VoxelForge/Standalone/Research/OwnerShapeWorld/speed_round/REPORT.md

Shape world speed round — final half-load verification

Result

The whole-view target remains unmet. The cold, uncached, full-payload view generated all 6,498 tiles through LOD6 in 2.135 s and 2.174 s at 8 workers. The mean process-start-to-ready time is 2.155 s. Shape compilation plus full-payload meshing averaged 1.945 s, so the generation path is about 0.945 s over the one-second mark; the process-start headline is 1.155 s over. Hashing was disabled for those timing runs. Collision cooking and the plugin’s GPU upload are not included.

The final source and measurements are in StandaloneShapeWorld.h, StreamingWorld.h, StandaloneViewer.cpp, Build.ps1, and this report. The six current captures are linked below.

Machine rule and headline timings

All builds and benchmark processes in this continuation ran at BelowNormal priority with affinity 0xFF00. Builds use /MP8. The final headline uses 8 workers, full UV/color/group payload, no mesh cache, and two no-hash cold runs. No current 16-worker timing was run after the reset.

Cold whole-view run	Process wall	Shape stage	Full clipmap stream	Shape + stream	Cache hits
A, 8 workers	2.174 s	0.828 s	1.116 s	1.944 s	0
B, 8 workers	2.135 s	0.836 s	1.110 s	1.946 s	0
Mean	2.155 s	0.832 s	1.113 s	1.945 s	0

The process runner includes executable start and world setup. The stream stage holds the 8-worker pool at 98.9–99.4% busy; LOD6 is the long pole. The full payload allocates 235.49 MiB across the view; the standalone viewer’s geometry copy is 115.67 MiB. The 27-tile LOD0 player neighborhood is CPU-mesh-ready 23 ms after streaming starts. Collision readiness remains unmeasured.

Stage comparison and per-LOD profile

The first column is the earlier speed-round W8 baseline from the stale report. That run used the former full-machine policy and the older viewer payload. The current column uses the restored half-load policy and emits all mesh arrays. These values show where the work moved, but are not an apples-to-apples speedup claim.

Whole-view stage	Earlier W8 baseline	Current W8 mean	Current run range
Local shapes and line bins	57.6 ms	53.8 ms	53.773–53.785 ms
Rock intervals, packed signs, candidate axes and mask merge	132.6 ms	138.3 ms	138.111–138.506 ms
Surface detail band	539.0 ms	589.8 ms	589.734–589.833 ms
Far-parent shapes and spatial bins	194.7 ms	41.9 ms	38.438–45.407 ms
Shape build	932.3 ms	831.7 ms	827.765–835.705 ms
All-LOD full-payload mesh generation	1,064 ms	1,113 ms	1,110–1,116 ms
Shape build + mesh generation	1.996 s	1.945 s	1.944–1.946 s

Per-LOD completion is cumulative from stream start. Each tile count and allocation figure is from the full-payload run.

LOD	Tiles	Density samples	Complete	Full payload allocation	Viewer geometry copy
0	512	21.952 M	0.137 s	33.60 MiB	16.30 MiB
1	448	19.208 M	0.214 s	20.37 MiB	10.07 MiB
2	320	2.195 M	0.231 s	6.04 MiB	2.96 MiB
3	208	1.427 M	0.244 s	4.23 MiB	2.09 MiB
4	144	0.988 M	0.251 s	2.99 MiB	1.49 MiB
5	96	0.658 M	0.258 s	3.17 MiB	1.57 MiB
6	4,770	32.717 M	1.109 s	165.09 MiB	81.18 MiB

LOD6 emits 1,834,816 vertices and 10,272,252 indices. It accounts for 32.717 million density samples and most of the stream time. The detailed timings are in run A and run B; their process records are A and B.

Required mesh payload and skip verification

I inspected the actual plugin source read-only. FVoxelMeshData contains one UV and one FColor per vertex, including dominant/neighbor biome palette, slope, and border blend channels. BuildTileStreamSet enables TexCoords, Colors, and PolyGroups and copies those values into the game stream. It assigns group 0 to ground and group 1 to sky-cap ceiling; the ceiling uses material slot 1 and does not cast shadows. The mesher’s UV/color emission and cap ordering show why the viewer-only skips cannot be used for game output.

The current default is full payload. In the standalone copy, UV storage is FVector2f, matching the float UV sent to the game stream; this halves the UV staging width from FVector2D and saves about 20.6 MB over 2.58 million vertices. No stable speed gain appeared. FColor is already four-byte packed. The dense per-tile ceiling-column cache preserved hashes but did not improve stream time (1.099 s versus 1.098 s), so it was reverted. The final source retains the original per-column memo and emits ceiling/ground groups. I did not derive UVs or biome colors in a new shader: the game material path currently consumes TexCoord0 and the packed vertex-color channels, and plugin material/source changes were read-only in this task.

The three diagnostic skip variants were independently hash-checked at W8 over full detail, whole clipmap, and LOD0–6. Density hashes and a canonical oriented-triangle topology hash match full output in all nine outputs. The topology digest uses vertex position/normal identities, so it is insensitive to vertex IDs and triangle ordering.

