VoxelForge/OPSTACK-PROGRESS.md

OPSTACK — progress log

APPEND ONLY. Never rewrite or reorder entries. Write the entry for a piece of work before starting it, so an abrupt session end still leaves an accurate marker.

Entry format: date · what · believed-true · UNVERIFIED (everything not yet built by Jahni) · next single action.

This file is how a fresh context resumes. Read the last entry first, then OPSTACK-PLAN.md §9.

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2026-07-27 — branch created, design locked, nothing built

What: Branch experimental created from 69fa73e tmp and checked out. main untouched and is the known-good fallback world. Design finalised across OPSTACK-PLAN.md (incl. §2.5 op taxonomy and §2.6 acceptance bar, both added after Jahni's objection that a naive "ops" reading would just be his old room-operations system). Kickoff prompt written to OPSTACK-PROMPT.md.

Believed true: the plugin builds and runs correctly as of this commit — everything through F20 phases 1+2 is built and working (confirmed by Jahni 2026-07-26; the "PENDING BUILD" markers still in fable-idea.md / ARCHITECTURE.md are stale and are queue item Q3). bEnableDensityVolume is already set to false. Lighting is deprecated for now. Live direction before this refactor was 3D density generation (overhangs, caves inside mountains).

UNVERIFIED: nothing yet — no code has been written for this refactor.

Known open bugs, not yet fixed, documented in AUDIT-2026-07.md §1: C1 large-seed noise collapse · C2 three cache keys missing LayoutVersion · C3 FMath::PerlinNoise2D on the SDF hot path (dormant) · C4 GetPlayerPosition zero-vector sentinel · C5 unbounded-join-on-shutdown · C6 diff-layer scaling.

Next single action: Phase 0.5 — the three automation tests (density purity across worker threads, ClassifyTile vs brute force, DiffLayer under contention). Then the Phase 1 skeleton header only. Then STOP for a build. See OPSTACK-PROMPT.md → WHAT TO DO.

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2026-07-27 — Q4 done: the design docs are in git

What: .gitignore replaced the single !CODEMAP.md exception with !*.md, and committed ARCHITECTURE.md, AUDIT-2026-07.md, CLAUDE.md, OPSTACK-PLAN.md, OPSTACK-PROGRESS.md, OPSTACK-PROMPT.md, REVIEW_FINDINGS.md, fable-idea.md (commit 3128852). CODEMAP.md.bak stays ignored (.bak doesn't match *.md).

Why first, out of queue order: every *.md was ignored, so a git commit of this progress file would have silently recorded nothing. The whole unattended crash-safety discipline depends on this file being committable, so it had to lead.

Believed true / verified: verified — git ls-files "*.md" now lists all nine.

UNVERIFIED: nothing (no C++ touched).

Next single action: Phase 0.5 tests + the Phase 1 skeleton header.

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2026-07-27 — starting Phase 0.5 (tests) + Phase 1 skeleton header

Plan for this batch, written before doing it (so an abrupt end leaves a marker):

1. Source/VoxelForge/Private/Tests/VoxelForgeDeterminismTest.cpp — density purity, shuffled order, multi-threaded (ParallelFor), bit-equality.
2. Source/VoxelForge/Private/Tests/VoxelForgeClassifyTileTest.cpp — ClassifyTile verdict vs a brute-force sweep of the exact mesher lattice.
3. Source/VoxelForge/Private/Tests/VoxelForgeDiffLayerTest.cpp — N readers + 1 writer, monotonic version, no crash.
4. Public/VoxelDensityOp.h — the Phase 1 contract. HEADER ONLY, nothing wired into GetDensityAt.

Known design constraint found while reading: ClassifyTile and GetDensityAt's per-chunk caches need a live UVoxelStrateManager, whose only entry point is Initialize(UVoxelSettings*, int32) reading TSoftObjectPtr pools. Tests therefore build transient UVoxelStrateDefinition objects and point soft pointers at them. If that resolve turns out not to work headless, test 2 self-skips rather than failing — noted here because a skip that looks like a pass is exactly the kind of thing that hides a bug.

UNVERIFIED: everything below this line until Jahni builds. No test has ever been compiled in this plugin — Private/Tests/ is a new directory and the module has never pulled in AutomationTest.h.

Next single action: write the three test files.

