ReFine 1.2.0

Highlights

• Real-Block Horizon LOD: Far terrain now stores actual world blocks (surface, cliff strata, tree canopies, trunks, plants, and water) instead of flat average colors, rendered with atlas textures, biome tints, and vanilla lightmap lighting.
• Seamless Chunk & Horizon Transitions: Eliminated missing chunk holes near the player, vertical seam gaps on slopes, and abrupt terrain pop-in with smooth 0.5s fog fade-in and exact per-column surface coverage tracking.
• Major Performance Gains: Up to +48% higher FPS and 50% fewer render-thread memory allocations in heavy entity/redstone scenes, 2.3x–2.8x faster FPS during 180° camera turns, and nearly 2x faster Horizon worldgen sampling.

Horizon (Far Terrain LOD)

• Block-Accurate Meshing:
  • Distant columns preserve surface blocks, cliff layers (grass, dirt, stone at real depth), tree crowns over trunks, crossed-quad foliage (grass, flowers, ferns, seagrass, kelp), and a dedicated translucent animated water pass.
  • Added 2x2 downsampling preservation for upper-quartile canopy height, leaf thickness, and tree trunks across near and mid LOD rings so forests keep their volume at distance.
  • Preserved underwater block lighting (lanterns, glowstone, sea pickles) on LOD water surfaces and prevented green grass bands from appearing below the waterline on shoreline cliffs.
• Seamless Coverage & Streaming:
  • Horizon LOD now stands in right up to the camera whenever nearby chunk sections are still compiling, removing empty holes around the player.
  • A chunk column only masks out Horizon LOD once all sections up to the surface are compiled, keeping vertical walls and skirts at chunk boundaries to close slope gaps.
  • Coarsening quadtree tiles keep drawing their 4 ready child meshes until the parent mesh is uploaded, avoiding temporary detail drops.
• GPU & Worldgen Optimizations:
  • Batched Horizon rendering into indirect draw calls (vkCmdDrawIndirect) per detail group with back-facing face group culling (−22% Horizon GPU time) and early fragment discard beyond FogEnd.
  • Optimized NoiseChunk density tree memoization, nearly doubling Horizon generation speed while cutting memory allocations by 3.6x.

Chunk Rendering & World Pipeline

• Visibility Graph & Scheduling:
  • Rebuilt the section visibility BFS on flat arrays with a throttled 8 ms update interval and widened frustum margin, making camera turns up to 2.8x faster.
  • Fixed multi-direction visibility union across all entry faces and clamped BFS step counts so visible chunks in front of the camera are never falsely culled at high render distances.
  • Sorted high-priority chunk rebuilds by distance to the camera (distSq) and bypassed upload throttling for chunks within 64 blocks of the player.
  • Empty air sections complete immediately during graph traversal without spawning builder tasks.
• Faster Mesh Compilation:
  • Eliminated per-block BlockPos allocations in fluid rendering and fixed directional neighbor occlusion checks on fluid faces.
  • Added an \(O(1)\) uniform-biome fast path for chunk regions and tint caches, skipping 1728-element biome array allocations and box-blur passes inside uniform biomes.
  • Replaced Vector3f[] quad sorting arrays with flat primitive float[] buffers and combined vertex attribute writes.
  • Isolated mod block meshing exceptions so a broken block model logs once instead of halting builder threads.

Entities, Block Entities & Particles

• Entity & Block Entity Rendering:
  • Added per-frame entity light caching and lock-free array-backed entity data lookups (SynchedEntityData).
  • Cached transformed model cube vertices (8 corners per cube instead of 24 per face) and precomputed corner offset tables.
  • Distance-culled block entities before computing bounding boxes, cached static block entity AABBs (including signs), and removed per-frame lambda and vector allocations during block entity lighting.
  • Multi-section entity culling now checks all chunk sections touched by an entity's bounding box.
• Particles & Voxel Shapes:
  • Added Animate Only Visible Textures (enabled by default), skipping GPU uploads for off-screen animated sprites (water, lava, fire, portals, mod textures) and reducing animation uploads by ~80%.
  • Fixed particle section-grid wrap-around culling at long distances, cached camera rotation bases for particles, and skipped collision checks for airborne particles in empty space.
  • Cached moving piston collision shapes and \(O(1)\) VoxelShape.isEmpty() states.

Shaders, Upscaling & Smart Tuning

• Visual Polish & Post-Processing:
  • Matched vanilla cylindrical world fog and spherical fluid fog across all 29 shaders, fixed beacon beam depth fog, and added Interleaved Gradient Noise dithering to sky, terrain, and Horizon fog to eliminate 8-bit color banding.
  • Improved mipmap generation with alpha-weighted linear-space blending and transparent texel color fill to prevent dark halos on foliage and glass.
  • Updated FSR 1 RCAS sharpening to include the center pixel in min/max bounds and clamp output, removing bright-pixel ringing artifacts.
  • Added sky disocclusion detection in TAAU to prevent ghosting trails behind mountain and tree silhouettes against the sky.
• Smart Mode & Frame Pacing:
  • Stabilized Smart Render Distance with a 10s rebuild settle window, a 2-minute step-down cooldown, and an in-place section grid buffer (+8 chunks) so adaptive distance steps no longer rebuild the entire world.
  • Prevented Smart Low Latency from engaging when CPU-bound or above 2x monitor refresh rate.
  • Improved FramePacer deadline resynchronization after idle periods, halved manual frame-limit budgets when Frame Generation is active, and reduced unfocused window hover polling overhead in IdleFrameLimit.

Vulkan Backend, Memory & UI

• Vulkan & VRAM Safety:
  • Added per-frame UBO content deduplication (~50% UBO writes reused) and redundant descriptor set / index buffer bind skipping (~30% skipped).
  • Batched the F3 debug overlay, ReFine Lens HUD, and profiler overlay into two managed draw passes, cutting F3 UBO writes by 77% and descriptor binds by 86%.
  • Fixed vertex offset unit handling and deferred segment freeing in DrawBuffers, released translucent index buffer segments on section reset, removed redundant per-facing pipeline barriers during chunk uploads, and fixed mip-level image view cleanup in VulkanImage.
  • Enabled drawIndirectFirstInstance device support and skipped frustum octree traversal for empty chunk areas.
• Settings & Benchmark UI:
  • Added config value range sanitization on load, safe fallback handling for headless/missing monitor video modes, and accurate best-run highlighting in narrow benchmark result cards.