History

Inspiration | ft. OptiFine Internal Shaders

It was a normal day for a regular watching YouTube videos for me when I noticed a subtle difference in the gameplay footage from a favorite Minecraft YouTuber [MCYT] of mine. "It was gorgeous" I taught. I then figured that I should try it. I had searched for it, only to find my answers on Reddit that point to an old video explanation from that same MCYT I mentioned. I then finally found how to do it, it was an OptiFine [OF] internal shader on a specific configuration. I finally can try it for myself.

"It's like theirs' gameplay footage" I figured. I then realized that my frames per second [FPS] plummeted. This is mostly due to my already underpowered hardware desperately relying on OF to even make playing Minecraft possible. I knew I couldn't endure a slideshow-like gameplay. I needed an alternative.

Generating a Bright Resource

While nosing around the Minecraft resource pack wiki. I stumbled upon a rather interesting flag for block models: shade: false. I tried this flag myself using a quickly made custom resource pack. Later to find out that it just did the same with OF's (configured) internal shader. "What if I'd applied this flag to all of the vanilla models" I pondered. Soon, I'd be seeing myself making a quick Java code to automate this process of adding this flag to all of Minecraft's block models. This resulted in a resource pack that emulates the mentioned shader. This custom resource pack never surfaced as downloadable online.

No Shades | The Precursor

Some time has passed and I have just walked away from a certain mod maker application due to the many headaches it needlessly gave me. I attained no valuable outputs or takeaways. It is by this time that I learned about Sodium and the Fabric mod loader. It was a hope to me that it might be more performant than my previous setup. It surely was and I'm not going back. The modularity was amazing, my experience was great despite some dependency issues here and there at the start. I am very comfortable with my new setup. I am liking Fabric.

I'm getting comfortable with the experience that I soon tried making a mod myself. The guides were very helpful. I believe the first mod I have ever made was No Shades. It allowed manipulating the shade brightness on blocks with a slider. It mostly centered around that, until everything went south as I didn't have a scope that leashes my ideas. My code grew more unsatisfactory to me. This is not what I wanted it to be. Soon after, the mod will be replaced by a new one. One that will learn from these mistakes.

Simply No Shading

This mod, the one your currently reading the history of, mimics OptiFine Internal Shaders. It supports toggling shading for blocks and clouds.