FarView 0.1.6

Fixed

Distant hillsides show soil again. Every terrace and cliff face in the distance was painted the colour of the grass on top of it, so hills read as solid green walls where the real terrain right in front of you shows brown earth. Vertical faces now use the block's own side colour — dirt under grass, netherrack under warped nylium, sandstone under sand. Measured against real terrain, a distant hillside went from no earth tones at all to matching the ground beside it.

The sun was on the wrong side. Distant terrain was lit from the east at sunset and the west at sunrise — backwards from everything nearer, and worst at exactly the hours when low light matters most. Distant ridges were also casting their shadows onto their own sunlit faces. Both corrected.

The distance no longer disappears after you relog. Rejoining a world, or stepping into the Nether and back, could leave the entire remembered horizon missing until you walked a hundred blocks. It now returns immediately.

Generate Horizon Now (Ctrl+J) actually works. With Grow Horizon switched on — which is the default — the manual sweep never started, no matter how many times you pressed it.

No more wall of fog in the Nether. FarView draws nothing in the Nether, but it was still telling the game to stretch its fog out to the LOD distance, which produced a hard fog boundary at about 150 blocks with the bare edge of the loaded chunks behind it. Shader packs got the same bad number and stretched their whole atmosphere with it.

Colours corrected for moss, azalea, podzol and cherry logs. Several blocks were as much as a third too dark or too bright in the distance. Podzol was the odd one — it was set too bright, which made it render too dark.

A white patch could appear across distant lakes. A single snowy block on a shoreline was painting the whole surrounding cell white, and neighbouring cells then merged into one hard-edged white slab lying across the water.

Lighting seams along region borders. Wherever the land rose towards the east or south across an internal boundary, that whole 128-block edge was lit as though it faced the other way. Only visible with a shader pack loaded, which is why it lasted so long.

Fixed — performance

FarView no longer does its work while switched off. With the mod disabled it still read the entire save on every launch — around forty seconds and several hundred megabytes of disk — and still generated terrain in the background. Off now means off.

The once-a-minute freeze is gone. Saving remembered terrain ran all at once on the frame it happened to land on. It is now spread across frames, and it is roughly seven times faster besides.

Grow Horizon no longer stalls the server. Generating new distant ground could freeze the world for two full seconds at a time, repeatedly. The safeguard meant to prevent that was watching an average that a single freeze could never move. It now reacts to the freeze itself and backs off in proportion.

Loading remembered terrain is about thirteen times faster. This is what caused the stutter as the horizon opened up ahead of you, and the long pause when joining a world.

Distant shading was costing far more than it should. The single most expensive step in building distant terrain was recalculating something it already had to hand — hundreds of thousands of times per region.

Grow Horizon can be switched off mid-game. Unticking it left the current sweep running to completion, up to an hour later.

No more pointless rebuilds under a shader pack. With a pack loaded, distant terrain was rebuilt from scratch every seventy-five seconds to update sun shadows the pack draws itself.

Fixed — world data

Remembered terrain can no longer end up in the wrong world. Quitting to the title screen while the save scan was running and then loading a different world could write the first world's terrain into the second one's files, permanently. The same could happen between the Overworld and the Nether or End.

A crash mid-save can no longer corrupt remembered terrain. Region files are now written and swapped in one step. A file that was already damaged is now detected instead of being read back as though it were complete — which had been leaving permanent invisible holes in the horizon.

A locked file is no longer overwritten. If antivirus or a backup tool held a region file open, FarView would treat it as empty and overwrite it.

Terrain generated by Grow Horizon is now read back correctly. FarView's own background generation produced ground that its save scanner then refused to read on the next launch — around one chunk in fourteen on a well-explored world. The first launch after updating re-reads the save once, then it is quick again.

Fixed — compatibility

FarView is now declared client-only. Dropping the jar into a server's mods folder took the server down at startup, and every server in the multiplayer list was flagged as incompatible.

Textures no longer break after a resource-pack change. Pressing F3+T or switching packs left distant terrain drawing with whatever textures had moved into the old positions, until you restarted the game.

Embeddium's settings page can no longer break startup.