Development Update – October 2021

Oi,

It is once again time for another devblog, and there are still quite a few interesting things to cover this time.

Kappa Shader

Version 4.1 of Kappa Shader finally got its release last month and boasts quite a changelog. You can find its update post, including a full changelog here: Kappa Shader v4.1

As I’ve already gone through the important bits in the update post for 4.1 I won’t be repeating them here since that would feel a bit redundant as the update post already covers it.

All in all it should be quite an improvement over 4.0 thanks to the plethora of tweaks, adjustments and quality of life changes so I definitely recommend you to check it out.

  • Kappa Shader and Patrix' Resourcepack

KappaPT

There have been numerous updates to KappaPT in the last month, which was also caused by having to keep up with the vast amount of changes that Kappa 4.1 introduced, as I still want to keep both packs fairly close to each other in terms of overall features and looks, aside from the obvious difference cause by the world space path-tracing. Speaking of which, the long awaited world space reflections using the voxel volume are finally there, although the denoiser needed for them in particular is still very much a work-in-progress but nonetheless it is looking very promising so far.

Another noteworthy addition is support for stained glass light tinting, which allows you to create some extremely pretty scenes and screenshots, as the gallery above should demonstrate.

Aside from these two noteworthy additions, many of the smaller changes Kappa 4.1 brought can also be found in KappaPT, which includes the atmosphere and tonemap adjustments as well as support for many of the new emitters that 1.17 introduced.

  • KappaPT and Patrix' Resourcepack

Nostalgia Shader

Version 3.1 also has been released last month, which means that I can now fully focus on bringing version 4.0 up to speed, but since there have been many other things needing my attention last month there isn’t much progress on it to be talked about yet.

  • Nostalgia Shader 4.0 and Vanillaccurate

NostalgiaVX

As this a very new project I’ve spent most of my time on it in the last month, especially since there were quite a few exciting things to figure out about it, which resulted in a rather performant, yet very good looking lighting approach. I’d highly suggest you to read this blogpost if you are curious about some of the technical details behind it.

Needless to say that this has been a tremendous upgrade over the lighting solution NostalgiaVX launched with. As I am quite happy with the current state of it, I plan on working on dimension support next, as especially the nether should look quite interesting with this pack.

Another addition I plan on doing would be world space reflections using the voxel volume, although I’d have to handle quite a few things differently compared to KappaPT’s solution. This inevitably means lower quality but it should still be sufficient to mitigate the limitations of screen space reflections or the reflection capture (the latter may get replaced then).

  • NostalgiaVX and Vanillaccurate

Anything else?

There isn’t much else to cover aside from those packs, Vanilla Plus got a small update again but that’s nothing overly exciting as its just bugfixes there.

I’ll most likely focus on Nostalgia Shader 4.0 now, as well as refining the world space reflection of KappaPT since the regular Kappa Shader and NostalgiaVX are in currently in a solid spot, and Vanilla Plus is as well since the release of 3.0.

Once more a big shoutout to my patrons, last month’s support was just as crazy as the months before, which is very much appreciated and helpful currently. It’s still hard to believe how much support you guys are doing lately but I am definitely not complaining about it xD

 

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Posted in Blog, Kappa Shader, KappaPT, Nostalgia Shader, NostalgiaVX.