Blacksite/docs/editor/evaluations/terrain-foundation

Terrain Foundation Evaluation

Date: 2026-07-12 Branch: codex/terrain-foundation Gitea issue: #22

This record captures acceptance for the persistent height-grid terrain schema and deterministic runtime chunk hydration. The permanent workflow lives in the terrain guide.

Live Editor Evidence

The native Wayland debug editor loaded the committed assets/levels/terrain_authoring_showcase.scn.ron fixture. The screenshot uses Forward rendering to isolate mesh/material/light correctness while foundation terrain remains explicitly excluded from Solari until exact terrain layer/Surface parity lands in #24.

The 5×5 authored grid renders as the expected asymmetric hill, resolves the committed shared Material Instance, and is split into four 2×2-quad chunks with generated trimesh colliders. The authored scene contains no HydratedTerrainChunk, Mesh3d, or collider-constructor components.

Acceptance Results

Area	Result	Evidence
Schema and serialization	Pass	Versioned bounded descriptor, exact height count, finite-value and scale/chunk validation, RON round-trip test
Chunk hydration	Pass	Deterministic four-chunk runtime fixture; topology test verifies 25 vertices and 96 indices for a 4×4-quad mesh
Runtime-only ownership	Pass	Hydration test verifies children have mesh/collider/owner markers but no LevelObject, then verifies removal cleanup
Actor/editor integration	Pass	First-class Terrain kind, registry descriptor, hierarchy/viewport icon, reflected Add Component and inspector transaction path
Material behavior	Pass with boundary	Shared Material/Instance source resolves for raster; missing source uses visible fallback; Solari submission is explicitly excluded pending #24
Project validation	Pass	60 level dependencies, existing 5 non-blocking findings, 0 blocking errors
Packaged acceptance	Deferred	Explicitly deferred by project-owner direction; no packaged result is claimed here

Automated Verification

Command/suite	Result
Focused terrain descriptor/topology/hydration tests	4 passed
Editor component registry reflection contract	Pass
cargo check --workspace --all-targets	Pass
cargo validate-levels --project .	60 dependencies, 5 findings, 0 blockers