Been a crazy month for us here at Continuum Graphics…
A health scare
Our lead shader dev, Joey, whom many of you know as dotModded, had a fairly serious health scare late this month. He passed out while eating dinner, heart almost stopped, and very nearly died.
Doctors aren’t yet sure what caused it, but he is home, feeling better and his doctors are actively looking into the cause. Unfortunately we do not know much just yet. He has been fitted with a heart monitor to try to figure things out and will be monitored closely for the foreseeable future. We will try to update you all when we know more though.
Despite feeling better and being stable, this was a fairly disturbing event for dotModded, and there will likely be a fair few trips to the Doctor before this is behind us, so progress on the upcoming 2.1, RT and Focal updates may be impeded a bit because of it. We considered just saying things got held up and being vague about this, but dotModded and the rest of the team felt that you guys deserved to know exactly what was going on.
And yes, that is dot snapping a cheeky, post-near-death experience, likely heavily medicated Emergency Room selfie
Focal Engine
With that out of the way, lets talk Focal. A good portion of work on Focal this month again went towards things required for the 2.1 Build 13 release. The rest was spent continuing to push into Vulkan. We don’t have much to share on either front just yet, but rest assured, some exciting things are coming for Focal.
As for short term updates, as we’ve mentioned before, Focal will be receiving a small update alongside the Build 13 release of Continuum 2.1 Alpha, to facilitate some of the extra features added to 2.1 since the last Focal update.
Continuum RT
While RT has mostly been waiting on the Vulkan update for Focal, we do have a small update planned for you all. This update will include fix for a LabPBR emission bug we recently discovered, as well as the remaining vanilla emissive blocks being added to the block.prop file out of the box, and potentially a fix for the completely opaque glass panes some of you may have noticed. Panes will still not be voxelized, as they are non-cubics and that will require Vulkan, but it should be an improvement in the meantime, if we can get it fixed up.
Below is a quick little before and after of the LabPBR Emissive bug (left) and it’s fix (right, with some minor exposure issues). This bug was causing the entire surface of emissive blocks to emit light, and not just the parts specifically setup to emit.
Click to enlarge.
We don’t have a set date for this update yet, but we hope to have it out sometime in May, so keep an eye out for that.
Continuum 2.1
Progress on Continuum 2.1’s Build 13 update progressed nicely for most of April, till dotModded’s health scare that is. It is slowly picking back up now, but with dotModded’s progress being slowed, Jake is left to work on his own a bit.
That said, 2.1 Build 13 is coming together. We did end up rewriting almost all of the shader to better take advantage of Focal and just generally clean it up though, vs just doing a mostly straight port (couldn’t help ourselves). This is the main reason why this has taken so much longer than anticipated. It should be worth it in the end though.
As of right now, the main things that are being worked on / need finished are aerial perspective, ambient fog, testing out different ways of rendering the volumetric clouds and potentially fog at a lower resolution, tweaking the new sky, tweaking exposure, contact shadows, and subsurface scattering. Seems like a lot, but most of this is already mostly done, just needs a few fixes and/or polish.
Here’s a few screenshots of what the shader looks like right now though, including one showing off the new ambient fog (fog can be around in times other than morning, still being tweaked). We will share a lot more once it’s a bit more polished.
Click an image to enlarge and enable gallery view
Stratum
Stratum received another update this month (now on Build 14). This update added more flowers, improved a few aspects of some of the previously released ones, and added Crying Obsidian, with LabPBR Emission support. Check out the full changelog below, as well as some screenshots of the additions/changes.
With Build 14 released, Stratum has most of, if not all of the single block tall flowers covered, and a fair few of the double tall flowers. Since it gets harder, and thus slower, to find suitable materials for specific flowers when there are less to do, we will likely be shifting focus to some other high profile untextured blocks with the next few updates. Keep an eye on our social media for more info and teasers on what will be added next.
Build 14 Changelog
Added
- Cornflower
- Azure Bluet
- Crying Obsidian with LabPBR Emission support
- New back for Sunflower
Tweaked or Fixed
- Removed stray pixels from around Sunflower head
Per usual, here are some screenshots of these new additions. Some notes this time though; since our only shader that currently supports LabPBR Emissives is Continuum RT, RT was used to showcase the emissive features on the new Crying Obsidian block in the first image. Due to the bug mentioned in the RT section above however, users wishing to recreate this effect in RT will need to wait for RT Build 15 to release, or use another shader that supports LabPBR Emission. Continuum 2.1 Alpha Build 13 should also support this feature upon release though.
Click an image to enlarge and enable gallery view
A few site updates before we go...
Our Frequently Asked Questions page has been updated to reflect the latest releases and other site updates, and one of our favorite pages, the Project Showcase, has been updated with some of our favorite screenshots from 2021, both taken by the team and the community. We strongly encourage giving them both a look.
That said, that’s all we have for you all this month. Hopefully next month will end on a happier (and healthier) note. We hope you stick around and find out though!