I think you misread my comment. I wasn't asking IF you wanted them, I was asking WHY you wanted them.
Because i want to see what does your 1st Version look like. I didn't get to try it & i don't know that your pack exists, until you commented on Chocapic13's Shaders thread.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
Because i want to see what does your 1st Version look like. I didn't get to try it & i don't know that your pack exists, until you commented on Chocapic13's Shaders thread.
By 1st version, are you referring to the first released version, or versions before that where I was still learning how shaders worked? Cause the first released version looks pretty much the same as the current version. Not a lot of major changes have been made since then that radically altar how things look.
Added clouds! Attempt number 1: They look quite minecrafty and square at the moment. I will probably tweak them many times in the future, but the framework for them is now in place.
Finally fixed transparent stuff not rendering through water
Revamped held lighting system: different items now emit different colors of light, and some items will also flicker with time. Additionally, zooming in with optifine now increases the distance held lights are effective for.
Enabled hand sway by default
Sunset fog colors are now less overwhelming when it rains
Improved shadow colors at sunset (now matches the color of the sunset instead of being always blue-tinted)
Fixed border between oceans and infinite oceans being visible when refraction is disabled
I know you said that you won't support earlier version of Minecraft, but you also said to report them and you'll see about fixing them.
So, that's what I'm doing! This picture shows a pretty severe issue and a not-so-severe one.
The first, and worst, is the black stuff on water.
The second one (Which might not even be able to be fixed, at least not easily) is the transparency of the glass against the water. I assume it's due to the blur only being calculated once, which means the glass blur takes priority simply because it happens first.
Speaking of glass, it's also invisible underwater, but only from certain positions...
There are also issues with Spiders and Endermen not rendering right, and their shadows surprisingly also do not render correctly.
Sunset also seems extremely red, but I don't know yet if that's intended. Otherwise, I especially love the clouds and infinite water, those are really nice touches.
This is all in Minecraft V1.7.10, so I don't know if you'll even take a look at the issue.
I know you said that you won't support earlier version of Minecraft, but you also said to report them and you'll see about fixing them.
So, that's what I'm doing! This picture shows a pretty severe issue and a not-so-severe one.
The first, and worst, is the black stuff on water.
The second one (Which might not even be able to be fixed, at least not easily) is the transparency of the glass against the water. I assume it's due to the blur only being calculated once, which means the glass blur takes priority simply because it happens first.
Speaking of glass, it's also invisible underwater, but only from certain positions...
There are also issues with Spiders and Endermen not rendering right, and their shadows surprisingly also do not render correctly.
Sunset also seems extremely red, but I don't know yet if that's intended. Otherwise, I especially love the clouds and infinite water, those are really nice touches.
This is all in Minecraft V1.7.10, so I don't know if you'll even take a look at the issue.
The stripy black stuff on water is not something I've seen before, I'll have to try it in older versions.
Transparency *should* be working in the current version. There used to be a bug where nothing transparent would render at all behind water, but I fixed that in V1.6.0. You are correct though that blur is only calculated once, and whatever's in front takes priority.
Entity shadows have been explained before:
Entity shadows I'm not entirely sure why they're broken. For some reason their light levels are much higher than they should be, and due to the way I handle things, light "rendering" is done AFTER normal rendering, which means light levels always overwrite whatever happens to be behind them. For opaque things this doesn't matter, since you can't see through them anyway, but transparent things are… problematic. I've (mostly) fixed this for things like stained glass/water by rendering them separately from everything else, but entities are rendered with the rest of the world, which means the "overwriting" issue will persist for any entity with a transparent texture. I *could* change this to render entities the same way I render water, but that just means more duplicated, messy code that will be harder to maintain. Plus, entity shadows and slimes are the only things I'm aware of that are affected by this, so I usually just play with entity shadows turned off, and kill slimes on sight
Spiders and endermen are… brighter than they should be, so I'll take a look at that.
Sunsets are intended to be that red. I think it looks pretty Should I turn it down slightly?
Lastly, the fact that water is so dark behind stained glass (in the first screenshot) is due to my clear water algorithm. Basically, the purpose of this is to overwrite light levels underwater to avoid pitch black lakes/oceans. The problem is that that requires knowing if any given pixel is actually water or not. And due to the limitations of shaders, this means that anything in the alpha pass (stained glass, portals, slime blocks, ice, etc…) will overwrite that water flag if it happens to be in front of water. Therefore it doesn't think that the stained glass is water, so it doesn't brighten things. This whole system has its flaws (try going underwater in a cave), but unfortunately this is the best I can do with minecraft's rendering engine.
