Hey folks,
I’ve been focusing a lot on the rework of NostalgiaVX, which solved many performance issues by leveraging many advanced features of Iris, as well as the release of FastPBR in the last month, thus these two have received some interesting updates. This also means that there are less other updates to talk about, and as both of these packs also had dedicated update posts expect this development blog to be a little bit shorter than usual.
NostalgiaVX
As most of you might know from the more extensive dedicated blogpost I’ve made regarding NostalgiaVX’ current state, I’ve made significant internal changes to it. These changes have led to Iris 1.6.2 or newer being a requirement to use any future versions of the pack. The performance has seen a significant uplift over previous version, with gains of up to 100% depending on the scene and 25% being what most setups have gained across the board, this is especially exciting when considering the fact that there computational workload has increased with the addition of spherical harmonics and goes to show how much previous versions struggled due to the limitations that were imposed by OptiFine at that time.
You can find the dedicated update post about NostalgiaVX here: Link
Naturally I have already updated the pack since that post, so a lot of the broken or missing features are already usable again in the latest update.
In case some of you are wondering, the current phase of the rework is of purely technical nature, so there won’t be any noteworthy updates to the overall look and visual style, as these will change a little bit once I begin working on the next update for the regular Nostalgia Shader. The changes of that won’t be too extensive though, so expect more of a nice touch-up that should elevate the visuals a little bit more.
FastPBR
This pack has finally been released, and it seems to be well received so far. I’m obviously very happy about that, especially given the fact that I’ve neglected it for far too long after I initially started working on it back in 2020.
You can find the full release post here: Link
Website Updates and such
The eagle eyed among you (or those that paid attention to the updates channel on my discord server) have probably noticed that a couple things have changed on this website. That’s because I am starting to clean up some of the less-than-optimal layout and design decisions I made back when I first switched to this website. The layout mostly originated from the github.io pages that I was using before, but the scope of my website content has grown a lot since then, which in turn made the layout feel less and less fitting (the way I handled shaderpack downloads was without doubt the worst offender).
I hope that the design changes will make everything look and feel a bit more refined and intuitive than before, though I’m obviously just updating and improving things and won’t be turning everything upside down :)
Another thing that I have started to look into was the platform Modrinth, as it seems to turn into a quite potent competitor to Curseforge and competition in a space like this is obviously always good. I’ve used FastPBRs release as a bit of a test run to see how the project management works over there and am currently planning to post other shaderpacks there as well, most likely in conjunction with their respective next update releases. I feel like this should be a nice addition to give you folks an alternative to Curseforge and it also avoids the pitfalls of a platform lock.
Closing words
As you can see there is still a lot going on, but that’s not a bad thing as the significant improvements to NostalgiaVX have shown :)
I’m still mostly trying to work through my little to-do list of shaderpack things one at a time, so updates will be a bit more focused on single packs in the near future, but this seems like the best way to get on with a lot of the long overdue stuff as I’ve explained before.
Last but not least it’s time for the inevitable huge thanks to my supporters over on Patreon, who make a lot of this stuff possible. You folks seem to still be going just as strong as in the previous months and I hope that you’re enjoying the various updates, especially when it’s something as significant as NostalgiaVX’ performance improvements :)
And that’s it for this month’s development blog, enjoy the new stuff and make sure give FastPBR a test run if you haven’t already.
