Oi folks,
it’s this time of the month again, and it should be rather interesting thanks to some fancy new things. This month might also be when the big project shuffling happens, as I might have two “project slots” freed up due to Kappa 4.1 and Vanilla Plus 3.0 being nearly done.
Kappa Shader
I have put some finishing touches on the existing changes in the last month, which includes improved parallax self shadowing (thanks to null511’s improved implementation of those) as well as properly working cloud shadows on translucent objects. The latter broke when I overhauled the skybox rendering and I pretty much forgot to update that part accordingly.
Other than that I feel like 4.1 is pretty much ready to go and should enter public testing soon.
KappaPT
KappaPT just recieved some very fancy new features, which not only includes an irradiance cache to aid with denoising but also light contribution in the fog volume, a feature that I teased about implementing for a while now. While it is still very much a work in progress due a variety of quirks and issues (especially bleeding issues are prominent currently) it does look very promising given that it’s just my first attempt at it, as you can see in the attached gallery. It will be available with the upcoming KappaPT update, but disabled by default unless I manage to iron out the issues. Said update should be up within a few days.
The irradiance cache will also come in handy when I implement worldspace reflections, as lighting objects in the reflections would be a bit janky otherwise. All in all this should be getting very interesting now, since the irradiance cache was a big roadblock that I wanted to get done.
Nostalgia Shader
I’ve finished up a small quality of life update for Nostalgia Shader, with said update currently being in public testing on my discord server. It fixes a variety of quirks that release 3.0 had, so it’s nothing huge but nonetheless an important update.
Despite that, have some fancy screenshots regardless.
Vanilla Plus
Version 3.0 of Vanilla Plus is nearly done now, I only need to wrap up some smaller “construction sites” as well as making the settings human-readable before putting it up for public testing. There isn’t really much to say about it beyond that, so I’ll leave it at this and stay tuned for the upcoming public test versions on my discord server.
Whats next?
Once I have finished the work on Kappa 4.1 and Vanilla Plus 3.0 I intend to pick up on the SSPT-version of Nostalgia Shader, something I have been talking about for a while. I’ve put that idea on hold until now since I lacked both time and motivation to pick up another project (of sorts), but with the two big pieces of work being mostly done it seems like a good moment to finally work on that. I haven’t decided how to handle that pack yet, but since it comes with a decent chunk of extra effort to get right I am leaning towards it being separate from the regular Nostalgia Shader, so it will most likely end up being available for Tier 2 Patrons, with occasional drop-downs to Tier 1 similar to how KappaPT occasionally drops down to Tier 2 instead of Tier 3. I’ll outline this in a better fashion once I actually get to that point though.
Last but not least a massive shoutout to my patrons who have turned July into an absolute record-month with their insane support. The jump of last months earnings is genuinely staggering and was completely unexpected for me, but I am definitely not complaining about that xD
