Hey guys! Yes, I'm still alive and working on stuff! Improving my mental health has been my main focus since my last update, and I'm thankful to say that I've made a lot of progress!
My main focus is still solo game development, but I'm still working on ReShade shaders, a rewrite of SEUS, and some other stuff. Follow me on Twitter/X for smaller more frequent updates on the things I'm working on (21) Cody Darr (@sonic_ether) ...
Hello there! Wait... it's been how long?? Well, here's what's been going on in my world.
I have continued to work on SEUS, game development, and ReShade shaders, but development has definitely been slowed by mental health issues. Recently things have gotten better with a medication change, but I'm a little hesitant to celebrate too much; those of you who have struggled with mental health know it's never a linear journey. Also, if you've ever looked at my code, I'm sure some of you can t...
2023-06-22 01:04:28 +0000 UTC View PostHey, all! So, here's what's been going on in my world creatively!
I've been working on a rewrite of SEUS PTGI, and have been experimenting with some new approaches to ray tracing. SEUS PTGI has been in need of a rewrite for a few years, and I'm redesigning it from the ground up. Some of the new ray tracing capabilities are really exciting, but I'm not sure yet how it will perform. It's too early to tell where these experiments will lead for sure, but I'll keep you updated!&nb...
2022-08-05 15:35:49 +0000 UTC View PostHey, all! I hope this post finds you doing well!
It's been a long time since you heard from me. Some heavy things have happened in my life that have had a profound impact on my creativity, and I'd like to share what's been going on.
I've talked a bit about some mental health struggles I've had in the past. I would like to open up and share my story in hopes that it may be helpful to someone. I usually don't like to talk about personal stuff, but if sharing my experience...
2022-06-28 07:45:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Resource pack by Patrix
Surprise, and Happy Holidays! Here's a present for you! I hope you all have been doing well and staying safe!
This one is all about Minecraft 1.18 compatibility. With the amazing new world generation, the short ray lengths and short ray tr...
2021-12-24 02:04:20 +0000 UTC View PostHey all, I'd like to tell you about some changes that I'm making to my Patreon!
Firstly, I no longer wish to have my content behind paid tiers. SEUS PTGI and my other work will now be freely available for anyone to download!
I think that for now I'll keep the current tier system, but know that they pretty much will only serve to offer roles for my Discord server. Perhaps I'll give special miscellaneous rewards for certain tiers in the future, but in general I don't want my Patreon...
2021-07-21 22:58:38 +0000 UTC View PostHey 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 tha...
2021-04-07 18:53:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Resource Pack: HardTop Vanillaccurate (OldPBR variant)
Update "SEUS PTGI HRR Test 2.1" (Dec 21 2020) changelog:
Hey all! Since it's been a while since you heard from me, I wanted to let you know how things are going.
Though I'm always working on SEUS, progress with actual results tend come sporadically, and as SEUS PTGI gets more advanced, each update becomes more difficult to achieve.
Though I said I felt ready to move on, I have done quite a bit more work with HRR ("Half Resolution Rendering", check out my last few posts to learn more). I suppose the promise if 2x performance at com...
2020-11-02 11:07:59 +0000 UTC View PostSo, as I talked about in the last dev news post, I've been working on this "Half Resolution Rendering" concept for quite some time. It aims to achieve higher frame rates by rendering the image at a lower internal resolution (half, per axis) and upscaling to full resolution.
This has been the most difficult shader project I've worked on so far. I know it seems ridiculous that it's taken so long to get to even a test version, but trust me, it's been very difficult. Unfortunately, th...
2020-08-07 12:46:54 +0000 UTC View PostHey all! Sorry it's been a while again, here's what's been going on.
Since the last dev news post, I've been working on another potentially huge feature for PTGI E13.
Performance is one of my highest priorities with SEUS PTGI, and I always try every little idea that comes to me that could promise performance gains. Especially because of the performance cost of the new E13 features, I've really been striving to find something that can offset this. This time, I've b...
2020-06-04 14:23:05 +0000 UTC View PostHey all! Sorry it's been a while, I've been wanting to share the progress I've made with E13, but I needed to really make sure that I didn't accidentally promise something that would turn out not to be possible. The pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together, so I can announce confirmed new features!
So, if you haven't read the last Dev News post, I've been working on a completely new approach to voxelization and representation of block shapes for ray tracing. This is defini...
2020-04-03 01:08:16 +0000 UTC View PostHey, all! Here's what's going on with the development of SEUS PTGI E13.
The focus of this update is compatibility and robustness. I've talked before about some ideas I've had about making PTGI work well with mods and custom block models, and none of those ideas were all that great. However, I think I may have found one that is!
The idea revolves around using a resource pack along with PTGI. PTGI would then require the use of a resource pack to inform it about the blocks...
2020-02-20 00:01:17 +0000 UTC View Post
HOTFIX 1: Fixed a few dumb compile errors that only an idiot could miss. Re-download to get a version that solves the issue.
SEUS PTGI E12 is here! This version takes the clouds and sky introduced in E11 and improves upon them significantly. There's also improved (and adjustable) "water fog", and some fixes to the GI filter that caused issue...
2020-01-09 04:21:29 +0000 UTC View Post
PLEASE READ AND ADHERE TO THE USAGE REQUIREMENTS BELOW BEFORE REPORTING ISSUES!!!!
It's finally here, sorry for the long wait! This update is fairly simple, but the new features took a ton of research, fine-tuning and adjustments to ensure they work well in all situations. Of course, I'm talking about the new sky and clouds! Please keep in mind that they're ba...
