own build, 3 runs:  1.509 / 1.542 / 1.543 s   (was 1.118 / 1.131 / 1.197 s)
Well above the 17% noise floor. The relief evaluation is what costs.

⭐ And the fix is already identified: the relief is `FMath::PerlinNoise2D` -- a
function of (X,Y) ONLY -- yet it is evaluated per 3D sample. That is exactly the bug
pattern the support floor had, where making the decision per-column took it from
2.29 to 0.138 us/sample (16x). Caching relief per XY column should recover most or
all of the 30%. Next round.

Renders confirm the floors now undulate gently instead of presenting a flat plane;
the global relief metric is wall-dominated and inconclusive, and Codex correctly
declined to claim the visual complaint solved on that basis.

Determinism holds: both final runs hash 4520DC6F with canonical repeat equality.
Analytically the authored floor profile is bounded by tan(44 deg) including the
Perlin derivative and mouth envelope; the full post-modifier SDF still is not
provable, so the player-fit audit stays.

Build 0 errors. Nothing outside Plugins/VoxelForge; RealtimeMeshComponent untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-10 18:00:11 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 383ec86c37 perf(apply): stutter is NOT the game thread -- and the flat floor cannot be relaxed
Two things the owner reported from playing 412a7ad. One is answered, one is a null
result that Codex flagged itself rather than dressing up.

THE FLATTENED TUNNEL FLOORS -- capability-safe, and worth almost nothing
He has now flagged these twice: every tunnel carries a smooth flat strip running in
and out through otherwise craggy rock. The idea was to make the floor CONDITIONAL --
assert it only where the natural rock fails walkability, leave the rock alone
elsewhere. Cheaper and better looking, in theory.

The floor is now skipped only when the exact no-floor field passes the same
player-fit validator at foot offsets 0, -1, +1. Unknown or failed keeps the slab.

  natural-floor skips accepted   1,539 of 1,529,241 tests   = 0.10%
  player-fit cells        20,153 -> 20,153
  reachable cells         10,483 -> 10,483
  arrival -> departure    connected, both
  dihedral p50/p90        2.5429 / 33.8499 deg, IDENTICAL
  mesh time (their batch) 1.757135 -> 1.757140 s

Capability preserved exactly. Visual complaint NOT solved, and no speed gained.

⭐ The useful part is what it PROVED by trying to go further. Every broader policy
lost walkable space:
    analytic-only        fit -217, reachable -195
    tightened analytic   fit  -76, reachable  -76
    exact +/-4 foot      fit  -16, reachable  -16
⇒ The floor cannot be relaxed without changing the walkability contract or adding a
route-aware global proof. That is a real constraint, now measured rather than assumed.

Codex's own words, and it was right to lead with them: "the conservative floor change
is capability-safe, but it does not visibly solve the flattened-strip complaint."

THE STUTTER -- measured, and it is not where we thought
Game-thread apply, meshed tiles, under -nullrhi:

  total apply            p50 0.107 ms   p95 0.153 ms   max 0.273 ms
    stream upload/RMC    p50 0.040      p95 0.088      max 0.124
    component creation   p50 0.019      p95 0.021      max 0.035
    registration         p50 0.010      p95 0.011      max 0.020
    collision config     p50 0.005      p95 0.007      max 0.019

A quarter of a millisecond at worst. The game-thread drain is NOT the hitch.
⇒ Remaining visible stutter is most likely render-thread/RHI work or asynchronous
collision cooking behind RealtimeMeshComponent, which is off-limits for edits.

Added anyway as a cheap safety valve: MaxMeshApplyMilliseconds, default 2 ms of drain
budget per frame. Over 729 apply frames: drain p50/p95/max 0.111/0.182/0.313 ms,
budget hits 0, at most 2 visible applies in a frame. It costs nothing today and caps
a future burst.

Request-to-ready, now timed after game-thread application:
  all     p50 57.1 ms   p95 432.9 ms   max 919.4 ms   -> 2.60 m at 6 m/s
  meshed  p50 134.1 ms  p95 457.4 ms   max 919.4 ms

⚠️ My own verification: 1.197 / 1.131 / 1.118 s vs 1.088-1.102 s on 412a7ad. Mean
+4.7% -- below the 17% noise floor, but slower in all three runs, and the validator
runs 1.5M times to accept 1,539 skips. Geometry moved by 4 triangles (153,740 ->
153,744), which is allowed. If the next round cannot make that validator earn its
place, it should come out.

Build 0 errors. Peak RSS 1.67 GB export / 1.90 GB game. Nothing outside
Plugins/VoxelForge; RealtimeMeshComponent untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-10 14:46:29 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 412a7ad219 perf(game): the path he actually walks -- meshed p95 4.91s -> 0.41s, RSS 19.5GB -> 1.7GB
The owner: "I want real performance gain for the ingame path... not in deletion, but
in optimization and tricks." Three rounds of ours had improved the commandlet export
he never runs. This one is the streaming path.

MEMORY -- it was retention, not the new lattice
19.5 GB was worker FChunkSDFCache arrays keeping capacity when keys were replaced
(946 MB across 15 workers in diagnostics), shared graph caches with no byte or
lifetime budget, and batch commandlets holding transient UObject worlds until exit.
BlockSkip is bounded to 8^3 bytes per tile; interval scratch is worker-local and
capped. Fixes: release storage on key replacement, LRU with a 256 MiB resident
budget, limit in-flight graph builds, drop oversized entries, CollectGarbage between
batch cases.

  peak RSS   19.5 GB  ->  1.643 GB (their runs) / 1.71 GB (mine, 3x128^3)   -91%
  a 3-case stress batch showed no accumulation

WHY SOME EMPTY TILES COST 5.6s AND OTHERS 3us -- a 1.9 MILLION x spread
Fast ones returned straight from the layout/edge proof (verdict AllAir/AllSolid,
refine=0, mesh=0). Slow ones returned Mixed, so the caller ran the FULL mesher grid
and only discovered emptiness by brute force -- logs show empty=1 after ~5 s of mesh
work. The interval machinery now reaches a verdict before a mesh job is enqueued.

IN GAME, 841 requests at streaming radius:

                     count     p50        p95        max
  empty                394   6.087 ms   12.113 ms   25.049 ms
  meshed               447 114.748 ms  410.314 ms  844.043 ms
  LOD0 empty           221   7.126 ms   11.901 ms   25.049 ms
  LOD0 meshed          122 355.794 ms  600.945 ms  844.043 ms

  against d38d4ca:  meshed p50/p95/max 0.6085 / 4.9075 / 5.0199 s
                    LOD4 empty max 5.618 s
  => meshed p50 5.3x, p95 12.0x, and the multi-second empty outliers are gone.

REQUEST-TO-READY -- the number that answers "I can outrun the generation and fall"
  all tiles     p50  57.576 ms   p95 429.052 ms   max 905.633 ms
  empty         p50  30.943 ms   p95  98.302 ms   max 305.505 ms
  meshed        p50 128.521 ms   p95 462.235 ms   max 905.633 ms

At the harness walking speed of 6 m/s: p95 = 2.574 m, worst case = 5.434 m. A walking
player now outruns tile readiness by a couple of metres, not by a strate.

