Continuum 2.1 Launch Blog

One last thing from us before the Holidays!

It's finally here.

It’s been a long time coming, and what we’ve just released today probably shouldn’t even be called ‘2.1’ at this point, with all the rewrites, advancements, tweaks, and time that has gone into making it. Something like ‘3.0’ would probably be more appropriate, but alas, it’s here, and it’s free for anyone who wants to give it a try, but might not have been able to afford or justify a Continuum Early Access pack during it’s development!

A big thank you to everyone that did support the project during it’s lengthy development cycle, be that from buying a CEA package submitting bug reports/feedback, or just interacting with our little community. You all helped make this a reality. Thank you.

A few important notes

In our haste to make sure we got this out to you all before Christmas, and some of our devs / devops people having Holiday commitments, we had to make a few concessions for this release. So at least until sometime in the new year, you will still need to download Focal Engine from the ‘My Account’ page, which does require a free Continuum account. You will also, at least for now, only find the release Build of Continuum 2.1 under the ‘Continuum Early Access’ / ‘CEA’ sections of the download page and Focal Engines download UI. Any current CEA user will be very familiar with this process, and this version will be like any other update for those users.

This is our first free Focal Engine shader release, so we need to push updates to our site, backend and all supported Focal Engine versions to change this behavior, and we were not able to finalize and test all these changes while still releasing the first live version of 2.1 before Christmas.

Here’s the basic gist of the install / download flow for a new user going to grab 2.1’s release:

Create and Verify a new continuum.graphics account (make sure to check your spam folder for that verification email if you don’t see it right away!)
Login to your account via the ‘My Account’ button in the top right
Click on the ‘Downloads’ tab on your account page, click the ‘Focal Engine’ box, and download the appropriate version for your needs
Follow the Focal Engine installation tutorial (trust us, it’s not nearly as scary as it looks)
Login to Focal Engine in-game (as shown on the tutorial page), click ‘Continuum Early Access’ and download ‘Build 34’. This is the full, free releases version of Continuum 2.1.
Enable it via the shader selection menu, and enjoy!

TL;DR, at least for now, you will still need a free Continuum account to download Focal Engine itself, as well as Continuum 2.1’s release, and you will find it in the Continuum Early Access / CEA section of both downloads pages, listed as ‘Build 34’.

Here’s the buttons in Focal Engine’s download UI you will want to click for now to access the full, free release of Continuum 2.1 (ensure you are logged in):

What the future holds

After today, the rest of the team is going to break for the Holidays, and when we return, on top of updating previous Focal versions, plus the required site updates to polish up the download experience for Continuum 2.1’s release version, we’ll be focusing on addressing our Focal Engine game version support with renewed vigor, so that you can all enjoy Continuum 2.1 on the latest game versions in 2025.

We’ll also be actively supporting Continuum 2.1, collecting bug reports, fixing issues as they’re found, adding small improvements, etc.. We will continue to utilize the Continuum Early Access pipeline for this. When an issue is found and a fix is committed, we’ll be dropping a test version for CEA users to test and give feedback on before it is officially pushed to the public as a new version, ala: 2.1.1, 2.1.2, etc.

Last, but not least, we’ll have a proper December / New Years update blog going over not only Decembers development, but a small recap of the year and a more in depth look at what’s to come in 2025…including a few other unannounced surprises for our Continuum Early Access users!