Another month another update. I've been cooking up some big changes so be ready because I have a lot to share!

---General---

• Added sky color control to the settings menu
• Fixed incorrect pack name in the settings
• Added dithering to reduce banding
• Reduced color precision for potential performance gains for lower end hardware
• Added per-effect reprojection for improved denoising (currently has a lot of ghosting)
• Fixed various gamma encoding issues
• Added SSAO

---Lighting---

• Adjusted sun and skylight color intensities to be less intensely bright
• Entities now are separately lit, resolving various transparency related issues with players and translucent entities.
• Improved nighttime lighting
• Added Voxel Floodfill lighting
• Tweaked general blocklight distribution
• This means we now have separately colored blocklight!
• Improved lighting during rain events

---Atmosphere---

• Reduced quality of clouds and fog for hopeful performance gains
• Adjusted fog density distribution
• Increased default min/max height
• Reduced density for random fog plumes
• Increased static density
• Adjusted weather fog
• Weather fog now increases max fog height
• Weather fog is now more uniform and less reliant on random noise with Non-Uniform Fog enabled

---Water---

• Updated water waves
• New "wave density" system for more varied waves
• Adjusted wave distance falloff
• Adjusted water scattering and absorption
• High Quality Volumetric Fog setting now overrides underwater fog for a volumetric implementation when underwater
• Fixed an issue that caused underwater scattering to unintentionally fade out when using High Quality Volumetric Fog

---Post Processing---

• Updated tonemapping to ACES Fitted
• Improved old ACES Fitted implementation with better color conversions
• Corrected issues with gamma correction in the final color output

Here we go guys, here's a massive new update that addresses various issues as well as adds some highly requested features! For a small rundown we have various improvements to SSR, completely overhauled volumetrics, and CLOUDS!

Escherida V4.0

Lighting

Lighting hasn't seen too many changes but some things have been tweaked and adjusted

• Moonlight should be far less intense on the enviornment
• Tweaked skylight intensities
• Tweaked sunlight intensities and colors
• Early sunrise should no longer be bright pink and should now correctly be deep pink
• Reduced moonlight saturation
• Fixed an issue where SSS would be far brighter than the overall lighting at early sunrise/sunrise
• Improved handling of LabPBR SSS

Atmosphere

This is going to be the largest section by far as so much has changed

• Added High quality volumetric fog option (on by default)
• This option enables a much more advanced volumetric fog model that is far better than the old at a slight performance cost
• Volumetric fog has been split into 2 options, basic and advanced. basic works for the old model, advanced for the new model.
• Advanced settings contain height, density, and noise distribution options (noise distribution requires non uniform fog to be enabled)
• Added volumetric clouds
• comes in 2 styles, boxy and fantasy
• NOTE: Fantasy clouds are sampled on a 2D cloud map so they do cut off at the top, there is no way around this until improved to use 3D maps.
• NOTE 2: Clouds do not currently fade cleanly into the background, this will be improved in the future
• Slightly adjusted skylight colors

Materials

This is mostly going to cover SSR tweaks

• Fixed an issue that resulted in SSR missing perfectly good rays
• Fixed an issue where parts of the environment being reflected would break off of the main reflection and appear disconnected
• SSR will now reflect the sky if no sky reflections are present

thats it for V4.0. This update breathes a whole new life into Escheridia and I'm happy for you all to experience it finally!

Hotfix

• Corrected a mistake that resulted in volumetrics being weaker than intended

Its really been a long time, but a new version is finally here! After months of hard work and an entire rewrite, I'm happy to finally bring Escheridia V3.0 to all of you!