CAPABILITY PRESERVED, which is the point
The owner asked that speed never come from quietly simplifying the world. It did not:
geometry SHA-256 98eaad61..d3c4f is IDENTICAL to d38d4ca, 153,740 triangles, 82,516
vertices, across three runs. No resolution, sample-count, octave or seed reduction.
Unknown intervals still cost the skip. Prove and skip, never simplify and hope.

Export path, my own build, 3 runs: 1.088 / 1.102 / 1.100 s (was 1.171-1.258 s). ~9%,
below the 17% noise floor, so not claimed as a speed win -- the export was not the
target.

Honest remainder: LOD0 empties are ~7 ms p50 with a 25 ms tail, not the 2-5 ms of a
pure layout proof. Those are bounded, sound interval refinements that never invoke
meshing; going lower needs stronger proof bounds, not more skipping.

Verified by me: build 0 errors, binary timestamp checked against sources, peak RSS
measured, hashes compared. Nothing outside Plugins/VoxelForge; RMC untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-10 11:05:09 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 d38d4cabef perf(gen): interval propagation -- blocks can finally be PROVEN empty. 1.55s -> 1.21s
Task 4 ran 11 hours and was killed by system memory pressure before it could file a
report. The work survived, builds clean (0 errors), and is verified faster with
byte-identical output. This commit is my verification, not its summary -- it never
got to write one.

THE STRUCTURAL FIX
0e9df9e established why no block could ever be skipped: OriginSpineOp,
PassageCarveOp and the active seals Lerp/Min/Max against the CURRENT density, so
with an unknown incoming density their supremum is genuinely unbounded. Not a
missing bound -- the operator semantics.

The answer is to propagate a density INTERVAL through the stack, and that is what
landed: FVoxelBoxSdfInterval + PropagateSdfOverBox on the operator interface, an
interval fold through every converter and modifier, interval arithmetic down into
the noise primitives themselves (gradient corners, warp, worm frequencies), and a
BlockSkip lattice the mesher consults per 8^3 block.

Its own guiding comment, which is the right default:
  "no finite interval is a proof. Unknown costs the skip and protects the geometry."

  128^3 TunnelNetwork seed 1337 slot 1, freshly built binary, 3 runs each:
    before  1.515 / 1.554 / 1.569 s
    after   1.213 / 1.258 / 1.171 s     -22.5%, 1.28x -- clears the 17% floor

  Geometry SHA-256 98eaad61..d3c4f IDENTICAL to 0e9df9e. 153,740 triangles either
  way. It skips only provably-empty work; nothing about the world changed.

It also fixed one cause of the 5.6 s empty tiles found in 0e9df9e: an LOD4 tile
legitimately spans 19^3 = 6,859 chunk keys and was rebuilding per-chunk state
thousands of times within a single tile. A shared cache removed that failure mode;
remaining slow empties were LOD0 and are a separate fast-classifier bail, still open.

Partially landed, unfinished when killed: RequestStartCycles on FChunkResult, to
report request-to-ready latency rather than worker generation time. Harmless as is.

⚠️ WHAT KILLED IT, AND IT IS OURS
A single UnrealEditor-Cmd commandlet grew to 19.5 GB, leaving 1.3 GB free on a
32 GB machine, and the OS killed the agent. Freeing it restored 21.6 GB. The owner
said twice that his machine should not be under memory pressure and he was right
both times: first the 411 MiB worker caches, now a 19.5 GB commandlet. A generation
run must not need 19.5 GB. Next task.

Cumulative on this region: 342.2 -> 16.2 -> 2.62 -> 1.49 -> 1.21 s  (~283x).
3,374 insertions / 342 deletions across 12 files. Build 0 errors. Nothing outside
Plugins/VoxelForge; RealtimeMeshComponent untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-09 21:11:13 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 2f33870a84 perf(mesher): adjacent tiles were re-evaluating 18% of the field -- 2.69s to 1.49s
Overnight task 2. Every claim here is end-to-end wall clock on a real 128^3 export,
not a profiled bucket, because the last two rounds shipped large bucket wins worth
0% in reality. Measurement floor is ~17% run-to-run; only Part 2 cleared it.

PART 2 -- KEPT. Density-grid reuse.
The mesher samples an expanded grid (-1..Cells+1), so adjacent tiles re-evaluated
their shared boundary planes. Measured: 2,744,000 requested samples contained
495,909 duplicates -- 18.07% of the field generated twice. A run-scoped read-only
lattice (FVoxelSharedDensityGrid) owns each world sample once and hands it to both
adjacent tile grids. Duplicates now 0.

  128^3 TunnelNetwork seed 1337 slot 1, freshly built binary:
    before  2.603 / 2.693 / 2.697 s
    after   1.488 / 1.499 / 1.486 s      -44.6%, 1.80x

  Geometry SHA-256 98eaad61..d3c4f IDENTICAL to the pre-change binary's output.
  153,740 triangles either way. Pure win, no field change.

The lattice is deliberately not a UObject and not a cache with eviction: ownership,
lifetime and iteration order stay explicit. A malformed or incomplete lattice is
ignored and falls back to the canonical generator path rather than altering geometry.

PART 1 -- REVERTED. Block-level empty-space early-out.
**0 of 4,096 blocks were safely classifiable**, and the attempt made it 85% slower
(3.632 -> 6.735 s). No unsafe bound was retained.
⇒ This is a finding, not just a failure: our conservative bounds are too loose to
prove ANY 8^3 block uniform. Hierarchical evaluation of any kind is blocked until
we know which operator has effectively unbounded reach. Next task.

PART 3 -- REVERTED. Task granularity.
15 workers, 64 tile jobs, mean job 0.594 s, launch fringe ~14.1 us. MinBatchSize=4
was 1.09% SLOWER end-to-end despite a better bucket time -- exactly the trap this
task's rule exists to catch. Default stays 1. ParallelForWithExistingTaskContext
not adopted.

PART 4 -- NO CHANGE. Renderer audited over 3 runs (8.736 s total, 1.483 s raster).
Mesh and BVH are already reused across viewpoints; no per-pixel heap allocation, no
redundant remeshing. Nothing gross to fix; it benefits from the above automatically.

STILL OPEN: the spatial index from ee89c4d has never earned its keep in wall clock
and accounts for ~214 MB of measured allocations. Codex proposes an on/off ablation
then removal if confirmed. Not done unilaterally.

⚠️ PROCESS NOTE: the agent reported "build passed" but the runtime DLL was still
from 03:07 while sources were edited at 05:22/05:42. My first three verification
runs measured the OLD binary and showed no change. Always check binary timestamps
against source timestamps before believing a measurement.

