Development Update – November 2022

Hey folks,

It’s once again time to go through a bunch of updates and upcoming things.

Kappa Shader

As version 5.0 of Kappa Shader is now released I’ve fixed a bunch of issues you people have reported, which means a small bugfix update will be released soon. In addition to that indirect lighting (especially skylight) will look a lot less flat in the next update, as I somehow broke the extra SSAO step I’m usually applying after the SVGF denoiser. Aside from these things I am pretty happy with how version 5.0 has been received so far, so I think it’s in a good state until I can do the long awaited full overhaul when Iris becomes usable for me.

KappaPT

I have finished part 2 of the weather update for KappaPT, which means you now have all the fancy new things such as local exposure, support for lightning bolts and in addition also improved denoising and TAA, as I have also worked on the latter two things. This should add to an overall more consistent experience, as the denoiser was a bit finicky for a long time and did some odd things it shouldn’t such as extremely over-blurring indirect shadows, which should be a bit less extreme now.

In addition to that wetness puddles now work properly without using a resource pack and porosity is also being handled correctly again.

NostalgiaVX

This pack got a small update that fixed the incorrectly rendered entity overlays, which is something I somehow missed for a while and then also forgot to release a fix for. I’ve also added support for 1.19’s new emitters, which is something some of you have also been requesting for a while.

UShader

I’ve made a bunch of improvements to UShader, namely fixing the nighttime visuals which were just completely off from what I intended as I forgot to adjust it to the recent colour-space changes. In addition to that I’ve tweaked the clouds, and especially the cirrus clouds look a lot nicer than before.

I’m starting to feel like the overworld is in a good state now (aside from some missing minor features here and there), which means I’ll move onto dimension support soon to finish up this rewrite (took me long enough as some of you know lol).

Soft Voxels

I have only done some minor changes to Soft Voxels recently to improve the TAAU, which should produce a lot less extreme ghosting in various scenes now and also responds better to camera movement.

Vanilla Plus

I have made a quick test run of Vanilla Plus with TAAU but as I expected the gains are very negligible and not worth the minor loss in visual fidelity, thus TAAU will not become a feature of it in the foreseeable future. Aside from that I’m pretty much out of ideas of what to change about it as both visuals and performance seem pretty solid to me as-is and bugs seem to be rare enough for me to not be flooded with bug reports xD

This also explains the lack of updates that some of you might be wondering about, there pretty much just isn’t anything to update about it at this moment.

Contest Results

There has been a short 24-hour contest with the theme “Halloween” on my discord server, these are the winners:

Closing Words

As always it’s time for a big shoutout to my supporters on Patreon since you folks are still going just as strong as in the past few months and as you know I am very grateful for that :)

I’ve been going a bit easier on the updates as of late as some of you might have noticed, since I feel like I have been putting a bit too much on my plate at once in the last few months so it made sense for me to slow down and relax a little, which also gives me more opportunities to come up with new ideas of stuff to make or add to my projects.

That’s pretty much it for this time, hope you enjoyed the updates and the ones that are coming soon while I wrap up the last of my “long term construction sites” (aka the UShader rewrite).

 

Become a Patreon

Posted in Blog, Kappa Shader, KappaPT, NostalgiaVX, Soft Voxels, UShader, Vanilla Plus Shader and tagged , , , , , .