The stripy black stuff on water is not something I've seen before, I'll have to try it in older versions.
Transparency *should* be working in the current version. There used to be a bug where nothing transparent would render at all behind water, but I fixed that in V1.6.0. You are correct though that blur is only calculated once, and whatever's in front takes priority.
Entity shadows have been explained before:
Spiders and endermen are… brighter than they should be, so I'll take a look at that.
Sunsets are intended to be that red. I think it looks pretty Should I turn it down slightly?
Lastly, the fact that water is so dark behind stained glass (in the first screenshot) is due to my clear water algorithm. Basically, the purpose of this is to overwrite light levels underwater to avoid pitch black lakes/oceans. The problem is that that requires knowing if any given pixel is actually water or not. And due to the limitations of shaders, this means that anything in the alpha pass (stained glass, portals, slime blocks, ice, etc…) will overwrite that water flag if it happens to be in front of water. Therefore it doesn't think that the stained glass is water, so it doesn't brighten things. This whole system has its flaws (try going underwater in a cave), but unfortunately this is the best I can do with minecraft's rendering engine.
I'm glad to see that you'll try and fix the issues, because I'd love to use this more generally, especially with the performance. I usually only use shaders if I want to see how something looks with them, because otherwise I need to play at ~20 fps, but with this I kept a pretty steady 60! The infinite ocean in particular would fit beautifully with my infinite-ocean modpack! You go build a ship and pirate things, but anyway, more to the point:
Unfortunately, there's no option in older versions of Minecraft to turn the entity shadows off, and believe me, I looked. I guess I could make a resource pack to replace the texture with a blank one, though.
My issue wasn't that it's dark per se, but that no water effects were happening behind the glass.
Perhaps you could try doing two blur passes? That should solve most issues, since it's not exactly common to have something like five rows of stained glass over water, but if the glass actually overwrites the flag in Minecraft's rendering engine, then that's much more complicated.
Is that water-cave issue from the clear lighting? I'm not sure if you're aware, but Optifine comes with an option to make water clear, found under the 'Quality' tab. You can see how water behind stained glass looks with the option on in the attachment.
Also, I just discovered the different-coloured lighting from held items. Really cool, but it's a shame you can't do that for placed light sources, and even more a shame that shaders aren't compatible with the Coloured Lighting mod. In fact, just for fun, I took a screenshot of what happens with the mod installed. Spoiler Warning: It's not pretty, but it's also kinda pretty. (For the record, I was in a forest when that was taken.)
On a bit more of a side-note, would it be possible to turn the grass colour variations down a bit? It really looks very weird red... It doesn't look like the grass itself is red, but that a red overlay is on it. The other minor brightness variations add a huge amount to otherwise monochrome biome foliage, though! It's just the redness.
I will admit, however, that it kinda works in certain biomes, but the red still just seems too much.
I'm glad to see that you'll try and fix the issues, because I'd love to use this more generally, especially with the performance. I usually only use shaders if I want to see how something looks with them, because otherwise I need to play at ~20 fps, but with this I kept a pretty steady 60! The infinite ocean in particular would fit beautifully with my infinite-ocean modpack! You go build a ship and pirate things, but anyway, more to the point:
Unfortunately, there's no option in older versions of Minecraft to turn the entity shadows off, and believe me, I looked. I guess I could make a resource pack to replace the texture with a blank one, though.
My issue wasn't that it's dark per se, but that no water effects were happening behind the glass.
Perhaps you could try doing two blur passes? That should solve most issues, since it's not exactly common to have something like five rows of stained glass over water, but if the glass actually overwrites the flag in Minecraft's rendering engine, then that's much more complicated.
Is that water-cave issue from the clear lighting? I'm not sure if you're aware, but Optifine comes with an option to make water clear, found under the 'Quality' tab. You can see how water behind stained glass looks with the option on in the attachment.
Also, I just discovered the different-coloured lighting from held items. Really cool, but it's a shame you can't do that for placed light sources, and even more a shame that shaders aren't compatible with the Coloured Lighting mod. In fact, just for fun, I took a screenshot of what happens with the mod installed. Spoiler Warning: It's not pretty, but it's also kinda pretty. (For the record, I was in a forest when that was taken.)
