June 2022 Progress Update & Continuum 2.0.5 Release

I bet many of you never expected to see 2.0 in here again, but we have a good reason…a few good reasons in fact.

You see, Continuum 2.0 is still our go to free shaderpack recommendation for either free/standalone Stratum users, and is still used by many of our fans while they wait for 2.1 to be finished. However, it has developed some rather annoying bugs over the last few years.

For one, we found that the TAA solution used in 2.0 does not play well with the RTX 20 or 30 series. Within a few minutes or even seconds (depending on your framerate), all Anti Aliasing with 2.0 would essentially disappear on these GPU’s. This lead to more aliasing (jagged edges), and noise, especially with resourcepacks like Stratum.

Another issue that popped up was with the Nether and End. You see, 2.0 never had any specific shading for those dimensions. The intended behavior when a user entered those dimensions was for them to essentially see vanilla graphics. This worked as intended for quite a while as well…then at some point an Optifine update came along, and completely broke this behavior, resulting in a white/black screen when users entered these dimensions.

Both of those issues prompted us to take another look at Continuum 2.0, and since Jake had some time to spare due to our roadblocks with 2.1/Focal, we got to work on them this month. We fixed the aforementioned issues, and then decided to take things a few steps farther, since this is very likely to be the last Continuum 2.0 update we ever deliver.

 We touched on everything from small visual tweaks, to fixes for edge case and rare issues that some users have experienced. Instead of continuing to ramble though, here’s the full changelog:

• Fixed TAA (Temporal Anti Aliasing) on modern graphics cards
• Fixed Nether and End dimension issues preventing players from seeing with the shader enabled
• Fixed Bloom breaking the shader when it was disabled in shader options
• Added the underground light leak mitigation from Continuum 2.1, and enabled by default
• Enabled the default LUT by default for a more universally pleasing out of the box experience
• Reworked water’s visual style. It is now smoother, less repetitive, and in our opinion, more visually pleasing (thanks to Mythical for most of this one)
• Fixed the ‘Cinematic’ presets settings ‘stickiness’ issue, which caused some settings to be stuck on Cinematic after the preset was used, even after changing to another preset, such as Low, Medium, High, etc..

This update should be live as of the time of posting this blog, and we strongly encourage anyone using Continuum 2.0.4 or older to update.

Before we move on, here’s a comparison shot of Continuum 2.0.4 and 2.0.5, using default settings for both:

The Cactus is here! No more throwing ultra high res dirt blocks into your 16×16 pixel trash Cactus! We also went back and fleshed out a few other block types a bit more.

As usual, you can find the full details about all of these changes, and some screenshots below.

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