What have we been up too? 

A lot has happened these last two months…hence the lack of a update blog for November. Plenty of Continuum 2.1, Stratum, and site updates, the long overdue launch of Continuum RT, and the Holidays. With most of that behind us it’s time to get into what we’ve been doing, for those that don’t follow us super closely or just might have missed something. Bear with us though, because this one is gonna be a bit longer and denser than usual 😉


The New Site

The new site, store, account and download experience is likely the most obvious, and large change most of you have noticed. We had talked about some of the site updates we were doing in the background to prepare for RT’s release in a few past blogs, but back then it wasn’t planned to become a entirely new site. We were just going to bolt the new customer experience onto our old Squarespace based site.

However, after finding out that it wouldn’t be much harder to implement our new store/checkout and download system into a new site vs the old Squarespace based site. We chose to build a new site (the one you’re on right now), using WordPress. We did this for a few reasons, the main ones being: hosting it is almost certainly going to be cheaper, and hosting our own site with WordPress allows us much greater control over the entire site than Squarespace ever would.

When fully finished, the new system should allow new and existing customers to create accounts easily on this site, buy new products and immediately access them, or access previously purchased ones, download previous and current products right on the site, pre-packaged to work as is with Minecraft (no more unzipping or any of that), and go. This should be much simpler than the old Squarespace/GitLab setup. It might even allow for roles on our Discord server to be applied fully automatically in the future, though we are still looking into this particular possibility.

With that said, the new site and download system are still somewhat early. We ask that you please bear with us as we iterate on them both in the coming weeks/months. In that time we plan to migrate all the existing GitLab based user accounts to the new site, squash any remaining bugs across the site, add any missing pages/content, and properly hook up the auto updating/packaging of our product downloads (it’s currently done manually by us, which is a bit slower as well as time consuming for us).

We hope that this new site and customer experience will greatly improve and simplify the experience of all of our users.


Continuum RT

The main reason for us starting all this site revamping in the first place was Continuum RT, which most of you may know, is FINALLY available for Early Access testing! It’s release was long overdue, but we finally managed to get it out on Christmas morning.

We have been working very hard for most of 2019, all the way up to the hour of release to bring Continuum RT to you We would have loved to have gotten it out much sooner, but it turned out to be much harder than any of us imagined. So as you might imagine, we are all very excited, and relieved to have finally released it! With that being said, Continuum RT is in a very early Alpha state at this time, and there is still a good amount of work to be done. Due to it’s early state, there are and will be some missing features, bugs, and likely less optimization than you can expect from more ‘finished’ builds later on in development.

For instance, a lot of non-cubic geometry, as well as entities, will not be rendered properly for a little while. This is due to the fully Ray Traced nature of Continuum RT. Unlike some other Minecraft Shaders, Continuum RT is not a hybrid engine. Everything is Ray Traced. All blocks, all effects, and eventually even all entities and custom geometry! RT is full of brand new features like proper refraction through glass and water, pixel perfect shadows from ALL light sources, and state of the art cloud systems with path traced lighting; all driven by our robust camera and familiar toning systems as their counterparts in the original, non-RT Continuum Minecraft Shaders. While it is fully capable of running in real time on modern graphics hardware, it is currently recommend that you have a GTX 1080 or higher for a good experience with it. This recommendation may relax as development goes on and the shader becomes more optimized.

The rendering of noncubics and entities will be addressed in future updates, as will denoising (currently it’s a bit noisey, especially in motion), as well as performance. Quite a few updates have already been pushed since we launched in fact, despite the holidays and us having to push updates to subscribers manually for now. We fully intend to keep these updates coming and to continue to improve Continuum RT.

For resourcepack users, RT supports the latest version of the LabPBR format, so Stratum and any other pack that uses LabPBR will function properly with it, and even supports a basic version of POM right now (this will be improved in the future). That said, if you wish to use a resourcepack, you currently need to set the pack resolution in RT’s shader settings.

