November 2022 Progress Update

The Holidays have begun, but we haven’t stopped working. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

While most of our dev time in November went into Focal VK, we did get a small update out for Continuum 2.1 Beta.  This update, Build 15, brings some settings for waving foliage, for those that wish to tweak the speed, or disable them entirely. These settings can currently be found in the uncategorized menu (settings updates coming in future builds).

This update also includes a small tweak to POM shadows that nets a small improvement to a flickering effect that can be seen on certain POM heavy resourcepacks at certain times of day. We will likely be revisiting this particular issue in a future update, as it is still a bit of an eyesore in certain situations/configurations.

As always, this update is available to all Continuum Early Access and Legacy Continuum Tier 2 users via Focal Engine v1.0.6 or later.

We made good progress on Focal’s Vulkan update this month. The bulk of our time as going into working on getting the foundation of the renderer in place. OpenGL, Vulkan, Lua, and the WebUI are now initialized. The concept of a renderpack is coming together, and soon we should have a system in place for loading and unloading render pipelines at runtime. All development is still being done in a standalone application made to emulate a simplified game environment that’s simpler to work with and tests the engine in it’s entirety., but once we get our first renderpack loaded in Lua we will begin attaching the engine to Minecraft and start on shaders!

This is not quite as much as we would like to share today, but a few things didn’t line up for this months blog. So look out for a more substantial write up in a future blog.