AuraLite Shaders

🆕 What's New in v1.0.7 — Comprehensive Bug Fix, Stability & Aurora Refinement Update

Version 1.0.7 conducts a deep code audit across the entire GLSL 460 pipeline to resolve rendering anomalies, feedback loops, and multi-pass inconsistencies introduced in earlier releases, and additionally refines the Aurora Borealis to remove high-frequency visual noise while softening its overall luminance.

🐞 Bug Fixes & Architectural Polish

• Massive Volumetric Cloud, Godray & Aurora FPS Bottleneck Resolved
• Underwater Screen-Space Ripple Distortion Feedback Loop Fixed — Removed legacy underwater ripple screen distortion from composite.fsh (where it erroneously sampled raw unlit G-buffer albedo colortex0 and mixed unshaded texels into the lit scene). Moved clean underwater screen-space view perturbation directly into final.fsh, sampling the fully lit, composited, and TAA-resolved scene.
• Glass & Ice Water Refraction / Reflection Distortion Fixed — Solved a multi-target G-buffer collision where stained glass windows and ice blocks triggered the depth-comparison detector (depthS - depth) > 1e-5 in final.fsh. Added a dedicated material alpha tag colortex2.a = 0.8 for water in gbuffers_water and gbuffers_terrain_translucent, ensuring glass windows (1.0) and ice blocks (1.0) never receive underwater refraction ripples or wavy water SSR reflections.
• Procedural Lava POM Coordinate Discard Fixed — Standardized the 4-step Parallax Occlusion Mapping loop in gbuffers_water.fsh and gbuffers_terrain_translucent.fsh to match gbuffers_terrain.fsh. Displaced UV coordinates p = currentTexCoords are now properly retained across the entire shader block for crack height calculations, temperature gradients, hotspots, and rising bubbles.
• Unnormalized Lava Normal Output Fixed — Normalized the G-buffer normal output normalize(normal) in gbuffers_terrain.fsh before encoding into colortex2, preventing interpolated vector length drift across triangle interiors.
• Camera-Inside Volumetric Fog, Ground Mist & Valley Sheets Fixed — In getInsideGroundMistVeil(), applyInsideCloudVeil(), and distant ground mist sheet rendering, fixed the exponential absorption rate (lowered from 0.014/0.0105 to 0.0018/0.0035) and removed hardcoded blanket opacity ceilings (0.30/0.34). Wired the user's FOG_DENSITY_LEVEL setting directly into volume optical thickness. Added a smooth attenuation factor (1.0 - camMistHere * 0.95) to distant 2D sheets when standing inside the ground mist layer, preventing double-accumulation with the screen-space volumetric veil.
• PCSS Blocker Search Self-Shadow Acne Fixed — Updated the blocker depth comparison threshold in composite.fsh from a static 1e-4 epsilon to the dynamic surface slope bias (bias). Sloped terrain no longer detects itself as a false shadow occluder.
• POM Division-By-Zero NaN Fixed — In getParallaxCoords(), changed the ray hit weight denominator from (afterDepth - beforeDepth + 0.0001) to min(afterDepth - beforeDepth, -1e-5). Since afterDepth - beforeDepth is strictly negative, adding +0.0001 mathematically cancelled out the denominator to zero on subtle step transitions, causing black dot NaN artifacts.
• POM Optical View Angle Cotangent Scaling & Limiting Added — Scaled tangent-space UV step offsets by V_tang.xy / max(abs(V_tang.z), 0.15) across all POM passes. Parallax crack depth now physically stretches when viewed at grazing angles instead of flattening out.
• Procedural Lava Sub-Step POM Linear Interpolation Added — Replaced the discrete sub-step endpoint p = currentTexCoords in the lava POM loop with exact linear interpolation mix(currentTexCoords, prevTexCoords, weight). Internal crack walls no longer suffer from 4-step banding/stepping artifacts.
• Block Mapping Extended — Added minecraft:magma_block to block ID 10009 in block.properties, granting overworld and nether magma blocks dynamic procedural glowing Voronoi cracks.

🌌 Aurora Borealis Refinement — Smoother & Softer

The volumetric Aurora in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh was producing subtle high-frequency "static" patterns and reading slightly oversaturated on bright presets. The shader pass has been retuned in this release:

• Dither offset re-centered and weakened — Replaced the 0..1 per-pixel ray start offset with a centered -0.5..+0.5 range scaled down to 0.6 × dt. Adjacent pixels now sample closer ray distances, eliminating the flickering pattern that read as visual noise.
• Vertical ray frequency lowered (32.0 → 14.0) — The single very-high-frequency sin(uv.x × 32) that powered the striations aliased into thin static-like lines. Two slightly offset waves (14.0 + 9.0) are now blended together with mix(0.5) to break the periodic aliasing while preserving the characteristic vertical pillar look.
• Ray sharpness softened (3.0 → 1.8) and amplitude reduced (2.0 → 1.3) — Pillars no longer have harsh, sharp edges; they blend smoothly into the curtain ribbon.
• Curtain ribbon exponent softened (5.0 → 3.5) and weight lowered from 0.5 to 0.45 — Lighter, more atmospheric curtains without the blocky stripe artifacts the high power was producing.
• Spatial color variation slowed down — sin(worldDir.x × 3.5 + worldDir.z × 2.8) × 0.2 → sin(worldDir.x × 2.2 + worldDir.z × 1.7) × 0.18. Color shifts across the sky are now gradual instead of rapid.
• Photographic palette toned down (~30% dimmer):
  • Cyan-Green: (0.0, 0.80, 0.50) → (0.0, 0.55, 0.32)
  • Magenta/Purple: (0.60, 0.10, 0.70) → (0.42, 0.08, 0.50)
  • Deep Blue (upper edge): (0.05, 0.10, 0.50) → (0.04, 0.08, 0.35)
• Optical depth scaling lowered (0.35 → 0.26) and final intensity multiplier × 0.78 — Overall accumulation is roughly 35–40% softer than the v1.0.6 original. The AURORA_STRENGTH profile setting still controls user-level intensity on top.

The aurora now reads as a soft, glowing, photographic northern light rather than an over-saturated neon stripe pattern. No menu changes; no new options; no profile changes. All existing AURORA_MODE, AURORA_SPEED, and AURORA_STRENGTH settings behave as before.