HyShade — Changelog

v1.2.0 — Hidden Depths

This release activates high-quality rendering paths that have been sitting inside Hytale's own shaders, compiled off, the whole time — discovered while mapping the engine's rendering pipeline shader by shader (see docs/HYTALE_RENDERING_PIPELINE.md and docs/UPGRADE_ROADMAP.md). Four new effects, all in the Realistic and Natural packs, all individually toggleable. Performance pack is untouched.

✅ Source-verified AND game-verified. Every injection anchor was checked byte-for-byte against the engine's dumped shader source, then confirmed in a live session (2026-06-12): all rules fired, visuals confirmed clean, zero shader errors.

New

• Soft shadows (SoftShadows) — the engine ships a 16-sample soft-shadow path that was never enabled, and it contains a math bug (the average divides by 4 instead of 16, which would make shadows 4× too bright). HyShade enables the path AND fixes the math: smooth penumbras instead of the dithered single-sample edges. Scoped to fragment shaders only — the 6 vertex shaders that also sample shadows (particles) keep their cheap path. This is the most GPU-expensive new feature: turn it off first on weak PCs.
• High-quality FXAA (FxaaHighQuality) — flips the engine's anti-aliasing from the 3-pass preset 20 to the 12-pass preset 39 (already present in the shader; the engine itself ships preset-39 variants, so this is production-tested engine code). Cleaner foliage and roofline edges; edge threshold tightens 0.15 → 0.05 automatically.
• High-quality bloom (BloomHighQuality) — switches the bloom downsample from the 4-fetch method to the 13-fetch COD-style method (both already in the shader), and upgrades the 5-tap/1-tap upsample variants to the 9-tap tent. Less flicker and fewer aliased rings on bright lights. Covers all engine quality-setting variants.
• Filmic tonemapping, relocated (FilmicTonemap) — ACES now runs before the engine's hard clamp to white, where bloom overshoot (values above 1.0) still exists — previously it ran after, on an image whose highlights were already destroyed. Sunsets and bright water glints now roll off smoothly. The old post-clamp ACES block was removed from both packs' look snippets (keeping both would double-tonemap).

Changed

• /hyshade toggle learned the four new effects: softshadows, fxaa, bloomhq, tonemap.
• hyshade.ini documents the four new toggles (all default ON; absent key = ON).
• Injection rule count: Realistic 9 → 15, Natural 4 → 10 (engine limit is 32).
• In-game verified 2026-06-12: 304 injections across 48 live shader variants, zero GLSL compile errors, clean session.

Known limitations

• The 16-tap shadow grid has no noise jitter (the engine's jitter only exists in the single-tap path), so mild penumbra banding is possible — report it and a jitter injection can be added in a point release.
• FXAA subpixel blending stays off — it's a const in the shader that injection cannot override (full shader replacement would be needed).