Hey all!
It's time for another update, and as decided from the recent poll, this time the update was focused on signs/hanging signs/boats
What's New?
It's not a very big update this time, all the sign textures are now complete except for bamboo_sign as I plan to do it in future along with bamboo_fence and bamboo_fence_gate.
Signs
When I started on the sign textures, I thought they would be easy, but after doing just one sign texture I realized that the sign textures are slightly different from one another, and making the texture round and seamless on every of its edge did cost me a lot of time. But not only this, instead of using Simplista's textures I re quantized the vanilla textures using a better algorithm I found recently, this new way not only improves my workflow speed a bit, but also the results are very good, although the signs color very slightly differ from planks and their respective log texture now, the colors on the signs are better and this new way of quantizing is something I will be using for Roundista's Bedrock Edition also which will result in slightly different textures but shall provide noticeably improved colors.
Minor font improvement
This is quite a story actually, as one thing just led to another, as I worked on signs I noticed that the font looks a bit more square on the signs than it does in the GUI, after a little checking I thought that upscaling the font a bit would give me better results, and it sure did but only for the GUI, after a little bit more digging I found out about Optifine HD font support which works after 1.16 which technically wouldn't be a problem as it used a different font texture in a different directory and the default texture would be used for fallback in other versions, But it just did not work, I tried Optifine installation and using mods which provides features from Optifine in Iris type installation, but in any installation it did not work, and when I say HD Font I don't mean upscaling would fix the problem or that's the way, because the problem seems to be how the font is blended on the signs, and the HD Font feature allows changing it, nonetheless the texture is there with a properties file now as it should be so if it's a mod issue hopefully it will be fixed in the future, I'll also get in touch with a few devs to know more about what can be done regarding this.
Fixing issues unknown before and improved pack icons
After completing the signs and messing with the font, I had some time to kill before releasing this update today, so I started looking for issues if there were any in the resource pack, and its add-ons, at first I couldn't really find any, but then I dumped the texture atlas to see how things were being loaded behind the scene and I did find a problem with the tinted_glass's 4th Compact-CTM variant, it was a little different from how it should be and was actually causing seams, not sure how it wasn't reported all this time, but it has been fixed.
After that, I still had some time so when dumping the atlas I noticed that the pack.png (texture pack icons) I used were very high scale, well they were for a reason like that as I knew Minecraft would downscale them anyway but as I was messing with sampling for font a few hours earlier I thought maybe I can improve them slightly by down scaling them beforehand which might give me better results, and sure it did, it's a very small improvement but an improvement nonetheless.
What's next?
Hanging signs and boats, I will be putting them in the next month's poll again for sure.
As always, thanks to all the Patreon and Gumraod supporters, I'll try my best to provide you more quality updates of this project and take account of any feedback.
I hope you all will like this update, and make sure to subscribe so you won't miss out the next one!