Hey folks,
It’s time to go through some new stuff again, this time more specifically the reflections update for NostalgiaVX and some of the other things I’ve planned for future shaderpack updates.
NostalgiaVX
I’ve been updating the path traced reflections of NostalgiaVX as of late, which are now matching KappaPT’s reflections solution, obviously with some minor adjustments that are needed to make things fit in. There are of course still some specifics that I am still working out, mostly related to the temporal accumulation since it’s somewhat difficult to find the best middle ground with fast-moving objects like the water in my shaderpacks.
Overall it’s definitely a substantial improvement over the old reflections solution and finally offers more fancy features such as multiple reflection bounces and proper textures of reflected objects.
Future Shaderpack updates
As I’ve already said in last month’s blogpost I am looking into adding support for Distant Horizons to my shaderpacks using the new API for it offered by Iris. As far as I can tell this seems to be somewhat non-trivial to integrate into the rendering pipeline of my packs, since the Distant Horizons geometry is rendered separately and rather different from the regular scene geometry. This means that I will most likely have to manually merge both rendering results into a single set of scene data as there would be a significant performance loss otherwise since things such as screen-space reflections would have to read from two different datasets at once rather than a singular one. This could be a bit of a challenge with my more complex packs especially, since it’d involve quite a handful of internal changes which is somewhat annoying so I’ll have to see how things pan out as far as my non-iris exclusive packs go. In the long run I may have to drop OptiFine support for all my packs if the feature-gap increases like this, as I would prefer staying up-to-date with the more advanced capabilities of Iris as you can imagine.
Arkham Mods
I’ve released another small skin-pack for Arkham Knight in the last month, this time a set of original skins set somewhere between Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum with a lot of inspiration from other suit designs from the Arkham series. You can find its full release post here: Link
These might be the last new skins for a little while now, as I want to bring some of my previous skins up-to-date before starting something new since some of them don’t hold up quite as well when compared to the raw quality I’ve achieved with the Proto-Asylum skins. This especially applies to the Arkham Asylum and City refit skins and parts of the 1989 and 1992 suits. I don’t know when I will get around to giving these significant 3D model overhauls though, as I want to do something else for a while after having just finished the Proto-Asylum suits.
Closing words
As there isn’t anything new or interesting to talk about aside from the stuff I already covered in this post its time for my usual huge thanks to my supporters over on Patreon, who make all of this possible :)
That’s all for this month, I hope that I can bring you some more interesting updates soon :P
