Better Foliage 2.7.0 (for Forge 1.16.5) released!


Even though there's not much difference that's readily apparent, this is a major release with some huge internal changes. Some core mechanisms (handling of block colors, layers, block configuration) were completely overhauled to make the mod more robust, and provide a steady foundation moving forward.
Graphical glitches like bad transparency, and mismatched colors should be much rarer now, and easier for me to fix when it does happen.
There's one new visual feature: Crimson Nylium and Warped Nylium in the Nether will have mycelium strands on top.
The 2 most common biome mods, BOP and BYG, should be fully supported. I will add more mod support as time goes on.
My immediate focus now will be to port these changes over to 1.16.5 Fabric. A 1.17 port for both loaders will come after that.

Better Foliage is my re-implementation of some features of one of my favourite 1.6.4 mods: Better Grass & Leaves, that was sadly discontinued after 1.7.2 came along. It makes your plant life a bit more verdant and fluffy by drawing some extra stuff on trees, grass blocks, cacti, lilypads. Also adds reeds and algae in water.

Better Foliage是我最喜欢的1.6.4 mod《更好的草和树叶》(它在1.7.2断更了)的一些特点的重新移植。Better Foliage使你的MC添加更加苍翠蓬松的树叶，草方块，仙人掌，莲叶；还增加了在水中的芦苇和藻类。

如果你找到一个模组，有不兼容的树叶，告诉我，我会搞定的！

Although you might want to turn off the short grass with shaderpacks using cast shadows: because of the shadow map resolution the grass looks like it is floating slightly above the block (it doesn't).
It also tweaks the block IDs seen by shader programs, so that all leaf blocks are treated as vanilla leaves, and all grassy things (flower, crops, sugarcanes, etc.) as tall grass. This will make them wave in the wind (with shaders that have this feature) without having to manually edit the shaderpacks. BetterFoliage's short grass and reeds will also have wind effects applied.
This feature is configurable: the config files classesCrops.cfg and classesLeaves.cfg hold the list of block classes that will act as leaves or tall grass. Lines beginning with a "-" are blacklist entries.

Source code for Better Foliage is provided under the MIT License.


Additional restrictions apply for distributing binaries:


Youmaydistribute Better Foliage as part of a modpack, but youmay notuse monetized links. (Adfly, Adfocus, etc.)
Youmay notdistribute the Better Foliage binary by itself. Please link to the file here on CurseForge.
Otherwise, you may freely use Better Foliage as part of a public or private modpack. If you do, I ask you to provide a link to this page (this is not mandatory).

As the questions keep piling up, it's time for a quick announcement.
My output has always come in bursts, and this time is no different. I've pushed really hard for close to 2 months on the ports, but IRL stuff has caught up with me again. I also might have burned myself out just a little bit. I really wanted to properly finish up the two 1.14 versions before I lose my momentum, but it is what it is.
The situation is now exacerbated by two factors:
- I've relocated to my parents' place out of the big city, and don't have my own computer with me (thanks a lot, coronavirus)
- I've started actually playing Minecraft again *gasp*
The TL;DR of all of this is that there hasn't been any work done on Better Foliage for the last 2 weeks, and won't be for the next month or so. I fully understand how frustrating it is when you're waiting for a mod to update - I've been on that side often enough - but please have some patience.
Now that I've properly let you down, some information:
To configure the Forge 1.14 version, you'll have to manually edit the config file. Unfortunately I don't know where your config file is, I only know where mine is. It depends a lot on which launcher you use, and how you have it set up. Do a file search for betterfoliage-client.toml and see what turns up.
Fabric 1.15 and 1.16 will be supported of course - after I finish up 1.14. Most likely you won't get away with just editing the mod metadata, it will have to be recompiled. Depending on what changed since 1.14, code might have to be changed too.
If you're having rendering problems, crashes, incompatibilities, etc. please submit a bug report on Github. Yes, yes, I know, it's pretty backed up. But issues reported here in the comments will definitely be forgotten.
That's all for now, guys. Stay healthy. Stay indoors. Play Minecraft.


20.3.21

Well, obviously it's not the end of January, so it's safe to assume I've hit some unexpected roadblocks :)
Some differences between Forge and Fabric seemed quite small and innocent at first, but the implications quickly bloomed and I realized I've bitten off more than I was prepared to chew. Also, IRL stuff.
Even though this version is not quite feature complete, I decided to release it anyway to get some early feedback, before I shift priorities back to Forge, and fixing the bugs you guys reported over the last month.
This version requires Fabric API and Fabric Language Kotlin. Optifine is supported through Optifabric, but other renderers are not.


Known issues:
- Round Logs do not work
- Grass and leaves do not have shader wind
Contrary to the Forge version, there IS a configuration GUI, but no keybinding yet. To access it, you must install Mod Menu, bring up its mod list, select Better Foliage in the list, then click on the gear button.
Tested to work with:
- Fabric Loader 0.7.3+build.176
- Fabric API 0.4.2+build.246-1.14
- Fabric Language Kotlin 1.3.61+build.1
- Mod Menu 1.7.16.1.14.4+build.128
- Optifabric 0.7.1
- Optifine 1.14.4 HD U F5

It's also possible to supply leaf textures by resource pack. To create packs, the mapping you need to use is: the leaf at assets/MOD/textures/blocks/path/to/texture.png has its round texture at assets/betterfoliage/textures/blocks/MOD/path/to/texture.png

General Assets
Better Foliage - having started out as a replacement for Better Grass & Leaves - retains the texture naming scheme of its predecessor for most assets (anything besides leaves and leaf particles). This is to ensure backward compatibility without resource packs having to make changes.


