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2 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
cfe2d6a09c Answer whether two shapes overlap, and how to undo it
akgl_collision_test takes two proxies and fills in a contact: a unit normal, a
depth, and a point. Three paths, cheapest first.

The proxies' bounds reject most pairs in four comparisons and no arithmetic,
which is free because the bounds were computed when the proxy was synced.

A box against a box is answered in closed form. That is not only cheaper than
the general solver, it is *exact*, and the difference shows up where it matters
most: an actor resting on a floor wants a normal of precisely (0, -1, 0), and an
iterative solver converges to something like (0.0001, -0.99999, 0), which
accumulates into a slow sideways creep. A tile game is almost entirely boxes, so
this is the path that runs.

Everything else goes to ccdMPRPenetration. MPR rather than GJK+EPA because MPR
allocates nothing at all, converges in fewer iterations, and its one weakness --
a coarser contact *point* -- is on a field the blocking resolver never reads.
EPA stays compiled and available behind the arena for a caller who one day wants
an accurate manifold. The header says the point is approximate so nobody builds
a damage falloff on it.

The normal points out of the second shape and toward the first, so a caller
moving `a` along it by `depth` separates the pair. libccd hands back the
opposite convention; converting once here saves every resolver from remembering
the sign, and getting it backwards would compile, would pass any "do these
collide" test, and would drag actors into walls. There is a test that asserts
the direction, and inverting the conversion turns it red.

AKGL_COLLISION_TEST_PLANAR flattens the normal into the xy plane. The extrusion
the setters apply already makes z the most expensive axis, so this is a net for
a caller who set a depth by hand -- and the failure it catches is silent: the
narrowphase reports a contact, the resolver pushes the actor into the screen,
and the actor does not move on screen while remaining inside the floor. It also
rescues the degenerate case, two shapes at exactly the same centre, where there
is no planar direction at all and a zero-length normal would be a wall that
stops nothing. Level authors stack things constantly.

Three things the tests found rather than assumed:

- The guard has two copies, one per path, and the box one is where it earns its
  place. Removing both is caught; removing only the iterative one is not,
  because the iterative solver is seeded from the line between the two centres
  and so converges to a planar answer on its own for a planar offset. That is
  measured and written down in the test rather than papered over with a fixture
  contrived to force it.
- A concentric pair has no preferred sign on the degenerate axis, so the test
  asserts the magnitude of the normal rather than its direction. The first
  version asserted -1 and failed against an equally correct +1.
- The box fast path and the iterative solver are two implementations of one
  answer, so they are driven over the same arrangements and required to agree on
  the decision and the axis. A shortcut nothing cross-checks is a shortcut
  waiting to diverge.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Code <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-08-02 06:18:09 -04:00
7e0e5a7841 Give libccd a static arena so libakgl still allocates nothing
libakgl does not call malloc at runtime. That is stated in seven places in the
manual and is AGENTS.md's second standing rule, and every object comes from a
fixed array in akgl/heap.h. libccd's EPA path does not know that: it builds its
expanding polytope out of realloc and free, and ccdGJKPenetration documents a
-2 return for when that fails.

The alternative was to compile only the three files MPR needs and leave EPA out
of the build. That works and it puts a copy of somebody else's source list in
this repository, where it rots silently on the next submodule bump. This instead
compiles all of libccd and points its allocator at a bump allocator over static
BSS, which keeps the promise literally true -- and keeps EPA available rather
than amputated, for the day a precise contact manifold is worth having.

The arena is reset at the top of each query rather than freed block by block, so
the lifetime is one narrowphase call, `free` is a no-op, and allocation is a
pointer bump. Exhaustion returns NULL, which libccd already handles by unwinding
to -2, which becomes AKGL_ERR_COLLISION naming the high-water mark -- a loud
failure with a number in it rather than a silently missed collision, which would
be a floor an actor falls through reported as success.

One GJK/EPA box pair costs 7,264 bytes, measured and printed by the suite. The
64 KB ceiling is that with about nine times headroom, and the high-water mark is
reported so the next reader can re-derive it rather than trust this line.

The redirect lives in src/ccd_arena_shim.h, injected with -include, and not in
CMake's COMPILE_DEFINITIONS. It was in COMPILE_DEFINITIONS first, and that is a
mistake worth recording: CMake cannot carry a function-like macro through a -D,
so it dropped __CCD_ALLOC_MEMORY without a diagnostic. libccd went on calling
the C library's realloc while the shim's `free` quietly discarded the results --
strictly worse than doing nothing, and invisible, because it leaks rather than
crashes.

What caught it was insisting the test prove the wiring rather than the outcome.
The first version asserted the arena balanced back to zero after a query, which
turned out to be the wrong assertion for a different reason -- free is a no-op
by design, so it cannot balance -- but a test that had merely checked "two boxes
collide" would have passed throughout, against an allocator nothing was using.
The suite now asserts what is actually provable: that a query allocates from the
arena at all, and that the process survives, since glibc aborts when the real
free(3) is handed a pointer it never issued.

Also here: AKGL_ERR_COLLISION, with the name registered -- tests/error.c asserts
the band and the names agree, and it caught the missing one immediately.
-fvisibility=hidden and CCD_STATIC_DEFINE keep every ccd* symbol out of
libakgl.so's dynamic table, which `nm -D` confirms is empty; AGENTS.md records a
shipped defect where an exported `renderer` was preempted by a same-named symbol
elsewhere, and a game linking a system libccd would hit exactly that.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Code <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-08-01 23:29:37 -04:00