End Of Year Status Update

It has been a while since I have posted on here, but fortunately I have good news.

The open source rewrite of Chronos is coming along nicely, though admittedly it is still pretty far from complete. The full current list of features with be listed at the end of this post, but before that I need to explain more of what exactly this rewrite is aiming to accomplish.

The primary goal of this rewrite is to function as a reference point for other developers who want realistic graphics. Whether that be through physical simulation or through fine tuning it does not matter, any realistic shaderpack can benefit from an accurate reference. Because of this I am going to be developing it in two parts. Part one will be the coding step and getting the pack working, hopefully without too many bugs, and part two will be cleaning up the code and adding some basic documentation. Unfortunately I cannot give an ETA due to the complexity of this project combined with the annoyances of life, but I hope to release sometime next year.

With all that being said there is another goal. That goal is to push the accuracy even further than has been seen before in this community. Two of the ways I aim to accomplish this is through accurate atmospheric refraction and polarization of light. Atmospheric refraction is essential for simulating lunar eclipses and polarization is required for light to feel like light. Due to the complexity these will likely not be in the shaderpack when I make it public but they will be added eventually. The reason behind wanting to push the accuracy even further is simply out of a desire to see how far I can go with it. Now, I will be focusing more on getting things working over making things even more accurate so this goal will not cause any problems. I have already dropped a few feature ideas due to the fact they'd complicate development and make it take way longer.

Now that my goals are clear, I would like to list the current features.

-Three separate CIE versions

-Spectrometre for measuring the light emission and reflection spectra of any surface you look at

-Realistic Sun and Moon paths, the program that generates these paths is outputting incorrect results atm but that will be fixed soon

-Atmospheric airglow

-Now using the US Standard Atmosphere 1976 to model density

-More accurate atmospheric aerosol density

-Voxel hashing

-Camera tone maps

-Microfacet based normal mapping

-Accurate lens systems

-Thick lens approximation

-Tiled rendering

-In depth debug screen

I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year, and I hope you enjoy these screenshots of the current WiP version of Chronos open source!