cam_sphere_visible refuses a sphere wholly past the wall (terrain patches, scatter cells, stream
chunks, grass tiles, water), actors past it are skipped for draws, casters and outlines, the grass
reach and the streams' generate-and-gather reach end at it, and the card shadows cast only from
the wall's share of a layer (fog_casters.ludic, rebuilt every 4 m). r3d_beyond_fog is exported for
the game to skip animating what will not be drawn. Render-only: no query of the ground or the world
changes, and off is the old frame (0 pixels over 8 against 160ce96, twice per side).
Draws per frame at the overlook: 2757 off, 1104 at 175 m, 484 at 30 m.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The renderer starts itself from the first frame (gpu_select), so the device, its tables, the
manifest and programs, grass, shadows, sky, terrain textures and the actor pool read as frame
allocations: each is @alloc_ok as start-up, with gvk_fail (a failure) and the actor census and
texture dump (debug switches). ov_nine's four corner/uv arrays are one floats(16) made in
gvk_startup_state; ac_in_light's four points are made there too. Compiled (steady, and ludic deps
over main 4316ff97).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
actor_own_skin(a) gives an actor its own clone of its model's skeleton and actor_release frees it
(skin_clone_free: the pose, matrices, views and scratch the clone made; the rest data stays its
source's). gvk_startup_state, at the end of gvk_init, makes the scratch and tables a draw used to
make on first need (gvk_tmp_buf, the pipeline fast cache, the set key and per-program uniform
offsets pre-sized to 4096 programs, skip/seen/size words, spare and retired lists, the grass cull's
words), and those frame paths no longer start them. Compiled (steady).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
