Hey folks,
It’s time for an update on how things are going, and I’ve finally gotten some results to show when it comes to updating my shaderpacks to support Distant Horizons.
As I’ve said before I’m using FastPBR as my “sandbox” for working out the implementation, since its rather clean and minimalistic codebase makes things easier for me. Although things aren’t working out quite as smoothly as I planned regarding the implementation side of things, I’m pretty sure that I got the bulk of it figured out now. The major hurdle that’s left now is “compositing” regular terrain and distant horizons terrain into a single shared G-Buffer setup that’d allow me to compute reflections and so on for the LODs without any additional overhead outside of the LOD rendering itself. Since especially reflections have a tendency to be one of the more expensive parts it’d be ideal to have them done in a single pass as you can imagine.
Aside from that I’ve already gotten some simple lighting on the LOD geometry working as well as generally consistent handling of special cases such as water, though I will most likely try to keep things as simple as possible when it comes to these things, since I’d obviously want to preserve the generally performant nature of the LODs generated by Distant Horizons.
Thankfully my general approach to handling the LODs seems to work out as I thought, since all of it works without having to do any invasive changes to the rest of the shaderpack, which means that implementing Distant Horizons support in my other packs shouldn’t pose that big of a challenge and I can probably also preserve OptiFine compatibility on those packs of mine that still support it.
That’s pretty much all for this time, I hope that I can give you folks a proper test version of FastPBR with Distant Horizons support soon so that I can iron out any potential unexpected issues, and as always I want to thank my supporters over on Patreon, since you guys are the ones making it possible for me to keep working on these things :)
