Hi folks,
It’s time to go through some new stuff again, especially when it comes to my lower end packs like Potato- and Simplicissimus Shaders as I have a few plans to bring those more up to speed soon.
One of my recent and somewhat random ideas was to bring a rudimentary and very simplified, yet effective support for labPBR materials to Simplicissimus and Potato Shader. While that will be quite an approximation in order to keep the performance impact as minimal as possible, it should add quite a nice bit of extra “fluff” to the visuals when you’re using a labPBR resourcepack. In addition to that I’m also looking into some extra quality of life things, such as Distant Horizons support for Potato Shader (since it should be quite simple there, as it doesn’t do a lot of complicated lighting) and various smaller improvements in Simplicissimus to make it look a bit more pleasant with more recent Minecraft releases as there are a few rough spots that popped up since I originally wrote most of it.
Aside from that I’ve also been planning to revisit some of my more streamlined and performant lighting solutions using LPVs again, as those would be a lot more viable to use these days thanks to Iris’ allowing for some more modern rendering tech without crippling performance. One of my ideas would be to leverage that to bring coloured emission into some of my free packs in the future, which should make for a nice addition, even if it’s a lot less exciting in terms of visuals when compared to full-on path traced solutions, but at the same time it’s also a lot more performant than those and would take care of the somewhat dated and out of place visuals of the vanilla lightmap in packs like Kappa or Nostalgia Shader. If I end up bringing LPVs to those packs those would be an Iris exclusive feature though, as its simply not viable to integrate those within OptiFine’s (still unchanged) limitations and shortcomings.
Another thing that’s on my todo-list is a more significant update to Soft Voxels Lite, as the full version has progressed quite a lot since its last release, not to mention various issues with block mappings and the likes in more recent Minecraft versions. I’ll give you a more in-depth breakdown of that as I get to work on it as always.
As for my other path-traced packs, I’ve released a handful of updates for those in the last month again and I’ll try to stick to a more steady stream of updates again, especially as I iron out some of the smaller weak spots that I’m noticing (mostly it seems to be just me noticing them but nothing wrong with some nitpicky perfectionism I suppose lol). I’ll give you a more detailed breakdown of those updates in the next support updates post as usual, including full changelogs. Regardless of that, one of the additions that I do want to highlight is automatic mapping for most (if not all) current and future noncubics such as doors and stairs through Iris’ handy block tags support for mappings. As you can imagine that’s quite a massive quality of life improvement for both you as the users and myself as the developer, since I longer have to type out hundreds of block state variations for each new stair type and whatnot.
Closing Words
That’s it for this month and I want to thank my supporters over on Patreon as always, as you’re the ones who allow me to keep going with those projects. As I also recently learned, I’m apparently one of the few remaining developers who are still actively working on path traced shaderpacks, which feels a bit sad when remembering there being a dozen or so of us a few years ago, and while the reasons for moving away from projects like that can vary greatly, I’m very grateful for being able to continue my work thanks to all of you folks who are reading this.
With that being said, I hope you’re gonna like the upcoming updates and stay tuned for more :)
