July & August 2020 Progress Update

Missed a month there...let's recap!

We hit a few bumps in the road these past few months, resulting in us deciding to just roll two monthly updates into one. Read on for more info…

Continuum RT

We’ve made a lot of progress, and crushed a lot of blockers on the road to the ‘big update’ we are working on for RT. I wish there was more we could share right now, but saying much of anything would ruin the surprise. We think we are closing in on the home stretch right now, but still don’t want to give any timeframes. The nature of the work we are doing right now is such that a single unforeseen issue can take days, if not longer to solve. That said, we think you guys will understand all the secrecy and long wait once release day arrives.

To anyone that have supported, or continued to support RT during this time, THANK YOU! We greatly appreciate it. That said, we entirely understand if you want to end your subscriptions until the next update is ready.

Learn more about Continuum RT

Get Continuum RT Early Access

Continuum 2.1

As we mentioned in some previous progress updates, we only have one developer available to work on Continuum 2.1 at this time (you might know him as Robobo). Everyone else is still hard at work on the RT update. Due to some personal obligations Robo has not been able to put as much time into 2.1 as we would like, plus the work needed to get weather implemented has proven to be a bit more involved than previously thought. It is for these two reasons that 2.1 has not gotten a new build in a bit.

Work on Weather first required the Volumetric Clouds to be rewritten. This is nearly done but there are still some lingering issues, some of which have nothing to do with the clouds at all. For example, the current clouds are getting a slightly dirty orange/brown tint due to the sunlight being slightly off. To fix this properly we need to make some fairly large adjustments to our prebaked 3D sky LUT. This issue was recently found and is one of the biggest blockers. Once it is out of the way work on the remainder of the Weather update can continue.

That said, this is not all Robo has been working on. He has made many smaller enhancements and bugfixes these past few months, some of which you may have seen us feature on our server or social medias. We have yet to decide if we will be waiting for the Weather update to be completed before pushing a new build, or if we will just push what has been done, minus Weather, despite the issues described earlier. Rest assured though, that either way, we are working on it as much as possible.

Here’s a list of the most noteworthy updates made this past two months:

More cloud density options
Cloud appearance improvements
Added Powder for indirect cloud lighting
Higher glow on emissives
Fixed skylighting not being full range
Misc. cloud optimizations (via rewrite)
Improved in-scattering probability for less dirty look to clouds
More shadow resolution options
More volumetric fog density options
Added custom color grade (made by Robo)
Fixed issue with water wave height
Improved specular distribution
Fixed some mipmapping issues with emissions and translucents
Fixed shadows sometimes sticking above the surface
Added local coverage to planar clouds
Small optimizations to SSS (subsurface scattering)
Fixed some lodding issues with shadows
Added a 3rd color grade preset
Fixed an issue with metals
Enabled the ability for metals to be reflected
Simpler ray refinement but with better results
Fixed SSR jitter
Fixed lit redstone lamp ID
Fixed issue that cropped up causing poor performance with high res resource packs
Fixed NaNs (black dots) on normals
Numerous smaller fixes and tweaks

Here are some screenshots of some of these updates (click on images to enlarge)

Learn more about Continuum 2.1

Get Continuum 2.1 Early Access

Stratum

Much like 2.1, Stratum also suffered some unfortunate setbacks these past few months, which are the main reasons we opted to roll these two monthly updates together. One of the two Stratum developers lost power for about a week last month, and even after power was restored, their internet connection was not back for a few additional days. Took a bit of time for them to get back up to speed after this. As of the time of writing this though, normal progress has resumed and we hope to push a new build of Stratum soon.

Some of the things added/changed since the last update:

Added

Giant Mushroom Stem
Inner Giant Mushroom
Giant Red Mushroom
AO for Podzol
AO for Grass
Giant Brown Mushroom
Oak Door V1
Birch, Jungle, Acacia, Spruce and Dark Oak doors (all just variants of Oak for now)

Tweaked / Fixed

Increased size of Lapis Ore
Acacia blockstate fix to use additional model variation
Minor adjustment to Giant Red Mushroom
Small improvements to Podzol and it’s AO
Improved Snowy Grass Block
Adjusted Tall Grass F0

Here are some screenshots of the additions (click on images to enlarge)

Learn more about Stratum

Get the Stratum Resourcepack

Screenshot Contest Results!

As some of you may know, our Discord Community has recently grown to over 7000 members. To celebrate we hosted another Screenshot Contest. Rules were the same as they usually are. Continuum shaders only, no external edits, etc..

We had a lot of great submissions and would like 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, as well as runner ups (click to enlarge):