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Rendering validation

The rendering overhaul is validated against an unmodified Minecraft Java Edition 26.2 client. The goal is a recognizable and useful structure preview, not a pixel-identical replacement for Minecraft's complete renderer.

Reference scene

The manual reference scene uses a fixed daytime camera and contains:

  • a sealed glass tank filled with source water;
  • exposed bottom and top slabs, stairs, an open trapdoor, and a fence with waterlogged=true;
  • a contained lava column behind glass;
  • a roofed alcove containing glowstone, hard shadow transitions, and occluded corners;
  • opaque, cutout, emissive, and translucent blocks viewed together.

The same categories are present in the demo validation scene. The demo uses Minecraft 26.2 block models, textures, and animation metadata.

Results

Area Minecraft 26.2 reference Deepslate result
Water surface Source blocks sit below the full-block ceiling; flowing edges use different corner heights. Neighboring fluid states determine exposed faces and averaged corner heights. Internal faces between compatible fluids are culled.
Flow direction Flowing water rotates its surface texture with the direction of travel. Flow vectors rotate the flowing-water UVs; still surfaces use the still-water texture.
Glass and water Glass remains readable in front of water without writing transparent fragments into the depth buffer. Translucent chunks, entities, and their contained quads are rendered in a shared back-to-front pass with depth writes disabled, preserving the glass/water relationship as the camera moves.
Waterlogged blocks Water occupies only the unfilled portion of slabs, stairs, and trapdoors. Slabs, stairs, and trapdoors use shape-aware clipped fluid volumes. Other waterlogged shapes retain a conservative approximation.
Lava and light-emitting blocks Lava textures animate and remain visually bright. Texture animation metadata updates the atlas at runtime, and emissive geometry bypasses directional darkening.
Sky and block light Daylight enters exposed columns and loses one level as it spreads under cover; light-emitting blocks propagate local light up to level 15. A baked two-channel light volume propagates sky and block light through the structure, including configurable opacity and emission per block.
Smooth lighting and ambient occlusion The four corners of a face blend nearby light values, while opaque side and corner blocks darken creases. Each rendered vertex averages the four adjacent light cells and applies Minecraft-style corner occlusion before the fragment shader's light curve.
Cutout blocks Transparent texels are discarded rather than blended. Cutout geometry uses alpha testing in its own render pass.

The comparison confirmed that the overhaul fixes the original failure modes targeted by this fork: flat full-block liquids, internal fluid faces, water overlapping partial blocks, unstable glass/water depth ordering, static fluid textures, and dim lava.

Minecraft 26.2 lighting cross-check

The baked-light implementation was also checked against the installed, unobfuscated Minecraft Java 26.2 client rather than tuned only by eye:

  • LightCoordsUtil.getLightCoords raises a rendered block's block-light coordinate to at least its own emission level. Deepslate does the same, so glowstone is rendered at level 15 instead of inheriting level 14 from adjacent air.
  • CardinalLighting.DEFAULT uses 1.0 for up, 0.5 for down, 0.8 for north/south, and 0.6 for west/east. The vertex shader uses those exact directional factors.
  • Minecraft's lightmap.fsh applies level / (4 - 3 * level) separately to sky and block light, adds the two colored channels, and clamps the result. Deepslate now follows that composition instead of taking the brighter channel only.
  • The stable block-light factor is 1.4, and the default block-light tint is #FFD88C. Deepslate omits only Minecraft's tiny random light flicker so static schematic previews do not shimmer.

Visual checks against Minecraft captures with smooth lighting enabled cover exposed faces, floor/wall junctions, enclosed corners, and roofed daylight. Glowstone and lava emission behavior is additionally checked against the client light-coordinate and lightmap implementations. Opaque neighbors affect ambient occlusion but no longer contribute a second zero-light penalty, which removes the former black bands along walls.

Default block emission is a snapshot of every emitting block registered by the 26.2 client. It includes state-dependent sources such as lit furnaces and redstone lamps, candle count, waterlogged sea pickles, charged respawn anchors, copper-bulb oxidation, trial-spawner state, vault state, and the 26.2 copper torches and lanterns. Explicit resource-pack light_emission flags still take precedence for custom or modded blocks.

Automated coverage

The test suite covers:

  • render-layer classification and state ordering;
  • neighbor-aware fluid faces, corner heights, and flow UVs;
  • waterlogged slab, stair, and trapdoor clipping;
  • animated texture metadata and frame selection;
  • Minecraft 26.2 top-flow rotation, downward side-flow UVs, underside orientation, and the exact water/lava animation sequences;
  • transparent sorting and renderer state transitions;
  • sky light, water attenuation, lateral light spread, and block-light falloff;
  • smooth per-corner light sampling and ambient-occlusion levels;
  • a dense 16 x 16 x 16 fluid-section performance benchmark.
  • a 32 x 32 x 32 combined sky- and block-light propagation benchmark.
  • structured-clone-safe schematic snapshots and cancellable Worker loading;
  • cooperative multi-chunk building and bounded structure queries;
  • entity lighting, appearance-state caching, and entity render-layer selection;
  • global translucent mesh ordering and camera-thresholded quad re-sorting.

The demo is also built in CI so resource or integration regressions fail the workflow.

Deliberate differences

The following remain outside this renderer's current accuracy target:

  • biome-dependent water tint;
  • Minecraft's dimension-specific sky rules, time-of-day brightness, colored light, dynamic entity shadows, fog, and post-processing;
  • exact per-fragment ordering where translucent surfaces physically intersect;
  • exact water clipping for every possible waterlogged block model;
  • byte-for-byte reproduction of Minecraft's internal flowing-fluid UV calculation.

These differences do not prevent a player from inspecting a machine or building schematic, but they should be considered before using the renderer for cinematic or pixel-comparison output.