2019-12-06 15:30:21 +0000 UTC View PostHello again! Here's what's going on with the development of SEUS PTGI E11!
A lot of research has gone into this update, and there are still some things being worked out that will hopefully arrive in E12. The adaptive temporal GI filter (for instant lighting changes) is still being worked on, for example, and won't make it into E11.
I've put a lot of time into working on optimization. Most ideas don't work out, but some do. I've managed to optimize the GI filter a bit without rede...
2019-11-08 16:10:15 +0000 UTC View PostHello! So, as I've talked about in previous posts, I've been looking at modding support for SEUS PTGI. One of the problems has to do with modifying the block.properties file inside the shaderpack.
The block.properties file needs to be setup a certain way for any blocks added by mods to function properly with SEUS PTGI, and without any tools, it's ridiculously time-consuming. I mean, just look at this excerpt from the current block.properties file in SEUS PTGI. This is only with vanilla ...
2019-11-01 17:22:04 +0000 UTC View Post
PLEASE READ AND ADHERE TO THE USAGE REQUIREMENTS BELOW BEFORE REPORTING ISSUES!!!!
UPDATE (OCT 6): A compile error that occurs when disabling Atmospheric Godrays has been fixed. Re-download to get the fixed version!
So, I talked about an improvement for the GI denoising filter I've been working on for this update in 2019-10-06 15:46:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, everyone! Here's what's going on with the development of SEUS PTGI E10!
So, what you see above is a preview of some tech that I've been working on, regarding the GI denoising filter.
In order to get more effective samples per pixel, I have designed a filter that, like most other denoising filters, utilizes information from previous frames. This temporal filtering is quite effec...
2019-09-25 15:54:31 +0000 UTC View Post
UPDATE (AUGUST 22nd): The change from the use of geometry shaders to instancing for E9 has caused some performance issues on the CPU side for some users, and some AMD users aren't reporting any performance benefits from this change, which was the main purpose of it. I have uploaded a test version ("SEUS PTGI E9 Geometry Shader Test", attached to this post...
2019-08-19 17:52:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone, sorry it's been a while since the last news post or update! Here's what's been going on.
So, I bought an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU a few weeks ago and have been working on AMD GPU compatibility for SEUS PTGI E9. I was quite disappointed with the performance on this card, though, and after some investigation, I found the cause. Due to differences in hardware design, AMD GPU...
2019-08-08 23:19:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, all! Here's what's going on with the development of SEUS PTGI E9.
Something I've talked about for a long time is the issue of ray/path tracing against blocks that aren't shaped like a full cube. Lots of other issues have taken importance before this, but now it's finally time to address it!
I've been worried about implementing this since the beginning. Since ray tracing is an iterat...
2019-07-16 18:10:51 +0000 UTC View Post
SEUS PTGI E8 is here, along with some exciting new additions and improvements!
First of all, E8 has an entirely new water and underwater rendering system! Unfortunately this new feature causes incompatibility with Minecraft 1.12 until the developer of OptiFine ports back newer features that this relies on. If you want to read more about this new feature, you can c...
2019-07-06 06:23:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, everyone! As you have surely noticed, SEUS PTGI has thus far been hideous in underwater scenes. I figured it's quite time to change that (especially now that Minecraft 1.13 compatibility is here), so this is mostly what I've been focusing on for E8
In the past, I've just relied on a thick application of fog for underwater rendering, since I could never really get clear water looking right...
2019-06-19 16:22:06 +0000 UTC View Post
[MINOR UPDATE] PTGI E7.1:
SEUS PTGI E7 is here! I would like to apologize for the delayed release. Uprooting all the old, stagnant code and replacing it with new systems without breaking t...
2019-06-02 09:19:58 +0000 UTC View PostHey, all! Here's what's been going on with the development of SEUS PTGI E7. The focus for E7 is bug fixes and optimizations.
SEUS PTGI has been long overdue for a deep cleaning. It's built on top of an old beta version of SEUS Renewed, and I've been so focused on adding and improving features that I haven't bothered too much about the more stagnant areas of the project. Having the project cleaned out will make it easier to manage for me, and more easily managed code is always a go...
2019-05-07 11:12:50 +0000 UTC View PostHey, everyone! I saw a recent discussion about my income and customer support in the SEUS Patrons Discord server and I wanted to share some thoughts about these topics, as well as a few related others.
I started my Patreon page hoping that I'd be able to get by doing what I love. I was drawn to Patreon because it is a platform where people can support creators who are doing work that they admire, and the creators can provide something in return for their support. It's not a store where ...
2019-05-06 12:13:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Phew, it's finally here! I'm...
2019-04-07 16:16:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Wow. First of all, thank you to all of the new patrons! There's been some buzz about SEUS PTGI lately, and I've seen some confusion out there that I'd like to clear up!
So, first of all, SEUS PTGI (short for Path Traced Global Illumination) is a shaderpack for Minecraft powered by the mod called OptiFine. It doesn't require any special hardware or an RTX card, just a modern G...
2019-04-01 05:02:38 +0000 UTC View PostWhew, sorry it's been so long, everyone! I feel like E6 has been perpetually in a state of "it'll be done tomorrow" for weeks. So, what's the struggle all about?
I decided to redesign the GI filter. The design I've been using works well when all sources of light are around the same intensity, but it fails when a light is brighter or darker than other lights. When too bright, denoising isn't aggressive enough and noise gets through. When too dark, denoising is too aggressive and doesn't ...
2019-03-20 04:50:45 +0000 UTC View Post