Distant Horizons for VulkanMod

v2.4.0-2.4.6+vm.4

First release as a standalone Fabric extension. Works alongside unmodified Distant Horizons 2.4.0+.

Added

• Supports MC 1.20.6 (VulkanMod 0.4.2) and MC 1.21.11 (VulkanMod 0.6.1) from a single codebase
• Ported Vulkan rendering backend from a DH source fork to a mixin-based extension mod
• All DH interception via mixins, no DH source modifications required
• Standalone jar installable alongside any compatible DH release

Included Features (from fork)

• Native Vulkan LOD rendering via VulkanMod
• DH-owned framebuffer with composite pipeline
• SSAO post-processing (2-pass, configurable)
• Fog post-processing (distance + height fog)
• Noise/dithering on LOD terrain
• Lightmap integration via VulkanMod's GL emulation
• Deterministic GPU memory management with buffer cache

MC Depth Comparison

• Full per-pixel MC depth comparison: LODs are hidden wherever Minecraft terrain has rendered, using MC's actual depth buffer values instead of a fixed clip distance.
• Shader-based depth reader pipeline (DhDepthReaderPipeline) copies MC's swapchain depth into a sampleable R32F texture. This works on all platforms, including NVIDIA Windows where the swapchain depth can't be directly sampled as a texture.
• MC depth debug visualization (mode 6) shows the actual depth buffer values, useful for diagnosing depth-related rendering issues (debug modes can be enabled via /dh-debug num).

Overdraw Prevention

• LOD overdraw prevention matches original DH behavior: LODs within MC's render distance are clipped based on the overdrawPrevention config setting.
• Hardware gl_ClipDistance clips LOD geometry in the vertex shader, less fragment shader cost for clipped geometry.
• Dithered fade transition in the fragment shader provides a smooth visual boundary between MC terrain and LODs when dithering is enabled.

Fade Mode Support

• Respects DH's vanillaFadeMode setting (NONE / SINGLE_PASS / DOUBLE_PASS):
  • NONE: LODs composite immediately with optional MC depth for debug mode.
  • SINGLE/DOUBLE: LODs composite first without MC depth, then deferredComposite adds MC depth occlusion after terrain renders.
• Unified rendering path for both MC versions — no version-specific branching in the composite logic.

Technical Details

• MC 1.20.6 compatibility required resolving mixin conflicts (DhVulkanMixinPlugin), preventing GL context poisoning (MixinLightMapWrapper), bypassing VM 0.4.2's hardcoded UINT16 index type, wiring custom uniform suppliers, and normalizing config value scaling.
• All version-specific code centralized in Compat.java using Manifold preprocessor directives.