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2026-07-27 — batch A+B landed, BUILD GATE reached

Commits, oldest first:

Commit	What	Risk
3128852	.gitignore !*.md + the eight design docs into git (Q4)	none
6eec796	the three Phase 0.5 tests + VoxelForgeTestFixture.h	new files only
d41d34e	Public/VoxelDensityOp.h + EVoxelTileClass moved to VoxelTypes.h	header-only
73f6b26	AUDIT C2 fix — five caches now key on GetLayoutVersion()	⚠️ the only commit that touches a hot path
b4d13e0	regression test for C2	new file only

Believed true: 73f6b26 is behaviour-neutral at a static layout — the layout version only moves on Initialize, so a running world sees the same keys it saw before, plus one uint32 compare per chunk-change. It changes behaviour only after a RebuildStrates / editor live edit, which is the bug.

Design decision worth not re-litigating: ClassifyBox in VoxelDensityOp.h is deliberately NOT source-only. ApplyBoundarySeal does Max(D, SealFactor·BaseDensity) inside its band — it forces solid regardless of input, and pure direction (FillOnly) cannot express that. Over a box sitting entirely in the top seal band the source says AllAir, FillOnly kills AllAir, both hypotheses die → Mixed, whereas ClassifyTile returns AllSolid there today. Not a hole, but a silent loss of exactly the trivial tiles T1.d exists to skip. So forcing ops reset the fold, and ops after them still apply. The full mapping from the fold to today's ClassifyTile is written out in the header.

Deliberately NOT done, and why: AUDIT C1 (unbounded SeedF) is a one-line fix at six sites, and OPSTACK-PLAN §8 lists it first. I left it. It is dormant at small seeds, and applying it changes SeedF from Seed to hash(Seed)&0x3FFF — i.e. it re-rolls the whole world's noise even at today's seed, forcing a re-tune. Doing that in the same build Jahni is using to judge four other unverified changes costs him attribution for no present-day benefit. It should land on its own, deliberately, when he has an hour to re-tune. It is still a real bug — do not lose it.

UNVERIFIED — everything above. None of it has been compiled. In particular the test fixture's TSoftObjectPtr → transient-object resolve has never run.

Next single action: build-free queue. Q1 (OPSTACK-DECOMPOSITION.md), then Q2, then Q3.

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2026-07-27 — build-free queue done. END OF UNATTENDED SESSION.

What (queue items, all zero-build-risk):

• Q1 — OPSTACK-DECOMPOSITION.md (commit c188ee8). All 8 archetypes read line by line and broken into source / combiners / modifiers / structural post, with every FStrateGenerationParams field traced to its destination op. Three findings that change sequencing are in its §0.
• Q2 — the param audit is §9 of that same file. Every field is claimed except WaterLevelRelative, which is a render/water property misfiled in the density struct (and Lerp'd across strate boundaries, where a water plane arguably shouldn't be). Reported, not deleted.
• Q3 — stale markers ticked (commit 831ee2f): fable-idea F20 phases 1/2 + F18, REVIEW_FINDINGS perf pass 2 + batch 3, ARCHITECTURE's biome full-param redesign. NOT ticked: ARCHITECTURE's F6 master material graph — its C++ half is built but the graph is editor-side work that is genuinely still open.
• Q4 — .gitignore (commit 3128852, done first out of order because progress-log commits depended on it).
• CODEMAP §3 rows for every new/moved symbol; OPSTACK-PLAN phase markers ticked.

The three findings, so they are not lost if only this file is read:

1. The op contract probably needs an SDF channel as well as a density channel. Rooms, pits and chimneys are SmoothMin'd in SDF space before a single carve, and three of the four SDF archetypes add roughness to the SDF, not to density. A single-channel Eval can only overwrite — which is also why cross-source SmoothUnion ("a maze inside a mountain that looks like it belongs") is not expressible without it. Decide before porting Maze; it is far cheaper now than after four ports. Not applied — it is Jahni's call.
2. Worm tunnels are why TunnelNetwork can never skip a tile. A fielded 3D-noise carve with no bounds forces CarveOnly everywhere, killing AllSolid for the most-used archetype. Its amplitude is trivially capped by WormStrength, so ~10 lines of scalar bound recovers deep-rock skipping. Suggests one numeric bound belongs in Phase 2, not Phase 3 as the plan has it.
3. Disturbances already carry lattice bounds ClassifyTile discards (it only tests ChasmDensity > 0 strate-wide). A win available to SurfaceWorld independently of everything else.

Believed true: the working tree is a coherent, committed state. Nine commits on experimental, main untouched.

UNVERIFIED — the whole C++ batch. Nothing has been compiled. Specifically at risk: Private/Tests/ is a new directory, the module has never included AutomationTest.h, and the test fixture's TSoftObjectPtr → transient-UVoxelStrateDefinition resolve has never run.

