Bruce

Increase Height Limit, 1.18 Compatibility, Blue Noise Sampling

Today I'm releasing OctrayRewrite v0.5.0. This update adds compatibility for Minecraft 1.18. Most notably, this includes raytracing support for the new [-64, 320] block height limit. As far as I know, OctrayRewrite is currently the only shader that supports raytracing the entire render distance (64x chunks, 384 height). This is partly enabled by the years of development that went into sparse voxelization, it's nice to see that work paying off.

Another new development is the inclusion of...

POM Silhouettes, 1.17.1 Compatibility, Iris Shaders Mod

OctrayRewrite v0.4.1 is now live in the Discord. This update primarily adds a new feature called "POM Silhouettes", where POM can actually influence the outline of blocks. This is a feature that is only really possible in shaderpacks that have world voxelization, since it uses this information to determine whether a block edge can be seen-through.

I also quietly added "Quadtree POM", which is my new fancy POM algorithm that uses accelerated data structures to raytrace inside high resolu...

The First POM Update (Work in Progress)

For the past couple months I've been working on and off on a brand new algorithm for parallax. It's technical name is Quadtree Displacement Mapping, although I'll stick to calling it a "POM" algorithm, since POM is such a ubiquitous name in the shader community. This new POM algorithm is based on the same accelerated ray-intersection that Octray uses to accelerate path tracing in the regular blocky world. Notice the similarity between "Quadtree" and "Octree", they are the same idea in 2 and 3...

Performance and AMD Compatibility Update

After several days of pretty consistent work, I manage to get OctrayRewrite running and performing reasonably well on AMD cards.

I started by sending demos to several AMD users in the server, however, due to a number of serious issues in both OptiFine and AMD drivers, I ended up having to source my own AMD system for development. This ended up being a wise decision, as there were so many mysterious bugs, it would have been impossible to fix all the issues without the tight testing loop ...

OctrayRewrite Launch

After working pretty continuously for the last few months, I finally have the important subset of features finished for me to release OctrayRewrite to people.

The most significant feature was de-noising. If you tried the old Octray on github, you'll know it was basically unplayable due to the amount of noise and poor filtering. Now that this has been addressed, I think the shaderpack is fairly playable (although there is tons of room for improvement, and I have lots of ideas for the fut...