Caustica Rework 0.1.3

Caustica Rework 0.1.3

Integration of Distant Horizons LOD terrain with scene-linear ray-traced lighting, foliage albedo alignment, and HDR tonemapping consistency.

Added

• Distant Horizons Material Provenance: Implemented authoritative tracking of Distant Horizons materials (`DhMaterialProvenance') and face recipe reconstruction (`DhFaceRecipeResolver').
• LOD Foliage Albedo Alignment: Accurately reconstructed foliage albedo from Near sprite atlas, biome color tinting, and ray-cone equivalent mip selection to prevent dark seams at chunk boundaries.
• Diagnostics Overlay: Added real-time Distant Horizons material, recipe, and residency diagnostics to the F3 debug screen overlay.

Changed

• Scene-Linear DH Relighting: DH distant geometry is relit in scene-linear ray-traced display space with celestial Lambert lighting, sky/block illumination, and tonemapping.

Removed

• Legacy Removal: Removed obsolete Distant Horizons rasterization fallback, dedicated reflection pipeline, and water mask passes.

Fixed

• HDR Tonemapping Alignment: Fixed tonemapping when HDR is active to evaluate the selected tone curve and look operators across available display headroom while keeping paper white normalized and consistent with SDR.

Validation

• 351/351 automated tests PASS
• 7/7 characterization benchmarks PASS
• V2 clean package build PASS
• 0 expected failures, 0 unexpected failures

Download

• File: caustica-0.1.3.jar
• SHA256: CB5CFF7259B1CB8EED820409117F27C19E0DD685AB87C9C321ED3AFD3FBAD1A9

Caustica Rework 0.1.2

Caustica Rework 0.1.2

Bugfix release focused on animated water stability and shoreline rendering correctness.

Fixed

• Fixed animated water shoreline artifacts by keeping ray-traced water geometry on authoritative BLAS hits and applying waves to surface normals only.
• Preserves wave gradient spectrum, animated reflections, refractions, and caustics without geometric mesh clipping.

Validation

• 290/290 automated tests PASS
• 7/7 characterization tests PASS
• V2 clean build PASS
• 0 expected failures
• 0 unexpected failures

Download

• File: caustica-0.1.2.jar
• SHA256: B6DD20187EF6983C07B3E386C793A7DD292FDD855D784EF36E6442511A4BD627

Caustica Rework 0.1.1

Caustica Rework 0.1.1

Bugfix release focused on rendering correctness and automated regression coverage.

Fixed

• Corrected moon-phase lighting so full and new moon illumination follow the intended Minecraft phase cycle.
• Corrected Frame Generation interpolation when swapchain capacity limits the effective number of generated frames.
• Corrected R11G11B10 rounding at the subnormal-to-normal boundary.
• Prevented Halton jitter sequence corruption from frame-counter overflow.

Tests

• Fixed CRLF-sensitive shader regression checks on Windows.
• Added regression coverage for the corrected production paths.
• Full automated test suite passes with zero expected failures.

Validation

• 284/284 automated tests PASS
• 7/7 characterization tests PASS
• V2 build PASS
• 0 expected failures
• 0 unexpected failures

Download

• File: caustica-0.1.1.jar
• SHA256: 79EEF06AF24C02EAC76B1BDE24D3096C373453E3BC54E97009BF2CD3BDC7DE92

Caustica Rework 0.1.0

Caustica Rework 0.1.0

Caustica Rework is a heavily reworked direct fork of Caustica focused on a cleaner Vulkan ray-tracing architecture, explicit GPU resource ownership and lifetime management, and modern reconstruction/rendering paths.

Highlights

• Decoupled Architecture: RtComposite reduced from universal GPU owner to lightweight orchestration and pass delegation.
• Dedicated Ownership Domains: Clear, isolated lifecycle boundaries for WorldTraceResources, TraceFrameResources, FrameGenerationResources, and PostProcessing.
• Explicit GPU Lifetime & Retirement: Strict deferred deletion queue with frame-tail retirement synchronization, preventing in-flight GPU execution races.
• Clean Shutdown & Level Transitions: Guaranteed GPU device quiescence (�kDeviceWaitIdle) prior to tearing down resource domains on level change or exit.
• Frame Pipeline & RenderGraph: Explicit macro-pass dependency scheduling with automated cross-queue barrier synthesis.