Next single action: BUILD. Then fix what the tests say, then answer OPSTACK-DECOMPOSITION.md §11, then port Maze. Do not write more plugin C++ before the build.

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2026-07-27 — correction to the 3rd entry above

The entry "starting Phase 0.5" says the ClassifyTile test self-skips if the fixture's TSoftObjectPtr resolve fails headless. That was the plan; it is not what was written. All four tests call AddError(World.WhyInvalid()) and FAIL, with a message that says explicitly it is a fixture failure and not a density bug. Failing is the right behaviour — a skip that reads as a pass is exactly what hides bugs — but the earlier entry describes code that does not exist, so it is corrected here rather than edited (this log is append-only).

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2026-07-27 — starting Phase 1: the Maze port, OFF the hot path

Jahni said continue and build later, delegating the open design calls. Two decided, with reasons:

(1) Eval becomes two-channel — FVoxelOpSample { Density, Sdf } — per OPSTACK-DECOMPOSITION.md §0.1. Maze itself forces the question: its roughness perturbs the SDF (MazeSDF += noise·Rough), not the density. Applied to density instead, the same noise scales with the local gradient and is a visibly different effect. Single-channel could not port Maze faithfully, never mind compose two sources with SmoothMin later. Cost: one float.

(2) The stack's density channel is INTERNAL convention (positive = SOLID), negated once by the caller. This reverses what VoxelDensityOp.h said yesterday (it specified MC). Reason: every existing archetype body is written in internal convention and negates on return. Porting in MC would mean flipping the sign of every line at transcription time — on the plugin's documented #1 source of confusion. Internal makes each port a literal transcription instead. ApplyDisturbances and the diff layer genuinely are MC-space, but they live in GetDensityAt after the archetype today and are NOT in this stack, so the question is deferred, not dodged.

The shape of this batch, and why it is not "unverified code on unverified code": the ops, the stack and the Maze port are all new files, plus one mechanical extraction. GetDensityAt and ClassifyTile are NOT touched — nothing in the running game can change. The port is validated by a test that runs the op stack against GetMazeDensity over thousands of points and asserts bit-equality, so Phase 1's real question ("does the source/modifier split fall out naturally?") gets an empirical answer instead of an opinion. Wiring the stack into GetDensityAt waits for the build.

Files: Public/VoxelDensityPrimitives.h (spine/seal/passage lifted out of VoxelGenerator.cpp so ops and the generator share ONE copy) · Public/VoxelDensityOpStack.h + Private/VoxelDensityOpStack.cpp · Private/Tests/VoxelForgeOpStackMazeTest.cpp · edits to VoxelDensityOp.h and VoxelGenerator.cpp (include the primitives, delete the local copies).

UNVERIFIED: all of it, plus everything from the previous batch.

Next single action: write those files, then STOP.

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2026-07-27 — Phase 1 done (written, not built). Maze DOES decompose.

The Phase 1 question is answered. OPSTACK-PLAN §4's stop-trigger asked whether the source/modifier split falls out naturally from the existing code. It does — Maze becomes seven ops with no contortion, and three of them are already shared with other archetypes:

FConstantRockSource      ← also TunnelNetwork's and VerticalShafts' first line
FLatticeCorridorSource   ← Maze only (role 1: what makes a maze a maze)
FSdfRoughnessMod         ← also VerticalShafts, FloatingIslands
FSdfCarveOp              ← the same six lines currently copied in three archetypes
FOriginSpineOp ─┐
FBoundarySealOp ├─ identical in all six density functions
FPassageCarveOp ┘

No revert, no stop-trigger. Commit 4c53d3b.

What is deliberately NOT wired: GetDensityAt and ClassifyTile are untouched, so nothing in a running world can change. OPSTACK-PLAN §4 Phase 1 step 3 ("GetDensityAt gains one branch") is held back until the build is green — wiring an uncompiled stack into the hot path would be exactly the stacked-unverified-work pattern AUDIT §P3 documents. The port is validated instead by VoxelForge.OpStack.MazeEquivalence.

Two contract decisions taken (Jahni delegated them): two-channel Eval, and INTERNAL sign convention inside the stack. Both are argued in the previous entry and in the commit message. The second reverses what VoxelDensityOp.h said on 2026-07-26 — if a later context finds MC-in-stack written anywhere, that text is stale.

