Round trip and equivalence

Decompilation is not a convenience export. It is a contract:

1. any UNiagaraSystem exports to a .dfs;
2. the export is byte-for-byte idempotent — build the export into an asset, export again, get the same text;
3. anything the language cannot express is written into the file header as an explicit gap and reported as a DFX8xxx, never dropped in silence;
4. Adopt re-exports and compares before taking an asset over, and refuses on any mismatch.

Point 3 carries the weight. An exporter that degrades silently leaves you staring at a wrong-looking effect three months later with nothing to pull on.

What a gap looks like

DFX8014: System exports preserve native inherits and the selected parent version, but complete overrides, event/stage snapshots and unavailable parent baselines still have limits. Standalone .dfe exports flatten the relationship. See native emitter inheritance for the exact contract.

DFX8015: More than one event handler on an emitter cannot be carried, and the export names what the rebuilt emitter will no longer receive.

DFX8016: A stage of a custom C++ stage class — not the engine's generic stage — has no DreamFXLang form.

Every one of them appears in two places: the exported file's header, and the log.

The four layers

mirror-diff -NoCompile skips L2 — much faster, and the right thing when the mirrors were built in the same session that is now diffing them.

Why the fourth layer has to exist

Of the first three, L1 compares two outputs of the same exporter. Something the exporter itself drops is dropped symmetrically on both sides: L1 is byte-identical, L2 still compiles clean, and L3 — which counts particles — sees nothing. The picture, meanwhile, is wrong.

That is not hypothetical. In one real case L1 was byte-identical, L3 reported exact, and the effect looked wrong; the cause was a derived bit (bBindingExistsOnSource) that appears in no export at all. So asset-diff takes another route entirely: it reflection-walks the facts of both assets, including the compiler's own view (the compiled fact family), and never touches the exporter.

The corpus compares a fifth thing

On top of that, the 55-case corpus compares "the asset built from a fixture" against "the asset rebuilt from its export". That catches symmetric loss: something dropped identically on both sides of a text comparison, and therefore invisible to it.

Three measurement lessons

Warning:

Measure one system per run. The L3 fixture can only measure one system per exec; more than that and the same asset gets reported as different things.

Warning:

A random system with no determinism is not equal to itself. So L3 uses an A-vs-A self-comparison to decide decidability first: a system that disagrees with itself is judged undecidable, not different.

Warning:

Behavioural divergence with everything statically green ⇒ measure the derivative. In the case where birth speed was off by exactly half, the cause was a lost bFixedTickDelta — one missing entry in the Settings table. A line diff reports only the first difference, so fixing one means re-running the whole thing.

Measuring your own content

# how much of my content can be represented? bucketed by feature
pwsh -File Plugins/DreamFX/.skill/dfx.ps1 coverage

# export a whole content tree to source, in one editor boot
pwsh -File Plugins/DreamFX/.skill/dfx.ps1 decompile-all -Path=/Game/VFX

# L1 + L2
pwsh -File Plugins/DreamFX/.skill/dfx.ps1 mirror-diff -Path /Game/VFX

# asset facts, independent of the exporter; -DumpFacts writes both sides to Saved/DreamFX/*.facts
pwsh -File Plugins/DreamFX/.skill/dfx.ps1 asset-diff -Path /Game/VFX -DumpFacts

Note:

asset-diff force-compiles both sides before comparing. Without that, the compiled fact family reports each side's compile history rather than its content, which is not a comparison of anything. -NoCompile is for diagnosis only.

The mirror namespace

Exports land in a Decompiled/<original path> namespace: the whole tree is first-class source that rebuilds into mirrors and structurally cannot touch the originals. Unpacked in Export vs Adopt.