[1.18.2] How to darken blocks en masse

[SoLegendary]

I want to have a fog-of-war feature that classic RTS games have by darkening blocks (separate to their in-world brightness) which are out of range of the player to varying degrees:

• No change for in range,
• Medium dark for out of range but previously explored,
• Very dark/black for out of range and unexplored

An example of what I mean from Starcraft would be this:

https://blog.gemserk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/SCScrnShot_082518_153611-1024x768.png

I want this darkening to apply to ALL blocks in view of the camera (I have a top-down camera in my mod so it's not that many blocks) so I need a solution that is relatively low-performance. My immediately thought of course is shaders and texture packs, except as far as I know those cannot be applied conditionally from code. I also don't want to mess with block world brightness so that light sources can still be seen properly in the fog of war.

EDIT: just found this page on the community wiki: https://forge.gemwire.uk/wiki/Tinted_Textures. Would it be possible to manipulate these tint textures to apply the darkening I need (preferably without impacting any original tinting conditions like grass blocks changing colour in specific biomes)

Edited May 3, 2022 by SoLegendary
tints?

[MFMods]

On 5/3/2022 at 3:36 PM, SoLegendary said:

Would it be possible to manipulate these tint textures to apply the darkening I need

no, because most blocks don't have that.

if you make a plant block, your model will likely consist of two parts: fixed color part (part that is not green: berries of flowers) and tinted part (texture will be gray but the game will make it match biome's shade of green).
so, no.

[SoLegendary]

Is there a way to conditionally apply shaders from code onto blocks? I saw this post doing something which could help me for entities

Except it relies on the RenderLivingEvent event and I don't see any equivalent event for block rendering.