Most of these assets support up to 16 variations, indexed 0..15 at the end of the file name. The actual texture used for drawing is chosen in a random but deterministic way. This is to provide variety, and to break up any repeating visual patterns.





Here is a list of assets which support variations:


better_algae_X.png


better_cactus_arm_X.png (part of the cactus sticking out)


better_coral_X.png (part of the coral sticking out)


better_crust_X.png (flat part of the coral)


better_grass_long_X.png (used - ironically - for Short Grass)


better_grass_short_X.png (currently unused, but retained from BG&L)


better_grass_side_X.png (used for Hanging Grass)


better_grass_snowed_X.png (used for Short Grass with snow)


better_lilypad_flower_X.png


better_lilypad_roots_X.png


better_mycel_X.png (Short Grass for mycelium blocks)


better_mycel_side_X.png (currently unused)


better_netherrack_X.png (netherrack Hanging Vines)


better_reed_X.png


rising_soul_X.png (Rising Soul particles - head)





There are also 2 textures with no variations:


better_cactus.png (the center part of cactus)


soul_track.png (Rising Soul particles - trail)





When in doubt, look inside the Better Foliage JAR to see how things are set up.

Leaf particle textures are similar to basic assets in that they allow you to define up to 16 variations which will be spawned randomly.


There are 3 types of leaf particles (default, jungle, spruce), but you can define your own leaf types. To do this, you need to have a mapping file assets/betterfoliage/leafTextureMappings.cfg in your pack. Here is what the default one looks like:


// Vanilla
spruce=spruce
jungle=jungle


// Biomes O' Plenty
fir=spruce


Lines starting with // are comments, and are ignored.


Otherwise, lines are expected to have a mapping in the format of TEXTURENAME=TYPE or DOMAIN:TEXTURENAME=TYPE. The way it works is, for every leaf block using a texture that contains TEXTURENAME in its name, leaf particles spawned from that block will be of type TYPE, and use filenames of assets/betterfoliage/textures/blocks/falling_leaf_TYPE_X.png (where X is an index between 0...15). Using the DOMAIN option, you can restrict the matching to only consider textures under assets/DOMAIN.


All leaf blocks with no mapping specified in this file will have the type default.


For example, Biomes O Plenty fir leaves have the block texture assets/biomesoplenty/textures/blocks/leaves_fir_fast.png or assets/biomesoplenty/textures/blocks/leaves_fir_fancy.png, depending on graphics settings. Because the name contains fir, the type of the leaf block will be spruce, and spawn the appropriate particles. All other leaf blocks from other mods which contain the word fir in its texture name will also be of type spruce. If the last rule in the file had been biomesoplenty:fir=spruce, then the rule would only match fir leaves from Biomes O Plenty (to be precise, textures under assets/biomesoplenty), but not other mods.


There are no restrictions on leaf particles - you can have any number of leaf types, textures can be any resolution you wish, and they can also be animated.

Round Leaves
Better Foliage creates its own textures for Round Leaves in order to have out-of-the-box compatibility with all mods. This gives adequate results in most cases, but things may start to look weird at higher resolutions. Therefore you also have the option of providing your own custom textures to use for Round Leaves and not rely on the generation process.


Similar to the basic textures which can have variations, Round Leaf textures have 4 "built-in" variations, as they are randomly rotated a multiple of 90° when drawing.





Texture Generation
The generation process is actually very simple. The textures of each leaf block are tiled in a 2x2 grid, and then a transparency mask is applied (except for Shaders Mod normal and specular maps) to basically strip away the corners and leave a round outline. This means that generated Round Leaf textures are always double the size of the original leaf texture.


The transparency mask is located at assets/betterfoliage/textures/blocks/leafmask_X_default.png, where X is the size of the leafmask. When generating, Better Foliage first looks for a leafmask of double the size of the leaf texture. If it is not found, progressively smaller masks are tried, halving the size each time. That means if you have a 64x leaf texture, first leafmask_128_default.png is tried, then leafmask_64_default.png, leafmask_32_default.png, etc. This way, you can have a transparency mask with a resolution matched with your other textures, but things will work fine if you don't want to provide it. If a smaller leafmask is used, it will of course be scaled up (and look quite pixelated).


Because vanilla textures (and most default mod textures) are 16x, Better Foliage only comes with a leafmask_32_default.png by default.


There are a few other leafmasks to be found in the JAR, but don't let them confuse you. These are only leftovers from a feature that was dropped.



Custom Textures
Providing custom Round Leaf textures is just a matter of having the texture in a specific location. Normally, block textures can be found in the following hierarchy:


assets/MOD/textures/blocks/TEXTURE.png


Where MOD and TEXTURE are of course just placeholders for the mod and texture names. Before generating a Round Leaf texture for a leaf block, Better Foliage will look at the following location:


assets/betterfoliage/MOD/textures/blocks/TEXTURE.png


If a texture is found there, it will be used instead of generating. Basically, you provide the Round Leaf textures in the same hierarchy, just shoved under assets/betterfoliage instead of simply assets. This works the exact same with Optifine CTM textures.


Here are a few real-life examples to make it more obvious:


assets/minecraft/textures/blocks/leaves_oak.png
becomes
assets/betterfoliage/minecraft/textures/blocks/leaves_oak.png
assets/biomesoplenty/textures/blocks/leaves_pinkcherry_fancy.png
becomes
assets/betterfoliage/biomesoplenty/textures/blocks/leaves_pinkcherry_fancy.png
assets/minecraft/mcpatcher/ctm/organic_and_soft_material/leaves/aleaves/1.png
becomes
assets/betterfoliage/minecraft/mcpatcher/ctm/organic_and_soft_material/leaves/aleaves/1.png