Finally got it correct. My environment for texture mapping was incorrect for secondary rays which took me forever to figure out! Glad its all sorted now though. Params: 16 spp, 1 glossy sample, 8 bounces, 30 area light samples, 99 seconds to render.

First try at glossy reflections/refractions. Something isnt all the way correct, I think my idea of how we are sampling the hemisphere isnt completely correct. I also need to fix double counting still.

Interesting result trying to implement glossy reflections

Got soft shadows correct. I was calculating the length of d wrong before.

I found one thing that I was doing wrong, but I am still getting what I got before I tried rewriting the soft shadow calculation. The shadows behind the ball dont make sense and also there is a weird shadow at the bottom left of the image.

Still trying to figure out soft shadows. I had a closer solution earlier that had some bugs, but now it seems every point just gets shadowed.