Cumulative on this region: 342.2 s -> 16.2 s -> 2.62 s -> 1.49 s (230x).
Determinism: identical hashes across all repeat runs. Build clean. Nothing outside
Plugins/VoxelForge touched; RealtimeMeshComponent untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-09 05:59:56 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 e63f016835 tools(profile): the instrument lied by 11.5x -- now it checks itself, and batching kills startup cost
Overnight task 1 of the owner's mandate: "better diagnostic, profiler and tools,
so we can batch test way more quicker."

WHY THIS CAME BEFORE ANY MORE OPTIMISATION
ee89c4d delivered a 5x candidate reduction and a 16x cheaper support floor for
0% end-to-end gain, because the profiler inflated by ~11.5x (14.74 us/sample
profiled vs 1.28 us/voxel real). Two rounds of bucket rankings were artefacts of
FPlatformTime::Cycles64() wrapped around ~100 ns operations -- the timer pair
calibrates at ~0.1 us, so it was measuring itself.

PROFILER
Deterministic count sampling plus amortised block timing every 64 density calls.
Coarse counters (calls, candidates) stay always-on -- they were never the problem.
Timing-only scopes are opt-in behind -profiledensityfull. UE CPU trace scopes added.

  before   profiled 14.74 us/sample  vs  1.28 us/voxel real   ~11.5x
  after    profiled 0.463050 s       vs  0.558470 s unprofiled   -17.09%
           geometry 235AC2DC in both

⭐ Every profiled report now prints profiled total, unprofiled total, discrepancy,
ratio and geometry equality, and EXITS CODE 2 if the comparison fails. An
intermediate run hit -22.6% and failed loudly, which is the point: this class of
bug must be impossible to miss rather than something noticed three rounds later.

⚠️ The -17% residual is run-to-run noise, so ~17% is our measurement floor.
Improvements smaller than that cannot be claimed from a single pair of runs.

BATCH EXPLORER
One process, many cases, one JSON. Startup was ~25-30 s of engine boot for ~3 s of
work, which is what made every iteration expensive.

  3 cases in 6.59 s of case time
  standalone vs batched, same binary: hash 235AC2DC, 2,461 tris, 343,000 tunnel
  lookups, 554,381 passage evaluations -- identical on both

-out= is enforced absolute under the plugin's own Saved/.

CACHE BREAKDOWN (the 272 KB/entry question)
The slot table is small. The weight is spatial-index bins and candidate arrays,
room arrays, support-column arrays and tunnel-world indices -- i.e. much of the
411 MiB is the spatial index ee89c4d added, which also bought 0% end-to-end.
Worth revisiting on those terms.

RESEARCH (recorded, not acted on) -- CODEX-TASK-1-PROFILER-BATCH-RESEARCH.md
Ranked follow-ups: deterministic empty-space early-out, density-grid reuse, task
granularity (ParallelForWithExistingTaskContext + MinBatchSize), SIMD MC (~2x over
optimised scalar, but cross-machine determinism is the risk), sparse hierarchy,
RMC partial updates, Transvoxel LOD seams. Sources cited in the doc.
⚠️ Upstream RMC is 5.3.2; the owner's copy identifies as 5.4 with custom
modifications. No upgrade is safe. Left untouched.

PUSHBACK, accepted: "buckets must sum to their parent" needs a parallel-time
definition -- summing worker CPU is not wall time. Reports now separate worker CPU
sum from wall-clock estimate.

End-to-end unchanged, as expected for a tooling change: 2.746 / 2.691 s on the
128^3 seed 1337 region (was 2.678-2.705). Build clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-09 05:02:21 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 ee89c4d8c2 perf(gen): 5x fewer candidates, 16x cheaper floor -- and 0% end-to-end. Read the last section.
Owner, after playing 0576e80: "slightly faster, still not on par... I can outrun the
generation and fall." Also, unprompted: "the tunnels seem forced, with a forced
flat -- it technically looks good, but could be a reason." He was right that it
was a reason; it was not THE reason.

WHAT LANDED, all real and all measured

Conservative spatial index (immutable per-chunk uniform bins, baked conservative
bounds, squared rejects, deterministic ordering):

  candidates scanned/sample   25.140 -> 5.192
  candidates evaluated/sample 13.879 -> 2.992
    cave tunnels  11.228/6.069 -> 1.525/0.723
    tunnel core   11.228/5.831 -> 1.216/0.567

The earlier flat AABB attempt failed because loose bounds culled almost nothing
while adding a pass. Technique from GPU Gems 3 ch.32 broad-phase.

The forced-flat floor, which the owner spotted by eye: a floor decision is
inherently per-COLUMN and was being recomputed for every Z sample in that column.
Now resolved once per integer XY column and reused.

  TunnelCorePosts   2.29 us/sample -> 0.138 us/sample   (16x)

The floor is unchanged in behaviour: still applied only after a tunnel passes its
world bounds and walkable projection, still walkable, look untouched.

FIRST MEASUREMENT OF OUR MEMORY FOOTPRINT
The owner: "it shouldn't be pressured on such system, even less when not running
anything." He is right, and it is ours:

  total resident worker cache   431,162,116 B  =  411 MiB
  15 workers                    27.41 MiB each
  average valid entry           278,704 B
  largest entry                 541,344 B
  static slot storage             2.4 MiB   (dynamic: 428.6 MB)

Cutting 4096 -> 128 slots only saved static storage. The weight is 272 KB PER
CACHED CHUNK STATE, ~102 live per worker. Nobody has yet asked why one cached
chunk state needs 272 KB. That is the open question, not the slot count.

⚠️ AND THE PART THAT MATTERS MOST: THIS BOUGHT NOTHING END-TO-END

  128^3 TunnelNetwork, seed 1337 slot 1, same region, unprofiled:
    before this commit   2.623 s
    after, 3 runs        2.705 / 2.678 / 2.682 s

Flat. A 5x candidate reduction and a 16x cheaper floor moved real generation time
by zero.

The reason is visible in the numbers and I should have caught it earlier: the
PROFILED path reports 14.74 us/sample while the real unprofiled cost is
1.28 us/voxel. **The instrument inflates by ~11x.** Every bucket we have been
ranking and optimising for two rounds was measured under that inflation, so the
ranking does not reflect where real time goes. We optimised what the profiler
exaggerated.

⇒ Before any further optimisation: make the profiler cheap enough that profiled
and unprofiled totals agree within a small factor, or switch to sampling. An
alarming number is the instrument until proven otherwise -- three for three in
this project, and now four.

Still true: ~21x slower than the pre-op-stack build, and generation still loses
to a walking player. Geometry changed by 40 triangles (153,692 -> 153,732), which
is allowed; two full exports hash identically (37E00BEE..0A7DF). Build 42/42.
No CPU-feature dispatch. Nothing outside Plugins/VoxelForge was touched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-09 03:05:40 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 0576e800c4 perf(gen): the landing work was per-voxel -- 342s to 2.6s, same world
The owner played 64f5d61 and reported the truth: "generation still takes ages...
TunnelNetwork doesn't even finish generating, as big as the surface world" while
SurfaceWorld completed in under 10s, and stopping PIE hung for 30+ seconds.

e08b49a's 21x was real and irrelevant. It fixed per-CHUNK state rebuilds, which
dominate the commandlet export path. The game is bound by per-VOXEL evaluation.
Same symptom, different bottleneck, and nobody had measured the second one.

