Dev news : missing signs

I’ve been made aware that the two nether-based signs are missing from Vanillaccurate. Indeed the warped sign and the crimson sign textures haven’t been done so far.

I started fixing that oversight today. I started with the warped signs which I wanted to behave like the stem and planks of the same essence.

Which means the plank itself would have reflective, moist-looking tendrils while the stem/post itself would have some emissivity.

I also wanted to check how shaders behaved with materials (normals, heightmaps, PBR-data) on entities such as signs. Turns out it’s highly variable, some shaders supporting most features while some others supporting none.

The king of the entity materials is undoubtedly BSL, which supports all features present on blocks on entities as well (not even Complementary seems to do so, I haven’t checked AstraLex). It’s the only shader supporting parallax mapping on those alongside ProjectLUMA (the latter doesn’t seem to support emissives on entities though).

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Most other high-end shaders support almost all features barring heightmaps. It’s the case for Kappa v4.1 T2 and SEUS PTGI HRR 2.1 with GFME patch v1.5 for example

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Some other shaders support emission but not normals, or normals but not roughness… It can vary wildly. For example here Fraction does support normal mapping and emission but does not have reflections/roughness support. MollyVX seems to support normals and roughness as well as emission but the normals/PBR seem to have some sort of glitch as if some vectors were inverted.

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Some other very well known shaders don’t support any of those features on entities at all. It’s the case for Chocapic v9.1 Extreme PBR test 2 or Loop.

Nostalgia -being one of my favorite survival shaders- doesn’t seem to support normal mapping on entities, but emission and roughness is supported though.

One last note on emission. There’s no universal standard in how an emissive map should look or how strong it should be or what its response curve should look like. This leads to situations where shaders will exhibit wildly different behaviors with regards to emissive.
The emissive map showcased here is very dim: the average emissive level being 14% (or 35/255). Shaders like Kappa are so intense (even with blocklight set to the minimum AKA 0.1 – the indirect emissive response curve only applies to diffuse not the block emission per se) they leave no room for fine adjustments on gradients (any value higher than a couple % will result in a super intense emission). Nostalgia feels a bit more reasonable here, while fayer3’s rendition feels too dim. SEUS HRR with GeForceLegend’s patch look great but also feel too intense, remember we’re talking 14% emission here.
The results closer to what I’d expect when designing these blocks would be BSL or Fraction.

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