Oi,
After a lot of time and work it’s finally done, thus I can finally present to you version 5.0, also known as the Weather Update, of Kappa Shader and there is quite a lot of new stuff to go through.
First off I have made a proper weather system as most of you probably already know. This system procedurally generates a bunch of parameters per ingame-day which in turn drive the maths behind the cloud shape, coverage and the present cloud types. In addition to that biome- and daytime-specific modifiers are applied to these parameters, which not only gives you variation on a per-day basis but also per-biome with dynamic changes throughout the day. This was a perfect opportunity for me to vastly increase the number of cloud types which should add up to more than six different types of clouds that you could observe over time rather than the usual two different cloud types you’d find in most other packs. In order to make this look and perform as good as it can I have completely overhauled the temporal upscaler I’m using for clouds, which now gives much sharper results while rendering to a lower target resolution, which gives it both a visual and a performance boost over the solution I used previously. Last but not least I have made some improvements to the overall lighting method of the clouds, which makes them look even better than before.
Naturally I have also hooked the fog up to the weather system, which means you’ll now get denser and slightly tinted fog in very humid biomes such as swamps and jungles, whereas deserts are now getting sandstorms when the ingame weather is raining rather than just some weird rain fog.
Another important addition is that of temporal anti-aliasing upscaling (or TAAU), which allows the shaderpack to render the scene at a lower resolution internally while still maintaining image sharpness thanks to the upscaler running at the end of the rendering pipeline. This gives the pack a nice overall performance boost, which should make it more accessible and performant for many of you.
Last but not least I have added local exposure, which makes the massive dynamic range Kappa Shader renders in a bit less extreme after tonemapping, as it adjusts the exposure for image areas individually. It may lead to some minor haloing in scenes with extreme contrasts though, but is nonetheless a big improvement.
There are many more additions but I’ve wanted to highlight these few as they really stand out as major additions of this update. With that being said it’s time to go through the full changelog, I hope you’ll enjoy this update :)
The resourcepack I used in the screenshots of the gallery is Patrix 32x.
Changelog
- Overhauled skybox
- Added cirrocumulus clouds
- Added cumulonimbus clouds during rain
- Added cumulus-congestus/-mediocris clouds (those two types are sort of blended into each other)
- Overhauled cirrostratus clouds
- Added noctilucent clouds
- Added altocumulus clouds
- Improved temporal upscaler for clouds
- Added lightning bolt interaction
- Sunlight now uses elevation based gradient
- Various minor cloud shape improvements
- Improved overall cloud lighting
- New approach loosely based on work by Zombye
- Fixed rendering of lightning bolts
- Added local exposure
- May lead to minor haloing with very extreme brightness contrasts in some scenes
- Added per-day weather
- Affects fog and skybox
- Minor influence on wind effects and water waves
- Added TAAU
- At 75% resolution scale by default
- Due to OptiFine limitations smooth depth of field focusing had to be removed in favour of TAAU
- Minor assistance in implementation provided by SixthSurge
- Image Sharpening strength can now be adjusted
- Fixed Nether when disabling advanced SSPT emission
- Adjusted Nether visuals
- Adjusted indirect lighting filtering
- Improved shadowmap bias
- Less overall shadowmap acne
- Added sandstorms for deserts during rain
- Adjusted overall fog parameters
- Improved parallax occlusion mapping (POM) thanks to Null511
- Improved self-shadowing
- Improved slope-normal calculation
- Added pixel-depth offset support for improved object intersections with POM
- Also allows SSPT to correctly respond to POM
- Fixed various compatibility issues with 1.17 and newer
- Added support for 1.19 emitters
- Various minor internal improvement and bugfixes
Downloads
By downloading you agree to the terms of use as detailed here.
Curseforge and Modrinth allow me to gain some benefit through their respective rewards-programs, so you are encouraged to download from there unless they’re unreachable.
Make sure to visit my discord server for support, development progress and other information.