WHY PIE HUNG
bShuttingDown was never checked inside VoxelMarchingCubesMesher.cpp -- zero
occurrences. A worker inside GenerateMesh could not abort, so 64f5d61's correct
unconditional EndPlay wait was waiting on tiles physically unable to stop. The
hang was not a teardown bug; it was evidence that one tile took tens of seconds.
Added shutdown polling per slab/row in the mesher and through GenerateTileResult;
aborted results carry Epoch + bAborted and ProcessQueue drops them. EndPlay still
waits unconditionally -- the 3s mark only logs now.

  PIE stop   3.409s / 44.759s  ->  4 ms teardown, 38 us worker drain

WHERE THE PER-VOXEL COST WAS
The owner's own comparison was the sharpest instrument available. Profiled both:

  GetDensityAt          TunnelNetwork 12.64 us/sample   SurfaceWorld 1.32
  tunnel candidates evaluated      7.088 per sample                 0
  tunnel-core candidates evaluated 7.201 per sample                 0
  room candidates evaluated        1.000 per sample                 0

  largest buckets: RoomGraphSource 2.57, TunnelCorePosts 0.76,
                   PassageCarveOp 0.22, PassageStructuralPosts 0.20

The three regressing commits map cleanly, and one is innocent:
  7a20eee drainage tree  -- cache-build work, NOT per-voxel
  413c15d landings       -- repeated full passage modification per sample
  55bf807 landing rooms  -- room SDF + tunnel/core evaluation per sample

Fixes: FPassageCarveOp carves only, landing/support moved to the structural MC
post; tunnel core support and SDF fused into one pass; room graph caches shared
per worker on complete deterministic keys; tunnel density cache uses open
addressing with 4096 slots. Room cache rebuilds fell to 9 per 42,875 samples, so
what remains is genuine O(local cached room/tunnel count) work.

  TunnelNetwork 128^3, seed 1337 slot 1, same region:
    342.2 s / 163.161 us/vox   ->   2.623 s / 1.251 us/vox     (130x)

  Geometry SHA-256 aaf95559..066b4, IDENTICAL to the pre-optimisation run at the
  same roughness. 153,692 triangles either way. Verified independently of the
  agent's own report.

NOT FIXED, and the first one is the next real target:
- L4 tiles still cost 16.93 s. Hit rate falls 99.9% (L0) -> 23.7% (L4), but
  1024 -> 4096 slots only moved 18.39s -> 16.93s and the 1,927 misses ARE the
  distinct key count. That is low reuse, not eviction. A bigger cache will not
  save it.
- TunnelNetwork is still ~10x SurfaceWorld (0.354s vs 0.028s on a matched 32^3).
- The live PIE tile table is SurfaceWorld: this checkout's PIE map is configured
  that way. TunnelNetwork went through the same mesher and density path via the
  commandlet, but no TunnelNetwork tile has been timed in an actual game session.
  Export numbers are not presented as game numbers.

Still outstanding, untouched here: the inter-strate passage has intersections it
should not have, routes through open passage when it should not, and should
descend from a low point of the current strate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-08 23:47:53 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 64f5d61e08 fix(crash): EndPlay tore the world down under live workers -- the cache made it lethal
PIE crashed with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading 0xffffffffffffffff:

  FRoomGraphSource::Eval()   VoxelDensityOpStack.cpp:3056  (Manager->GetLayoutVersion())
  UVoxelGenerator::GetDensityAt()  VoxelGenerator.cpp:1103 (ActiveOpStack->EvalMC)
  ...  AVoxelWorld::LoadTile lambda, on a task-graph worker

Two lifetime bugs, combined:

1. EndPlay gave up after a 3-second deadline and destroyed UObjects while workers
   were still inside GenerateTileResult. The crash log records 4, 3 and 7 tasks
   still running during teardown. ARCHITECTURE has always said EndPlay blocks on
   ActiveTaskCount -> 0; it did not.
2. e08b49a's worker-local cache keeps 128 built op stacks alive per thread, and
   those stacks hold a raw UVoxelStrateManager*. Before the cache, a stack was
   rebuilt at every chunk crossing and never outlived its owner for long. After
   it, a freed manager stayed reachable and got dereferenced.

The cache did not create the teardown race. It made an existing one lethal.

Fixes:
- EndPlay now waits unconditionally for ActiveTaskCount == 0. The 3s deadline is
  demoted to a log line: a slow drain is reported, teardown is never torn out
  from under a reader.
- UVoxelStrateManager carries a process-unique CacheLifetimeId, folded into the
  cache key. Deliberately not a UObject pointer: allocator address reuse must not
  let a stale worker-local stack look current across PIE sessions. PassagesVersion
  restarts per layout and cannot make that distinction.
- Cached passage/room manager references are weak pointers, fail-closed.
- Verified FStrateGenerationParams is copied BY VALUE into tunnel operators, and
  stack moves preserve owned operator allocations, so no operator references a
  previous cache entry's parameters.

  TunnelNetwork mesh  342.332 s -> 16.199 s   (21.1x)
  per tile, 64 tiles    5.349 s ->  0.253 s

NOT verified, and it matters here:
- No PIE measurement. The owner restricted this session to analysis and fixes, so
  the numbers above are the commandlet's direct-mesher path, NOT the streaming
  path the game uses. They are not game timings and are not presented as such.
- The 128-slot cache may churn at distance: an L0 tile crosses at most 27 exact
  chunks, but L2/L3/L4 tiles touch 216 / 1,000 / 6,859 chunk keys. Whether that
  helps or hurts in game is unmeasured.
- EndPlay waiting forever converts a crash into a hang if a task never observes
  bShuttingDown. Workers do check it, but this trade is deliberate and worth
  watching.

Named, not changed: the straight "roads" the owner still sees are inter-strate
passages. FStratePassageConfig defaults Connections=1 and Style=Straight
(VoxelStrateTypes.h:1781); GeneratePassages maps Straight -> SlopedTunnel and
builds a two-leg switchback that FPassageCarveOp carves
(VoxelStrateManager.cpp:819). d97373c removed the landing-to-hub radial roads; it
did not touch these. FLatticeCorridorSource also still emits axis-aligned capsule
edges for Maze (VoxelDensityOpStack.cpp:548). Awaiting the owner's call on what
should replace them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-08 21:17:57 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 e08b49a183 perf(gen): a thrashing one-slot cache cost 18.7x -- and the world is unchanged
TunnelNetwork density evaluation was 45x more expensive than Maze for identical
work: 2,097,152 voxels, 64 tiles, same mesher, same machine. Profiling killed
every hypothesis I brought to it -- box classification skipping 0/64 tiles was
true but irrelevant (export bypasses classification), near-surface early-outs
fired at 49.7%, the room cache built 340 entries for 2.74M samples, and the
per-room overrides resolved once per sample rather than once per modifier.

