Colours & Tints

In order to add new colors and tints for Advanced Colored Lighting (ACL), .json files can be added under folders named colors and tints.

The code will be injected into /shaders/lib/colors/blocklightColors.glsl.

JSON Format

There is only one field that needs to be filled in, which is the code field. It contains a single line of GLSL code that outputs a vec4 (or a vec3 for tints).

The first 3 components are the RGB components of the color and the last component is the amount of additional light that the block should emit (in addition to normal Minecraft blocklight). The last component should not be too large, at most about 0.2.

Take Note

When defining your own colours, if you aren’t able to see them, try increasing the magnitude of the first three components (the RGB values). This makes them stronger. In addition, try and place your block inside a cave, rather than having it exposed to skylight. That makes the blocklight colour more obvious (and helps you check that its working).

Injections

Additional code can be injected into the top section of /shaders/lib/colors/blocklightColorsACL.glsl by placing .glsl files within the colors/injects folder. This can be used to define additional processing before the code within the .json.

For example, if you want to have an option to change the color of light emitted, you can do something like the following.

#ifdef CHANGE_COLOR_OPTION
    vec3 yourColor = <your color>
#else
    vec3 yourColor = <some other color>
#endif

{
  "code": "vec4(yourColor, 0.0)"
}

Specifying a Blocklight

Take Note

Ensure that your names for each color and tint do not overlap. If they do, the name for the color will take precedence as the shader patcher checks the list of colors first, before checking the list of tints if no valid color with the given name is found.

After creating your blocklight colors, you will need to assign them to a block. To achieve this, we can use the blocklight parameter within the shader JSONs for opaque and translucent blocks. There are 4 possible ways of specifying the blocklight.

If there are no conditions on which blocklight colors to apply, we can apply the lighting just by itself:

{
  ...,
  "blocklight": "minecraft:candle"
}

If there is a single condition that determines whether or not a single color is applied, we can specify the condition and blocklight color as such:

{
  ...,
  "blocklight": {
    "color": "minecraft:candle",
    "conditions": [
      "DO_CANDLE_LIGHTING"
    ]
  }
}

If there are multiple conditions that determine which colors are applied, we can specify the condition and corresponding blocklight color in a list as such:

{
  ...,
  "blocklight": [
    {
	  "color": "minecraft:red_candle",
	  "conditions": [
	    "DO_COLORED_CANDLE_LIGHTING"
	  ]
    },
    {
      "color": "minecraft:candle"
    }
  }
}

The lack of a condition being specified in the last element of the list means that if all previous conditions are false, then the final specified blocklight color will be used.

In any of these cases, if different colours need to be applied for different materials within the same material shader, the single color parameter can be swapped out for a list of blocklight colors.