Solstice

v1.4

Reduced-resolution post pipeline

• Bloom moved from two full-resolution passes to quarter-resolution colortex1/2, with a soft-knee threshold, firefly control, and a wider lower-intensity filter
• Volumetric/blocky clouds, SSAO, and light shafts now render at half resolution
• The final effect merge performs depth/class-aware reconstruction so cloud, AO, portal, and shaft samples do not bleed across terrain silhouettes
• Disabled effects now disable their composite programs, including dimension-specific paths

Temporal skies and cloud lighting

• Volumetric clouds use a frame-varying march offset and a persistent cloud-only history
• History reprojects with the previous camera/model-view/projection data, clamps to the current 3x3 neighborhood, and rejects large camera jumps or reactive cloud changes
• Cloud direct light was rebalanced so the forward silver lining stays bright without turning the entire cloud body white; bases retain stronger tonal separation
• Full-scene TAA remains intentionally absent

AO, shafts, and portal light

• The repeated sun/moon visibility gather is now a single 1x1 frame-level pass
• Light shafts moved to a half-resolution buffer
• Full-resolution 16-tap portal gathers were replaced with a downsampled portal-light mask and two inexpensive separable blur passes
• SSAO moved from ten samples per full-resolution pixel to eight samples per half-resolution pixel

Reflections, shadows, and final image

• SSR_QUALITY adds profile-controlled 16/24/40-step caps, matching refinement tiers, tighter hit thickness, Fresnel gating, and distance/travel rejection
• SHADOW_FILTER_QUALITY adds 4/8/12-tap PCSS tiers; blocker samples scale with the tier
• The shadow vertex pass reuses the visible terrain foliage deformation in player space
• The old four-neighbor edge blend was replaced with low-cost directional FXAA
• The filmic curve has a softer highlight shoulder and a gated near-black lift that leaves true black and genuinely dark caves anchored