Zepholume Shaders V1.0.3

Release file: Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.3.zip

V1.0.3 focuses on improving visual consistency, shader maths, portability, validation, and performance without turning Zepholume into an unnecessarily heavy shader pack.

Highlights

• Improved lighting transitions for smoother and more predictable skylight and block-light behaviour.
• Refined cave and interior lighting to reduce unwanted skylight leakage.
• Improved warm block-light response for more natural-looking artificial lighting.
• Further polished water lighting and reflections.
• Improved shader portability and validation across supported GPU configurations.
• Expanded regression testing to catch subtle mathematical and rendering errors before release.
• Continued optimisation of shader code and compile-time variants.

Lighting Improvements

• Corrected the skylight transition range to 0.04–0.65.
• Corrected the block-light transition range to 0.10–0.90.
• Hardened the Hermite-style lighting transition maths for more stable interpolation.
• Improved lighting consistency between bright outdoor areas, interiors, caves, and low-light environments.
• Reduced abrupt lighting changes and unintended light leakage.

Water Improvements

• Further refined the water lighting pipeline.
• Improved Fresnel behaviour and specular response.
• Removed unnecessary encode/decode behaviour from the water path.
• Reduced precision loss while keeping the water implementation lightweight.

Performance & Shader Optimisation

• Simplified shader maths where equivalent cheaper forms could safely be used.
• Continued reducing unnecessary calculations in frequently executed shader paths.
• Preserved compile-time feature removal for configurations where certain effects are not required.
• Maintained Zepholume's lightweight rendering architecture without adding expensive shadow, history, compute, or multi-pass systems.

Compatibility & Portability

• Improved portability validation for different GPU and driver combinations.
• Continued support for Iris and Oculus.
• Maintained compatibility-focused GLSL without relying on vendor-specific extensions.
• Improved compiled shader variant validation across Zepholume quality presets and supported dimensions.

Validation & Reliability

• Added stronger numerical regression testing for lighting calculations.
• Tests now verify values below, at, inside, and above lighting transition boundaries.
• Maximum observed numerical error in the tested skylight path was approximately 2.3 × 10⁻⁹.
• Maximum observed block-light error was approximately 1.1 × 10⁻¹⁶.
• Water float32 round-trip regression testing showed an error of approximately 1.19 × 10⁻⁷ before the unnecessary path was removed.
• Expanded automated shader validation and source checks to reduce the chance of silent rendering regressions.

Documentation & Development

• Updated compatibility documentation.
• Updated shader source provenance information.
• Improved validation scripts and regression-test coverage.
• Updated release documentation for V1.0.3.

Overall

Zepholume Shaders V1.0.3 is primarily a quality, correctness, portability, and optimisation release. It strengthens the shader foundation rather than adding expensive showcase effects, resulting in more consistent lighting and cleaner shader behaviour while preserving Zepholume's performance-conscious design.