Hey folks,
It’s been quite a while since the last proper devblog of mine, which was mostly the result of a lot of unexpected stress and other irritating things in my life happening that drained quite a bit of my energy and mental health, so I had to focus on getting those things sorted out first. I’ve (thankfully) been getting everything back in order again as of late, which also meant more shaderpack updates and the likes again, so there’s a significant amount of catching up to do in this post which I’ll get into right away.
Previews Galore
Let’s start off with what’s probably of interest to most of you, which I’d assume is the host of upcoming updates for my free packs (which you might already know a few things of, if you’ve been keeping an eye on the testing channel in my discord server). I’ve been focusing on a lot of bugfixes and quality of life improvements there, mostly to iron out some new issues that popped up with recent Minecraft updates as well as some old oversights or minor shortcomings that some of my packs had.
This includes the TAA(U) improvements I’ve mentioned in my last devblog for example, which I am now bringing to my other packs (or at least those where those improvements are applicable). That should iron out a lot of the issues that some of you had with my TAA(U) implementation, especially at lower resolutions, since it preserves a lot more small scale and distant details as I’ve shown in the aforementioned devblog.
Another noteworthy addition would be Distant Horizons support for Potato Shaders, which was just more trivial to do there without breaking OptiFine compatibility than with most of my other packs. I figured I’d give that a go because of that, especially since this pack seems to have gained a bit more popularity as of late, so maybe it’s time to bring it more up to date again.
There’s also a bunch of other minor changes that the previews I’ve posted on my discord server so far include, so I’d strongly recommend that you check those out.
Coming up…
As for the broader, overarching plans for my packs, not much has changed since my last post, so OptiFine support will still be dropped in the long run, especially with Mojangs move to Vulkan, which also forced a bit of a shift of focus towards Iris’ long term replacement Aperture, even if that’s still in its early stages. Migrating to that will obviously be a bit easier with packs that are already tailored to a more modern set of features than what OptiFine offers, since there’s quite a lot that I can do more efficiently if I don’t have to maintain that level of backwards compatibility with all its associated quirks and issues anymore. I’m not sure when I’ll take that step, but I reckon that it should happen soon-ish, but for obvious reasons I can’t really give you an ETA yet.
I’ve also been asked a lot about adding support for Voxy to my shaderpacks, so I figured that I should address it here as well: The gist of it is that Voxy’s current way of handling shaderpacks doesn’t feel all that appealing to me. It also comes with a few quirks that make things a bit difficult and irritating to deal with in a deferred rendering pipeline (like most of my packs use). So while I’m very excited about what it does and its advantages over competing mods like Distant Horizons, it doesn’t quite feel like something that I’d want to spend my time on as of now. That will probably change in the future as it advances, especially in the long run with aperture becoming a thing, but for now that’s my answer to that question.
PT Shenanigans
I’ve also done quite a few things on my voxel based packs since my last blogpost, as some of you might have noticed from the occasional changelog I’ve posted since then. Aside from DH support for KappaPT, most of the changes were also focused on fixing a lot of minor issues and some quality of life improvements. Some of these include better overall handling and blending of DH terrain as well as catching up with the free counterparts of the respective packs in some aspects, most notably with finally bringing depth-writing parallax occlusion to KappaPT and NostalgiaVX as well as adding proper effects for darkness and blindness potion effects.
Another long overdue improvement was fixing the (at times very) jittery bloomy fog, something that also bothered myself for a long time, but somehow I just overlooked the fact that I can fix it with relative ease ever since I moved those packs to Iris-exclusivity. So yeah, that’s yet another old issue being tackled now. That improvement will obviously also make its way to my free packs once I drop OptiFine support.
There’s a lot more changes than that as well, but I’d recommend you to check my supporter updates posts if you want comprehensive changelogs about those.
Closing words
As you can see, I was still fairly busy despite having to deal with a lot of nonsense in my life that I honestly could do without, but sometimes life just happens I suppose, I’ll just try to make the best of it and I’m happy to be spending more time on my projects and the things I love doing again. I’m not the type of person that’s able to just do nothing for a while, since that tends to make me feel kind of bad and unhappy about myself, so you can imagine how much better it feels when I’m able to be busy and productive with some of my many projects again. I hope that nothing else will disturb that anymore now, because I’ve kind of had my fair share of annoyances for now to be honest, at some point you just want to be able to do your thing in peace again lol.
I’ll probably keep doing blogposts as I have time and energy and as makes sense for a while though, although I’m aiming for at least a bi-monthly rhythm again but rest assured, I’ll keep you all in the loop whenever I got some interesting updates to show.
Aside from all of that it’s also time for the obvious shoutout to my supporters on Patreon and everyone else who’s using and enjoying my shaderpacks. I’m super grateful for your ongoing support as always, and it’s always nice to see you enjoying the stuff I put out there.
And that’s it for this time, thanks for reading until here :)
