Commit Graph
55 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
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 6b916699af test(explore): 81 runs in an afternoon -- every failure is a DROP, not a squeeze
First real use of the commandlet, and it paid for itself immediately: 64
sweep runs + failure renders + origin probes, which at the old 73-minutes-
per-automation-run would have been days.

⭐ FINDING 1: THE WORLD IS FRAGMENTED VERTICALLY, NOT PINCHED.
Across all 64 runs: ZERO narrow-gap events. Every failed run has separate
arrival/departure fit components with a positive gap, 12.75 m to 72.98 m.
So corridors are not too tight anywhere -- the space is severed.

And for the first time in this project we LOOKED at a failure instead of
inferring from aggregates:
  FlatPlain/42   "a broad flat floor sheet with a sharp diagonal ledge
                  descending into black open space" -- a drop, gap 63.9 m
  SurfaceWorld/7 "terrain shelves and a large black void between them.
                  There is no connecting floor" -- gap 51.8 m
  Maze/42        "a massive solid rock wall/overhang fills the separation"
                  -- gap 27.7 m
I checked the images myself. FlatPlain shows two floor LEVELS 27 m apart
in Z with nothing joining them.

⇒ The missing thing is VERTICAL CONNECTION between floor levels. Ramps,
slopes, ledges, stairs. Every archetype builds floors; nothing builds a way
between them.

⭐ FINDING 2: THE ORIGIN HUB IS NOT REACHABLE, which contradicts 413c15d.
  agent's reachable set included the origin column:  0 / 64 runs
  origin column had ANY player-fit cell:            17 / 64 runs
  Maze slot 4, all 8 seeds:                          0 fit cells, unreachable
Even in the 17, the origin cells were not in the arrival component.

The reason is structural and obvious in hindsight: the origin spine is a
VERTICAL CYLINDER. A vertical shaft has no walkable floor except at its
bottom, so a scalar-density carve that guarantees open air guarantees
nothing standable. The landings join a hub you cannot stand in.

That is a finding about the §6.5 hub join as exposed to the player-fit
layer -- not walk tuning. Recorded rather than patched.

Also from Jahni, looking at the renders -- two things numbers missed:
- The render cameras sit INSIDE ROCK, viewing tunnel surfaces from the
  solid side. Cameras must be seeded from the player-fit set.
- ⚠️ THE MAZE IS STILL A LATTICE OF STRAIGHT PATHS. The spanning tree
  changed WHICH edges exist, not what an edge LOOKS like: every corridor is
  still a straight axis-aligned capsule between cell centres, every junction
  90 deg. So 15.9% dead ends and mean degree 2.504 measured maze-ness of the
  TOPOLOGY while the eye sees a sparser grid. Sixth time a metric answered a
  question adjacent to the one that mattered.

Two tool issues found: PowerShell needs -modes="render,walk" quoted or it
parses as render-only; and "showcase slot" is ambiguous (cards use 1/6, the
Maze diagnosis uses 4).

Determinism spot-checked: repeated arguments give identical SHA-256 JSON.
Measurement-only changes; no generation, parameter or threshold edits.
Editor build succeeded.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012aheo2crrZmHuYtPpdY2Cb
2026-09-07 18:33:15 +02:00
Fr0zkaandClaude Opus 5 bd547c35c4 feat(explore): a commandlet -- 91x faster, and the first real PICTURE
Every experiment in this project cost a build + full-suite cycle. The
landing task took 52 of them over ~9 hours. And nobody could SEE the world:
every visual judgement all session was made on density SLICES -- diagrams,
not pictures. That is how a floor heaving 1.4 m every two metres got
described as "roughness visible but modest" while Jahni spotted it in
thirty seconds by walking it.

-run=VoxelForgeExplore, editor-only module, three modes, one build many runs:

  render  raymarched PNGs, fixed 0.25-voxel step + 10 bisection iterations
          (NOT sphere tracing -- the op stack yields density, not a signed
          distance, so a long step tunnels through walls). Three views, each
          with a 1.76 m human marker in frame, because every scale mistake
          here came from numbers with no body beside them.
  walk    an agent using the EXISTING VF player-fit stencil, never its own
          movement model -- two definitions of "can a player stand here"
          would drift and we could not tell which was lying.
  export  OBJ through the canonical UVoxelMarchingCubesMesher. No second
          mesher; a forked meshing invariant is the bug this project keeps
          paying for. 23.2 MB, 106,762 verts, 200,842 tris for 128^3.

⭐ THE NUMBER THAT JUSTIFIES IT: the full automation run takes 4,396 s
(73m16s). The commandlet does all three modes in 48.1 s wall, 5.9 s of
which is engine startup. ~91x faster. And I had guessed the suite cost
~90 s -- it is 73 MINUTES. The iteration loop was far more expensive than
I knew.

First real walk metrics on the Maze (seed 0, slot 4):
  distance 214 m · tortuosity 4.98 · dead ends 0.935/100 m
  narrow-gap events 0 · reachable fit fraction 3.01%
  result NotConnectedAtThisResolution
Tortuosity ~5 is a genuinely winding route, which is right for a maze.
3% reachable is not.

Editor Development build clean. SHIPPING build clean with the receipt
containing VoxelForge and NOT VoxelForgeEditor -- the instrument cannot
reach a packaged game. Automation 32/32, 0 failed.

⚠️ Codex initially shipped this UNBUILT, and correctly: I omitted the
## Validation section from that spec, so it fell back to CLAUDE.md's
"NEVER build or compile". 100+ compile errors from three causes -- bare
TCondensedJsonPrintPolicy and TJsonWriter needing their template
arguments, and a missing UObject/Package.h. That include is the SECOND
miss this session, so CODEMAP §6 now carries the gotcha.

⚠️ Unrelated, found in passing: VoxelForge.uplugin does not declare
RealtimeMeshComponent although the runtime module uses it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01K8V9my1PL68pmQb2gutZZV
2026-09-07 04:07:07 +02:00