Hey folks,
it’s a new year and time for some updates again, and as Iris 1.5 has recently been released things might get very interesting from now on as I can start leveraging a lot of new features and rendering tricks, but let’s start off with some regular updates first.
Kappa Shader
I have ironed out a few more issues with Kappa Shader, which means version 5.0b will be released soon and should be fully functional with Iris as well. The current release 5.0a still has some issues with Iris and dimensions such as the nether, as there are a few things that don’t break on OptiFine when they should, thus leading to these issues just slipping by me during testing.
In addition to that I have also added a setting to allow you to choose the colour space of your display, which means you can now mitigate the lack of colour management in Minecraft by simply selecting the correct value in the shaderpack settings. This lets you correctly utilise the wider gamut of a DCI-P3 capable display for example without everything looking extremely oversaturated. I might even propose the inclusion of such global settings to Iris, where it would allow shaderpacks to account for the user’s display in a much better way compared to just assuming its standard sRGB. The aforementioned setting will obviously make its way into my other packs as well.
NostalgiaVX
This pack received a couple bug-fixes and TAAU updates last month but will eventually receive a major overhaul now that Iris has become usable. I’m already testing a few new things so stay tuned for some major improvements.
Soft Voxels
I have started looking into various internal changes that leverage the new features that Iris offers, starting with the addition of spherical harmonics for the path-traced lighting which gives the overall image clarity a major boost as it helps preserve a lot of the directionality of the lighting. This in turn makes the TAAU’s job a bit less difficult, as it works a lot better with well-defined edges than with the very soft result of the denoising without spherical harmonics. As I am also doing major internal reworks at the same time it might take a while until you see the first update with these improvements, which will most likely also cease working on OptiFine unless it catches up with Iris’ extra features.
Hodilton also made a nice showcase featuring Soft Voxels again, so naturally I’ll have to feature that here :p
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UShader
As you know version 2.0 of UShader is finally done and released, so you can find its full changelog here: Link
I’m glad that I’ve finally finished this long overdue update, so it’s time for me to move onto the next packs that desperately need updates.
Closing words
I hope that you all had enjoyable holidays and had a good start into 2023. As some of you might know from my Discord server I’ve also taken a bit of a break during the holidays, which is also why this month’s blog is a little bit shorter than usual but nonetheless I hope that you’ll enjoy the released and upcoming updates :)
I’ll also have to thank my subscribers on Patreon once more, of which there were more than 800 in the last month which is quite the record for me since the highest before that must have been “only” around 600. As you know I’m very grateful for your continued support and welcome all the new folks, I hope you like the stuff I’m working on and I’ll keep trying to make things as polished and unique as I can, especially now that I no longer have to deal with most of the annoying restrictions of OptiFine.
Last but not least, the planned things I’ve mentioned in last month’s blogpost are obviously still on my to-do list, but as I have lots of new things to fiddle with thanks to the latest Iris update I’ll obviously look into some of the more pressing issues some of my packs had due to OptiFine limitations. The improvements I come up with can in turn make their way into future updates of other packs though, so it seems like a good thing to me.
And that’s it for this month, as you see things are getting a lot more interesting now and I’ll have a lot more freedom to implement things the way I want thanks to Iris, so expect a lot of fancy new things and updates from now on :)
