Sonic Ether

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 o

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

Hey, 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

Hey, 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 th

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 tracing view distance that PTGI has got

Hey 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

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

Resource Pack: HardTop Vanillaccurate (OldPBR variant) Update "SEUS PTGI HRR Test 2.1" (Dec 21 2020) changelog: Fixed new issue caused by bad placeholder tonemapping that I forgot to revert (caused gross banding in dark areas) Fixed issue with HRR where darker areas were less responsive/had more gho

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 re

So, 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 di

Hey 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 pe

Hey 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 fe

Hey, 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

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 so

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 abo

Hello 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 exa

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 f

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 filte

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 ("

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

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'v

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 rel

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 appli

[MINOR UPDATE] PTGI E7.1: Magma blocks now emit GI Fixed RTX graphics card visual bugs Fixed redstone torches on walls (in Minecraft 1.13 or later) not emitting GI 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

Hey, 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

Hey, 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 Patr

HOTFIX 1 (April 7): Fixed a compile error with one of the shader options. Re-download it and it should work now! HOTFIX 2 (April 13): A fix for graphical glitches on RTX cards has been found and implemented! I've updated the attachment, just re-download it. Huge thanks to Tre on the Discord server w

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 Opt

Whew, 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

SEUS PTGI E5 is here! This update isn't as big as the last, but some new features that aim to enhance your gameplay experience are here. E4 was the first version of SEUS PTGI that I actually tried survival gameplay with, and it led to some insights. The most distracting problem for me was how long l

SEUS PTGI E4 is finally here! Sorry for the wait! But, I think it'll be worth it, this one's a big one. My goal with this update was to take the first steps in getting SEUS PTGI ready for gameplay. Many effects have been fixed and added from the main version of SEUS, though, the main focus of this u

SEUS PTGI E3 is here! For more information on what's new in this version, check this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/seus-ptgi-update-22356734 If you haven't read the post for the release of SEUS PTGI E1, I highly recommend doing so. https://www.patreon.com/posts/seus-ptgi-e1-is-17814179 This ve

EDIT: SEUS PTGI E3 is out now! https://www.patreon.com/posts/22415508 Exciting news about SEUS PTGI! So, first of all, I've gotten sunlight with proper GI contribution working with path traced GI! I also was able to optimize the inner path tracing code, so optimized path tracing + sunlight contribut

SEUS PTGI E2 is here! For more information about what's new in this version, check this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-on-path-20991507 If you haven't read the post for the release of SEUS PTGI E1, I highly recommend doing so. https://www.patreon.com/posts/seus-ptgi-e1-is-17814179 In sho

Inspired by all the shiny new RTX stuff, I've been working more on SEUS PTGI and want to share my progress. If you're a Gold patron, you've probably tested out SEUS PTGI E1, the first experimental version of SEUS with path-traced lighting. It was a good first attempt, but there were myriad problems

All-new volumetric clouds powerful enough to drive a new weather system are the focus of this new Experimental version of SEUS Renewed! Of course, this is the first experimental version with a very bare-bones weather system. As of now, the biome the player is in does not affect weather; this is bein

Hey, all! The first experimental version of SEUS with LPVGI (Light Propagation Volume Global Illumination) is here! LPVGI in SEUS has the power to totally replace Minecraft's lighting and allows infinite bounced lighting from all light types with correct occlusion! Of course, working within the limi

It's finally time for the first experimental release of the main branch of SEUS! A LOT has changed, but these are the most noteworthy changes: Leaf subsurface scattering Land atmospheric scattering matches sky model Fixed POM and normal mapping on rotated textures/blocks Fixed black objects (like on

Hey, everyone! So, here comes the first experimental version of SEUS with path-traced global illumination! PLEASE, READ THIS POST! This is an extremely early development version with many known issues and isn't suitable for standard gameplay. Here are the requirements for running this shaderpack: Op

Hey, everyone! I wanted to let you know that my website, sonicether.com, has been updated to accommodate SEUS with information, a gallery, a new way of hosting downloads, official documentation, and a new feedback/issue tracking system! Now, if you want to report an issue with SEUS, ask a question,

Just wanted to post the video here, in case you guys missed it. I put together a quick video showcasing the new path-traced global illumination. An experimental version of SEUS with this tech will be released soon! SEUS: Path-Traced Global Illumination Showcase (YouTube)

So, what's next? The first thing I'll work on is moving to a proper deferred + forward pipeline for better handling of transparent rendering. This will fix issues with transparent materials and free up the internal data structure a bit, which will likely improve performance. Biome-specific features