Hi folks,
This time there aren’t as many things to cover as in the last months, since I am focusing on the rework of KappaPT while all my other packs already received numerous updates in the last couple of months. That’s also why there has been a bit of an update draught (for my standards anyways lol), but I feel like that isn’t that big of a deal after the recent update run and given the fact that these updates came with a lot of substantial improvements.
KappaPT
The rework of KappaPT has turned out to be a much more extensive and time consuming effort than I anticipated, as I decided to include huge portions of the packs foundation in the rework in order to maximise the gains (both visually and performance-wise) from using Iris’ full capabilities while also just improving a lot of the things that I have been doing differently since I wrote the bulk of KappaPT’s code. This is also why there isn’t much to see from the rework yet, in a quite literal sense, as most parts of the pack aren’t fully functional in their current state while I am working my way through the rendering pipeline. In addition to that I have to completely rethink some features as well, such as the irradiance cache which I am completely overhauling in order to leverage spherical harmonics, which should make it a bit more performant while giving some more pleasing results.
As of now I have finished most of the integration of the new voxel storage and adapted the path-traced indirect lighting accordingly and I hope that I can get most of the rendering pipeline usable again soon so that I can show you some fancy images of the improvements (although don’t expect huge visual upgrades, as I am currently focusing on visual parity with improved performance).
In addition to that the rework will most likely also come with all the recent changes and updates of the regular Kappa Shader, so it will most likely be quite a sizable update once it’s ready :)
Closing words
As you can see I am really focusing my efforts on KappaPT for now, which is both due to everything else having received lots of updates recently and the fact that the pretty crazy update run I’ve pulled did turn out to be somewhat draining and exhausting. Focusing my efforts on one thing while also taking a bit more time to relax in general has started to feel necessary for me because of that, and in addition to that I do have an unhealthy habit of overworking myself from time to time which usually leads to a lot of downtime afterwards, so I am obviously trying to avoid that kind of thing nowadays.
Aside from that my supporters over on Patreon managed to reach quite a record in the last month in terms of numbers, as there have been over 1350 of you people in the last month. That is quite a massive leap from the usual 1100-ish subscribers I’ve had in the last months to say the least. If it isn’t already obvious based on my previous devblogs, I am incredibly grateful for your strong and ongoing support as it’s pretty much what allows me to give you all of these fancy shaderpacks and updates in the first place, and I hope to bring you even more of these in the future as you have probably guessed already :)
That’s pretty much it for this month, for those on the northern hemisphere: enjoy the remaining summer weeks :p