Diagnostic mode	Density equal	Serialized mesh hash equal	Oriented topology equal	Full payload hash equal
Skip UV and colors	9/9	9/9	9/9	0/9
Skip material groups	9/9	6/9	9/9	6/9
Skip both	9/9	6/9	9/9	0/9

The group skip reorders index output in three results; the geometric triangles and winding still match. The payload hash changes when UV/color arrays are omitted. These are diagnostic results only: dropping either data path changes the game’s stream contract. Combined skips took 1.533 s and 1.536 s process wall in no-hash runs, about 0.620 s below the full-payload mean, but this is not a valid game-generation result. Hash logs: UV/colors, groups, and both.

Far-bin reserve A/B

The final far-bin reserve is 24 buckets per primitive; the axis-bin path retains 96. I rebuilt the same source with the old 2× far-bin estimate, then restored and rebuilt the final 24× source. All nine full-payload outputs matched exactly across density, mesh, payload, and topology hashes between the two reserve settings. The final 1-worker and 8-worker matrix also matches exactly.

Across two no-hash samples, the 2× build spent about 47.9 ms building far spatial bins; the 24× build averaged about 41.9 ms. Full stream time was effectively unchanged (1.1135 s versus 1.113 s), within run variation. I keep the capacity hint as a small build-stage improvement, not a whole-view speed claim. The old-estimate build and runs are logged in build, hash, timing A, and timing B.

Final determinism matrix

The final executable was rebuilt after restoring the 24× reserve. The 1-worker and 8-worker cold hash runs had zero cache hits and all 5,642/5,642 route samples open. Each of the nine output hashes below matched exactly at both worker counts, including the full payload hash.

Output	Density hash	Geometry mesh hash	Full payload hash	Oriented topology hash
Full detail	0xa071e48a996e2828	0x6f270c621d39302f	0x33c7353b2eda16a7	0x1b39c8cc2ffed4b3
Whole clipmap	0x95c3f446cce0eaea	0x5036df929534d3ef	0xb9ed5e975705753b	0xb0eec830b29044e1
LOD0	0xc31fc55744c45928	0x7a70def3eb3e11ad	0x5780ec294cd873c5	0xa3126405acc20185
LOD1	0xd74d6563f970d9f9	0xf47463988641b397	0x7740ea61a08d30c7	0xb8a7cace0866efd3
LOD2	0x44f878e3420376a2	0x17de625b9ceda2a9	0x1fe6c3de98251541	0x1c4ab868773fe313
LOD3	0x80713f3f7e379bf9	0xec609008c8248eeb	0x8f9c8b3d627933b4	0x27361f6a30c71959
LOD4	0x726efa9eb9933226	0xdcb8c20437152e74	0xd01d47eeed04fd3a	0x94972f103fa9bcac
LOD5	0x4345a3990bb8b68a	0x8b7d9b5c1a0872a4	0x396b044b5a774097	0x0c5fb1df85d0d38c
LOD6	0xc78f04f08fc84094	0x2eab9309b9493d47	0xa93aedb363c18aa5	0x4f6059255abed405

These checks establish repeatability on this AVX2 host across 1 and 8 workers. Cross-machine identity was not tested.

What helped and what was rejected

Retained work from the measured speed round:

• Parallel candidate-mask merging reduced the interval/sign stage by about 14 ms in the predecessor’s 16-worker profile while preserving hashes.
• A line-local value-noise cache reuses relief noise corners along Z; its 16-worker detail-band sample fell from about 375 ms to 298 ms with exact hashes.
• A lattice-specific mesher entry point removed repeated coordinate rounding. The predecessor’s 16-worker full-detail stream moved from about 183 ms to 129–141 ms in hash runs.
• Fusing repeated rock-distance evaluation preserved hashes and lowered one 16-worker hash-run stream sample from 698 ms to 624 ms.
• Direct far capsules replaced 181,836 distant connector primitives with 16,491 while keeping all routes open and hashes stable across worker counts. They cut far-parent construction by roughly 75 ms in the predecessor’s profile.
• The compact inline/spill bin list reduced far-bin construction while keeping primitive IDs in ascending query order. A flat open-addressed table and an earlier larger inline layout were rejected because total streaming slowed.
• The per-worker vertex-map reserve remains a small allocation hint: a 32-tile LOD6 sample moved from 33.513 ms to 33.145 ms, with no stable whole-view gain.
• The current 24× far-bin capacity hint saves about 6 ms in the measured far-bin stage against 2×, with exact hashes and no measurable full-stream change.

Rejected or not tested:

• Skipping UV/colors and skipping material groups improved the standalone diagnostic viewer only. They remain off by default because the game consumes those arrays and sections.
• The dense ceiling-column cache produced no stable stream improvement and was removed.
• A thread-local last-bin cache, parallel far-bin builder, per-tile field snapshot, and per-worker edge cache did not improve the final total. The first edge-cache version removed 2,477 vertices and was rejected as a geometry change.
• Early far-tile overlap changed LOD0/1 hashes while far parents were incomplete; the path was removed.
• The multi-pass Flying Edges-style mesher, AVX2 primitive batches, forward differences, Morton page order, Bernstein bounds, six workers, and explicit coarse far surfaces were not prototyped. The measured workload has 4,770 queued LOD6 tiles and a busy worker pool, so splitting one critical tile is not the current bottleneck.

