What have we been up too?
We’ve had a busy month behind the scenes, with a lot of work being done on RT, build delivery services, Stratum and even a bit on 2.1 Alpha despite most of the focus being on RT right now.
Lets get into it, shall we?
Continuum RT
Many of you may have noticed the lack of updates to RT this month. If you haven’t been on the server you probably don’t know the reason for this, so let me get you up to speed.
To push builds of RT out, they have to be first ran through our obfuscater, packaged and then uploaded to the site so that subscribers can download them. Sounds easy enough, but the first step has been giving us problems from the start. We underestimated the difficulty of obfuscation, and that has come back to bite us. We’ve had quite a few updates to RT this month, and it’s improved quite a bit with said updates, but they could not be pushed without manually finishing obfuscation, which takes hours of dev time to do with each build. So instead of doing that we decided to use that time to focus on RT development and fixing the obfuscator. Hopefully the work on the latter will conclude soon.
That said, we do not think the lack of updates in recent weeks is fair to subscribers, so when the next build, build 6, arrives, it will be made available to current AND past subscribers. This means that even if your subscription has ended and you did not resub for February, you will get the update that should have came out during January. Keep an eye on our social media and/or your account pages for that update in the coming weeks.
Obfuscation and all that aside, how about those RT updates? Since build 5 was released, we have improved nearly every aspect of the shader. Make no mistake, it’s still quite early, but things like noise are already much, much improved vs the last update. We will continue to improve the denoiser, performance, etc. while the obfuscator is finished up. We can’t wait to share these updates with you all when they are ready.
Continuum 2.1
While RT is the main focus of the shader dev team, 2.1 hasn’t been forgotten. It’s received a fair few updates in the last month, including:
- Improvements to GI (RSM)
- Fixed AO rendering through glass
- Some small optimizations to AO
- Some fixes to water parallax
- Small improvements to clouds
- Fixed a crash on AMD GPU’s
- Fixes to some rendering issues for entity maps (maps, paintings, etc.)
- Fixed an old lava rendering bug related to POM
- Fixed artifacts in torchlight when its at it’s peak
- Added volumetric ground fog as an option
- Fixed atmosphere when going above a certain height
- Fixed cloud shadow option
- Fixed volumetric cloud shadows still rendering when volumetric clouds were disabled
- Fixed AO flickering
- Started preliminary organization of the in game shader settings menus
These are the main updates/fixes for the month of January, if you’d like to see the full list, and you’re a Continuum Early Access user, you can view the full list here or in the #alpha-webhook channel in our Official Discord server.
Here are some screenshots of some of the new 2.1 features/updates:
Continuum Legacy
Legacy is still on the backburner for now. RT, 2.1 Alpha, Stratum and all their supporting systems are still the priority, and splitting our dev time even more just isn’t realistic at this time.
Rest assured though, Legacy is still coming.
Continuum 2.0.4
Nothing new happened with Continuum 2.0 this month, but I wanted to include a little reminder about the recent 2.0.4 update we released to it. If you use any LabPBR resourcepacks, including Stratum, in conjunction with 2.0, you should update to 2.0.4 to maintain support for the latest LabPBR version. Click the link below to go to our downloads page and grab it.
Stratum
Stratum has continued to get updates this month, though we did spend a bit more time messing with models for a few of the new additions, namely the mushrooms. We experimented with a bunch of different models to try to spruce them up a bit more, but settled on a rather basic model as we were not happy with the results of adding more panes, or the side effects of that as far as variations/rotations are concerned.
Textures in the works right now that will likely be in upcoming updates include flowers and jungle leaves. Once both of those are done, most of the overworld vegetation textures should be covered!
In the meantime, here’s our usual list of new and updated textures.
Added
- Brown Mushrooms V1
- Red Mushrooms V1
Tweaked / Fixed
- Grass Specular Alpha fix
- Fixed Seam in Podzol Top specular
And as usual, here are some screenshots of the additions.
Click on images to enlarge.
Wrapping up...
Once we push through current blockers, like the obfuscator, updates should come out much, much more often for RT, and then we can turn out attention to getting full on build automation online, which will mean users of the new site get updates to everything from 2.1 Alpha to Stratum, and its MC 1.12.2 version, much quicker. We will also have more time to focus on account migration, which is still planned.
Per usual, we want to thank you all for your continued support, and we hope to see you back here for next months progress update!
