Read on to find out what we’ve been up to this past month.


dotModded

So far, none of the doctors visited, or tests ran have been able to figure out what is or was potentially wrong with our lead dev a few months ago. They’ve all given him a clean bill of health, and thankfully, he has been feeling fine as well. As such, this will probably be the last health update on dotModded for a while. Hopefully only good news from here on out.

Onto the monthly updates though!


Focal Engine

While finishing up the 2.1 rewrite continues to be a high priority for us internally, dotModded has once again put in a good bit of work on Focal this month, and we are now fairly deep into the process of transitioning from OpenGL to Vulkan, with quite a bit of progress being made.

Currently, we are building out the internals of the C++ code. We have also found, through developing our own shaders on Focal Engine, that JSON was far too limiting, so we have decided to shift to full Lua. We picked Lua over JS for performance and backend customizability. We are building an entire Lua API backed by Emmy Lua for rapid development with autocomplete, covering many of the pitfalls of Lua compared to JS. This will allow developers to make more fine grained settings, and have complete dynamic control over the shader, resource pack, and game events.

We have also began wrapping up the Window for the game, which is more complex than one would imagine. As well as starting work on the compatibility with the existing GL system, this allows mods with custom rendering in GL to be unaffected for both GUIs and in world geometry not rendered through an API (Forge/Fabric). This code will not be run in Vulkan, instead it will stay in OpenGL.

Then, finally there’s the bridge, which brings all of the game events, geometry, textures, animations, everything from the game into the engine. This is probably only around 15% complete at this time. The tiered design of this project allows us to maintain all versions of the game simultaneously, so backwards compatibility to 1.14 will likely remain intact for the foreseeable future.

This work will continue, and we will have more updates for you all next month!

Support Focal Engine with a Continuum RT Early Access Subscription

Continuum RT

RT is currently waiting on that large, upcoming Focal Engine update, so we do not have any updates planned for it between now and then just yet. Should we plan a minor update to RT before that Focal update arrives, we will let you all know. Otherwise, per usual during a lull in updates, we completely understand if anyone ends their sub till another update arrives, and we appreciate any level of support given!

With that said, we would like to showcase a map that we commonly recommend to our RT subscribers that really helps to show off the Ray Traced lighting possible with Continuum RT; Le Ultimate RTX (we love the memey name by the way), by shortnamesalex

We have attached a few screenshots of the map below, and here is a link to download the latest version for yourselves. One recommendation though; enable the SEUS PTGI Emissives setting in RT’s shader options so that all the proper light blocks emit light. You can find this setting by navigating to options > video > shaders (make sure RT is loaded) > shader options > material settings > material override settings > enable SEUS PTGI Emissives on the bottom right.

Click to enlarge.


Continuum 2.1

The Rewrite of 2.1 for Focal has progressed well this month, though is sadly still not quite ready for a release.

Jumping right into it, a new version of Focal will be required for 2.1 Build 13 to work, as we’re using new shader features for implementing a variation of FXSSSR, an amazing implementation of SSR from AMD. This should provide smooth specular for resource packs at a reasonable frame rate!

Clouds have also been optimized a bit, currently rendering at 75% render resolution, allowing them to be run with a higher framerate, or on lower end hardware. We do still want to improve their quality while ran at this lower resolution, and try to implement a 50% render resolution option for them before release though.

We are also attempting to improve the performance of shadows. Unfortunately, really dialing in the performance of the shadowmap is nearly impossible at this time, as we are still relying on Optifine for rendering it. However, we are trying to squeeze the most quality out of each shadowmap resolution that we can, to reduce the need to run higher, more demanding resolutions for good visual quality. At least until we can fully replace Optifines shadowmap with our own solution.

Volumetrics are also underway, which will be the foundations of our new weather system, and GI has been rebalanced, optimized, with accuracy and denoising being dramatically improved. Though we do want to note, it is still RSM (reflective shadow maps), so it still has the normal visual limitations of RSM.

We have included some images of the current clouds, at 1080p, rendering at the current 75% render resolution, as well as some images of the newly improved GI (Global Illumination) below.

Click an image to enlarge and enable gallery view


Stratum

Stratum got another decent sized update this month, with a few particularly stunning blocks being added, in our opinion. Memory tests have also be re-ran again, and are fully up to date on the system requirements page.

The full changelog and some screenshots for this months update can be found below.

Build 16 Changelog

Added

  • Prismarine (block, slab, wall & stairs)
  • Prismarine Bricks (block, slab & stairs)
  • Dark Prismarine (block, slab & stairs)
  • Chiseled Stone Brick
  • Chiseled Sandstone
  • Red Chiseled Sandstone
  • Basic Soul Torch
  • LabPBR AO for Stone Bricks and variants

Tweaked or Fixed

  • Slightly Improved Torch Emissive mask and color
  • Fixed Cut/Chiseled Sandstone bottom heightmap seam and shifted texture up for less POM leaking on top edge.

Some screenshots have been attached below, per usual.

Click an image to enlarge and enable gallery view


That about does it for June. We hope all of our US followers had a good, and more importantly, safe fourth of July, and we’d like to once again thank all of our followers and donors for their continued support! We couldn’t do this without you all.