Dev News (Patreon)

Hey all! Sorry it's been a while! Here's what's going on with the development of SEUS PTGI.

I've been putting most of my development effort into getting E13's tech ready for a first release. It's been much more challenging than I thought it would be as I've gotten closer to finishing. Then, OptiFine started adding some really powerful new features for shaderpack developers that sort of render some of that work obsolete, but that's actually a good thing!

The recent new features that are being added to OptiFine are really game-changing. The box within I've had to try to fit SEUS PTGI has just gotten a lot bigger! It wouldn't be right to not take full advantage of these new features, and that essentially demands a full redesign of the rendering pipeline. I now have essentially double the available render texture memory to work with and the ability to write compute shaders, as well as other new features to take advantage of. It'll be a lot of work, but when it's done it'll be absolutely worth it. Many of the things that I've wanted to improve about SEUS PTGI are now possible! Some of the new possibilities are: farther view distance of ray tracing and longer rays, more sophisticated denoising filters, more accurate shading of blocks in reflections, vastly improved appearance of moving entities/mobs, potentially a version of HRR that has better performance gains than previously released versions for the same visual quality, and a lot more experimental ideas that I've had floating around in my head. Compute shaders also offer new optimization techniques that couldn't be used before.

I'll keep you all updated on how this process goes! Or, maybe I'll just surprise drop E13! You all know that I prefer surprising you with good news rather than trying to predict how this kind of experimental work will play out. This is why I tend to stay quiet until things are confirmed and done.

I never feel that I can thank you enough for your support and understanding. I know I can't make everyone perfectly happy with how things are going, I can't even do that for myself. I'm just so grateful for those who have joined me in this journey and for those who accept and are supportive of my creative process.