The cause was the wrapper, not the stack. A mesher tile samples an EXPANDED grid
(-1..Cells+1), so one worker crosses several exact chunk coordinates while
meshing a single tile. The generator's cache held only the last coordinate, so
every boundary crossing rebuilt the resolved parameters, the whole 22-operator
stack and the tunnel-core cache. On one representative tile: 3,675 refetches,
38.0s. The entire operator stack was 18.5s of a 4,272s total -- 0.43%.

Replaced with a 128-slot direct-mapped thread_local cache keyed on owner, chunk,
layout version, params fingerprint and generator type. Collisions force a safe
rebuild, never a stale read. No shared mutable state, no order-dependent
reduction.

  TunnelNetwork  344.5s / 164.267 us/vox  ->  18.4s / 8.763 us/vox   (18.7x)
  Maze             7.4s /   3.535 us/vox  ->   1.08s / 0.513 us/vox  ( 6.9x)
  same tile        38.0s                  ->   0.51s ; refetches 3675 -> 27

Output is BYTE-IDENTICAL, before vs after and across repeats, both archetypes:
TunnelNetwork 50d6b4d0..f23126, Maze 364f7489..2fbe99. The permission to change
the field was not needed.

Also in this commit, from the two preceding tasks:

- Explorer renders from the MESH instead of raymarching. It meshes the region
  once through the canonical UVoxelMarchingCubesMesher, then CPU-rasterises via
  a BVH. A viewpoint went from ~16 minutes to 0.155s; 8 views now cost 1.25s of
  drawing. No render pixel samples the density field.
- One sampled grid and player-fit mask per run, shared by render/walk/export,
  instead of the same 368s walk computed twice.
- A wall-clock budget (25 min default, hard 30 max) that stops cleanly and
  records truncated/truncated_during/completed_modes rather than overshooting.
- ParallelFor across the measurement sampling; the suite was ~10% of a 16-thread
  machine.
- -surfaceroughness= on the commandlet, and a surface-relief metric in export
  mode (edge lengths, dihedral distribution, face-vs-smooth normal divergence)
  so "does this look like rock" is a number, not a screenshot argument.
- Smooth vertex normals in the rasteriser: FVoxelMeshData::Normals is the
  density-gradient normal the engine shades with, and the raster path was
  recomputing a face normal over it.
- ScaleDiagnosis: baked candidate indices are now derived from the current
  corpus, so a legitimate field change stops breaking the test.

NOT verified, and not claimed:
- TunnelNetworkSpineEquivalence exceeded the 30-minute cap and was stopped.
  Inconclusive, not passing. The identical hashes are strong evidence the
  op-stack/legacy equivalence holds, but the test has not confirmed it.
- CrossPlatformDigest passes but reports 2 samples within 1e-6 of the
  isosurface; FMath::Sin/Cos leaves Windows/Linux equivalence unproven.
  Pre-existing, not caused by this change.
- The cache's memory footprint (128 entries x ~16 workers) is unmeasured.

What the roughness sweep settled, for the record: SurfaceRoughness 0 -> 8 moves
cost by 0.3% (163.2 / 163.2 / 163.7 us), so roughness was never the cost. It
does reach the surface (dihedral p50 1.1 -> 2.2 -> 5.9), which kills my claim
that the density-channel operator contributed nothing. TunnelNetwork's hard
seams are present at roughness 0 (4.4% of edges past 40 deg vs Maze's 1.0%), so
they are structural -- in how primitives are unioned -- not a roughness
deficiency. More roughness makes them worse, not better.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-08 20:31:56 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 d97373c5a8 feat(gen): Jahni's playtest corrections -- rooms flattened, roads deleted
From walking a TunnelNetwork preset at (0,0). Four corrections, and two of
them were the same mistake.

2a. The (0,0) landing room is sized to host a FUTURE straight vertical
    shaft from the surface, with flooring around the origin itself. The
    room is the landing for a shaft the player digs later.
2b. The inter-strate descent no longer starts at the spine -- placed by
    deterministic hash within a radius around (0,0). The spine room is for
    the surface shaft; the descent is elsewhere.
2c. ⛔ DELETED the landing->hub connector roads from 413c15d. Jahni:
    "its straight up making other tunnels straightly through everything...
    they have nothing to do here." Zero references remain.
2d. ⭐ FLATTEN THE ROOM JOINS instead. Where two spherical rooms intersect
    and leave a lip above head height, the join is brought down to a
    walkable level.

⭐ 2c AND 2d ARE ONE CORRECTION. I solved "rooms do not connect" by
TUNNELLING BETWEEN THEM when the answer was MAKING THEIR FLOORS MEET. The
81-run sweep had already said so -- zero narrow-gap events, every failure a
vertical severance, renders showing "a sharp diagonal ledge descending into
black open space". A radial corridor to the origin could never have fixed
that; flattening the joins is aimed at exactly it.

2e. Descent tunnel 1.5x wider, per "1.5x bigger wouldn't be too much".
2f. Corridors WANDER. Jahni, from the renders: "its not a maze, its still a
    latice made straight paths." The spanning tree changed WHICH edges
    exist, not what an edge looks like -- every corridor was a straight
    axis-aligned capsule, every junction 90 degrees. Now hash-jittered
    chains, seam-safe like the tree.

RENDERER: 192x128 -> 512x288, and cameras are now seeded from the
player-fit set -- "a density-checked pose from the exact player-fit walk
mask". Previously they sat INSIDE ROCK looking at back-faces, which Jahni
spotted instantly and no metric could. First genuinely legible pictures of
this world.

ParallelFor landed at 6 sites in VoxelStrateMeasure before I stopped the
run; the rest of that work continues next.

⚠️ AND THE RENDERER IS ARCHITECTURALLY WRONG, per Jahni: "why, in engine,
does it take a minute to have clear view of thousands of angles, but in our
renderer it takes ages?" Because the engine MESHES ONCE and rasterises --
~32k density calls per chunk, then every angle is free. I RAYMARCH: tens of
millions of density calls PER IMAGE, nothing reused between frames. We
already have the mesher and an export mode. Next task renders from the
mesh.

Also from him: runs must stay under 30 minutes. This one hit 33 and
produced 2 images.

Build clean. Committed as a checkpoint -- the task was stopped mid-Part-3,
not finished.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-08 14:14:29 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 55bf807f60 feat(descent): landing ROOMS and a walkable tunnel -- per Jahni's correction
Jahni corrected the design: "the connection between level is a tiny tunnel
connecting both strate, not vertical, it needs to be walkable" and "'the
spine' shouldn't be carved except optionally from the top first strate,
then it's used to have a landing room".

COMPOSER-NOTES §6.8 had said the spine "provides a clean landing space, not
a continuous open shaft" -- and the implementation carved a vertical
cylinder anyway. A vertical cylinder has no walkable floor except at its
bottom, so a carve guaranteeing open AIR guaranteed nothing STANDABLE.
That one omission is behind five of my dead hypotheses this week.

