The Options row shipped last commit said the setting needed a relaunch.
It does not have to. The reference's "enabled upon restart" is about its
TEXTURES, not its CVars — both register with `flags = 1`, live — because
its sampler state was baked inside each `TextureCreate` (`0x449ae0`) and
it kept no list of live textures. Ours can be re-stamped in place.
Two things make it possible, and neither is new work:
- A governed sampler now wears `POLICY_SAMPLER_LABEL`, written by the one
constructor `TexFilterSetting::descriptor`. That is the `applyGlobal`
split the reference draws, made legible at runtime: terrain, WMO/M2 and
the liquid sheets take the policy; weather sprites, the minimap, glue,
Lua widgets, the sky and decals keep their own mode. All four governed
lanes went through that constructor, so a lane cannot forget the label
and silently opt itself out of every later change.
- Extracting a `RENDER_WORLD`-only `Image` takes its *pixels* and leaves
the asset behind (`take_gpu_data` is an `Option::take` on `image.data`).
So every resident texture's own descriptor is still readable in the main
world, for nothing — there is no ledger to keep and none to go stale.
The policy itself stops being a `OnceLock` and becomes one atomic word
plus a revision, so it can be published again on every write and both
halves of the refresh can key off the same number in the same frame:
`refresh_policy_samplers` (render world, `ExtractSchedule`, before every
Prepare) swaps `GpuImage::sampler`, and `invalidate_materials::<M>` raises
`AssetEvent::Modified` so bind groups that captured the OLD sampler are
built again. `static_gx` carries two samplers of its own and rebuilds its
cached cell bind groups in place rather than dropping them — clearing the
cache would be one line, but a region with no GPU state does not draw, so
every building in view would blink out and trickle back under the bake
budget.
Measured, not asserted. `WOW_CVAR_LATE=<name>=<value>` is new here: it
writes CVars *after* the scene has settled, then re-settles the image
around them. A latched lever and a live one give the same boot picture, so
no boot-time A/B can tell them apart. On the Elwynn vista:
anisotropic 16 at boot vs 16 written late:
0 of 1,440,000 pixels differ
and the control that proves the harness is not doing the work (boot 16,
written 16 again late, so no refresh runs but the re-settle is still paid)
is byte-identical to a plain boot. The cost of the change is 873 samplers,
75 material bind groups and 264 static_gx cell bind groups, once; nothing
is re-uploaded, since the pixels never move.
The first run of that A/B was NOT identical — 6.7% of the frame, a dapple
of stale tree shadow on a road that was otherwise correct. That is
`CutoutShadowCasterMaterial`, which deliberately reuses the forward pass's
own leaf handle and so holds a governed sampler, and which lives in
`benilla-app` rather than the engine. Hence the shape the invalidation
took: a public `invalidate_materials::<M>` each crate registers beside its
own `MaterialPlugin`, published through the world-API wall with the record
that says why (the engine naming every material type in the program is the
inversion that wall exists to stop). Forgetting one is silent in exactly
that way — a bind group built after the change is right and one already
cached is wrong — so the capture A/B is written into `docs/GRAPHICS.md` as
the check for this feature, not a unit test pretending to be one.
The Options row keeps its deferral to Apply, now for the real reason: the
commit is cheap once and silly sixteen times, which is what a drag across
the groove would ask for.
Verified: ALL GATES GREEN (520 s); `benilla-app --lib` against the install
at the exact 269-failure baseline, set-identical by `comm`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
gromandClaude Opus 5
c315fb4f35