Development Update – April 2023

Oi folks,

I’ve done a couple of updates again in the last month and have been focusing a bit more on getting FastPBR done, as it’s also one of those long overdue things from my to-do list.

Soft Voxels

Some of you might know of the custom film stock emulation I’ve recently written for Unreal Engine, I have brought this over to some of my shaderpacks now, starting with Soft Voxels. As it turns out this is probably my favourite colour grading tool now, as it gives very organic results and just feels more suited for adjusting the final image to my liking than the typical colour grading tools. I’ve attached a few comparison images below, left is without and right is with.

I also made a couple adjustments here and there, especially regarding the skybox and atmosphere.

FastPBR

This pack also received said film stock emulation, although with very different parameters to get different results. In addition to that I’ve also finished up a lot of the pack now, which includes some new optional features such as HBIL to provide simple and performant indirect lighting beyond simple skylight. Support for the Nether and The End is also integrated now, and especially the latter looks quite unique again, as I’ve just improvised its look without a set goal this time. I think it’s safe to say that it has a fitting and distinct look there now.

Last but not least I have also adjusted a great deal of things, which includes different parts of the skybox, water, exposure and tonemapping, so everything should be looking a bit more refined now. This also means that public test versions of FastPBR should happen fairly soon, with a full release following shortly after.

Vanilla Plus

There will be a small update for Vanilla Plus soon, as I have fixed a couple of bugs and future-proofed it with block mappings for some of the new blocks coming with Minecraft 1.20.

Upcoming updates

As I am now getting more familiar with the new features offered by Iris and got FastPBR mostly done, I’ll most likely get to work on the next updates for Nostalgia Shader and NostalgiaVX, which I’ve already explained in some of the recent development blogs. Since I’m trying to follow more of a “one at a time” approach as of late the updates are a bit more focused on fewer packs rather than being spread across multiple packs each month. I feel like this is the more sensible approach as some packs require a bit more work than others, so I’m working through the crucial changes in a more focused manner than before.

There are a couple of upcoming minor updates to many of packs nonetheless though, as I’ve been trying to iron out some of the older bugs and am bringing slightly outdated packs like Simplicissimus up to speed so that they work properly with the latest Iris and OptiFine versions.

Closing words

I’m starting to have some more time and energy to work on more shaderpack updates again as you can see, and I feel like it was definitely a good idea to focus more on the long overdue updates rather than just doing constant “project hopping” like I used to.

And now it’s time for the obvious shoutout to my subscribers over on Patreon, since y’all just keep growing in numbers like crazy. The highest amount of subscribers was almost 1200 in the last month if I remember correctly, which is quite an increase over last year, where I barely even got past 1000 subscribers. As you already know (I mean I’ve said this a lot of times by now, but I just have to repeat it) I’m very grateful for your support and appreciate the fact that you folks seem to enjoy my work as much as you do :)

This is it for this month’s development update, hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming updates and especially the new version FastPBR.

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Posted in Blog, Soft Voxels, Vanilla Plus Shader and tagged , , .