What have we been up too? 

We had another relatively busy month, thankfully with a few less issues with obfuscation and more updates to RT!

Lets get into it, shall we?


Continuum RT

Continuum RT had 3 new subscriber builds this last month, enabled by our much improved (but still not perfect), obfuscation. The first of which, build 6, was meant to have come out in January, but our Obfuscation woes prevented that. We didn’t think that was all that fair to January subscribers, so we added build 6 to every account that was subscribed during January, even if their subscription was cancelled or had ended.

Build 6 included some minor improvements to noise and some small performance enhancements. Shortly after it’s release we pushed build 7. This build included some fairly massive performance enhancements, Roughly 60-100% depending on the scene, and much improved noise vs previous builds, as it was the first subscriber build with the denoiser enabled.

About a week later we pushed build 8. This included a fix for a bug with volumetric clouds that was introduced in build 7, some improvements to reprojection, some energy improvements and a bunch of smaller tweaks and fixes.

After we made build 8 live, we got back to work on improving denoising and light occlusion checks. More specifically, we are working on implementing a modified version of  A-SVGF (Adaptive Spatiotemporal Variance Guided Filtering). This should, quite basically, allow us to eliminate more noise, but preserve more detail. It should also handle lights that move and/or turn on and off much better. This implementation is taking quite a while, and may require some new features from Optifine to get it working 100%, but it’s what we are currently working towards in the short term. Longer term we hope to get most, if not all noncubics, and maybe custom models rendering properly, but we will share more info about that at a later date.

Here are some screenshots taken with Continuum RT Build 8 (click to enlarge)


Continuum 2.1

With RT being the main focus internally at the moment, all but one dev has been working on it and nothing else. That leaves Robobo to work on 2.1 usually, and he was on holiday for most of this month, as many of our Discord community members may already know. This means not a whole lot happened with 2.1 this month. Only a few small Volumetric Cloud tweaks early in the month before he left. Rest assured though, now that he is back 2.1 updates will start rolling out again. Night for instance, is being worked on and is due to be added soon! It might even be available by the time this blog goes live…


Stratum

Work on Stratum continued as usual this month, with a bit more focus on fixing up issues that have snuck in here and there.

Here’s our usual list of new and updated textures.

Added

  • Dandelion V1
  • Dead Bush V1
  • Dead Bush V2

Tweaked / Fixed

  • Podzol Top Seam removal
  • Removed some stray pixels on the fern textures
  • Downscaled the 4K Dandelions to 2K that we accidentally pushed (oops)
  • Particle Fix for Acacia leaves
  • Fix for Wheat specular texture being emmisive

And as usual, here are some screenshots of the additions.

Click on images to enlarge.


Discord Screenshot Contest

Our Discord Community has recently grown to over 6000 members. To celebrate this milestone we hosted another Screenshot Contest on our server. Rules were the same as they usually are. Continuum shaders only, no external edits, etc..

We had a lot of great submissions and want to thank everyone for their participation!

If you want to make sure you’re around for the next screenshot contest, or just want to interact with the team and the community more, consider joining our discord server here.

Here are the winning submissions (click to enlarge):

1st Place - RaxxSnaccs

2nd - Jouba Mety

3rd - Paypur

4th - Yeet.exe

5th - Integral

6th - Minecreep


Wrapping up...

We want to thank you all for your patience and support these last few months. Especially with obfuscation. The progress made on obfuscation means updates for RT aren’t being held up nearly as long before they can be pushed forward to subscribers. This should improve even more going forward and we hope to keep a consistent update cycle going forward. 2.1 should also be gearing up again update wise soon,

Again, thank you all for your continued support, and we hope to see you back here for next months progress update!