Maze and Slab now report BIT-IDENTICAL: FPSemantics = Precise, set for
cross-platform play, dissolved the ULP residue. Hypothesis 3 had the right
mechanism all along — under /fp:fast the compiler transforms by surrounding
context with no isolable axis, which is exactly why five one-variable experiments
all came back negative. Removing the permission removed the difference. Nobody
solved C10; C9 got fixed for an unrelated reason and C10 fell out of it.
SurfaceWorld step 1 forced an architectural decision. DECOMPOSITION section 5 notes
the height ops operate on Z values rather than density, then lists them as children
of FHeightfieldSource. Writing them made the consequence unavoidable: they do not
fit IVoxelDensityOp. No input Z (they produce one), XY-pure per column rather than
per voxel, and they write neither channel. Forcing them in would need a per-voxel
channel for a column property, or one opaque op — section 2.5's failure mode.
So height space gets its own contract: VoxelHeightOp.h (FVoxelHeightSample with
Height + Relief, IVoxelHeightOp, FVoxelHeightStack) and five ops. Relief is the
original's M — produced by the structural source, consumed by the terrace gate.
Section 0.1 found density needed a second channel; this found terrain needs a
second space.
The type system now forbids for free what AUDIT 6.3 warns about: a height stack
cannot hold Z-dependent data because there is no Z in the signature.
Deliberately staged — this touches nothing on the density path. If height space had
not decomposed cleanly, it shows up here for one test rather than after building the
adapter, the column cache integration and the dispatch on top.
The test runs twice; the second pass is load-bearing because the F20 terrain ops are
off by default, so a defaults-only run leaves all four modifiers untested. It also
brute-forces MaxDisplacement, since a false bound would later be a hole.
ComputeSurfaceTerrainZ moved private -> public for the test, same justification as
GetSlabDensity. Old declaration removed.
UNVERIFIED: not compiled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jahni: "I do not need your work to be identical or near identical to what I had
before, only having it 99.99% at worst reproducible if two people share the same
seed, since everyone rebuilds it on multiplayer."
Recorded as OPSTACK-PLAN 2.6.1, superseding 2.6's "recognisably the same place".
Consequences, each recorded where it will be found:
- C10 closed permanently rather than parked: it measures old-path vs new-path
agreement and the two never coexist in a shipped world.
- The equivalence tests keep their value as PORT-CORRECTNESS checks, not fidelity
checks. Isosurface hard-fail stays; ULP grading is diagnostic only.
- C9 promoted to top open risk. "Two people share a seed" is exactly what /fp:fast
weakens across toolchains, and a Linux dedicated server against Windows clients
compiles the density path under opposite float models. FPSemantics = Precise is
the fix and the IWYU debt now blocks something that matters.
- C1 unblocked: it was deferred only because it re-rolls the world's noise.
Then, doing C1's arithmetic before applying its documented one-liner: THE FIX IS
WRONG. It bounds SeedF but keeps the * 97.7 multiplier, so the coordinate term
still reaches 1.6e6 where the ULP is 0.19 — 9.5x the ~0.02/voxel step. It would
have left the bug live for mid-range seeds while closing the ticket.
The real fix deletes the multipliers: they only decorrelate the ~40 noise sites,
which is a hashing job. VoxelHash::SeedOffset(Seed, Site) gives a site-salted,
bounded, final-units offset. Bounding SeedF alone would also funnel every seed
through 16384 offsets shared by all sites; per-site salting requires a collision at
all ~40 sites instead.
The op stack has already inherited the bug via FSlabVoidSource, so it must land in
both paths at once — and every further port copies it again.
Docs only; the C1 fix is not written.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jahni's call to pin it and move on, and the right one -- six builds spent and the
information stopped being worth the cost.
The final run closed it as far as it can be: SDFs identical everywhere (counted
unconditionally, 0 differ), yet two character-identical carve implementations in
the SAME translation unit fed a provably identical input differ by 1 ULP on
126/5000. That is only possible if they compile to different instruction
sequences, which /fp:fast permits based on surrounding context with no single
isolable axis. Hypothesis 3 was right about the mechanism and wrong about every
clean variable proposed for it, which is why four well-designed isolation tests
came back negative.