On a bit more of a side-note, would it be possible to turn the grass colour variations down a bit? It really looks very weird red... It doesn't look like the grass itself is red, but that a red overlay is on it. The other minor brightness variations add a huge amount to otherwise monochrome biome foliage, though! It's just the redness.
I will admit, however, that it kinda works in certain biomes, but the red still just seems too much.
Unfortunately, that water flag controls all water effects, including refractions/reflections/fog/etc… As much as I'd like to first render the terrain, then the water (applying all its effects) THEN render other transparent stuff in front of the water, that's just not possible in this case. It would take fundamental changes to minecraft's rendering engine to accommodate that, which means a dedicated mod which is likely to be incompatible with a lot of other stuff.
The same is true for blur effects. At the time when water is being rendered, it doesn't know what the terrain behind it looks like, so it can't apply any blur effects itself. And when water is finished rendering, so is all the stained glass in front of it, so nothing that renders after THAT can know it needs to apply water effects to begin with. My advice: avoid using stained glass and water in the same build where possible.
Yes, the water-cave issue is also caused by the clear water option. And the reason I implemented it at all instead of just using optifine's clear water is two fold. 1: Optifine's clear water only works to a depth of 16 blocks. It does this by changing the skylight absorbed by water from 4 to 1. This means that avoids the cave issue, but the bottoms of deep oceans are still dark. My system allows for deep oceans to remain bright. If optifine added an "even clearer water" option that makes water absorb 0 light levels per layer, I will not deny that that would be a big improvement over my system. The 2nd reason I'm not using optifine's option is that it's… glitchy. Sometimes it works correctly, and other times some locations have incorrect light levels. This can be easily seen, because these areas always form diagonal-ish shapes. It looks absolutely awful in my opinion.
I wish I could do colored placed lights too, but sadly the data about which block is actually emitting the light simply doesn't exist for placed lights like it does for held lights. Held lights have a uniform called heldItemId, which I use to determine the color of the light, but placed lights ONLY have light level, not ID data. Plus, what happens when multiple different blocks are illuminating the same thing? I don't even want to think about the logic required to make that work.
I specifically put in a check to make sure that grass can't be more red than it is green, but it was an absolute system, not a proportional one. So in the biome you're in, where grass is MUCH darker than usual, the threshold for being too red wasn't restrictive enough. This has now been fixed. If it's still too dry for you, you can also try changing the humidity offset option in gbuffers_terrain.fsh. (you'll have to manually edit this file because shaders don't support in-game options in 1.7.10
Also, I did manage to reproduce and fix both the water stripes and spider/enderman lighting, and in the process, I discovered that entity shadows weren't handled the way I thought they were, so they're fixed now too in version 1.7.1:
Fixed dark stripy patterns appearing on water in older MC versions
Fixed spiders and endermen being too bright
Fixed entity shadows being too bright
Fixed grass becoming too red under certain circumstances
Well, I'm pleased to report that everything is awesome!
The only things I can think to suggest now would be some kind of infinite lava or cave effect in the nether akin to the Overworld's ocean, and maybe experimenting with doing effects based on the positions of blocks. In particular, I'd love to see if you could, say, generate a point light (The same as you're doing for held items) at a specific block or entity, but I don't know if shaders have that capability.
Does the shaded side of blocks change based on the angle of the sun and moon? That'd be a neat subtle shadow effect.
On a sidenote, porkchops seem to be... glowing. I don't know about you, but I prefer my meat to be inert, and not possibly exposed to high amounts of radiation. (Probably just a debug testing thing, right?)
On another sidenote, the colour of the sunsets now reminds me of the pocket edition.
Well, I'm pleased to report that everything is awesome!
The only things I can think to suggest now would be some kind of infinite lava or cave effect in the nether akin to the Overworld's ocean, and maybe experimenting with doing effects based on the positions of blocks. In particular, I'd love to see if you could, say, generate a point light (The same as you're doing for held items) at a specific block or entity, but I don't know if shaders have that capability.
Does the shaded side of blocks change based on the angle of the sun and moon? That'd be a neat subtle shadow effect.
Also, on another sidenote, the colour of the sunsets now reminds me of the pocket edition.
