Its this time of the month again, and this time its quite interesting.
Kappa Shader
In the last month there was a staggering amount of shaderpack related OptiFine updates, thus I decided to immediately make good use of these. This eventually lead to starting the development of Kappa Shader v4.0 and I can promise you’re in for a treat on this one. Not only could I boost the performance by a considerable margin (between 10% and 25% across the board) but the increased flexibility by having more framebuffer attachments available also allowed me to improve the quality of volumetrics without any performance impact thanks to temporal upscaling.
The biggest improvement however would arguably be the new SSPT, which is now fully taking care of indirect lighting as well. This means you now get proper ambient occlusion, screenspace global illumination and emission, which performs and looks far superior to what Kappa 3.x had to offer. Especially emission has seen a steep improvement as I can now afford longer distances and quality levels than before, as you can see in the image gallery above.
Version 4.0 is already in the preview stage and will drop down from Tier 3 to Tier 2 on patreon within the next few days, so make sure to give it a shot if you have already supported. With the release of Kappa Shader v4.0 there also will be no need for Kappa Lite anymore as I can now make the pack much more flexible and scalable than before. Thus with 4.0 there will only be one edition of Kappa Shader instead of a full and a lite one.
KappaPT (formerly KappaRT)
It went a bit quiet about this pack since I announced it two months ago, but I have finally made some considerable progress again thanks to the already mentioned OptiFine updates. I was able to test a good deal of new things and refactored the pack to leverage the new capabilities of OptiFine. This lead to massively improved emission response, which is ahead of almost all other shaderpacks that are built around path-traced lighting and best of all, aside from the lighting part it’s mostly just like the normal Kappa version. This means you get the fully fleshed out atmospherics and post processing section and do not have to compromise on these in order to get path-traced lighting. It also now features a screenspace and voxel space hybrid path-tracer, which allows me to have a less hard time with noncubics and entities.
However the performance is currently not quite like I would want it, which is mostly due to many of the additions to the lighting section being a work-in-progress, so they are not as optimised as they could be. Nonetheless it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to assume that this can be improved, especially with the newly added compute shaders.
KappaPT will eventually make its way onto my Patreon soon, most likely at first only for Tier 3. I have planned a slightly different distribution model for this pack, which includes a free, but less frequently updated, lite version that lacks some of the advanced features while the full version will be a Patreon exlusive as this kind of pack requires a lot of time and effort. I don’t feel comfortable with fully locking it away (which will also encourage piracy, and I want to avoid that as best as I can), thus the free lite version, although in any case the normal Kappa Shader remains free and is a suitable alternative, especially with the new SSPT that is coming up with version 4.0.
Nostalgia Shader
Version 3.0 of Nostalgia Shader is finally drawing close to a release. Its pretty much feature complete and already went into public testing on my discord server a few weeks ago. It is arguably a very big and impressive update at this point, essentially ironing out all the weak points of past versions, similar to Kappa Shader v3.0. Most notably the overall ambient colors as well as water have been massively improved over v2.x, which not only gives superior visual results but also looks more faithful to its original goal of capturing the essence of first generation shaderpacks.
If things go according to plan this massive update will be released within the next few weeks so stay tuned and until then you can find test versions on my discord server.
Potato Shaders
There have finally been some updates on this pack again, which includes a plethora of new settings to give you folks more precise controls about the colors of the various individual aspects of it. The Nether is also supported now and will eventually recieve a few unique effects later on.
This pack is currently available for all patrons, so make sure to give it a shot if you’re curious.
UShader
Its time for the long overdue rework of this pack, which should bring it up to par with my other reworked packs. It is already leveraging some of the new OptiFine additions to both improve performance as well as visuals, namely through temporal upscaling of volumetrics. It might not get some exciting bleeding-edge features like Kappa Shader, but will instead be focused on gameplay and performance while still providing a broad palette of features, which also includes full resourcepack support.
A preview of UShader v2.0 is already available for tier 2 patreons.
Thats it for this month. Once again a big shoutout to my patrons that seem be increasing in numbers each day as well as to all the awesome folks that use my stuff and gave me a total of one million downloads on curseforge.