Now:
  origin spine   a finite rounded ROOM per strate, no vertical bore.
                 radius 14 -> 8 m wide, 7.5 m tall
  descent        a walkable tunnel, single-file by design: 3 m mouth,
                 2.5 m waist, gradient capped at a NAMED 15 deg
  exotic styles  VerticalShaft / SpiralDescent / CascadingDrops /
                 CrackCrevice preserved, no longer the default

⚠️ THE GEOMETRY BITES, and it is worth Jahni's eye: at 15 deg a 32 m drop
needs 119.4 m of horizontal run -- about 59.7 m per switchback leg. That is
a long walk between strates. It is the honest consequence of "walkable",
not a tuning artifact, and the alternative is a steeper number.

⭐ AND THE ROOT CAUSE GOT NAMED A THIRD TIME, by Codex mid-run: "the round
tube was hollow air but had no authored support strip, so 'open' still did
not mean 'standable'." Tunnels now carry a floor band, and the root join
terminates in the finite origin room rather than an annular shaft hub.

Measured, commandlet sweep, 8 archetypes x 8 seeds, 64/64 valid:
  origin column has player-fit cells   17/64 -> 63/64
  origin column reachable               0/64 ->  7/64
  arrival landing probes            315/320 fit AND in the arrival component
  tunnel audit    5,916/5,916 floor and capsule samples pass; zero gradient,
                  floor, capsule, geometry or seal failures
  narrow-gap events 0        box verdicts 14 checked, 0 violations

⚠️ arrival->departure is 6/64. The landings and tunnels are now provably
walkable; what remains is the INTRA-STRATE vertical connectivity problem
found in 6b91669 -- floors at different levels inside a strate with nothing
joining them. Separate and larger. Not tuned toward.

⚠️ PROCESS: this took 5.7 hours, of which Codex used 4 SECONDS of CPU. The
rest was polling the 73-minute automation suite at ~10% machine load. The
commandlet exists to avoid exactly that. New rule recorded: iterate with the
commandlet, full suite ONCE at the end.

Editor + Shipping builds clean. Automation 32/32, 0 failed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-08 02:14:37 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 413c15de24 feat(passages): §6.5 landings -- you arrive somewhere you can stand
The last unbuilt Tier 1 item. A passage was a bore through rock with no
floor inside the walkable angle, so its mouth was not a standing position
and neither was anything near it -- the departure mouth measured a FOUR-CELL
player-fit component. You arrived and there was nowhere to stand.

Both ends of all 7 passages now open into a landing, sized from the body:
  capsule diameter 2.72 vox      floor >= 12 vox (3 m) to stand and turn
  capsule height 7.04 vox        room >= 12 vox tall, stock mouth gives 18 (4.5 m)
  3-voxel floor slab, tube tangent to it -- no lip to climb out of
  connector 5-vox radius: 2.5 m clear width, 3 m clear height
  ramps over 44 deg get a deterministic level dog-leg

⭐ THE MOUTHS ARE NO LONGER SPECKS:
  archetype        components      largest      arrival-departure
  Maze             309 -> 340      176 -> 3210    43-81  -> 3210-3210
  TunnelNetwork    467 -> 227     1292 -> 3841     2-1   -> 3841-269
  Underwater        86 -> 117       35 -> 3838     3-11  -> 3838-267
  FlatPlain         45 ->  11      259 -> 2130     1-1   ->  268-273
  CrystalChamber   197 ->  90       24 ->  286     1-1   ->  286-274
  FloatingIslands    2 ->   1        3 ->   72     1-1   ->   72-72

Law 1/8 -> 2/7 connected (1 refused on MaxCells), and critically ZERO
connections now run through a four-cell pocket.

Every landing floor was verified against the FINAL density, after all posts:
14/14 pass the 44 deg slope bracket, worst room gradient .059, worst
connector .522. 14/14 deterministic root joins. 0 seal failures.
0 box-verdict violations across 82 proved + 174 mixed, 109,142 voxels.
Op-stack bit-identical, order-independence green over 10 slots / 31
passages / 3 pool orders. Cache 0.665 us rebuild, 0.646 us hot.

Post order: origin spine -> vertical seal -> passage tube + landing floor
-> XY edge seal. Landings clamp 4 voxels inside the vertical seal; the XY
seal stays last and wins at world edges.

⚠️ ARCHITECTURAL NOTE, not a detail: landings join a deterministic annular
ROOT HUB at (0,0), built identically for every endpoint -- no nearest-
component search, no passage ordering. That is what makes the join
guaranteed rather than likely, and it extends the (0,0) spine concept from
a landmark into a structural network. It also means routes tend to pass
through the centre, which is a gameplay consequence worth Jahni's eye.

⚠️ AND IT DOES NOT CLOSE THE LAW. Codex is explicit: the landings guarantee
membership in the new root network, NOT in the archetype's pre-existing fit
component. The whole-strate Maze check still shows a 71.9-voxel gap between
1,235 and 2,938-cell components. So the native corridor networks remain
disconnected from the root network in places. Real, separate, next.

52 build-and-measure cycles, ~9 hours, finding real geometry bugs on the
way (a landing floor overlapping the ramp cells and hiding a floor
discontinuity; the disturbance pass refilling connector headroom).

Build clean, 32/32 success, 0 failed. Showcase regenerated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K8V9my1PL68pmQb2gutZZV
2026-09-06 23:55:47 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 2eaceb5984 feat(maze): a spanning tree -- it is a maze now, not a grid
Jahni: "mostly a cube full of straight pathway along the edges... basically
just a repeating pattern of tunnel connecting to each other, definitely
unwanted". And the measurement: the arrival mouth in a 30-cell pocket while
the network held 1,217. SAME CAUSE -- edge selection was independent hash
gating per +X/+Y/+Z edge, i.e. a random subgraph of the cubic lattice.
Every junction identical, and connectivity left to chance.

Fixed the way VerticalShafts was fixed in 7a20eee: guarantee it by
construction. Each non-origin node hashes ONE parent axis toward
(0,0,0) so Manhattan distance strictly decreases -- a proof of a global
rooted tree, not a probability. Loops are capped at 0.18 x
BranchProbability and 0.10 x Verticality and can never supply connectivity.
⛔ No edge probability was raised; percolation is a phase transition, not a
knob.

  64 seeds x 9,261 nodes:  0 disconnected cells, 0 edge-count violations
  determinism:             20,000 bit-identical checks
  seam freedom:            42 probes, 0 legacy and 0 op-stack mismatches

⭐ AND IT READS AS A MAZE, in numbers rather than adjectives:

  degree   1 (dead ends)  15.9%      mean degree 2.504
  degree   2              36.6%      run length median 1, p90 3, max 18
  degree   3              31.7%
  cubic-grid control:     100% degree-6, 0% dead ends, mean 6.000

Two abreast, derived not nudged: 3 m usable floor / 0.7 = 4.286 m clear
bore, + roughness reach 3.75 voxels => CorridorRadius 12.5 (6.25 m bore),
giving 3.06 m of usable floor. CellSize 64 still leaves a 7.875 m wall
between neighbouring bores.