Infinite lava oceans are doable, but there's 2 problems with that. 1: The nether isn't open like the overworld is. In other words, if you pick a direction and fly in that direction forever, you're bound to hit a wall eventually. Usually in less than a few hundred blocks. So there's no direction you could look which didn't have terrain there, so having infinite oceans doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially given that the nether roof is a thing that exists; should I add infinite bedrock too in that case? 2: Fog. Even if I did make infinite lava oceans a thing, they would get fogified pretty quickly, to the point where they'd be mostly invisible in most directions. I like the idea, but it just doesn't work in the nether as nicely as it does in the overworld. Hell, overworld infinite oceans are mostly invisible too due to the fog, but since it's a seamless transition, your brain just kind of ignores that. Especially considering that sunsets can still reflect off of them and ignore fog, reinforcing the idea that it really does go on forever.
Point-lights of any color are also theoretically possible, though doing them with shaders is a bad idea all around for performance reasons, as it would require iterating through a giant list of light sources to calculate values for every frame. Plus, it wouldn't be changeable in-game by making all of block/entity X emit light; you'd have to edit the files each time you wanted to move or add a new light source. Additionally, it wouldn't obey line of sight rules, so if you had one near a wall, both sides of the wall would be illuminated. This doesn't matter for held lights, since every time you try to look at the "dark" side of the wall, you'd have to go over there, which means moving the light source, so now it's no longer dark.
And yes, the shaded side of blocks does change based on the sun's position. There's also an option called "light fix" (gbuffers_terrain and water.vsh) which hackilly disables minecraft's native block shading. It's disabled by default because sometimes it's disabled automatically and sometimes it isn't, depending on which version you're using and the alignment of the planets. If at exactly sunset (approximately /time set 12700), the top and bottom faces have the same brightness, then you probably don't need to enable it. If on the other hand the bottom is much darker, then you probably should enable it. Can also do the experiment at noon (/time set 6000) and look at 2 adjacent side faces, but you have to disable sunPathRotation for this (I believe I put that in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh and vsh).
How about making it look like a cave, or something else solid in the distance, rather than seeing clouds and things in the 'sky'?
As it stands, the water effect still being visible in the Nether looks pretty cool, anyway.
Speaking of other dimensions, has the End portal been given any love? I'm going to take a guess and say no, since it's not in the changelog. Also, I don't know what the special sky you did was for it, but I suspect the 1.6.4 version of shaders didn't support dimension-detecting or something, because that's weird.
I can think of a few uses for the lights, but they do sound more trouble than they're worth.
Sorry that I keep making suggestions, but it might be cool if possible to deeply redden things seen through a nether portal, to give the impression that you're looking into the nether itself.
V1.4.0 released:
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
I'd suggest you should avail all the versions that you've made
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
What do you mean by that?
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
Like upload your 1st Version up to the latest version, like BS Shaders. One link to all of his versions (from V1 to V5).
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
Old versions are not supported. Why do you want them?
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
Sure, haven't tried one of your older versions (except for V1.2.2 & above).
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
I think you misread my comment. I wasn't asking IF you wanted them, I was asking WHY you wanted them.
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
Because i want to see what does your 1st Version look like. I didn't get to try it & i don't know that your pack exists, until you commented on Chocapic13's Shaders thread.
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
By 1st version, are you referring to the first released version, or versions before that where I was still learning how shaders worked? Cause the first released version looks pretty much the same as the current version. Not a lot of major changes have been made since then that radically altar how things look.
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
V1.5.0 released:
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
V1.6.0 released: The BIG update!
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
v1.6.0 Is Cool!
Love those 2D MC CLouds, they're a gr8 alternatives though
I'm TheCoolSteveMan, you can call me CSM for short!
V1.7.0 released:
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
I know you said that you won't support earlier version of Minecraft, but you also said to report them and you'll see about fixing them.
So, that's what I'm doing! This picture shows a pretty severe issue and a not-so-severe one.
The first, and worst, is the black stuff on water.
The second one (Which might not even be able to be fixed, at least not easily) is the transparency of the glass against the water. I assume it's due to the blur only being calculated once, which means the glass blur takes priority simply because it happens first.
Speaking of glass, it's also invisible underwater, but only from certain positions...
There are also issues with Spiders and Endermen not rendering right, and their shadows surprisingly also do not render correctly.
Sunset also seems extremely red, but I don't know yet if that's intended. Otherwise, I especially love the clouds and infinite water, those are really nice touches.