AUDIT C10 records the observation, what is proven (SDF bit-exact 126/126, zero
isosurface crossings), the five refuted hypotheses in a table so nobody repeats
them at a build each, why the settling experiment is blocked (shared-PCH / IWYU
debt), and the rule that actually matters: never run both density paths in one
world and never compare them for equality. That is NOT a client-desync risk --
within a binary the field is proven bit-pure and every peer runs the same path --
the cross-platform concern is C9, which stands on its own.
Corrected OPSTACK-PLAN 2.6 and C9: my earlier "/fp:fast across translation units"
explanation was measurably wrong and is removed rather than softened.
MazeEquivalence keeps the permanent value (equivalence with ULP grading,
window-invariance, box-verdict brute force) and drops the verbatim copy,
three-way, bisect, inlining and constness experiments.
Phase 1 closed: Maze decomposes into 7 ops, SDF bit-exact, 0 isosurface
crossings, window-invariant, and 23 of 60 tiles proved uniform where ClassifyTile
proves zero.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jahni asked the right question: does the same seed produce identical results
across OS builds today? Checking the other toolchain made the answer sharper and
worse than what C9 originally said.
ClangToolChain.cs (Linux, Mac, Windows-with-Clang):
case FPSemanticsMode.Default: // Default to precise FP semantics.
case FPSemanticsMode.Precise: Arguments.Add("-ffp-contract=off");
and VCToolChain forces Precise when Windows uses Clang. So the same
FPSemanticsMode.Default resolves to OPPOSITE float models per toolchain, and
Windows/MSVC is the only imprecise configuration in the engine's defaults. Two
builds of identical source are not merely permitted to diverge -- they are
compiled under different rules.
Also added, so the entry does not over-fear itself:
- Calibration: 0 of 20000 samples crossed the isosurface under a 1-ULP
perturbation, so divergence means occasional single-voxel surface differences,
not different terrain. The case that bites is topological (a cave pinch-point
connecting on one build and not the other), which is rare and unreproducible --
the expensive kind.
- Precise everywhere still would not guarantee cross-platform bit-identity:
FMath::Sin/Cos route to platform libm, which is not bit-standardised. It closes
the large gap, not every gap.
- The knob would ALIGN Windows with every other platform rather than being a
one-sided cost -- but still must not be turned speculatively.
- The claim is inferred, not measured. The cheap decisive test is one Windows
build with FPSemantics = Precise: if MazeEquivalence's 454-sample residue
vanishes, the FP model is confirmed as the sole cause.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The bisect settled it. The difference survives every stage removal down to
"corridors + carve ONLY", which is character-for-character transcribed code, so
it is not in anything the decomposition added.
Cause, read out of the engine rather than assumed (VCToolChain.cs):
case FPSemanticsMode.Default: // Default is imprecise FP semantics.
case FPSemanticsMode.Imprecise: Arguments.Add("/fp:fast"); break;
with UBT's own doc: "the compiler is allowed to transform math expressions in
ways that might result in differently rounded results". Identical source in two
translation units may reassociate differently, worth ~1 ULP. It shows up on
exactly the ~2% of samples inside the SDF blend shell, where Blend - Sdf
catastrophically cancels; outside it Carve is exactly 0 or 1 and both agree.
So MazeEquivalence now grades what it can actually assert:
- hard fail : any isosurface crossing (geometry moves)
- info : differences at ULP scale (the unavoidable floor)
- warn : anything larger, which IS port drift, and runs the bisect
A test that warns on every port would get ignored by the port that matters.
Recorded in OPSTACK-PLAN 2.6, and as AUDIT C9 for the part that outlives this
refactor: ARCHITECTURE 9.1's "every peer regenerates identically" holds only
between bit-identical binaries under /fp:fast. Fine for one build on one
platform; a real desync source for a Linux server plus Windows clients both
regenerating authoritative geometry. The FPSemantics::Precise knob exists but
must not be turned speculatively -- it blocks the vectorisation T2.a was chasing,
on the hot loop, for an unmeasured cost.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AUDIT P1: every markdown design doc except CODEMAP.md was untracked, so
ARCHITECTURE / AUDIT / OPSTACK-PLAN / fable-idea / REVIEW_FINDINGS lived
only on disk. Replaces the single !CODEMAP.md exception with !*.md.
Also makes OPSTACK-PROGRESS.md commits actually record something, which
the unattended crash-safety discipline depends on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fr0zka