Iris Alpha v0.3.0 for Minecraft 1.16.5

This pre-release of Iris was archived from its original on Patreon for posterity on November 22, 2022.

Original Post Date: April 27th, 2021 at 7:03 PM PDT

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Iris 0.3.0 is here, and compiled builds are now available to all patrons! It's been a long time since the last release, and there have been tons of changes and improvements. Notably, BSL v8 & Complementary v3.13 are now somewhat playable on Iris 0.3.0, instead of being completely broken like they were on Iris 0.2.0! Please note however, that this version of Iris does not support shadows, because they are still experimental, though they are available to patrons of the $8 tier and above for testing purposes.

The posting contains a pre-compiled jar of both Iris and the required fork of Sodium, as well as a step-by-step guide on how to get them working.

Fair warning: Patreon charges you when you sign up, and on the first of every month. It may be in your best interest to wait before signing up to get this release, given that the first of May is in 4 days - you'd be charged today and on May 1st! Normally I don't like releasing so late in the month for this reason, but Iris 0.3.0 is already long overdue.

Feel free to share these files with your friend group and in other private places, but I ask that you do not share them publicly at this time.

What files should I download?

First, download the iris-0.3.0+patreon.jar file in the Attachments box below. This build supports Sodium, but can be used without Sodium as well.

Then, if you want to use Sodium, download the sodium-fabric-mc1.16.4-IRIS-SNAPSHOT_rev.3e3d08f_patreon.jar file in the Attachments box below.

How do I use it?

If you are having trouble getting things working, send me a private message on Patreon or Discord and I will try to help you out as best I can.

As a prerequisite, you must have Fabric Loader installed.

This guide will assume that you would like to use Sildur's Vibrant Shaders v1.283 Medium. If you are using a different version (High, Low, etc) you must adjust the guide accordingly. While Extreme-VL works, the volumetric lighting effect does not work since shadows are not supported.

If you haven't already, start the game with Iris. Make sure that you've removed any older versions of Iris or the Sodium fork first!

If you can't start the game (crashes, etc), send me a message containing your latest.log file and I'll help you figure out what's going on.

While Minecraft is running:

• Move "Sildurs Vibrant Shaders v1.283 Medium.zip" to your .minecraft/shaderpacks directory
• Go to the .minecraft/config directory and open the iris.properties file
• Change "shaderPack=(internal)" to "shaderPack=Sildurs Vibrant Shaders v1.283 Medium.zip"
• Save your changes.
• Return to Minecraft and walk around. Press the R key. You should see a "Reloaded Shaders!" message in chat. This will reload shaders, and thus load Sildur's Vibrant Shaders v1.283 Medium.

Known Issues

• Many shaderpacks are broken under Iris, but there are many that are starting to work. Sildur's Vibrant Shaders is the shaderpack that I currently prioritize supporting, however BSL and Complementary work with some issues as well.
• There are still some minor rendering bugs, though many have been resolved.
• Xaero's Worldmap is incompatible at this time (item rendering bugs)
• Light Overlay, Litematica, and the in-world shapes in MiniHud have rendering issues with Iris.

Notable changes and improvements in 0.3.0:

BSL v8, Complementary Shaders v3.13, Sildur's Enhanced Default v1.11, and SEUS v11 now mostly work on Iris! Many things are still broken, but they are approaching the state of being playable. It's still recommended to use Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, however, as it is still the best-supported shaderpack. Things are changing rapidly, though!

• Known issues on BSL: There are no reflections, bloom flickers a lot, rain does not show up.
• Known issues on SEUS v11: Bloom flickers a lot, issues with rain, the sun is not tilted.
• Known issues on Complementary Shaders: Bloom flickers, reflections are all black.
• Known issues on Sildur's Enhanced Default: The sun is not tilted, enchantment glints are broken

Vertex format extensions are now fully supported on Iris, even when Sodium is not installed. This means that water reflections work, plants and foliage wave like normal, water looks like water, stained glass looks like stained glass, and all around means that a lot of things work way nicer even without Sodium installed. They also are 100% compatible with Indigo (without Sodium) and Indium (with Sodium), meaning that Iris is still fully compatible with the Fabric Rendering API and mods that use it.

Iris now has full support for parsing block ID mappings. This means that hanging lanterns now wave, double tall grass looks right, and that it is no longer necessary to manually modify block.properties for things to look correct.

You can now disable shaders entirely with Iris through the enableShaders property in iris.properties. If you put enableShaders=false on a new line at the end (assuming the file does not already contain an enableShaders property), then shaders will now be fully disabled.

The sodium-compatibility branch has now been merged into trunk.

Other changes and fixes in 0.3.0:

• Fixed an issue where the world would appear to be entirely in shadow on some open-source Linux graphics drivers (Mesa)
• Add support for tilting of the sun path (doesn't work on Sildur's Enhanced Default yet)
• Fixed light appearing to come from the wrong direction at night time
• Buffer formats are no longer hardcoded, which opens the door to a lot more shaderpacks working.
• Iris now provides placeholder content for PBR textures, fixing some issues with Complementary Shaders
• Fixed some issues related to buffer clearing, which caused a multitude of issues in some shaderpacks, including weird rainbow effects when looking through translucent things on Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, pink entity reflections on Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, and other weird interactions between translucent things and the sky.
• Support for geometry shaders, a stepping stone for supporting SEUS PTGI and other raytracing shaderpacks
• The alpha test and blending are now disabled during the fullscreen passes (composite & final), preventing some weird issues including the content of previous frames bleeding into the next frame on Sildur's Enhanced Default
• noiseTextureResolution is no longer hardcoded, fixing clouds & water waves on Complementary
• Support for custom noise textures, fixing clouds & water waves on BSL
• Fix clouds smearing apart after playing for many hours on Sildur's Vibrant Shaders
• Full support for TAA on Sildur's Vibrant Shaders through the framemod8 uniform
• Fix the sky not rendering on low render distances
• Hardcode the custom uniforms needed by BSL & Complementary so that the day/night cycle mostly works on them
• Load some baseline block ID mappings if the shaderpack doesn't provide mappings, which helps with SEUS v11.
• The wetness is now smoothed properly, instead of updating instantly along with the rain strength. This should mean that rain puddles will stick around even after it has stopped raining.
• Iris now tweaks the far plane to match OptiFine when shaders are enabled. This fixes some issues with water reflections on Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, however it causes clipping issues with shaderpacks that use vanilla clouds, such as Sildur's Enhanced Default.
• All entities are rendered prior to translucent content. This fixes a few issues where underwater entities and block entities (like chests) would become invisible. However, it makes slimes and nametags render oddly. Further work is necessary to make the translucent parts of entities render later on, separate from the opaque parts of entities.
• Firework spark particles, opaque block breaking particles, and barrier particles are now marked as opaque, meaning that they are rendered early with other opaque particles. This fixes some issues with how these particles interact with water / stained glass.

Licensing

These files are licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3, an open-source license. The source code is available on GitHub.