Hi folks,
I’ve finally gotten around to working on a few updates and improvements that have been piling up over the last few months (as many of you might already know from my last few posts). I’ve also decided to skip the update post for July, since there really just wasn’t anything noteworthy to talk about, but there is now.
Distant (Horizons) Shenanigans
One of the most interesting news is most likely the fact that KappaPT now has its first iteration of support for Distant Horizons as you can see in the screenshots shown in this very post.
As always I’ve set my priorities on the basics at first, so it only works in the overworld while I am still working out some pack specific quirks. I also have a few ideas that I want to add to make its DH support a bit more elaborate than what I’ve done on my other packs, especially since I’ve usually taken a few shortcuts to minimise the invasiveness of the implementation that might be obvious once you really zoom in on the LODs (not that you should, close-ups really aren’t the point of them).
Temporal Revisions
Another thing that I’ve started work on is another pass on my temporal anti-aliasing and upscaling solutions, abbreviated as TAA(U) in case you’re wondering, since I’ve started to feel like I could gear it a bit more towards crispness and responsiveness rather than putting the primary focus on ideal static scenes, especially since I could probably improve the former while still preserving most of the latter.
This is still very much an in-progress thing, but KappaPT and NostalgiaVX have already received updates with the first step of this. My other packs will eventually follow, but as always I prefer to workshop these things on my Iris-exclusive packs (even though FastPBR has very little to gain this time, hence why it’s not the first one to receive these changes).
Legacy Ballast
This also brings me to one of my next plan, which involves a more extensive under-the-hood modernisation of my free packs. The crux with that plan is that it’d most likely involve dropping OptiFine support for good, which means that future versions will no longer work on OptiFine at all. This is something that I have been considering for a while as many of you probably already know, but given that I can’t even really validate my packs for it anymore due to crashes and whatnot I might as well just stop supporting it at all. That’d also mean that I can streamline the internals of my packs with modern rendering tech that isn’t limited to specifications that are multiple decades old, just because the shaderpack loader mod never properly implemented “modern” things such as compute shaders, which are also already over a decade old and massively useful.
The silver lining would at least be that my free packs are already in a pretty solid state, so the last OptiFine compatible versions would still be top of the line for quite a while, which makes that cut a bit less worrying for me than it’d be if it was otherwise.
I don’t have any ETA on when I’ll get around to this, but I’m fairly certain that I’ll have to take this step with the next round of more major updates.
Foliage Issues
A small thing that I want to mention here are rendering issues with foliage in my packs that have been occurring with recent Iris versions (specifically since 1.9.0 as far as I know). That issue makes foliage appear unnaturally bright and may also come with other issues related to tinted shadows from translucent objects.
The cause for this issue lies within Iris and since I wasn’t sure when a fix for that will make its way into a release I’ve compiled a patched version of Iris that you can find in the testing channel in my discord server.
So if you’re on Minecraft 1.21.6 or newer and are using Iris 1.9.0 or newer and are struggling with that issue, try the patched version until there’s another Iris release that contains the fix.
Closing Words
I’ve (finally) been more busy with my projects as I was able to in the last few months as you can see, and it feels good to finally get back into it, as I was kind of annoyed by myself for not being able to get as much stuff done as I wanted to. I absolutely want to put some more consideration and energy into my planning so that I can stick to a steadier pace again, especially because the maintenance backlog only grows longer when I’m too occupied to work through it.
And now (as always) it’s time for a huge thanks to my supporters on Patreon as well as to all of you who keep using my packs. I’ve been paying a bit more attention to the shaderpack community outside my little bubble again and it’s always nice to see people still using my packs and still posting awesome screenshots and whatnot with them, so in that sense I’m just super thankful for all of that :)
That’s all for this time, stick around for some more exciting stuff in the future!
(And somehow I really had a thing for snazzy titles or whatever you wanna call it this time lol)
