Oi, there have been plenty of changes since NostalgiaVX launched almost a week ago so I felt like a blogpost outlining those for the ones who are interested in the project would be useful.
First of all, I’ve entirely changed the lighting approach. It is now using proper VoxelPT (with a short screenspace trace ontop, not unlike KappaPT) in conjunction with the Light Propagation Volume. This solution, which I was initially just trying out of curiousity, turned out to sacrifice visual accuracy compared to regular VoxelPT in favour of considerably easier denoising and some extra performance thanks to not having to sample the block texture atlas. Naturally I went all in once I realised the potential of this solution, so NostalgiaVX now also features bounced sunlight and skylight occlusion using the VoxelPT. As you can see in the image gallery above, this is quite a tremendous step up in terms of visual quality.
I have also revisited the emission color palette, which should now be much more consistent with the rest of the pack rather than overly bright (which was caused by me just reusing the emission color system of KappaPT without much adjustment, I just wanted to get something that works there) and exposed some of the lighting related settings some of you might be familliar with from KappaPT.
There is also some bad news however, there seems to be a weird performance issue that happens on some configurations. This issue seems to be somehow caused by Optifine or more specifically the shadow- and voxel-gbuffer. It’s unclear if this is caused by some sort of bug or if it’s just the generally horrid CPU-performance of the shadowmap rendering that hits especially hard in this pack. I am familiar with this sort of issue, as KappaPT struggles with a similar one, but it seems like it has turned a bit less bad with the recent updates, so while it is not gone it appears to be a bit less of a trouble-cause now.
Aside from these two noteworthy things, I’ve also made a lot of tweaks and adjustments, so anyone who used P1 and P2 will find a significant quality of life improvement in P3, since annoying issues like torches being entirely broken in some scenes should be fixed now.
After this run of updates I’ll most likely take care of the other projects again for a few days, as I still have Nostalgia 3.1 and 4.0 in the pipeline, with 3.1 being one I really want to release as it’s bridging the gap until 4.0.
Thats pretty much it for this time, hope it was interesting to read and I hope that you’ll enjoy the loads of updates to this project.
Make sure to visit my discord server for support, development progress and other information.