If Continuum RT sounds interesting to you, you’d like to support us and its continued development, or try it for yourself, you can click the link below to grab a Early Access subscription. If you’d like to know more about Continuum RT and our Early Access program for it first, you can click the ‘Learn More…’ link below.

Before we move on, be sure to look out for a few Continuum RT cinematic from a few of our YouTuber friends in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s a little gallery we’ve put together of Continuum RT and what it can do, enjoy.

Click images to enlarge.


Continuum 2.1

While the new site, the new customer experience that goes with it and Continuum RT took up most of our time these past few months, Continuum 2.1 did get a few notable updates. These include the first pass of Global Illumination Via RSM being implemented, and then optimized / improved, further improvements to cloud lighting, updating of the LabPBR version, and the addition of morning ground fog, which was teased on our social media midway through November, to much excitement from the community. These have all resulted in Continuum 2.1 Alpha’s general look and feel improving quite a bit in our opinion.

Going forward work on night. as well as a few other things, such as emissive texture support are planned. However, they are being held up a bit right now due to us running out of buffer space to work them into the shader. This is going to likely require some restructuring of the shader internally to resolve. We will update you all on our progress on this in upcoming blogs, but again, before we move on, here are a few pictures of the current state of Continuum 2.1 Alpha after this months updates.

Click images to enlarge.


Continuum Legacy

Not a lot has changed as far as Legacy goes. Work on it is pretty much at a standstill for now. Between the new site, Continuum RT, Continuum 2.1 Alpha, keeping Continuum 2.0 up to date LabPBR wise and Stratum, the team really doesn’t have the time to meaningfully work on Legacy. Plus, as we have mentioned before, the work being put into Continuum 2.1 will at least somewhat help with Legacies development when the time comes. With that said, when we have more updates on Continuum Legacy, we will include them in a progress update.


Continuum 2.0.4

With the introduction of a new version of the LabPBR standard, v1.2, and Continuum 2.1 / Continuum RT being updated to support it as well, we thought it would be prudent to update Continuum 2.0 with it as well. We recommend anyone that uses Continuum 2.0 and is using, or plans to use resourcepacks that use the LabPBR specular format update to 2.0.4.

You can download Continuum 2.0.4 for free by clicking the button below to go to the Continuum downloads page.

Continuum Downloads

Stratum

Stratum has not been forgotten during the last 2 months either. A fair few textures have been added, tweaked, or replaced. We are also planning to add support for the AO portion of the LabPBR standard in light of the changes included to it in it’s latest version.

New textures will be supporting this feature going forward, but existing textures will not be updated until we hear back from Sp614x (the Optifine developer), on our open issue regarding 16bit PNG support. We are waiting on his response because all existing normals will need to be redone for LabPBR AO, and they will also need to be redone when / if we get 16bit PNG support as well, so we would much rather only have to do this once. As for why we want 16bit PNG support, it’s fairly simple: It will allow us to gain a significant amount of heightmap precision, which should improve the quality of POM in our textures. We will update you all on the status of this in future blogs.

In the meantime, here’s our usual list of new and updated textures.

Added

  • Jungle Log and Log Top
  • New Brick
  • Gold Ore (v1 and v2)
  • Improved Wool
  • New Andesite
  • Sandstone

Tweaked / Fixed

  • Podzol blockstate fix to prevent rotation
  • Fixes to Jungle Log seams
  • Fixes to normal texture for Gold Ore v2
  • Fixes to specular textuere for Gold Ore v2

And as usual, here are some screenshots of most of the additions. One small change though; due to the recent improvements to Continuum 2.1 Alpha, I have started to transition to using it for Stratum screenshots. Most or all going forward will be taken with 2.1 instead of 2.0.

Click on images to enlarge.


Wrapping up...

We’ve been quite busy these past few months, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future as we continue to polish the new site, it’s new customer experience, as well as continue to work on Continuum RT, Continuum 2.1, and Stratum.

Thank you all for supporting us throughout the years. We hope to see you back here next month for the January 2020 Progress Update.