Trace - Radianced!

Trace 2.0.0

The pixel art update

Styles & Profiles

• Performance and Style settings are now separated.
• Profiles set performance only, now Small Potato, Balanced and NASA Potato, old Trace profile became the Trace style.

Bounce Light

• Lightmap now draws from blocks octants, giving a much much accurate depiction of each block shape not just complete cubes.

• Attempt to fix leaks and flickers specifically around non cubic blocks.

• Every probe now traces the same fixed rays so nothing gets averaged over frames, Cascade Memory removed.

• Probes retrace only when a block, its light or its sunlight changes in reach plus a slow refresh for time and weather, probe pass under half the old cost in still scenes.

• Sunlight traced through voxels instead of the camera following shadow map.

• Light direction no longer read on a cell border or inside the wall.

• Torches, lanterns and campfires share one fixed warm color, soul versions a fixed blue

• Held items light the area in their own color.

• Glow lichen and cave vines give light, mushrooms, fungus and cocoa no longer solid cubes (this kinda buggy atm).

• Quad Voxelization (new) voxelizes each face once instead of four times for a cheaper shadow pass.

• Sun Bounce (new) reflects sun color into the shade.

• New debug views for probes, flicker, light shadows and octants.

Outline

• Outline, halo and rim light now share a unified pass, which cut costs around to half a ms in testing.

• No outlines on text, nametags, signs, lightning or things outside of Trace.

• Outlines show underwater.

• Corals count as foliage to avoid excessive lines drawn in oceans.

Sky & Clouds

• Cloud Style (new) with 2D, Story and Anime clouds, Story is vanilla style 2.5 times taller based on Spices Up Clouds by Tixul and not_thefirst under MIT, new Anime style made custom for Trace using pixel art cumulus and cel shading!

• Clouds follow a planet curve, meeting the horizon about 2000 blocks away.

• Cloud Height Spread (new) gives each anime cloud its own height to make layers look more natural.

• Painted Sky (new) Beautiful set of custom pixel art for the night sky and a little nebula for the end.

• Shooting Stars (new) light the sky occasionally, very small addittion.

• Sun and moon bloom, the sun is now visible and not just an eye burning flare.

• Edge of the render distance fades into the exact sky color of its direction.

• Fog Planes removed.

Weather & Air

• Sandstorms (new)! in dry biomes

• Blizzards (new)! in cold biomes

• Desert dust now pixel art!, instead of the odd looking volumetric air now just some odd pixel art dust speckles.

• Biome Specks (new) with pollen over flower fields, cherry petals, swamp fireflies at night and End specks.

Water

• Pixel Water (new!) probably the best new addittion to the pack, go give it a try.

• Shorelines now derive from a separate Shoremap.

• Entities in water get foam and a short fading wake, boats, mobs, items and players!

• Trace water sliders for cells, flowing streaks and cell speed (Thanks HappyMeek for the feedback!)

• Underwater haze defaults to 0.01.

• Underwater Clarity (new) sets swimming visibility, shorter absorption and a thinner veil, blue tint kept.

Nether & End (new)

Small support for both (still no full support, future updates will try to cover these and modded dimensions)

• Nether air takes each biome fog color, painted sky gradient and a really really cool heat shimmer close to lava!

• Nbula above the horizon, even ambient light, violet specks.

Mod Support (new)

• Distant Horizons support added.

• Voxy support, experimental.

• Colorwheel support added.

Fixes & Performance

• Scene stability should improve a lot while diminishing visual artifacts related to colored light.

• Bounce Light rays up to 20% faster, shadow pass writes less data.

Overall this was a pretty chunky update, while many systems started with the ideology of taking advantage from screen space methods in the end a lot of the rc lightmap needed to be reworked because the "patches" for many of the artifacts introduced by a deficient mix of a global yet not world anchored lightmap system and let alone experimental ended up adding extra cost much more than simply making a unified scene regardless of screen space. Thanks everyone for the feedback provided in earlier verions!