We're still working...
Despite the recent goings on in the world, we have been quite busy here at Continuum Graphics this past month. Read on to find out exactly what we’ve been up too!
Continuum RT
Lots of work was done on RT this month, including:
- TAA was fixed, and improved.
- Non-cubics (stairs, fences, etc.) and entities now render and can be affected by lighting, but cannot affect lighting themselves (yet)
- Volumetric clouds updated
- 2D clouds added
- Night added
- Proper Leaf rendering
- Various improvements to the filtering, denoising and reprojection
This was all pushed with build 9 of RT. Build 10 is almost ready as of the time of writing this blog (might be out by the time this goes live), and will include even more improvements to the filtering/denoising. Build 11, which we have already started work on, should include working specular as well (it’s currently disabled in Build 10 due to some issues and it not being setup fully as well).
Going forward, we will be trying out a new update schedule for RT (and 2.1). We will be aiming for an update every 2 weeks, with RT and 2.1 being staggered, so there is one bigger update per week for you guys to play with. Hopefully this will result in more consistently high quality updates as well, and it will help the team out a bit, as compiling builds (especially for RT), is still a fairly time consuming affair.
Some screenshots of these updates (click on images to enlarge)
Continuum 2.1
2.1 is drawing ever closer to Beta status with this months round of updates! We added quite a few things and improved on quite a few others.
Here’s a list of the main updates 😉
- Added Night
- Added Stars at night
- Fixed banding issues in low light situations
- Fixed banding issue when TAA was disabled
- Added High Altitude 2D clouds
- Crash fixes when changing certain settings
- 2D cloud improvements
- Added time speed slider
- Minor performance optimizations
- Organized settings menu
- Entity hit damage color
- Fixed TAA Sharpness Slider
- Added Ray Traced Contact Shadows to fill in gaps between rasterized shadows and the objects casting them (most obvious on grass)
- Added new Sub-Surface Scattering; resolves issues with normal map rendering on plants
- Improved Global Illumination
- Added Waving Plants/Leaves
- Fixed black outlines on blocks
- Fixed broken leaf shadows
- Various other smaller miscellaneous fixes and tweaks
While quite a few of these features are available in Build 6 of 2.1 Alpha, Build 7 will be coming soon with the remaining features from this list. Work on weather has started as well, and a early version of it will likely make it into a build in the coming weeks.
Also, as mentioned in the RT section above, 2.1 will also be apart of our new staggered update schedule. That means we will attempt to deliver one larger update for it every 2 weeks.
Here are some screenshots of some of these updates (click on images to enlarge)
Stratum
The Stratum developers were hard at work this month as well, and brought quite a few updates to the pack:
Added
- Ice
- Packed Ice
- Hay Block/Bale
- New Obsidian (replaced placeholder texture)
- Soul Sand
- Grass Path Side
- Updated 1.12.2 version to match 1..13+ version
Tweaked / Fixed
- Improvements to grass path side
- Removal of large rocks from grass path side
- Ice/Packed ice tiling improvements
- Grass/Tall Grass color tweaks to bring more in line with Grass Block color
- Added AO maps to Hay Block/Bale
All these new updates are being packaged and will be uploaded to the site in the coming days, so new site users should look out for that. GitLab users can access them right away. We apologize for the delay for the new site, but the back-end system meant to automatically build an update for the new site when a texture is pushed to GitLab is not ready yet. Until it is we have to create and upload these updates manually, which takes a bit more time.
Here are some screenshots of the additions (click on images to enlarge)
CEA Price drop & GitLab Account Migration
As some of you may have noticed, we announce and enacted a price drop on Continuum Early Access last month. It is now $15 for full Early Access to Continuum 2.1 Alpha, Legacy (when available) and whatever comes next in the 2.0/2.1 lineup of shaders. We were able to lower the price because of the years of dedicated support from you, our community! So thank you all for that!
That said, we want to show our appreciation for the Continuum Early Access users who purchased before the price drop. Every account with Continuum Tier 3/Continuum Early Access that purchased before this price reduction will be getting a complementary build of Continuum RT, available in their accounts on this new site. There is however a small caveat to this…we need everyone’s account on the new site to give them access to their free build of RT, so these will not go out until we have finished our work on account migration and put it into action. This work is in it’s final stages, and we have been actively testing it for the last few days. We don’t want to give out a firm date for migration, but it should happen soon™. When it is ready we will make the appropriate announcements on all of our social media accounts and our Discord server, so be sure to join and/or follow us on your preferred social media platforms for more expedient updates on our progress with that!
Wrapping up...
And that’s a wrap on another monthly update. Once again, we want to thank you all for your continued support, especially during these trying times, and hope you all stay safe and healthy! We hope to see you here next month for the April progress update.
