Afterburner

Afterburner 0.2.9 (Forge 26.3)

Made for weak PCs (2 cores, 4 GB of RAM, Intel graphics). Shader packs (Complementary, BSL) show leaves, grass, water and glass again with resource packs whose foliage has soft edges, and keep drawing mobs, your hand and particles after a resource pack reload. High-resolution resource packs load: a 1024x pack that crashed the game ("Unable to fit" or out of memory) is scaled down just enough to fit your graphics card and memory before it is read, and texture loading builds its smaller copies faster (block textures on a 2-core PC: 16.6 s down to 7.4 s in a test). World generation makes 30-39% less garbage for the same area, with identical worlds. New options that change the look or are still being tried are off by default.

New (each can be switched on or off in the settings)

• Chunks In Front First: On a server, the chunks a player is waiting for are sent the ones in front of them first (inside the way they look). The same chunks, in another order.
• Keep Chunks by Section: Keeps chunks from servers with Afterburner in pieces of 16x16x16 blocks instead of whole. When a chunk has changed a little since last time, only the pieces that changed are sent again; pieces that are the same in many chunks are kept once. Everything read from disk is checked and asked for again if it is damaged. Needs Keep Chunks, and replaces what that has kept so far for the server. Off by default until tried more.
• Compressed Block Atlas: With a high-resolution resource pack (128x or bigger), keeps the block textures on the graphics card in a compressed form, a quarter of the size. Slightly lossy and slower to load; needs OpenGL with S3TC. Restart needed.
• Skip Mob Motion Packets: On a server, the motion packets of ordinary mobs, which the game does not use, are not sent. Off by default: not tried with a real game yet.
• Far Entities Less Often: On a server, a player on a slow connection is sent entities that are more than 32 blocks away every 6 ticks (12 beyond 64 blocks) instead of every 3. Far mobs move in bigger steps, so this is off by default.
• Faster Texture Loading: Makes the smaller copies of each texture (mipmaps) with a quicker routine that gives exactly the same pixels. Cuts the loading time of high-resolution resource packs, most on slow PCs.
• Heightmaps From Blocks: With the chunk link, chunks are sent without their heightmaps, which your game works out from the blocks. Off by default: not tried with a real game yet.
• Calm Loading Screen: The world loading screen is drawn at no more than 30 frames a second. Drawing its chunk map as fast as possible took a good part of a processor core away from making the world, which matters on 2-core PCs.
• Memory-Mask Behavior Skipping: Mobs skip behaviors whose needed memories are missing with one comparison. Same results as vanilla.
• Skip Back Faces of Entity Models: Mobs, players and armour are built from boxes, and half of each box faces away from you and is thrown away by the graphics card. Now those faces are not written at all. Same picture. Off by default until it has been checked in a real client.
• Parallel Mipmaps: Makes the mipmaps of all textures on all of the game's background workers instead of one after the other. Helps resource pack loading on PCs with 3 or more cores.
• Reused Terrain Noise Buffers: Generating a chunk's terrain and biomes keeps noise results in buffers that were thrown away when the chunk was done and made again for the next one. Now they go back to the generator's pool. Less memory churn while exploring, the same land.
• Reuse Chunk Build Copies: Building a chunk copies the blocks of its 27 sections; a section that has not changed since it was last copied now hands out the same copy again, and sections of one block only share one. Less work and garbage while chunks load. Same chunks as vanilla. Off by default until it has been checked in a real client.
• Half-Rate Big Fading Textures: With high-resolution texture packs, textures that fade between frames and are 128 pixels or wider are redrawn every second tick instead of every tick, so the fade moves in coarser steps. Frame changes still show at once. Less work for slow graphics chips.
• Pace Chunks on Slow Links: On a server, a player on a slow connection is not sent a new batch of chunks while their connection is backed up or two batches are still unanswered, so that moves and block changes are not stuck behind chunk data.
• Fewer Particles on Slow Links: On a server, a player on a slow connection is not sent decorative particles (hearts, smoke, crits...), and at most 100 particles a tick. Off by default.
• Cached Spawn Lists: Natural spawning reads which mobs may spawn per biome once instead of working it out every try. Same results as vanilla.
• Free Texture Pixels After Loading: Block, item and particle textures keep a second copy of their pixels in the computer's memory after they are on the graphics card. This lets that copy go (hundreds of MB with a high-resolution pack). The picture is the same.
• No Repeated Positions: On a server, an entity that stands perfectly still is not sent its position again every 3 seconds, unless the game moves it itself on the player side (items, arrows...).
• Texture Size Cap: For high-resolution resource packs (128x and up) on computers with little memory or an old graphics card. Block, item and particle textures bigger than the size set below are scaled down as they load, which saves memory and graphics memory but loses detail; smaller ones are left alone. An atlas too big for the graphics card is scaled down instead of stopping the game. Changes take effect at the next resource reload (F3 + T).
• Largest Texture Size: The longest side of a block, item or particle texture, in pixels. Needs the Texture Size Cap switch on (restart after switching it). Reload resources (F3 + T) after changing.

Servers and slow connections: chunks are sent in the direction you look first, slow links get fewer far entity updates and decorative particles, and entities that stand still are not sent again.

Everything else is as in 0.2.8.