Pulsar Lighting Engine

[0.6.0] - 2026-10-30 - The Dawn of a World in Color

Added

• Add optional RGB block and sky lighting for terrain, fluids, entities, particles, held items and tile entities in Vanilla/Forge and Celeritas.
• Add a one-time SCALAR/RGB selection screen with English and Japanese text. Save the choice per instance and request a restart when changing the active mode.
• Add RGB_MAX gameplay brightness and an independent VANILLA lighting policy. Compatible SCALAR clients can receive authoritative gameplay light from RGB servers.
• Add additive, squared-weight, linear-weight, OkLab, vivid and MAXIMUM RGB blends. MAXIMUM preserves neutral full daylight; LEGACY retains the earlier appearance.
• Add source-color presets for Botania, Twilight Forest, Thaumcraft 6, Tinkers' Construct, Biomes O' Plenty, Natura, Natura Legacy, Chisel, Applied Energistics 2 and Ars Magica 2: Rekindled.
• Add CBMultipart lighting integration and RGB support for ProjectRed lamps, fixtures, buttons and light microblocks, preserving brightness and power state.
• Add configurable source colors and per-channel filters in pulsar-colors.cfg and pulsar-filters.cfg. /pulsar reload validates changes, rolls back failures and relights loaded chunks automatically.
• Add optional RGB shader lighting, tested with Demonica and Complementary Reimagined.
• Add public static/positional lighting APIs, a Forge registration event, API/source artifacts and conversion helpers for SuperNova light values.
• Add opt-in lighting/render tracing and Celeritas rebuild diagnostics.

Changed

• Default to SCALAR. RGB uses squared-weight blending and RGB_MAX gameplay light by default; existing explicit mode choices are preserved.
• Upgrade the config schema to version 3, preserving existing settings and filling missing options with current defaults.
• Reduce lighting memory use and allocation through shared immutable data, lazy buffers and worker reuse.
• Reduce redundant skylight work during chunk generation and updates.
• Batch contextual light notifications and avoid unnecessary polling of constant Multipart light sources.
• Align vanilla source hues and stained-glass/pane filtering with SuperNova's lighting palette while retaining contextual brightness and explicit overrides.
• Deprecate the legacy no-op light flush API and clarify lighting readiness queries.
• Require compatible Pulsar clients for RGB_MAX servers. SCALAR servers retain ordinary client compatibility.

Fixed

• Save light-only changes on otherwise untouched chunks, including neighbouring chunks.
• Keep lighting usable when mod callbacks fail, retaining previous/static samples without blocking chunk visibility or saving degraded light as a valid cache.
• Prevent stale light caches and missed dynamic-source updates around palette reloads and cached chunk loading.
• Correct night-time sky attenuation, mixed-hue brightness and signed lightmap coordinate handling in RGB rendering.
• Center manual relights correctly at negative fractional coordinates.
• Avoid the OptiFine G5 startup crash (#26). Full OptiFine rendering/RGB compatibility remains unsupported.
• Prevent premature lighting-completion reports and missing chunk updates after large edits or during initial chunk loading.
• Fix intermittent login packet encoding errors and RGB disconnection handling.