RTX Reactor v0.5.5a — Release Notes

Five & half a spark!
This release fixes a ton of bugs, brings RTX Reactor up to speed with Minecraft's changes both in and outside of preview, and gives the UI some hefty upgrades for future flexibility, with a bunch of new features — plus much more!

Highlights:

•  Scram Button (small red one on the right):
Press this during generation to immediately terminate the ongoing process and clean up temporary data. Outside of generation, it simply plays a cool homemade sound effect!

•  UI Enhancements
Improved flexibility and responsiveness, with the addition of some new animations!
Known Issue: Resizing the window may feel slow, especially for larger windows. On slower CPUs, avoid resizing while multithreading is active to prevent potential freezing.

•  Added multithreaded processing
This allows RTX Reactor to gobble up as much available CPU as needed for faster generation. However, it is currently poorly implemented and may cause the UI to freeze during operation. Don't panic, the program is still running in the background — it will unfreeze once generation completes, have patience.

Best Usage: Enable multithreading when you don't need your PC for other tasks. For larger packs, it can reduce generation time significantly (e.g., from 30 minutes to 10). By default, it is disabled.

•  Added a "force_heightmap_gen" option in settings.json, a global setting in settings.json that forces heightmaps across all blocks and entities. This is particularly useful for deferred lighting packs in case you want entities to also use heightmaps.

•  Resource pack files' name capitalization is now preserved throughout all PBR textures, this could previously cause missing in-game textures when naming conventions weren’t respected by the resource pack author.

•  Updated fog and deferred lighting packages
- Fog and fog multiplier functionalities are restored, along with deferred lighting support.
Note: Deferred lighting is subject to frequent changes in Minecraft Previews. As such, support remains limited until Minecraft finalizes this feature.

Issues addressed in this release:
•  Fixed various incorrect materials
•  Resolved formatting issues with .tga files
•  Fixed fully transparent pixels being treated as black during the initial texture feeding.
•  Fixed buttons and toggles being interactable outside their bounds
•  Fixed fallback temporary locations not being cleaned up in case of failure
•  Fixed errors opening the config file when no default app is assigned for .json files; the app will now prompt you to select one
• Other minor fixes and improvements

Other Changes:
•  The normal_intensity_reducer option in settings.json is now a float between 0.0 (high-intensity normal maps) and 1.0 (flat normal maps).
•  Optimized code for improved normal generation efficiency.
•  Force heightmap/normal options now override any specific settings for 32x files.
•  Minimum engine version of generated packs is now 1.21.40 or higher.
•  Updated output for Deferred Mode to indicate it is specifically for deferred lighting (e.g., pack name, save name, icon, capabilities).

•  Temporarily removed alternative normal map generation
Note: I'm in the process of testing something far superior at this moment, a glimpse of it was included in 0.5.0a but didn’t work well enough to keep.

I'll leave the idea here for the curious souls, so you know why it's taking a while and what to expect:
The goal is to generate multiple normals, some based on a quantized heightmap, some not, using various normal map generation algorithms and techniques.
These normal maps are later composited together based on the color composition and noise index of the texture itself!
While this is exciting (& unholy inefficient!) I have firsthand seen the possibilities, just now writing this paragraph gets my blood pumping!

Finishing Notes:
This was a mid-cycle update. As you may already know, I’ve been busy with Vanilla RTX, but that hasn’t stopped me from chipping away at other projects bit by bit. This update is the culmination of finalized changes I’ve been able to make since the fifth major release of RTX Reactor a few months back.

The only thing this release lacks is a major uplift in generation quality, which is the very reason the version number hasn’t been bumped to 0.6! The next update, Decay Chain, will be a game-changer. It would arrive much sooner if I could dedicate all my time to RTX Reactor, but life is unpredictable. Plenty of things come up to steal you away from doing the things you love — in my case, what I do here, but it won’t stop me from trying.
Anyhow,
Pale Garden is being added in roughly a week as of writing this!
So see you all in a Vanilla RTX release post with completed Pale Garden support — coming very very soon!

Important Note:
This version of the setup is protected by a password!
To retrieve the password, check the RTX Reactor community chat here on Patreon. Alternatively, connect your Discord account to Patreon and join the Vanilla RTX Discord using https://discord.gg/A4wv4wwYud. The password is pinned in the #rtx-reactor channel, here's a direct link to the message: https://discord.com/channels/721377277480402985/871755222693847101/1311329627788283904