Progress update

Hey everyone!

First of all, thank you so much for your amazing support, even though things have been pretty quiet on my end lately.

But now I've finally reached a point where I feel ready to share what I've been working on so much over the past few months, and what I'm still actively developing.

I know most of you are here for the textures, but let's be honest. Textures like mine only really shine when they're used with a shader that can properly take advantage of all the features they provide.

And that's exactly where the problem begins...

Let's take Create as an example.

Create heavily relies on Flywheel, a mod that uses instancing to render all those moving parts much more efficiently. And it works incredibly well!

But then Iris comes along with its beautiful shaders and more or less disables Flywheel.

As a result, Create no longer scales nearly as well as it should. And when you add a shader that supports all the features my textures offer, performance quickly becomes a serious problem.

Even my RTX 4090 starts struggling once I enter a properly developed Create factory.

So I made a decision.

I temporarily put texture development on hold and started working on something completely different.

Introducing HWRT-Extension!

HWRT-Extension is a hybrid rendering engine designed to work alongside Iris.

One of its long-term goals is to keep Flywheel active and make sure it can work properly together with shaders.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Right now, my engine is primarily focused on Euphoria Patches, as it introduces some of the most impressive and advanced shader features available.

My engine integrates into this rendering pipeline and is designed to eventually handle, enhance, or replace things like shadows, PBR, reflections, and much more.

The goal is to calculate all of this far more efficiently and, most importantly, in a way that actually scales by taking advantage of the GPU's dedicated RT Cores.

In other words:

The most computationally expensive rendering tasks will be moved into my engine and handled using hardware-accelerated ray tracing!

And I've finally reached a point in development where I think it's worth talking about.

I even have a little preview clip to show you! :)

The foundation of the engine is already in place, and I've successfully offloaded shadow calculations to the GPU's RT Cores.

On top of that, I've already extended the system with block light shadows, including support for entities!

This is still just the beginning, but I'm really excited about where this project is heading!