Vitrail Shaders

Added

• A Max Shadow Distance slider in the video settings, under Vitrail. Pulling it in is the cheapest frame rate a shader pack has to offer: the world is walked a second time for the light every frame, and this decides how much of it. It goes from 32 chunks down to none at all. At none the shadow pass does not run: the shadow depth every pack reads is emptied to its far plane, so nothing casts a shadow, and the only thing left standing is a shadowcolor buffer the pack asked to keep between frames, which holds the last one drawn until the setting moves again.

• A pack that fixes its own shadow render distance now gets it. shadowDistanceRenderMul was read by no part of this engine, so the light gathered the whole world it could see whatever a pack asked. Seven of the eight packs tested declare that line, and the shadow walk now stops where they meant it to: Mellow and Body Camera at 96 blocks, Complementary and Reverie at 192, BSL at 256. How many of them that changes anything for depends on your render distance, since a shadow walk asking for more than the world you have loaded is left alone: at 12 chunks it bites on the shorter three and not on the rest. Those packs decide the distance, so the slider greys out and says so; it is the packs that stay silent, Sildur's among them, where it is the player's to move.

Changed

• The shadow map stops being drawn from parts of the world that cannot cast into what you are looking at. The light used to walk everything inside the box its map covers, the ground behind you included, which is a second copy of the world drawn every frame for shadows nothing ever samples. It now walks the camera's own view swept along the sun instead: what stands between the sun and what you can see is kept, what could only ever shade your back is dropped. Expect more frames per second wherever shadows are on, and no change to the picture.

  The shape is the pack's to choose through shadow.culling, which is read now where it used to be ignored, together with the voxelDistance distance behind one of its states. A pack asking for a box about the camera instead of that sweep, or for no view frustum at all, gets what it asked for. The log line the shadow stage prints on the first frame of a pack now names the shape as well as the two counts, so the gain can be read off it.

Fixed

• The texture filtering selector in the video settings no longer offers RGSS while a pack draws the world. That method is written into the terrain shader the game and Sodium ship, and neither of those two draws once the pack's own terrain program does, so the setting read as live and moved nothing at all. It comes back the moment no pack is drawing the terrain. Anisotropic filtering is untouched and goes on working under a pack.

• Naming a pack that is not in the Shader Packs folder now says so, in the chat line the reload key answers, on the settings screen and in the log, with the name that went unanswered. It used to read as if no pack had been asked for at all, so a renamed or deleted pack looked like a choice.