Escheridia V3.0

General

• Fixed an issue that resulted in particles blending incorrectly on surfaces with subsurface scattering, water, or reflections
• Rain has recieved the same fixes
• Fixed a shader compile error when disabling SSR

Lighting

• Lighting has been completely rebuilt and overhauled
• Updated diffuse light method within the brdf for directional lighting
• Improved specular handling to fix bloom from "exploding" on metals and other shiny objects with a labPBR resource pack
• Improved skylight and blocklight curves for more dynamic lighting

Atmosphere

• Made many improvements to volumetric fog
• Reduced number of filter samples for volumetrics
• Fixed an issue that would result in inconsistent volumetrics across old-newer mc versions
• Volumetric fog now fades out towards the border resulting in a more clear sky while volumetrics are enabled
• Note: Fog at the border does not blend cleanly with the terrain while volumetrics are enabled
• Improved sky colors
• Sky is now rendered in a deferred pass rather than from the sky gbuffers
• Border fog will now correctly render through transparent surfaces
• Fully overhauled the weather experience
• Weather visuals will now fade in/out when entering biomes that do not have weather affects in vanilla minecraft

Materials

• Added porosity support during weather events
• Added a new noise-based puddle system with a puddle ripple effect during rain
• Water waves have been updated to appear less repetitive and have varying intensities
• Completely overhauled ssr and roughness based reflections
• Rough reflections now react more correctly and no longer rely on an arbitrary threshold.
• Reflections now exponentially lose their intensity based on the roughness of the block rather than being hard capped (will optimize this in the future)
• Greatly improved the handling of metals.
• Added a slight blur to denoise reflections
• Metals now have clean reflection tinting and also corrected a mistake that resulted in the incorrect F0 value being used in the BRDF pass

Post processing

• Adjusted the default color parameters
• Changed tonemap to Lottes (was uncharted2)
• Added temporal reprojection filtering
• This will help clean up noise in the image that is produced from shadows, ssr etc. its not perfect but helps

This update has been a long time coming, but I feel its finally ready for the public.

---Lighting---

• Completely overhauled lighting from the ground up
  • There was a lot of feedback that the shader felt both too bright and too saturated so I've taken big steps to improve that
• Sunlight has been adjusted at all times of day
• Revamped nighttime lighting
• Ambient lighting has now been reworked.
  • Ambient lighting used to be a fixed value, now it adjusts itself to be stronger while in a cave, allowing dimly lit areas to be more playable without messing with outdoor visuals
• Adjusted the shadow filter parameter, shadows should now be less mushy
• Updated shadow bias
  • fine tuned the shadow bias to get the least amount of visual artifacts and best quality !lighting showcase

---Atmosphere---

• Added Volumetric Fog!
  • Volumetric fog is like the old screenspace godrays technique but doesn't disappear when you look away! Don't worry though, screenspace godrays are still in the shader if you prefer that method :)
• New and improved sky model
  • Previously, the sky worked off a slightly modified vanilla sky calculation. The sky is now calculated with fully custom implementation! As a user you can customize the blending points of the horizon, zenith and ground components, as well as increase/decrease the rayleigh scattering coeficcient
• Improved the shader sun
  • The sun now properly sets and rises and doesnt awkwardly flip positions.
  • Fixed a strange bug with the sun where it could have black pixels in it
  • Made the sun larger
  • The moon no longer has a small glowing bit at night
• Star twinkle speed has been slightly tweaked
• Improved how bright the area around the sun is, it should now be perfectly visible on default settings (will account for other options at a later point)
• Reworked static fogs
  • Base enviornment fog is no longer tied to the sky color. This change was done to prevent a visual issue
  • Removed the static sun fog
• Border fog now cleanly blends with the enviornment
• Improved the blending and lighting of vanilla clouds !fog

---Water---

• Improved reflections on water
• Updated wave pattern to be more wave-like
• Updated water fog while volumetrics are enabled
  • The rays underwater are now fully volumetric and function more "realistically"
• Updated underwater fog rendering

---Materials---

• Improved SSS handling further
• Improved normalmap "handedness", they should be much less agressive and far more natural
• Added integrated PBR
  • This feature is a very rough implementation and requires a lot of reworking but is functional, if using a resource pack, change RP mode to labPBR if its a pbr pack, if not leave it on hardcoded and the shader will handle it

---Post Processing---

• Updated bloom to be less intense
• Updated default colors
• Adjusted some internal tonemapping configs
• Default tonemap operator has been changed to Uncharted 2 AAAAND thats it folks. Another massive changelog for a nother massive improvement to the shader!