1.85 Hotfix 4 : The Final Hotfix

This will most likely be the last update. Fortunately GrassFlow 2 will be releasing soon with an entirely new shader while keeping everything you know and love about the original, and improving on a few other things as well.

Anyway, here's your scheduled changes:

-Fixed incorrect normals in deferred Shader

-Fixed some small lighting/shadow issues

-Fixed URP Shadows

-Fixed small visual issues when initially adding multiple terrains and meshes

-Probably some smaller things I forgot to keep track of since it was difficult fixing these in parallel with developing GF2

1.84 Hotfix 3 : Hotfix with a Vengeance

-Fixed an issue with setups that did not have a main camera when initializing.

-Fixed shadows on newer URP versions

-Added ability to receive additional light shadows in newer URP versions

1.82 Hotfix 2 : Hotfix Harder

-Fixed implementation of new asynchronous LOD chunk culling to work properly with multiple camera setups. Before, it would likely cause gnarly flickering having more than one camera in the scene even if it wasn't rendering grass.

1.81 Hotfix

-Fixed a dumb bug introduced in the last version due to a typo causing terrain chunk bounds to be calculated incorrectly resulting in chunks being culled inappropriately. Oops..

1.8

-Whew, happy to finally be implementing these much needed updates

-Added ability to add multiple meshes to the same renderer

-Added mesh density normalizer feature

-Added asynchronous initialization feature

-Removed burst culling in favor of native C# multithreading tasks, now culling is just way faster always

-Removed ability to bake grass density to a separate mesh in favor of applying this change in-place, now called "Discard Empty Triangles"

-Refactored chunk data structure, should be more memory efficient/load faster

-Added ability to add additional meshes at runtime for procedural style terrains

-Added OnInitialized event

-Added automatic check and warning for URP project support

-Added specific warnings when required fields are missing

-Added warnings to painting info when no map is present

-Added more hotkeys for changing brush size and other painting functions (I'm sorry this took so long..)

-Added tooltips to the material editor

-Grass reloads automatically now after changing certain settings

-Added shader feature to choose which textures in the type atlas use LOD width scaling

-Shader efficiency improvements

-Fixed bug slightly offsetting terrain detail maps

-Minimum C# version moved up, really old versions of Unity may need experimental .net enabled

-Added easter egg

1.69

-Nice

-Fixed type-map painting to allow for proper 100% coverage of any type, rather than "mostly" covered by that type.

-Fixed bug causing type-map to save very improperly in linear color space.

-Added "Use Brush Opacity" option for type painting.

-Fixed up map creator not respecting "Use Noise" setting.

-Fixed map creator preview not showing on grass.

-Set up map creator to automatically set type map as a red single channel texture with no compression to fix compression related issues with type map.

-Fixed an error that could occur if a texture on a terrain layer was null.

-Some other minor fixes I forgot to keep track of, oops.

1.67

-Added automatic package importing for required packages when using the Burst feature.

-Made it so grass no longer goes over the edges of a terrain when using the terrain expansion property.

-Fixed up some more slight issues with domain reloading and constant forces.

-Fixed URP shadow sampling.

1.65

- Added a new GrassForce feature which allows for adding constant forces to push grass instead of needing to use the ripple system.

- Added a confirmation prompt for saving painted changes in certain situations.

- Fixed ripple functionality when using the experimental play mode setting to disable domain reloading.

- Added the missing "Flatness Adjust" property to the URP shader, fixing broken flatness on URP

- Fixed painting selection bug when using paint-continuously.

1.61

- Fixed default max bendable segments from 12 to 4 because i accidentally left it really high oops.

1.60

- Bendable Grass! I got a bit inspired by a new game 'Ghost of Tsushima' with its curved/bendy grass and it made me feel inadequate so I took extra advantage of the geometry shader to add the ability to have multiple segments per grass blade, and segments are reduced over distance. This feature looks really cool if you set it up right, and it doesn't hit performance quite as much as I expected.

- LOD step fading! This makes a HUGE difference in looks. Now when switching between amount of grass rendered it will fade in-between each step as they come in. This virtually eliminates grass pop-in, though there are still some minor artifacts that can't really be helped due to the way things are rendered with depth and shadows sometimes. Sorry it took so long to add this one.

- Added a custom GUI for the grass shader that adds foldouts for the different groups of settings. It also compresses the texture section a bit. The shader was getting quite crowded so I figured it would be good to finally add this in.

- Added specular and occlusion maps to deferred shader.

- Added a new example scene for bendable grass.

1.55

- Fixed (hopefully permanently) issue where sometimes the right shader variant was not included in builds resulting in no grass showing.

- Maybe also fixed grass appearing white in deferred builds in some cases.

- Fixed some brush errors after building sometimes.

- Prob some other small things.

1.52

- Added Undo/Redo support to painting. Also removed "Save On Stroke" option as it is no longer necessary.

- Slight improvements to how saving is handled. No longer saves when GrassFlow is deselected.

- Slight improvement to URP setup process.

- Fixed small bug introduced in v1.43 that broke the terrain splat-map feature.

1.50

- NEW Painting mode that lets you paint which grass texture to use from a texture atlas.

- NEW Experimental Universal Render Pipeline support.

- Added new shader setting that tilts grass away when looking down.

- Fixed incorrect normals in mesh mode. (Not sure how nobody ever noticed this and told me)

- Some minor changes to shader that may or may not be more efficient, idk.

1.44

- Burst mode properly refreshes on script reload now.

- No longer renders during prefab editing unless its part of the prefab.

- Fixed issue on 2017 version of package missing a function and breaking on newer versions of Unity.

1.43

- Fixed issue on certain hardware configurations where painting grass would turn the entire texture black.

- Fixed paint continuously mode initial paint strength spike.

- Fixed some issues with chunk bounds in mesh mode causing incorrect distance checks and manual culling.

- Added asynchronous multithreaded transform update method for newer C# versions.

- Minor performance optimizations.

1.41

- Fixed painting issue in newer versions of Unity.

- Fixed dumb issue causing invisible grass in builds because apparently ShaderLab's "UsePass" feature is broken in builds :)

Well... This is awkward. I ran out of the (10,000 character) space to write the changelog.

So now the versions below have been stripped of their details, and their dignity.

It's a dark day as the complete unaltered history of my current most proud creation is now: incomplete.

I know all of you reading this (yes, all one of you. [looking at you Robin]) must be so upset to hear of this.

It surely aches at your intense desire for historic knowledge on curiously arbitrary topics.

Where else will you find the information containing all of the amazing past improvements and fixes I made to this cool virtual grass tool?

Who knows, honestly.

Maybe someday a new archive will flourish, but today is not that day.

Now, by this point you might be wondering internally, "You do realize that you've now wasted (precisely) 1,558 characters on writing this obituary?"

Truthfully I'm insulted by this thought.

Both because it insults me that you'd think I can't understand the irony of this situation, and because you don't see the importance of what I'm doing here.

What happened to my changelog is an atrocity, obviously, but I cannot simply bow down to the will of the system.

Thus I am writing here my spite, and not just because writing is a fun pastime.

So what if I once also wrote a 105K word novel out of spite?

That's none of your concern.

Hmm? No, of course I won't stop flexing that. You talk to me after your write *your* novel.

Anyhow, I hereby leave the list of names of those we have tragically lost upon this day, in the great culling of changelog entries.

Honorably:

1.4

1.32

1.31

1.3

1.2

1.15

1.11

1.1

1.05

1.0

- First release

GrassFlow : DX11 Grass Shader