Rendering & Reconstruction

• Vulkan Ray Tracing: Native Vulkan hardware path-traced world rendering with modular scene assembly.
• Dual Reconstruction Backends: Production support for NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction and native, vendor-agnostic SVGF denoising.
• Advanced Lighting: Spatio-temporal ReSTIR direct light sampling and SHaRC spatial hash radiance caching for multi-bounce indirect illumination.
• Materials: Physically based LabPBR 1.3 material support with metallic, roughness, normal maps, and subsurface scattering.
• Color & Presentation: Native HDR10/PQ (BT.2020) presentation on supported platforms alongside standard calibrated SDR display tone mapping.
• Translucency: High-fidelity refraction and transmission for water and stained glass.

Architecture

text RtComposite ??? WorldTraceResources (AS manager, static/dynamic scene buffers) ??? TraceFrameResources (per-frame tracing targets, G-buffers) ??? FrameGenerationResources (optical flow, UI/HUD capture masks) ??? PostProcessing (SDR tone mapping, HDR10/PQ presentation) ??? Reconstruction Backends (DLSS Ray Reconstruction, native SVGF) ??? Lighting Systems (ReSTIR reservoir sampling, SHaRC cache) ??? SceneAssembler (terrain, entities, particles, weather) ??? TemporalState (motion vectors, camera history, reset tracking) ??? GraphExecution (macro-pass dependencies, automatic barrier synthesis)

RtComposite now orchestrates instead of universally owning GPU resources. Each migrated domain has a single semantic owner. Potentially in-flight resources use explicit completion/retirement authority. Shutdown establishes GPU quiescence before owner teardown.

Qualification & Validation

The rework underwent rigorous, gate-driven qualification:

• Test Suite: 266 total tests, 262 passing, exact 4 canonical known failures (pre-existing upstream baseline suites), 0 unexpected failures.
• Characterization: 7/7 characterization benchmarks PASS.
• V2 Clean Build: Full compilation and shader validation PASS.
• Performance: Matched CPU frame dispatch (no CPU regression), composite GPU path verified without regression, and VRAM footprint maintained within strict thresholds.
• Full-Frame GPU Benchmark: Full end-to-end GPU frame timing benchmark is OUT OF SCOPE / NOT REQUIRED for this functional baseline release.

Scope & Waivers

• NRD Scope: NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) is experimental, quarantined behind
  t/reconstruction/experimental/nrd/, and OUT OF TARGET / NOT REQUIRED for production.
• Compatibility & Upscaling Waivers: Integration code for Distant Horizons (DH), Voxy LOD, AMD FSR 3, and Intel XeSS is present in the codebase where applicable, but runtime qualification of these paths is covered under authorized waivers and excluded from the production qualification baseline.

Building from Source

NVIDIA DLSS / NGX runtime binaries (
vngx_dlss.dll,
vngx_dlssd.dll) are proprietary and are not stored in the public source repository. Developers building from source must supply the supported DLSS_SDK environment variable pointing to the official NVIDIA DLSS SDK. Refer to README.md for build instructions.

Upstream

• Original Project: ComfyFluffy/Caustica
• Development Base: xysgottaken2/Caustica

For detailed architectural and task reports, refer to docs/rewrite/FINAL_REPORT.md and docs/rewrite/FINAL-GATE-result.md.

Verified Binary Release

• File: caustica-0.1.0.jar
• Source commit: a03fa611abb4bab2ef099d7ed4417ab852046b01
• SHA256: 6889c7eb8ceb0d8fa05d3032ad6aeef0e7cbd3f15cb2f849cb6ccb02ebe7638e