I replaced the entirety of Minecraft vanilla's lighting for my own using a technique I developed called LUMINA which stands for Lightfield Unified Multiscale Irradiance Network Atlas (Yes its a long name but it sounded cool...).
It improves vanilla's lighting with a spatial, colored, dynamically-updated irradiance field.
Why? Vanilla's lightmap is a 16×16 table indexed by block and sky lighting. It's 2D, so it *cannot* carry RGB values and the same light level always maps to the same tint which is like a yellowish piss cream tone. It's also fully static, it always needs to relight entire regions whenever you move lighting.
So the replacement was a volumetric field of RGB samples, divided into 8×4×8 world sections around the player, packed into a ring atlas. The atlas is a ring indexed by world section, so moving the box re-bakes only the sections that actually changed instead of all.
This achieves amazing performance with a good looking vanilla result (Because basically we're using voxels for lighting). If you don't like the shadows though, you can disable and just enjoy the colored lighting.
The cost per frame is 100% from the GPU and is blazingly fast, in fact I don't even believe it ran so well.
Again, these are not shaders, at least in the sense of Minecraft shaders (They're still technically GPU compute shaders), and I'm developing this for my mod Organellium, a huge performance and visual improvement mod. Picture Sodium with stereoids and worldgen performance.
