NeoLux

Faster and cleaner: clouds at a quarter of their cost, cheaper shadows, FXAA, light from a torch in the hand, and an end to the black rims that ran along every edge against the sky.

Added

• Light from the hand: a torch, lantern or any other light source held in either hand lights the surroundings and falls off one level per block, like the same block placed there. Faces turned away from the player get less of it. HAND_LIGHT on the Lighting page; turn it off when a dynamic lights mod does the same.
• FXAA on the tonemapped image, FXAA on the Post Processing page. On in every profile except Potato.
• Lightning has a program of its own and glows. It used to fall back to the entity program and was either never shaded or lit like a grey mob.
• The darkness a warden spreads dims every light and closes the view in to about fifteen blocks, as it does in vanilla.

Changed

• Clouds read their value noise from the noise texture instead of hashing it, about four times faster: on a GTX 1070 Ti a screen full of sky at 8 steps takes 0.8 instead of 3.4 ms. The shapes are the same kind, in other places.
• The shadow filter looks at the centre and the outermost ring first and stops there when all of them agree, and reads the second shadow map and the tint only where they can matter. With colored shadows that is 1.8 to 2.4 times faster for filter 2 to 4. The light shafts skip the same lookups.
• Shadows keep their full strength over most of the shadow distance and fade out over the last part of the map. The fade used to start at the player, which left a shadow 80 blocks away at half strength.
• Water looks its shadow up once for the diffuse light and the sun glint.
• Tonemapping and grading moved from final to composite3. final sharpens the display ready image and keeps every pixel inside the range of its neighbours.
• Particles take the same block light falloff as the surfaces around them.
• With shadows and light shafts both off, the shadow pass is not rendered.

Fixed

• Sharpening put a black rim on the dark side of every edge against the bright sky, and those rims crawled along leaves and fences as the camera moved.
• The star field was under twenty horizontal dashes near the horizon and nothing overhead. Stars are points about a pixel across now, several hundred of them, and they turn with the sky.
• Sugar cane, kelp, vines and the other stacked or hanging plants tore apart at every block seam in the wind. Each of their blocks moves as a whole now, and vines on a wall sway along it instead of into it. The upper half of a tall plant starts with the swing its lower half ends with.
• The lens flare shone through clouds.
• Powder snow fog was olive green.
• Entity faces jumped from lit to dark as they turned past the light.
• Banding in the dark night sky and in dusk gradients: the output is dithered.
• Twelve options showed their raw names in the menu: the whole cloud page, lens flare, moon brightness and shade desaturation, and the soft tonemap showed as "4". The English file also has the comments the German one already had.