S24(5) - VETR - RC1

 

                                                                       On Reflection...

S24(5) is finally getting its last dents hammered out and the final polish applied. I won’t rehash the entire changelog — SourceForge has that covered — but merging the 2026.1 base code has been… an adventure. I even made two heroic attempts to pull in the 2026.3 “visual fluff” branch. Both ended with a week of my life vanishing into the void.

From testing, I can say this much: 2026.3 looks shiny, but it breaks things. Spectacularly. The screenshot above? That’s how it should look — which tells you everything about how badly planar reflections are mangling existing content. Strike one.

Then there’s motion blur. In gamer terms, it’s the least‑wanted feature in the known universe. It costs performance, adds nothing to immersion, and now it also breaks build tools and highlighting, which flickers like it’s possessed. Sprinkle in some odd texture artefacts — probably related — and you get the picture.

Environment HDR? Fine. Water de-noise? Also fine. But tightly integrating them into the aforementioned chaos? Not so fine.

Reflections in general are “more correct,” I suppose, but also less impressive. A downgrade disguised as an upgrade.

So no, I couldn’t inflict this on you. For vetr, we’re sticking with 2026.1 and spending our time tuning, fixing ancient bugs, and generally making things behave. And a note to LL: if you comment something as “no longer used” on both client and server, but it is still used — please, for the love of all that is holy, update the comments. That little surprise cost me hours.

As mentioned in Beta 4, we’ve moved to vcpkg, and I’ve untangled a few LL features that were baked into libraries they absolutely shouldn’t have been. APR autokill, I’m looking directly at you.

Enjoy RC1.

Much love,
KL