Better Voxels

Big Atmosphere Update XD

• Biome Atmosphere: Per-biome fog and light shaft colouring for over sixty biomes, sorted into thirteen categories — Forests, Taiga / Conifer, Jungles, Plains / Meadows, Wetlands, Drylands, Frozen, Highlands, Oceans, Underground, Nether and Endlands. Every biome carries its own colour and intensity, and the crossfade between them is driven by the engine, so a border reads as a slow blend rather than a switch. Anywhere without an entry is left exactly as the pack looked before.

• Seasons: Spring, summer, autumn and winter, derived from the world day so every client on a server agrees on the date. Configurable length, start season and crossfade point. Leaves get their own tint curve separately from ground cover — they turn harder and redder, and hold less colour through winter. Spring scatters flowers into grass with fourteen distinct looks, each with its own petal colour, heart colour and shape, clumped by a coarse field so they gather into patches instead of settling one per cell. Winter lays frost on foliage and can switch on Snow World with it.

• Post Processing: A whole new tab, two pages of it. Screen Curvature, Scanlines, VHS Noise, Tape Distortion, Chromatic Aberration, Vignette, CRT Bloom, VHS Tracking, Film Grain, Retro Pixelate, Color Depth and Monochrome, each with its own settings page. Plus ASCII Mode and BodyCam Mode.

• Filters: Twenty-four photographic filters with a strength slider, named for the process rather than for anyone's brand. Reversal and negative stocks — Warm Chrome, Vivid Slide, Portrait Negative, Consumer Negative, Tungsten Night, Expired Film, Instant Print. Lab processes — Bleach Bypass, Cross Process, Three-Strip, Sepia, Cyanotype, Selenium Tone. Monochrome — Black and White, Orthochromatic, Red Filter Mono, Infrared, Noir. Grades — Day for Night, Faded Print, Teal and Orange, Golden Hour, Cold Morning, Sunset Push. Only the selected one is compiled, so the length of the list costs nothing.

• Cinematic: A letterbox sized from the real aspect of your window rather than as a fixed fraction of its height, with a choice of ratio from 1.66 to 3.00. And film grain weighted the way film actually grains — strongest in the midtones, falling away at both ends, because grain is the statistics of how many crystals happened to develop and there is nothing left to vary where almost none or almost all of them did.

• Three New Post Profiles: OverColorful lifts the whole biome atmosphere table, the light shafts and the overall saturation. Retro Camera pairs the CRT and VHS chain with a warm sensor. Cinematic is a camera rather than a grade — AgX so highlights walk to white instead of clipping, saturation and contrast pushed up rather than down, shadows losing colour faster than midtones, a warm sun, depth of field, no digital sharpening, a 2.39 letterbox and Golden Hour at seventy percent. And more...

• Stars: The star field is now a system rather than three constants. Star Brightness, Star Size, Round Stars, Star Softness, Twinkling Stars with its own speed, a second Star Layer, Daylight Stars, Hide Vanilla Stars, plus Star Colors with per-star variation that runs blue on one side and orange on the other the way star temperature does — and Shooting Stars, derived from time slots rather than spawned, so a pass with no memory between frames can still animate one.

• Photonics Support: Optional integration with the Photonics ray tracing engine, off by default and folding away entirely without the mod. The two engines are crossfaded rather than swapped: where Photonics is live the pack's own block light and bounce step back, and past the edge of its reach they come back up on their own.

• Auto Exposure: Metering modes, target level, minimum and maximum, and separate speeds for brightening and darkening.

• Unbound+ Clouds: A second cloud deck laid above the ordinary Unbound clouds — the same renderer with its own numbers, set up flat, higher, wider and thinner so the puffy deck passes underneath it.

• Volumetric Fog Sea & Volumetric Cave Fog: Two marched fog layers with their own altitude, thickness, density, distance, step count and drift.

• Low Health Effects: Tint, desaturation, vignette, pulse, zoom, blur, dizziness, motion, darkening and glare, all scaling with how close you are to death, plus a configurable death sequence with closing, blackout and glitch stages.

• Water Plunge: A dedicated effect for going under, with its own duration, curve, veil, distortion and bubbles.

• Water Color Style: Presets alongside the existing sliders, so the sliders are only consulted under Custom.

• World Curvature: Configurable strength and full-curve height, with an automatic altitude mode.

• Personal Time & Personal Weather: Run your own time of day and weather independently of the server.

• Debug Tab: Every diagnostic view in the pack gathered in one place, and a new Ray Trace View with seven modes onto the voxel tracer itself — Voxel Colour, Distance Field, Cascade Level, Sky Exposure, Bounce Hit, Bounce Distance and Trace Cost. The last one is the one to read about frame time.

• Better SO: The selection outline traces the block's own texture instead of only boxing it. Glow lichen, vines, a ladder, a rail — all of them are a cutout painted on a full-size quad, so the ordinary outline draws a rectangle around a shape that fills almost none of it. This follows the shape itself, silhouette and holes, and leaves the box where it is. Solid blocks need no list and are untouched.

• Cloud Outline: Outlines drawn along the cloud silhouette as well as onto geometry, independent of World Outline.

• Global Illumination: GI Color Bleed puts the bounce's colour back after the ambient comparison takes it, and GI Bounce Ceiling caps only the albedo that feeds back into the next frame, which is what stopped bright surfaces amplifying their own sampling noise.

• Menu Reorganisation: New Mods, Debug and Misc tabs. Particles moved into Other. Formatting stripped from the main menu so only Performance Settings stands out.

• Smaller Additions: Sun/Moon Glare Size alongside the strength slider, Daily Sun Drift, smooth shadow rotation, separate Cave and Underwater light shaft multipliers, Fine Voxel Color for sub-block detail near the camera, Reflection Screen Reach, Cave Fog Sky Release, Mobs Push Leaves.

• Bugfixes: bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix.... huh...

biggest update btw (again)