Development Update – January 2022

Oi folks,

It’s once again time for a development status update, which covers quite a bunch of interesting things.

Kappa Shader

I’ve started to do some small adjustments to the clouds and atmosphere, mainly to be able to produce a more realistic horizon edge of the sky. I am however still a bit undecided about what should become the new default, as the previous way was a bit more “filling” but the new way makes the clouds appear less disconnected from the sky around the horizon. Regardless of that you’ll be able to switch between both visuals through in-game settings. I am personally leaning towards the new way though, as it just feels more authentic to me. These changes will obviously also affect KappaPT.

I’ll eventually start releasing previews of Kappa Shader v4.2 once I’ve gathered enough changes to warrant a new release, although this version will be focused on small touch-ups like this rather than big changes.

KappaPT

I’ve done some small quality of life improvements to KappaPT, which includes less noisy reflections, improved night-time visuals as I’ve already teased in the last devblog as well as support for the extended world height limits of Minecraft 1.18. Support for The End as well as accurate refractions are the things that I’m planning to add next.

Nostalgia Shader

Version 4.0 of Nostalgia Shader is finally out and brought quite a lot of changes as promised. You can check its release notes here: Link

  • Nostalgia Shader and Vanillaccurate

NostalgiaVX

I’ve finally added nether support, now that Nostalgia Shader v4.0 is done which gives me a bit more time to spend on this project again. I’ve also added support for world-space reflections using voxels, which replaced the previously used reflection capture. Emitters should also look a bit nicer out of the box now, as I’ve fixed the slightly broken emission masking used on them. Now only areas that are supposed to light up are actually rendered emissive. On-top of that I’ve also added support for simple refractions on water as well as the new Depth of Field Focus modes you may already know from Kappa Shader.

I’ll eventually tackle support for The End next, although I want to take a closer look at some new bugs that seem to be appearing on nVidia GPUs first. Said bug causes some odd purple light leaking under some circumstances with certain shadowmap resolutions without any directly apparent reason.

UShader

I’ve picked up on rewriting UShader again, although I’ll most likely do more of a full overhaul to completely redesign it from scratch, as I want to slightly change its direction, so that it is more unique compared to my other projects, both visually and code-wise. I can’t go into details on that yet, as I am still working things out in that regard.

Potato Shader and Simplicissimus

Both of these packs will receive a small update soon, with the main purpose of ensuring compatibility with newer Minecraft versions, as it has been quite a while since the last updates of these packs.

  • Simplicissimus Shader

Closing words

Once again I’ll have to give a massive shoutout to my patrons, as last month’s revenue was just as crazy as the months before, you guys really are just setting record after record lately. I don’t really have the words to describe how I feel about that beyond just being extremely grateful for your crazy support folks, this is a really nice way to start into the New Year so to speak xD

All that’s left to say is I hope all of you had some enjoyable holidays and a nice start into the New Year, let’s see what 2022 has to offer and hope it will be better than the last two years.

 

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Posted in Blog, Kappa Shader, KappaPT, Nostalgia Shader, NostalgiaVX, Potato Shaders, Simplicissimus Shader, UShader and tagged , , , , .