Oi folks,
There have been various updates in the last month as most of you will have noticed based on the wave of releases that most of my free packs have experienced, and there are more to come soon.
Kappa Shader
There will be another minor update soon, mostly to address a few issues that have slipped past me with 5.1 or that arose with recent AMD driver updates. Aside from that I’ve generally been focusing on bugfixes and long overdue improvements as you probably already know.
KappaPT
This pack will receive a major internal overhaul soon (and will also be brought up-to-date with the latest Kappa Shader release), which will also break OptiFine compatibility as expected since I’ll be utilising a lot of Iris’ additional features again, similar to NostalgiaVX. This should give it a similar performance boost, as the voxelization is the major bottleneck here as well. In addition to that compatibility with latest AMD drivers will also be fixed through these changes.
Nostalgia Shader
I have started working on version 5.0 of Nostalgia Shader, which will feature a host of improvements and visual changes. This includes a moderate shift in colour grading through my custom film stock emulation, which makes everything a bit more vibrant and pleasing to look at, as well as completely overhauled volumetric clouds. The latter are now being lit in a much more natural and pleasing way and correctly interact with terrain and fog if necessary.
Another addition comes in the form of temporal anti-aliasing upscaling (TAAU), which can give you a significant performance boost depending on the scene while sacrificing little visual quality at its default ratio of 75%.
There are obviously also a lot of bugfixes, minor improvements and adjustments that I’ve already introduced, so expect this update to be a big jump in overall consistency and quality and stay tuned for the eventual public test versions that should happen fairly soon :)
In the meantime early previews are already available for all patreon subscribers.
NostalgiaVX
This pack has been my main focus in the last few weeks, but I feel like I’ve finished the bulk of the important work, as the new voxel structure and all the related changes are now working as expected. I have also added an experimental temporal ray guiding solution, which I might even replace with ReSTIR once future Iris updates allow me to do so, as I am currently facing some framebuffer attachment limitations again.
Various bugs and regressions that were introduced with P9 or that remained from before the rework have also been fixed with recent updates and I am trying to iron out as many bugs as I can as of late. Worldspace reflections will also receive a major overhaul soon as I’ve already announced, but they should be mostly working like before the rework now.
The changes of Nostalgia Shader v5.0 will obviously also make their way into NostalgiaVX soon, so expect some more major updates :)
Closing words
Most of you have probably already noticed, but all of my free packs are now also available on Modrinth and I have updated the download-widgets of this website accordingly, so make sure to check that out.
Aside from that, my shaderpack related to-do list has shrunken quite a lot as of late, which is probably no surprise if you consider the number of recent updates that my packs received. I’m glad that I have finally managed to get a lot of long overdue changes and improvements done, since it not only gives you folks a much better experience when using my shaderpacks but it also lets me focus on more new things without having to worry about old bugs and such.
As always I also want to thank my supporters over on Patreon, who are making most of this possible in the first place, so a big thanks to you folks who have been going strong and increasing in numbers in the last few months.
That’s pretty much all I have to say for this month, I hope that you’ve enjoyed the recent updates and stay tuned for upcoming ones :)
