October 2020 Progress Update

Progress has continued on B13 of RT. We realise it is taking quite a while but we think we are closing in on the finish line! Unfortunately though, we still aren’t yet ready to share a release window with you all. We feel waiting till it’s truly ready is better than having to announce any delays. We hope you understand.

As before, anyone that have supported, or continued to support RT during this time, THANK YOU! We greatly appreciate it. That said, we entirely understand if you want to end your subscriptions until the next update is ready.

Once again, despite limited time, Robo managed a pretty decent update to 2.1 this last month!

This update dropped on the 9th, and notably included Official support for Minecraft 1.16, including a few mitigations for Optifine bugs that exist in that version. We also added something some of you have been asking for, for quite a long time…an underground light leak fix! Sadly, this ‘fix’ is similar to what other shader devs employ to get around this issue with Minecraft, so it still has the drawbacks we’ve mentioned before, but it’s there if needed. You can enable it in shadow settings (off by default). A better fix may come later but we decided to add this for now. This update also disables the reflections on glass, so that water can be rendered through glass. We liked the glass reflections personally, but the performance hit of rendering water properly through glass with the reflections would have been too great, and leaving it as is looked bad, so at least for now, they’re gone in favor of water rendering properly. Check the screenshots for a before/after of this.

Something that didn’t make it into this update is Weather. This is still being worked on but was entirely too time intensive for Robo to get ready on already limited time, especially seeing as he has also started to help the rest of the team wrap up the RT update.

We’ve outlined many of the features that ended up in this updateabove, but here are the official patch notes in case you are curious (also available to CEA users on the downloads page):

• Official Minecraft 1.16.X support
• Added Underground Light Leak fix (off by default, enable in shadow settings)
• Removed glass from translucent blocks (Water can now render behind glass)
• Improved shadow handling and normal maps
• Improved cloud lighting
• Fixed some “z fighting” issues with stained glass and water
• Some other small optimizations

Here are some screenshots of some of these updates (click on images to enlarge)