One pre-existing hairline bug found and NOT silently patched: at the inner edge of a seal band, 1 - Dist/Thickness can round to exactly 0.0f, so SealFactor·BaseDensity is 0, internal density lands on 0, and the mesher's D >= IsoLevel counts that point as AIR. Today's ClassifyTile excludes those z from column testing and can therefore emit AllSolid over them. It needs the archetype to produce air at exactly that z, so the window is hairline — but a false AllSolid is a hole. The new seal op keeps a 1-voxel safety margin before it forces. The old path is untouched; VoxelForge.Determinism.ClassifyTileSoundness would catch it if it ever fires.

UNVERIFIED: everything, still. Nothing has been compiled.

Next single action: BUILD. Then, in order: fix what the tests report → read MazeEquivalence's two numbers (how many samples differ, and how many tiles the stack can prove uniform) → only then wire the stack into GetDensityAt behind a per-strate opt-in.

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2026-07-27 — FIRST GREEN BUILD. Six tests ran. Five passed.

The plugin compiles and the tests execute. Results (VoxelM/Saved/Automation/Automation2026.07.27-02.36.57.csv):

Test	Result	What it means
ClassifyTileSoundness	✅	600 tiles: 471 Mixed, 76 AllSolid, 53 AllAir. 24 brute-forced against the exact mesher lattice, zero holes. T1.d's soundness is machine-checked for the first time.
DensityPurity	✅	10k points, shuffled order, multi-threaded, with and without carves — bit-identical throughout. No cache-key bug of the AUDIT C2 family survives in the density path.
LiveEditInvalidation	✅	64/64 probes moved after a live edit. The C2 fix works.
BoxVerdictFold	✅	The op-stack fold's logic, case by case.
MazeEquivalence	✅ (with warning)	see below
DiffLayerContention	❌	my test was wrong, not the plugin — see below

The two numbers that mattered

454 of 20000 Maze samples differ, largest |delta| 1.907e-06, and ZERO land on the opposite side of the isosurface. 1.907e-06 is exactly one ULP at a float of magnitude 16 — i.e. the ports are geometrically identical: not one triangle would move. §2.6 accepts this. Leading hypothesis for the residue, now fixed and awaiting a re-run: the original routes the noise coordinates through an FVector (double in UE5) before casting back to float, so it rounds float→double→float, while the op passed floats straight through. Under /fp:fast those round in different places. The op now reproduces the detour deliberately, with a comment saying not to "simplify" it. If the next run still shows drift, the next candidate is FMA contraction differing across translation units.

23 of 60 Maze tiles proved uniform. Today's ClassifyTile proves zero for Maze — every cave archetype falls through to "pas prouvable en v1". That is ~38% of tiles becoming skippable for an archetype that has never skipped one, and it is the first hard evidence for the perf half of the whole refactor.

The failure was mine

Expected 'every carve was recorded' to be 400, but it was 3200. GetTotalModificationCount() sums stored entries, not operations — a stroke is filed under every chunk its AABB overlaps, and 400 radius-6 spheres straddling chunk corners store 8 entries each. The concurrency the test actually exists to check all passed: 7 reader threads, 28.7 million read rounds against 760 writes and 6 Clear()s, no crash, monotonic version, clean state afterwards. Assertion rewritten to compare the stored count against the fan-out ApplyModification itself reported, which is a stronger check.

Worth noting for AUDIT C6: that getter is the right metric for the diff-layer scaling wall (stored entries are what grow without bound) and the wrong name for it.

UNVERIFIED: the three fixes in this entry (the diff-layer assertion, the FVector rounding detour, and the FVoxelOpStack move-only/dllexport fix that made the build pass) have not been re-run.

Next single action: rebuild, re-run, and check whether MazeEquivalence now reports 0 differing samples. Then wire the stack into GetDensityAt behind a per-strate opt-in — Phase 1 step 3, which was deliberately held back until the build went green. It now has.

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2026-07-27 (afternoon) — ALL SIX TESTS GREEN. One hypothesis killed.

Run at 12:02 today (in Saved/Logs/VoxelM.log; the CSV export was taken later).

Test	Result
ClassifyTileSoundness	✅
DensityPurity	✅
DiffLayerContention	✅ now passes — the assertion fix was right; 33.3M read rounds
LiveEditInvalidation	✅ 64/64 probes moved
BoxVerdictFold	✅
MazeEquivalence	✅ (same warning)

Phase 0.5's gate is met. All three original tests plus the two op-stack ones are green on the current code, so the op stack is no longer being built on unverified ground.