BranchProbability and Verticality are now LOOP-DETAIL knobs, not
connectivity controls. Documented at their declarations so nobody tunes
them expecting the old meaning.

⚠️ The player-fit law still fails, and Codex named the likely reason in its
caveats: "global tree connectivity does not guarantee connectivity inside
an arbitrary finite cropped measurement window." The tree routes toward the
ORIGIN, and the fitted window is the AABB of the two mouths -- so the
connecting path runs A -> origin -> B and leaves the box. The coarse maze
graph now measures Connected while the fine windowed law does not. That
smells like the sixth measurement artifact of this session, and it is the
next thing to test rather than to assume.

Box audits: existing maze 104 proved / 0 violations; novel fill stack 240
proved / 319,440 voxels / 0 violations. Op-stack bit-identical over 20,000
samples. Perf 1.13 us rebuild, 0.145 us hot call.

Showcase regenerated. Build clean, 32 tests, 30 clean successes, 2 known
deliberate warnings, 0 failed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K8V9my1PL68pmQb2gutZZV
2026-09-06 11:12:52 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 faa62d419e feat(runtime): the composed world can BE the game world
Jahni: "can you not implement those settings? as in, have them be live in
game?" This is that. The composer stops being a lab tool.

THE ARCHITECTURAL LINE, which is the whole design (COMPOSER-NOTES §3.1):
COMPOSITION stays editor-only, EVALUATION becomes runtime. Rolling,
measuring, preview, selection, promotion, the corpus -- none of it reaches
a player's machine. What crosses into the runtime is exactly two things:
reading a season manifest, and materialising a recipe into an op stack.

  UVoxelSeasonAsset      a cookable UPrimaryDataAsset holding the manifest,
                         so a season ships in a packaged game. The JSON
                         stays the reviewable, git-diffable artefact.
  UVoxelSettings::Season  optional. Unset => behaviour is exactly as today.
  GetEffective*()         season seed / spine radius / world radius / season
                         number override the authored values when assigned.
                         The test deliberately sets DIFFERENT authored
                         values, so "the season is authoritative" is proved
                         rather than coincidental.

⭐ MULTIPLAYER DETERMINISM, PROVED: two independent runtime managers built
the same season and compared 393,216 density samples BIT-IDENTICALLY. This
is the property the whole multiplayer model rests on -- replicate seed +
layout + diff, never geometry.

⭐ AND A STALE SEASON IS DETECTABLE, NOT SILENT. Initialize() now returns
bool and an assigned-but-invalid season NEVER falls back to the authored
pool. Falling back would hand a client a world that looks fine and is not
the season -- silent divergence, the worst failure mode in a shared world.
GetCurrentSeasonContentHash() is exposed BlueprintPure to compare at join.

HasComposerRecipeOverride() is gone. It force-classified every custom recipe
as Mixed, which was correct while box verdicts were only proved for
hand-written stacks -- but 8e346a3 made EffectOverBox correct in ISOLATION,
proved on a stack no builder produces. Keeping the force would have cost
tile skipping on every composed world forever.

VF_RollStrateRegionCount moved behind WITH_EDITOR while the partition-seed
helpers stayed runtime: rolling out, evaluation in. Lateral regions remain
gated off.

⚠️ Sol hit its usage limit mid-task, so the edits arrived unvalidated. I
built and ran them myself rather than assume -- and they did not compile:
VoxelForgeComposerSeasonTest.cpp was missing UObject/Package.h, which every
other test picks up transitively through the shared fixture it does not use.
One include; every NewObject/GetTransientPackage in the file was failing.

Editor build clean. SHIPPING BUILD SUCCEEDS -- the invariant that proves no
composer roller is linked into a packaged game. 30 succeeded / 0 failed.

⚠️ UNVERIFIED: whether it looks right on screen. Nothing headless can tell
us that; it needs Jahni to assign a season asset and press play.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VJiTcTSDNkKBtnNdiBtdaU
2026-09-05 08:37:01 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 dd38832bb6 feat(composer): lateral REGIONS -- built, measured, and gated OFF
Jahni's own idea: "archetype could even mix within the same strate at some
point, tunnel network leading to a big chamber". An archetype becomes a
spatial REGION inside a strate, not a label on it.

Built by extending the mechanism that already exists rather than inventing
one: the stack blends VERTICALLY between strates, so regions blend the same
way LATERALLY. Deterministic jittered Voronoi sites on a 256-voxel lattice,
1-3 regions per strate from (seed, strateIndex), 24-voxel symmetric blend
band, per-chunk lookup cache. Parameters are never blended -- a shaft's
ShaftSpacing means nothing to a slab -- only the resulting DENSITY is.
Structural posts stay global and unconditional, so an invented region
cannot switch off the primordial law.

  single-region path   BIT-IDENTICAL to legacy, 256 probes, native + recipe
  cross-boundary boxes 20 of 40, 199,800 voxels brute-forced, 0 VIOLATIONS
                       (every seam-spanning box correctly returned Mixed)
  blend-band cost      663 ns vs 338 ns per voxel, over 16.0% of voxels
                       ~1.15x field-weighted
  survival             16/16 valid, non-vacuous, largest share >= .50

⛔ AND IT IS GATED OFF, because the seam breaks the one law that matters:
arrival -> departure across a region boundary passes 9/16 seeds, against
11/16 same-region controls in the same harness. Density blending alone does
not guarantee a player can cross a seam. A strate that mixes archetypes and
strands you at the boundary is strictly worse than one that does not mix.

VF_LateralRegionsAreShippable() returns false and the test ASSERTS THE GATE
IS SHUT while the rate is imperfect -- so flipping it without fixing
connectivity turns the suite red by design. The rate is a warning, not an
assertion: it is the measured state of an off-by-default feature, not a
regression in a live world, and a permanently red suite stops being read,
which is how real failures get missed.

Everything that ships is still hard-guarded: single-region bit-identity,
zero cross-boundary box violations, and every shipping-path law test
untouched.

The fix is an explicit CROSS-SEAM CORRIDOR CONTRACT -- a design decision,
recorded rather than made unilaterally. Codex diagnosed this correctly and
declined to tune the threshold, which was the right call.

Build clean, 29 succeeded / 0 failed, run and verified by me.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VJiTcTSDNkKBtnNdiBtdaU
2026-09-05 05:06:32 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 d717bc74ff feat(editor): walk a composed candidate in PIE + why rooms read angular
PART B -- the thing Jahni asked for: "any way to test those in game?"
A candidate existed only as measurements and PNGs. Now he can stand in one.

  Select the VoxelWorld actor in PIE -> Live Edit|Composer ->
  ComposerSeed / ComposerCandidateIndex / ComposerTargetStrateIndex /
  bComposerRollStructure -> click Apply Composer Candidate.

The button and the automation tests call the SAME roll wrapper, which was
the load-bearing requirement: a second roll path could drift, and then he
would be judging a different world than the contact sheet describes. A
determinism sample is logged on apply (seed, index, recipe, archetype,
metrics, epoch, eight-point density verdict) so drift is caught the day it
happens rather than in a month.

