Oi folks,
I’ve teased this project in this months devblog already and here it is, a very unique project with its very own niche. As some of you might know, basically all ready-to-use packs that use voxels for their lighting in some way are going for a realistic look, so I was wondering if its any good in a stylised pack like Nostalgia Shader. Thus the idea of NostalgiaVX was born, but I wanted to make something more interesting than just complex high-quality lighting through ordinary path-traced lighting through voxel-raymarching, especially due to its downsides in terms of performance and denoising. The other approach would be floodfill lighting or light propagation volumes, which in turn are pretty performant, don’t need denoising but give rather simplified results with little detail. So I thought I might take a stab at somehow combining the two methods, which resulted in the lighting approach that I deemed viable for an advanced version of Nostalgia Shader that I had in mind for so long. It is still very much a work-in-progress, especially due to the lighting solution being a bit of an reinvention of existing methods to make them work together without issues, but its in a far better state than the initial prototype I made a few weeks ago, thus I felt like its ready to be launched now.
It will be available for Tier 2 Patrons (5€), with occasional dropdown to Tier 1 (1€) which is similar to the distribution model you may already know from KappaPT. The regular Nostalgia Shader will obviously still be updated and may even benefit from synergies between both versions, leading to further refinements to the lighting as version 4.0 will already demonstrate with its screenspace-path-tracing solution, thus it doubles as a free demo version of NostalgiaVX if you want to get an idea of what to expect of it.
I don’t really have a feature-roadmap for it yet, but I an considering to also try a few other gimmicks like world-space reflections through voxels and such since it seems like a good opportunity as I already have a voxel volume at hand, although one thats quite different in nature than the one in KappaPT, so it is also a unique challenge for me to take a different approach at things.
Thats pretty much all I have to say about it for now, it should be available on Patreon later today (no idea how I’ll deal with Nostalgia 4.0 and VX being at Tier 2 at the same time atm, bit poorly timed by me there but 4.0 should go into Tier 1 soon anyways) and I hope you’ll enjoy it :p
Make sure to visit my discord server for support, development progress and other information.
