Voxel Chunk Lifecycle

Use when

Chunks appear twice, disappear during reload, keep stale meshes, or finish asynchronous work after they have been unloaded.

Workflow

1. Define explicit states such as absent, requested, generating, generated, meshing, ready-to-upload, resident, and evicting.
2. Assign each request a chunk key plus generation/version token so stale async completions can be rejected.
3. Specify ownership for voxel data, mesh data, GPU resources, and neighbor dependencies; define cancellation and eviction rules.
4. Test every transition, including unload/reload during generation, neighbor edits, world shutdown, and repeated requests.

Required output

A state-transition table, ownership diagram, cancellation contract, and lifecycle regression cases.

Validation

• Every async result checks that its token still matches the current chunk generation.
• Resources are freed exactly once and stale meshes cannot replace newer ones.
• Boundary and shutdown transitions are covered.

Guardrails

Do not rely on timing delays or arbitrary sleeps to hide lifecycle races; expose state and make transitions testable.