Zepholume Shaders V1.0.2

File: Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.2.zip

V1.0.2 is a major visual-refinement and optimisation update focused on better lighting indoors and underground, more convincing water, cleaner atmospheric transitions, and reducing unnecessary shader work across different quality profiles.

✨ Visual Improvements

• Improved cave and interior lighting to reduce unrealistic sunlight and moonlight leaking into enclosed spaces.
• Added better skylight-aware cave grounding, making underground areas feel more naturally separated from the surface.
• Refined block-light warmth so torches and other light sources blend more naturally instead of producing overly flat orange lighting.
• Improved water rendering with:
  • Schlick-style Fresnel reflections.
  • Refined dual-lobe specular highlights.
  • More convincing viewing-angle response.
• Enhanced cloud lighting with restrained twilight rim lighting and moon-influenced coloration.
• Improved consistency between the sky, horizon and fog, especially during sunrise, sunset and changing weather.
• Prevented inappropriate celestial lighting from affecting the Nether and End.
• Further refined atmospheric transitions without introducing heavy post-processing or additional render passes.

⚡ Performance & Optimisation

• Reduced redundant normal-vector normalisations in several shader paths.
• Added faster helpers for calculating sun elevation and related lighting values.
• Removed unnecessary sky-vector re-normalisation work.
• Compiled out irrelevant celestial calculations in the Nether and End.
• Expanded compile-time feature removal for the Potato profile.
• Kept the shader architecture lightweight:
  • No shadow pass.
  • No composite pipeline.
  • No temporal/history buffers.
  • No compute shaders.
  • No SSR or heavy volumetric pipeline.
• Terrain remains highly economical, requiring only one texture sample and one primary normalisation on its core textured path.

🎚️ Quality Profile Refinements

The quality presets now separate their workloads more deliberately:

• Potato — strips out additional atmospheric and analytical effects for maximum performance.
• Low — focuses primarily on direct lighting with minimal additional processing.
• Balanced — enables improved cave grounding and the intended core Zepholume visual experience.
• High — increases visual refinement while remaining performance-conscious.
• Ultra — uses stronger water Fresnel/specular behaviour and the fullest available visual treatment.

This makes the presets more meaningful instead of simply changing a few arbitrary constants.

🌍 Compatibility & Portability

• Continued focus on cross-GPU portability and conservative GLSL usage.
• Maintains the lightweight GLSL 330-compatible shader architecture.
• Designed for Iris and Oculus.
• Minecraft 1.20+ remains the primary supported range, with Minecraft 1.20.1 used as the main development target.
• Older Minecraft versions may work but are not guaranteed.

🛠️ Shader Code Improvements

• Added safer normal handling to reduce the chance of invalid values from unusual or modded geometry.
• Simplified several lighting calculations and shared helpers.
• Reduced duplicated calculations between terrain, sky, fog and dimension-specific shader paths.
• Improved compile-time separation between dimensions and quality tiers.
• Continued cleanup of shader code without adding additional render buffers or expensive new passes.

📦 Release

Zepholume Shaders V1.0.2 represents a substantial refinement of V1.0.1: better underground lighting, better water, tighter atmospheric integration and leaner shader execution across supported presets.

Release file: Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.2.zip