This is all in Minecraft V1.7.10, so I don't know if you'll even take a look at the issue.
The stripy black stuff on water is not something I've seen before, I'll have to try it in older versions.
Transparency *should* be working in the current version. There used to be a bug where nothing transparent would render at all behind water, but I fixed that in V1.6.0. You are correct though that blur is only calculated once, and whatever's in front takes priority.
Entity shadows have been explained before:
Spiders and endermen are… brighter than they should be, so I'll take a look at that.
Sunsets are intended to be that red. I think it looks pretty Should I turn it down slightly?
Lastly, the fact that water is so dark behind stained glass (in the first screenshot) is due to my clear water algorithm. Basically, the purpose of this is to overwrite light levels underwater to avoid pitch black lakes/oceans. The problem is that that requires knowing if any given pixel is actually water or not. And due to the limitations of shaders, this means that anything in the alpha pass (stained glass, portals, slime blocks, ice, etc…) will overwrite that water flag if it happens to be in front of water. Therefore it doesn't think that the stained glass is water, so it doesn't brighten things. This whole system has its flaws (try going underwater in a cave), but unfortunately this is the best I can do with minecraft's rendering engine.
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
I'm glad to see that you'll try and fix the issues, because I'd love to use this more generally, especially with the performance. I usually only use shaders if I want to see how something looks with them, because otherwise I need to play at ~20 fps, but with this I kept a pretty steady 60! The infinite ocean in particular would fit beautifully with my infinite-ocean modpack! You go build a ship and pirate things, but anyway, more to the point:
Unfortunately, there's no option in older versions of Minecraft to turn the entity shadows off, and believe me, I looked. I guess I could make a resource pack to replace the texture with a blank one, though.
My issue wasn't that it's dark per se, but that no water effects were happening behind the glass.
Perhaps you could try doing two blur passes? That should solve most issues, since it's not exactly common to have something like five rows of stained glass over water, but if the glass actually overwrites the flag in Minecraft's rendering engine, then that's much more complicated.
Is that water-cave issue from the clear lighting? I'm not sure if you're aware, but Optifine comes with an option to make water clear, found under the 'Quality' tab. You can see how water behind stained glass looks with the option on in the attachment.
Also, I just discovered the different-coloured lighting from held items. Really cool, but it's a shame you can't do that for placed light sources, and even more a shame that shaders aren't compatible with the Coloured Lighting mod. In fact, just for fun, I took a screenshot of what happens with the mod installed. Spoiler Warning: It's not pretty, but it's also kinda pretty. (For the record, I was in a forest when that was taken.)
On a bit more of a side-note, would it be possible to turn the grass colour variations down a bit? It really looks very weird red... It doesn't look like the grass itself is red, but that a red overlay is on it. The other minor brightness variations add a huge amount to otherwise monochrome biome foliage, though! It's just the redness.
I will admit, however, that it kinda works in certain biomes, but the red still just seems too much.
Unfortunately, that water flag controls all water effects, including refractions/reflections/fog/etc… As much as I'd like to first render the terrain, then the water (applying all its effects) THEN render other transparent stuff in front of the water, that's just not possible in this case. It would take fundamental changes to minecraft's rendering engine to accommodate that, which means a dedicated mod which is likely to be incompatible with a lot of other stuff.
The same is true for blur effects. At the time when water is being rendered, it doesn't know what the terrain behind it looks like, so it can't apply any blur effects itself. And when water is finished rendering, so is all the stained glass in front of it, so nothing that renders after THAT can know it needs to apply water effects to begin with. My advice: avoid using stained glass and water in the same build where possible.
Yes, the water-cave issue is also caused by the clear water option. And the reason I implemented it at all instead of just using optifine's clear water is two fold. 1: Optifine's clear water only works to a depth of 16 blocks. It does this by changing the skylight absorbed by water from 4 to 1. This means that avoids the cave issue, but the bottoms of deep oceans are still dark. My system allows for deep oceans to remain bright. If optifine added an "even clearer water" option that makes water absorb 0 light levels per layer, I will not deny that that would be a big improvement over my system. The 2nd reason I'm not using optifine's option is that it's… glitchy. Sometimes it works correctly, and other times some locations have incorrect light levels. This can be easily seen, because these areas always form diagonal-ish shapes. It looks absolutely awful in my opinion.
