The first generation pass's R32F height is kept as ter_height_tex (not copied into an RGBA32F),
so every reader of the height - placement, the read-back, physics, selftest16's 9 mm - sees the
same 32 bits. ternormal.frag writes the baked normal's x and z into ter_normal_tex (RG16F), and
the six places that read it (terrain.frag twice, tersun.frag, grass.vert, grass.mesh,
grass_cull.comp, which takes a third texture at binding 6) rebuild y. SPIR-V regenerated.
Maroon Lake's play, headless Vulkan: 2793 -> 2647 MB. The camp's frame: 0.066% of pixels differ by
more than 8 (mean 0.024/255), isolated grass blades at the slope gate. ludic-dev test 307/307.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- every texture upload malloc'd a CPU copy of its pixels and never freed it (236 MB over the
valley's boot, and again for every model loaded later): the pixels are converted straight
into the mapped staging buffer
- the per-level and per-layer views gvk_view_of made outlived their texture, and on MoltenVK a
view keeps its Metal texture alive: a released texture takes its views with it, and the cache
is keyed by numbers instead of a string built on every call
- the Vulkan structs filled for a draw, pass, barrier, descriptor set, buffer, allocation or
upload (about sixty call sites) come from a reused 1 MB scratch ring (gvk_tmp)
- the descriptor-set cache and the retired buffers are emptied in place, not replaced; the grass
cull's dispatch arguments are made once
- macOS drains an autorelease pool each frame (Vk.frame_pool, lvk_frame_pool in vk_mac.ll)
- R3D_VK_PROF reports Vulkan objects made and destroyed by kind, and every cache's length
- examples/rendering/smooth presents through render3d, so it runs on Vulkan too
The full valley on headless Vulkan loads to 2.18 GB and holds (it passed 8 GB while loading
before). ludic-dev test 305/305, selfhost-test 33/33.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- grass_cull.comp decides each candidate blade once a frame (place, ground, density, water,
slope, frustum, colour field) and writes survivors into three bands by distance, one indirect
draw each; grass_inst.vert only bends and places the vertices. OpenGL keeps grass.vert's
per-vertex path; R3D_GRASS_GPU=0 compares
- compute programs take sampled textures after their buffers (gpu_compute_tex / gpu_dispatch_tex),
and every dispatch now records a compute-to-draw memory barrier
- the blades as a sward: 4 m cells, bands with five, three and one-quad blades, spacing doubling
every 18 m to 70 m, never narrower than a pixel; lit facing the sun and leaning to the sky,
shadow looked up above the ground (it read the terrain as its caster), a colour ramp that
leaves only the sheath dark, clumps, dry patches and a tussock shade worked out per blade
- scatter layers flagged grass are skipped while the blades draw (and under R3D_NOGRASS);
R3D_BLADES, R3D_NOBLADES win over the game's setting; R3D_GRASS_S0/D0 for measuring
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