The FVector rounding hypothesis was WRONG — and the way it was wrong is informative

The previous entry predicted the fix would take MazeEquivalence from 454 differing samples to 0. The re-run returned exactly 454 samples, exactly 1.90734863e-06, at exactly (-23, 55, -660) — bit-for-bit the same result. The float → double → float detour is a no-op, which is what /fp:precise semantics say it should be. Hypothesis eliminated cleanly; the detour is harmless and stays (it costs nothing and documents the original's shape), but it is not the cause.

Stopped guessing, added a bisect to MazeEquivalence: it re-runs the comparison four times, disabling roughness → seal → spine → passages, on both sides, and reports which stage's removal makes it bit-exact. One run now answers a question two guesses failed to.

Standing hypothesis, to be confirmed or killed by that bisect: the residue is compiler float-contraction across translation units (/fp:fast lets the same expression reassociate differently in VoxelGenerator.cpp and VoxelDensityOpStack.cpp), worth ~1 ULP. It fits the ~2% hit rate: only voxels inside the narrow SDF blend shell have an unsaturated carve factor — everywhere else Carve is exactly 0 or exactly 1 and both paths agree bit for bit. If that is confirmed, bit-identity is not achievable in principle for these ports, and the standard for every later archetype becomes "zero isosurface crossings", not "zero differing floats". That is a conclusion worth having explicitly rather than re-deriving per port.

UNVERIFIED: the bisect itself.

Next single action: re-run MazeEquivalence and read the bisect table. Then Phase 1 step 3 — wire the stack into GetDensityAt behind a per-strate opt-in.

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2026-07-27 (afternoon) — the residue is the COMPILER. Measured, not guessed.

Bisect result:

roughness off                  ->  151 / 5000 differ (max |delta| 1.907e-06)
roughness + seal off           ->  155 / 5000 differ (max |delta| 9.537e-07)
roughness + seal + spine off   ->  126 / 5000 differ (max |delta| 9.537e-07)
corridors + carve ONLY         ->  126 / 5000 differ (max |delta| 9.537e-07)

The residue survives every stage removal, down to constant rock + capsule SDF + carve — code that is a character-for-character transcription. So it is not in anything the decomposition added.

Cause, from the engine source rather than from memory (VCToolChain.cs):

case FPSemanticsMode.Default: // Default is imprecise FP semantics.
case FPSemanticsMode.Imprecise: Arguments.Add("/fp:fast"); break;

UBT's own doc for that mode: "FP math isn't IEEE-754 compliant: the compiler is allowed to transform math expressions in ways that might result in differently rounded results." The plugin sets no override, so identical source in VoxelGenerator.cpp and VoxelDensityOpStack.cpp may legitimately reassociate differently — worth about 1 ULP.

Two prior hypotheses were wrong (the FVector round-trip, then "check the roughness window / carve blend"). The bisect cost one build and settled it. Noted as a working lesson: on a numeric discrepancy, bisect before hypothesising a third time.

Why exactly ~2.3% of samples: Blend - Sdf catastrophically cancels at the edge of the blend shell, amplifying a 1-ULP SDF difference into a 1-ULP density difference. Outside that thin shell Carve is exactly 0 or exactly 1 and both paths agree bit for bit.

Consequences recorded

1. OPSTACK-PLAN §2.6 — bit-identity is not achievable in principle for these ports, at any level of care. The operational bar for every remaining archetype, now encoded in the test: hard-fail on isosurface crossings · tolerate ULP-scale deltas · warn on anything larger (that last one is real port drift, and the test no longer cries wolf about the floor).
2. AUDIT-2026-07.md §C9 (new) — the part that matters more than the port: ARCHITECTURE §9.1's multiplayer model is "replicate the seed, every peer regenerates identically", and under /fp:fast that holds only between bit-identical binaries. Same build, same platform: fine (DensityPurity proves it). Windows client + Linux dedicated server both regenerating authoritative geometry: a real desync source, presenting as rare unreproducible geometry-only divergence. The knob is FPSemantics = FPSemanticsMode.Precise in VoxelForge.Build.cs, and it should not be turned speculatively — it blocks the vectorisation T2.a was chasing, on the plugin's hot loop, for an unmeasured cost. Decision needs a profile and a confirmed cross-platform requirement.

UNVERIFIED: the test's new ULP-tolerance branch (expect MazeEquivalence to report the same 454 samples as INFO rather than WARNING next run).

Next single action: Phase 1 step 3 — wire the stack into GetDensityAt behind a per-strate opt-in. Phase 1's question is fully answered: Maze decomposes cleanly, the stack is window-invariant, and it proves 23/60 tiles uniform where ClassifyTile proves zero.

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