Research retained for these choices: Abseil Swiss tables, Meta F14, VTK Flying Edges, the LDAV 2015 paper, and Intel’s Intrinsics Guide. In particular, the latter cautions that an intrinsic does not guarantee a faster instruction sequence.

Routes, joins, shape checks, and edit latency

Every final shape build reports 5,642/5,642 passage centerline samples open and retains the native landing floors. The three fixed-view grid-stair checks pass the 0.400 threshold.

Fixed view	Grid-stair metric	Flat-patch share	Largest flat patch	Result
Chamber	0.003	5.0%	433 samples	Pass
Tunnel	0.028	5.0%	433 samples	Pass
Passage	0.205	8.0%	520 samples	Pass

The chamber, tunnel, and passage detail checks pass at a 4-voxel supremum with an 8-voxel band. Shared tunnel joins: 280 in chamber/tunnel and 240 in passage; endpoint radius and slope deltas are 0.000000 and 0.00000000. The room-floor, floor-slope, C1 floor-profile, and tunnel-radius audits pass. The whole-view level-zero shard audit covers 512 tiles and finds zero thin sheets, zero isolated small components, and four small boundary-touching components.

The crater benchmark is one transaction containing three brushes (10 m diameter, 24 m from the player): a sphere carve, rounded-box cut, and capsule rim. At 8 workers it remeshed all 14 affected tiles with zero cache hits: 12 LOD0 and 2 LOD1. Remesh time was 14 ms; edit-to-ready was 17 ms. Collision cooking is unavailable in the standalone harness.

Current audit logs: chamber, tunnel, passage, whole-view shard/join audit, and edit transaction.

Six fixed captures and visual review

All six captures were regenerated from the final full-payload executable at 8 workers and the half-load process limit.

View	Fixed camera in metres; yaw/pitch in degrees	Current capture
Chamber	(-11.75, -123.25, -19.85); 0 / 0	chamber
Tunnel	(-11.75, -123.25, -19.85); 90 / 0	tunnel
Passage	(-39.19, 6.27, -28.51); 63 / 0	passage
Far view	(-11.61244, -118.2212, -19.8452); 0 / 0	far
Passage-floor close-up	(-39.19, 6.27, -25.51); 63 / -25	floor close-up
Tunnel bend	(-198.97, -99.57, -45.58); 33.59 / 23.17	bend

Five captures are byte-identical to the preceding rebuilt set. The passage view differs in 662 of 1,024,000 pixels, with a maximum channel delta of 97; side-by-side inspection shows the same framing and visible geometry. Against the owner images, the visual gap remains: the chamber still has broad smooth ceiling/floor areas, the tunnel has repeated relief bands, the passage keeps a horizontal shelf and dark opening instead of the owner’s layered profile, and the far view lacks the owner’s larger connected forms. The look is not a match.

The four owner-comparison references remain chamber, tunnel, passage, and far view. The earlier fixed captures are in round 2.

Build limits and failed invocations

The final build is final_halfload_build.log. It succeeded with /MP8. The build and workload processes ran BelowNormal on affinity 0xFF00. The recurring French vswhere.exe setup diagnostic still appears, followed by a successful compile; six existing C4838 narrowing warnings remain in VoxelStrateManager.cpp.

Failures during this continuation, with corrected work preserved:

• The first dense ceiling-column cache build used CellsPerAxis before its declaration. That build failed; the declaration was moved before use, the retry built, and the cache was later removed after a no-gain timing result.
• One audit runner call named StandaloneViewer.exe, which does not exist. RunMachine stopped before launching a child; the corrected executable is VoxelForgeStandalone.exe.
• The first six-capture wrapper assembled --camera and --capture arguments as separate strings. Each process exited 2 on Invalid --camera value before opening a viewer. The arguments were corrected and all six final captures completed with exit code 0.
• An earlier wrapper call used a relative Tee-Object path after Build.ps1 changed directories. Its log redirection failed; the build was checked and rerun with an absolute log path.
• Older exploratory audit and optimization failures from the look round remain documented in round 2 and its retained logs.

No external viewer was closed. No commit, push, or stash was made. All source, report, and capture edits are within Standalone.

Principal logs

• Final no-hash full-payload timings: final_full_payload_w8_a/b.stdout.log and final_full_payload_w8_a/b.runner.log.
• Final restored hash matrix: final_restored_full_hash_w1.stdout.log and final_restored_full_hash_w8.stdout.log.
• Skip checks: canonical_topology_full_hash_w1/w8.stdout.log and canonical_topology_skip_uv_w8, canonical_topology_skip_groups_w8, canonical_topology_skip_both_w8.stdout.log.
• Reserve A/B: reserve_ratio_old2_build.log and reserve_ratio_old2_*.stdout.log.
• Current audits, edit run, and captures are listed above; capture process output is in final_capture_*_w8.stdout.log.
• Machine runner policy: RunMachine.ps1. Build flags and limits: Build.ps1.