Zenith: Windlands' own far rendering, replacing Voxy

Mountains on the horizon, a forest across the river, a player flying way past the loaded part of the world. In Windlands all of that ran on two mods: Voxy drew the distant terrain, and farplayers, a mod made for Windlands, showed players where regular Minecraft can no longer see them. Voxy is leaving the modpack. Its place goes to Zenith, a far rendering mod built for Windlands from scratch.

Why not Voxy

Voxy is a good mod on its own. It just didn't fit Windlands in every way.

With shaders on, there was a visible seam where far rendering began: shadows cut off and distant grass changed color. That can't be fixed inside Voxy, because it simply doesn't hand the far terrain to the shader's shadows. It also needs a graphics card with modern OpenGL. Because of that there was no far rendering on Mac at all, and on weak computers it had to be turned off. And the first time you joined, the world around you filled in bit by bit, right in front of you.

What Zenith changes

• To the shader, the near part of the far view looks like ordinary blocks: same light, same shadows, same grass color. No seam at the border.
• Zenith is built with old OpenGL in mind, the version that Mac and integrated graphics run on. The far view will show up on low graphics settings too, not only on high ones.
• The far view is prepared ahead of time and ships with the launcher. You can't build in the world, it only changes with updates, so there's no reason to compute the distance on the fly. The server doesn't carry that load, and an update only downloads the pieces that changed.
• Glowing blocks stay visible from far away.

farplayers stays and already works together with Zenith, so distant players are visible across the whole horizon.

Where it stands

The first version of Zenith is already in the launcher instead of Voxy. The server is still closed while testing goes on. There's plenty left to do: under shaders the distant horizon isn't fully hooked up yet, and small artifacts in the distance get fixed from version to version. Next on the plan are the full horizon with shaders and a separate fast mode for modern graphics cards that hands almost all the work to the GPU.

Which graphics preset to pick for your computer is covered in the settings guide.