Changelog: Tessera v0.1.0 (1.21.1)

First public release of Tessera, a high-performance, GPU-first VRAM optimization engine for NeoForge 1.21.1 designed to dramatically reduce the VRAM footprint of texture-heavy modpacks.

Key Features & Changes

• On-the-Fly BC7 Compression: Intercepts Minecraft's SpriteLoader atlas stitching pipeline to recompress qualifying texture atlases directly into GPU-native BC7 block-compressed format instead of raw RGBA.
• Dynamic Auto-Budget Engine: Implements VramBudgetEngine to compute a smart per-atlas VRAM target at runtime, dynamically balancing memory savings against visual fidelity.
• Dual-OS Native Bridge: Ships prebuilt, high-performance native binaries for both Windows and Linux (x86_64) using a Rust JNI bridge combined with a vendored C++ BC7 encoder (bc7enc_rdo).
• Safe Automatic Fallback: Designed with built-in safety checks; if the native bridge fails to load or encounters an unsupported environment, it safely falls back to vanilla RGBA behavior without hard-crashing the game.
• Smart Caching & Detection: Utilizes TextureFamilyDetector and AtlasCache to bypass redundant recompression work across resource reloads.
• Real-Time F3 Debug Overlay: Features an integrated TesseraDebugOverlay displaying live VRAM savings metrics directly in the debug HUD.
• Developer API: Exposes the TesseraAtlasCompressEvent public event hook for compatibility and observation by other mods.

Performance

• Achieves up to a 75% reduction in texture atlas VRAM footprint during heavy workloads (tested extensively on large modpacks like All The Mods 10).
• Maintains near-lossless visual quality through optimized BC7 block compression.