HyShade v1.4.0 — Golden Hour

The release you can see from across the server: golden sunsets, halo-free sharpening, living water.

✨ What's new

• Sunset & sunrise grading — the world now warms to gold as the sun drops, with a subtle cool lift in the shadows, then returns to neutral at noon and midnight. This runs inside the engine's lighting pass with the actual sun direction — a screen filter physically can't know what time it is. Watch one full sunset and you'll get it.
• CAS sharpening — the engine's old-school sharpen filter is replaced with contrast-adaptive sharpening (the AMD-style approach modern games use): stone, bark, and foliage detail gets crisper, and the bright edge halos the old filter produced are gone.
• Living water (experiment, Realistic pack) — HyShade's first geometry-level effect: water waves are taller and keep moving farther from your camera. Not your thing? WaterWaves=false and it's gone.

🎚️ Everything is a knob

All of v1.4.0 ships tunable in hyshade.ini — SunsetWarmth, SunsetCoolShadows, CasStrength, WaterWaveBoost, WaterWaveRange — alongside v1.3.0's live bloom/CA controls. Your look, your numbers. And /hyshade toggle sunset | cas | waves works from chat.

🤓 For the shader nerds

Sunset grading injects into the deferred combine (the only post-stage shader with SunLightDirection in its UBO — the gameplay PostEffect has neither sun nor time), gated by a sunrise/sunset band computed from sun elevation; alpha is never touched because it carries the G-buffer config bitmask. CAS is a 5-tap contrast-adaptive kernel with a bounded per-tap weight (denominator can't flip sign), delivered as a pure injection: the function is inserted above the engine's own sharpen() definition and a token-exact #define sharpen hy_cas at the call site reroutes it — no hash replacement, all other rules intact, engine update resilient. The water work is vertex-stage injection (the rule engine turned out to be stage-agnostic), scaling the engine's own fluidOffset and maxDistanceForWaves locals. All constants ride the {{Name:default}} templating from v1.3.0. 22 rules in Realistic, all anchor-verified, all under the self-healing compile net.

⏫ Coming from v1.2.0? You also get all of v1.3.0

v1.3.0 was finished and verified but never published — this download includes everything from it:

• Self-healing safety net — if a game update ever breaks an injected shader, HyShade names the exact rule in the log and automatically falls back to the stock engine shader for that one effect. No black screens, ever.
• Update-drift alarm — any enabled effect that a patch silently disconnects gets a log warning at session end, so breakage can't hide.
• /hyshade status — in-game health report: DLL version, active preset, rules loaded vs. fired, and anything that needs attention.
• Live tuning — Bloom and ChromaticAberration toggles plus BloomThreshold / BloomIntensity / CAStrength numbers apply within ~1 second of saving hyshade.ini, no restart.
• Smoother soft shadows — per-pixel dither on the 16-sample shadow edges kills the banding stripes (tunable via ShadowJitterStrength).
• Fuller night sky — fixes the engine's star-falloff math no-op; more stars low on the horizon at night.
• Retuned defaults — chromatic aberration halved, bloom calmed in daylight; all three values are knobs now if you preferred the old look.

📦 Updating

Extract the ZIP, copy opengl32.dll, hyshade.ini, and the shaders folder into the Client folder (%APPDATA%\Hytale\install\release\package\game\latest\Client), replace HyShadeSettings.jar in %APPDATA%\Hytale\UserData\Mods, restart, and catch a sunset. Note: overwriting hyshade.ini resets all custom settings — your preset, toggles, and numeric knobs — so note down anything you've changed before replacing it. The new file documents every knob.

Asked about Linux or macOS: HyShade is Windows-only by design — it works via a proxy opengl32.dll loaded through Windows' DLL search order, a mechanism that doesn't exist on other platforms. Linux is untested but may work for experimenters running Hytale's Windows client under Wine/Proton with a DLL override. A macOS version would require a ground-up rewrite and isn't planned.