Hazards handled, since this is the first composer code to touch the live
runtime path: preflight materialisation before any live mutation, generation
and decoration tasks drained, PassagesVersion bumped to invalidate
thread_local caches, reuse of the existing RegenerateAllChunks / Epoch
invalidation rather than a new path, no Initialize() or GeneratePassages()
during apply (the re-entrancy trap), DiffLayer locks untouched, and custom
recipes conservatively force ClassifyTile to Mixed.

Scope is deliberate: a DENSITY-ONLY overlay. Layout height, authored
passages, content, water and biome metadata stay from the existing slot;
RebuildStrates() clears it. A full composed layout replacement needs a safe
rebuild path that does not exist yet.

Editor-only, verified: a Shipping build succeeds with the bridge excluded
(96/96 actions), so §3.1's "offline only, never on a player's machine"
still holds.

⚠️ UNVERIFIED BY DESIGN: a button cannot be tested headlessly and Codex was
told not to claim it works. Jahni presses it and confirms the visual plus
the "determinism=PASS" log line.

PART A -- why rooms read angular, measured not guessed. One of three room
shapes is VoxelSDF::RoundedBox:
  ShapeA = (.8 Rxy, .8 Rxy, .8 Rz)   ShapeR = .25 Rxy
so rounding is 31% of the horizontal half-extent but 78% of the vertical.
Corners are rounded; the broad planar FACES survive. SmoothMin (blend 4)
softens room/tunnel junctions not isolated corners; the cave warp bends
geometry but preserves flat regions; roughness is surface-scale only.
The name is accurate -- "rounded box" is not "blob".

NOT ACTED ON. Jahni corrected his own read: the angular archetype is Maze
(lattice source, rectilinear BY DESIGN and correct), and TunnelNetwork is
"alright-ish". Codex's recommendation is recorded for if he ever wants it:
~5-10% boxes, 10-20% capsules, rest ellipsoids, or a larger ShapeR.

Also closed REVIEW_FINDINGS EVoxelPassageType/Style as WONTFIX, enacting a
2026-08-16 judgement that recommended closure and was left open.

Build clean (Editor + Shipping), 25 succeeded / 0 failed, run by me.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VJiTcTSDNkKBtnNdiBtdaU
2026-09-04 22:03:01 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 4f11ce81a4 fix(shafts): the primordial law holds -- 0 trusted negatives across 16 seeds
Closes the VerticalShafts bug. Two remaining failures were investigated
and neither was a broken world.

PART A -- my measurement window was binding, not the world.
The window was a square centred on (0,0) with a radius, while mouths sit
up to ~200 voxels out in arbitrary directions, so a box holding both was
mostly empty space paid for at full price. Seed 6 at step 1 needed
16,515,072 cells and blew the cap; fitted to the two mouths it needs
6,553,344 and measures fine.

  seed  6  step 2  NOT_CONNECTED -> CONNECTED at doubled margin
  seed  6  step 1  NOT_CONNECTED -> CONNECTED at doubled margin
  seed 14  step 2  CONNECTED
  seed 14  step 1  CONNECTED

A fitted box can cut off a route that detours outside it, so every
negative is re-run at doubled margin. 5 of 16 were binding negatives and
all 5 flipped. TRUSTED NEGATIVES: 0. There is no evidence of a single
unescapable strate in 16 seeds.

PART B -- the drainage tree has no orphans, and a third cause existed.
  0 / 10,372 unreachable shaft paths (0% orphan rate)
  16 strict local minima, all caught by the direct-spine fallback
  neighbour fallback fired 0 times; emergency fallback 0
  91.8% of non-largest components are smaller than one shaft volume --
    they are roughness bubbles, not geometry

So a mouth could land in a noise bubble that is open but unreachable --
worse than useless, exactly the trap the law forbids.
VF_SuggestLandingPoint now returns the selected shaft AXIS, which is on
the drainage tree by construction.

⚠️ Codex found a third cause neither of us listed: tree capsules could
cross ledge bands, so a guaranteed connector could be blocked by a ledge.
Connector Z is now drawn from a deterministic ledge-free interval,
mirrored in the op stack.

⚠️ And an 8th error in my spec: "connect to any neighbour shaft" as a
fallback can create CYCLES -- a loop of shafts that drains nowhere and is
disconnected from the spine. The fallback must preserve strictly
decreasing origin-distance. Implemented that way.

  per-archetype law 6/6 · box-verdict violations 0 · stack equivalence
  bit-identical over 20,000 samples · sweep 45.3 -> 20.4 s
  cache 7.970 us rebuild, 0.073 us hot call (225-cell rolls on rebuild only)

Build clean, 21 succeeded / 0 failed, verified by me in VoxelM.log.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VJiTcTSDNkKBtnNdiBtdaU
2026-09-04 03:57:30 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 9d2324879d feat(world): the XY edge seal -- the fourth structural invariant
VF_ApplyBoundarySeal was purely VERTICAL: it sealed each strate's ceiling
and floor and there was no horizontal equivalent, because until the depths
were bounded the world had no sides. The GDD now says "bounded, but
gigantic", so a player who walked far enough reached unterminated
generation running off into nothing.

Built as a FORCING op, appended automatically and not author-omittable, so
an invented strate cannot forget its own edge. Because a forcing op proves
AllSolid in its band, the outer shell also becomes free to skip in tile
classification -- correctness and a perf win from one change.

  order  spine -> vertical seal -> passage carving -> XY EDGE SEAL
         -> disturbances -> diff
  A near-rim passage may pierce a vertical seal; the XY seal runs after and
  wins. A passage must never punch a hole through the world's edge.

ClassifyBox/ForcedMarginOverBox proved via the closest AABB radius with a
one-voxel margin: 8 boxes proved, 1 tile proved, 600 voxels brute-forced,
0 violations. FXYEdgeSealOp is IsXYPure. Max rim discontinuity .187 against
a 1.0 threshold -- a ramp, not a cylinder wall.

⚠️ WorldRadiusVoxels DEFAULTS TO 0, and that is deliberate. Codex flagged
that DA_Settings and BP_VoxelSettings predate the property and so do not
serialize it -- they inherit the C++ default silently. A default of 8192
would have walled in every existing world on next editor open with nothing
in the asset to explain it. 0 is a bitwise no-op (45 interior comparisons
against the unbounded path prove it). The GDD's intended ~8192 is a value
to set in the asset, deliberately, once. Documented at the declaration.

Codex found four spec errors, three of them mine: VF_ApplyBoundarySeal
lives in VoxelDensityPrimitives.h not VoxelCaveMorphology; the asset
default trap above; and my "density increases through the band" wording
contradicts the MC sign convention (solid is more NEGATIVE) -- the test
measures increasing solidness.

Build clean, 21 succeeded / 0 failed, run and verified by me.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VJiTcTSDNkKBtnNdiBtdaU
2026-09-04 01:17:12 +02:00