0.6.6 — 1.20.1 catches up

Everything from the 1.20.4 line lands here: Vibrant Graphics, the rebuilt shader system, surface maps from resource packs, and the two bundled packs.

Vibrant Graphics

Water effects as real particles — rain rings, splashes, shoreline foam, a wake when you wade through shallows, and spray at the foot of waterfalls. One setting under Video Settings — Vodium: Off / Low / Medium / High / Max. Works with or without a shaderpack.

A particle lives in the world: you see it from any angle, it is lit like everything else, and it does not vanish when you turn the camera. A shader can only tint pixels already on screen, and it cannot know what block sits next to the water — shoreline foam is exactly that kind of knowledge.

Shader packs are directories now

terrain.fsh is still the only required file, but next to it go terrain.vsh for the vertex stage, composite1.fsh..composite8.fsh and final.fsh for a full-screen chain, and any .glsl files pulled in with #include. Single-file packs keep working — standard and the rest are untouched.

Pack settings declared as #define NAME value // [a b c] Label become buttons in the interface, in the syntax Iris and OptiFine authors already know. Passes talk through colortex0..colortex5, can run at half resolution with /* SCALE: 0.5 */, and get the world state under the names Iris packs use: camera, matrices for this frame and the previous one, sun and moon, weather, potion effects.

Two packs ship with the mod and appear in shaderpacks/ on first launch:

• Realism — water with waves and Fresnel, volumetric clouds, light coloured by time of day, bloom and film tonemapping.
• Vivid — vanilla-styled: Blinn-Phong lighting, contour SSAO kept deliberately subtle, screen-space GI, sun shafts.

Surface maps

A resource pack can drop an _s file next to a block texture: R smoothness, G metalness, A emission. Vodium stitches them into an atlas mirroring the vanilla one texel for texel. The layout is Vodium's own, not labPBR — a missing map is honest zeros rather than full emission.

Notes

The port needed exactly one code change: Screen.renderBackground takes only the context on 1.20.1. Everything that could have diverged did not — the private sprite atlas layout, the rotation order in renderSky that the sun position depends on, the FALLING fluid property, the renderClouds signature.

Verified by launching the game: the Vivid pack builds into six passes, Vibrant Graphics connects, and the specular atlas stitches across 1577 sprites.