I wish I could do colored placed lights too, but sadly the data about which block is actually emitting the light simply doesn't exist for placed lights like it does for held lights. Held lights have a uniform called heldItemId, which I use to determine the color of the light, but placed lights ONLY have light level, not ID data. Plus, what happens when multiple different blocks are illuminating the same thing? I don't even want to think about the logic required to make that work.
I specifically put in a check to make sure that grass can't be more red than it is green, but it was an absolute system, not a proportional one. So in the biome you're in, where grass is MUCH darker than usual, the threshold for being too red wasn't restrictive enough. This has now been fixed. If it's still too dry for you, you can also try changing the humidity offset option in gbuffers_terrain.fsh. (you'll have to manually edit this file because shaders don't support in-game options in 1.7.10
Also, I did manage to reproduce and fix both the water stripes and spider/enderman lighting, and in the process, I discovered that entity shadows weren't handled the way I thought they were, so they're fixed now too in version 1.7.1:
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
Well, I'm pleased to report that everything is awesome!
The only things I can think to suggest now would be some kind of infinite lava or cave effect in the nether akin to the Overworld's ocean, and maybe experimenting with doing effects based on the positions of blocks. In particular, I'd love to see if you could, say, generate a point light (The same as you're doing for held items) at a specific block or entity, but I don't know if shaders have that capability.
Does the shaded side of blocks change based on the angle of the sun and moon? That'd be a neat subtle shadow effect.
On a sidenote, porkchops seem to be... glowing. I don't know about you, but I prefer my meat to be inert, and not possibly exposed to high amounts of radiation. (Probably just a debug testing thing, right?)
On another sidenote, the colour of the sunsets now reminds me of the pocket edition.
Infinite lava oceans are doable, but there's 2 problems with that. 1: The nether isn't open like the overworld is. In other words, if you pick a direction and fly in that direction forever, you're bound to hit a wall eventually. Usually in less than a few hundred blocks. So there's no direction you could look which didn't have terrain there, so having infinite oceans doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially given that the nether roof is a thing that exists; should I add infinite bedrock too in that case? 2: Fog. Even if I did make infinite lava oceans a thing, they would get fogified pretty quickly, to the point where they'd be mostly invisible in most directions. I like the idea, but it just doesn't work in the nether as nicely as it does in the overworld. Hell, overworld infinite oceans are mostly invisible too due to the fog, but since it's a seamless transition, your brain just kind of ignores that. Especially considering that sunsets can still reflect off of them and ignore fog, reinforcing the idea that it really does go on forever.
Point-lights of any color are also theoretically possible, though doing them with shaders is a bad idea all around for performance reasons, as it would require iterating through a giant list of light sources to calculate values for every frame. Plus, it wouldn't be changeable in-game by making all of block/entity X emit light; you'd have to edit the files each time you wanted to move or add a new light source. Additionally, it wouldn't obey line of sight rules, so if you had one near a wall, both sides of the wall would be illuminated. This doesn't matter for held lights, since every time you try to look at the "dark" side of the wall, you'd have to go over there, which means moving the light source, so now it's no longer dark.
And yes, the shaded side of blocks does change based on the sun's position. There's also an option called "light fix" (gbuffers_terrain and water.vsh) which hackilly disables minecraft's native block shading. It's disabled by default because sometimes it's disabled automatically and sometimes it isn't, depending on which version you're using and the alignment of the planets. If at exactly sunset (approximately /time set 12700), the top and bottom faces have the same brightness, then you probably don't need to enable it. If on the other hand the bottom is much darker, then you probably should enable it. Can also do the experiment at noon (/time set 6000) and look at 2 adjacent side faces, but you have to disable sunPathRotation for this (I believe I put that in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh and vsh).
I made my own shader pack, by the way.
How about making it look like a cave, or something else solid in the distance, rather than seeing clouds and things in the 'sky'?
As it stands, the water effect still being visible in the Nether looks pretty cool, anyway.
Speaking of other dimensions, has the End portal been given any love? I'm going to take a guess and say no, since it's not in the changelog. Also, I don't know what the special sky you did was for it, but I suspect the 1.6.4 version of shaders didn't support dimension-detecting or something, because that's weird.
I can think of a few uses for the lights, but they do sound more trouble than they're worth.
Sorry that I keep making suggestions, but it might be cool if possible to deeply redden things seen through a nether portal, to give the impression that you're looking into the nether itself.