We opened a whole barrel of fun this month…let’s talk about it!
Focal Engine, Continuum RT, & 2.1 Beta
Work on Focal Alpha (OGL) updates, Focal VK, Continuum 2.1 Beta (and its push to RC), and even Continuum RT has continued this past month, with decent progress in many areas. I’m going to step back and let our lead developer, dotModded, take it from here:
This month I’ve been working on fixing some bugs with our shaders, finishing up plans on how we’re initializing focal engine from Minecraft and all the hooks that come along with startup, improving/correcting stratum’s downscaler, and looking into ways we can get focal engine updated to 1.20.4 and beyond.
Starting with the shaders; in 2.1 glowing banners were fixed, which lead to us also finding and fixing some encoding issues with textures; metals with invalid values are now rendered as well as they can be as well (the issue that lead to this also lead to us making significant updates to Stratum’s downscaler, which we will talk about more in the Stratum section). And finally, I’ve also confirmed and fixed the error causing underwater to be black on compatible AMD GPU’s and drivers. Thanks to our Early Access AMD testers for reporting that one. Unfortunately we have no updates regarding post 22.6.1 AMD driver support (and by extension, RX 7000 series support), at least not yet.
RT is also getting some much needed attention, merging the new features from 2.1 along with some secret sauce for more performance and fixing the world height. This will be one of the largest updates to RT since its launch and I’m excited to bring it out. We’re also debating if we should enable a shadow map for rendering shadows on entities and other things that are not path traced, if we do decide on bringing this feature it will be disabled by default for the purists. I’m also investigating if it’s feasible to implement some non-cubic geometry that is commonly used, please note however we are still investigating and it may cost too much performance and it may be scrapped entirely. We will keep you all posted on our progress on this in future updates.
Focal Engine VK is moving along; we’re still working on initialization. Thankfully much progress has been made and we have a decent plan for moving forward. As mentioned previously we have our own custom OpenGL context to keep around and controlled by focal engine. Getting this properly initialized with minimal blocking is truly a challenge, and it’s been pretty fun sorting it out, ideally we’ll have something to show soon! Though no dates can be given as development of this moves at varying speeds depending on the actual complexity, not just theoretical.
Last but not least, getting Focal Engine Alpha updated to 1.20.4 (and beyond) is going to take far more work than anticipated, due to the changes made to the forge module system. I’m still debugging why our mod is using the wrong class loader. As someone who still feels uncomfortable working with gradle at this scale, I’m still learning and progress is slow, this kind of issue is way out of my usual day to day work. Please bear with us while we figure this out.
With that higher level summary of the developer’s work this month out of the way, here’s a quick overview / changelog for the Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 28 release we put out at the end of June:
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 28 Changelog
- Potato graphics preset added; this preset serves as a ‘very low’, and makes as many sacrifices as can reasonably be made to give users with low end GPUs the best chance of running Continuum 2.1 in a playable state. Combining it with lowered render quality should enable many configs that could not attain playable framerates before to do so now.
- Added additional settings values to some options
- Fixed glowing banners
- Fixed encoding error causing incorrect rendering of PBR materials (specifically metals) in certain conditions
Potato mode is likely the last of the settings presets that will be added to Continuum 2.1. That brings the total to five; Potato, Low, Medium, High (default), and Ultra. This mode is just about the lowest settings we could feasibly implement without large changes to the shader’s internal structure, completely destroying effects, or gaining no real performance back for large drops in visual fidelity. Other shaders can, and do, allow for lower settings and better performance on low end hardware, but our shaders have never really been designed with lower end hardware in mind, so this is about as close as we can get to accommodating that…at least without creating a new shader, purpose built for that from the start, which we have no current plans to do.
Still, Potato mode should enable more users with configs that cannot handle 2.1 on even Low to at least get a playable experience, particularly when combined with a lower Render Quality setting. It may also serve as a good base preset for tweaking settings up to squeeze the most visual quality out of a low end config as possible.
Going forward, we are once again going over all settings sliders in 2.1, ensuring everything is functional, adding more stops, lower minimums and higher maximums where appropriate / useful. As well as working through our current list of feasibly fixable known issues, and addressing new ones as they come in, as we march forward towards the first Release Candidate build. We’re confident that, barring any unforeseen and complex issue being found, an RC build is likely to be ready in the coming months. Keep those bug reports coming though!
Stratum
Stratum did not get an update during the month of June, but for good reason;
The short version is, we found some specular encoding errors when fixing the Glowing Banner bug in Continuum 2.1 (mentioned above), and after fixing them, they exaggerated some issues with metals in our downscaled textures, particularly the lower resolution versions (all versions of Stratum below 2048x are created by downscaling from the 2048x source). We then worked on fixing and enhancing the quality of our automated downscaling for much of the second half of June, fixing the issues with metals on lower resolution versions of Stratum, and enhancing the overall quality a bit in the process!
For the longer, more technical explanation, here’s dotModded again:
Stratum’s downscaler script has been largely untouched for quite some time now. After observing some incorrect metal values in the lower resolutions of Stratum, which Continuum mostly hid until the latest fix for banners, I noticed we were using a Lanczos filter for all textures (albedo, specular, and normal) instead of just the albedo.
We had originally planned for point filtering for reflectivity and hard coded metals, while using box filtering for everything else, but at some point this code was disabled and incorrectly implemented. This lead to normals and specular textures to have increased contrast, which is wildly incorrect.
We corrected those issues, and also took the time to test out different methods for albedo filtering. We ended up switching from Lanczos to a Box and sharpen filter. This fixes a lot of the weirdness on textures like the crafting table having too much contrast and halo/ringing at lower resolutions. This also fixes ores and raw blocks having white rings around the actual metal parts.
The overall consistency and quality of lower resolution versions of Stratum as of the next build (Build 48), should be notably improved, both with, and without Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 28.
Below, you will find comparisons of just some of the affected textures before, and after both the shader (Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 27 vs 28), and Texture Downscaler fixes and enhancements! This is far from an exhaustive selection of textures affected by these changes, just some of the most noticeable. Almost every texture in Stratum has been improved due to these changes!
We used the 128×128 version of Stratum for these comparisons, as it highlights the differences the best, particularly when using compressed images such as these. The difference is still present with higher resolutions of Stratum though, but gets progressively smaller / less noticeable as you go up in texture resolution.
We recommend clicking on an image to open gallery view, then using the next / back buttons, or the arrow keys on your keyboard to get a better view of the differences before, and after these new updates!
And finally, we did also do some standard texture development last month, with Barrels and the Candle making it all the way to the in-game stage before the shader material and downscaler updates started.
You can find some images of both below; These new textures, the downscaler enhancements to the entire pack, and more will all be coming in our next update, Stratum Build 48!
As always, thank you for your continued patience and support. It means the world to all of us here at Continuum Graphics, and we hope you continue to join us for future progress updates!
