New Year 2023 Progress Update

First thing’s first, Happy belated New Year!

We skipped over a December blog due to the Holidays, and delayed this one a bit for reasons we will get into in the Focal section, but we have a lot to talk about!

Despite the holidays, we got one new build of 2.1 out (16) before Christmas, fixing numerous bugs and improving a few aspects of the shader. We pushed another build (17) out at the end of January, fixing a resurfacing bug with enchanted armor.

Our focus has and will continue to be mainly Focal’s Vulkan update, but small quality of life fixes and improvements like this will continue to come to 2.1 while we work towards Focal’s big update, so keep those bug reports coming!

Here’s a list of changes made in Builds 16 and 17 of Continuum 2.1:

• Fixed numerous light leak issues related to both MC 1.19 and the shader in general (though be even better underground now, even on older MC versions)
• Tweaked the Auto Cam for better exposure of bright objects, such as Lava, when in the overworld (was previously only tweaked like this in the Nether), and added a few user configurable settings for the adjustment made
• Increased default AO (Ambient Occlusion) radius slightly, for better shading in some complex situations, and added a slider for user configuration of the radius
• Moved AO options out of Misc settings and into their own menu and tweaked some of their ranges
• Touched up a few other settings menus/descriptions (mostly Specular settings in this update)
• Replaced a few remaining texture2D() calls with texture(), may improve compatibility in some configurations
• Fixed glowing Banners
• Fixed multiple visual issues with Enchanted Armor, such as the blinding glow at night, and the unsightly purple splotchiness it had previously

As we alluded to in the intro, we delayed this blog a bit to try to get a little visual teaser of our progress finished. We didn’t quite make it, and didn’t want to push this update back any longer, so we will be showing that at a later date. That said, we have still made great progress over the last 2 months, and we have some updates straight from our Lead Focal Dev, dotModded, to share:

Focal Engine has made major internal progress over the last few months. With both Vulkan and OpenGL working on Nvidia, Intel, and AMD GPU’s (using specific driver versions) and everything set up for Minecraft to be shared with Vulkan we’re able to fully focus on getting a head start on the Lua backend. Within the coming weeks we should have a fully working standalone application for further testing on broader hardware. This little demo will allow us to sanity check initial performance concerns and compatibility, saving us the headache of rewriting thousands of lines of code later down the line.

This next section is more intended for shader developers who understand Vulkan and OpenGL on a surface level. The major thing we’re working on right now is the main Render Graph system for handling the execution of all pipelines and commands. We’ve built up systems for simple creation of common types of passes. We’ve split the render graph up into what we’re calling sequences, you can think of a sequence like a single submission to a queue, that are synchronized with other sequences via the internal timeline semaphore. Vulkan and OpenGL are triple buffered for lockfree rendering, this system is rather complex so the shader developer isn’t expected to care about which frame(s) are currently scheduled on the GPU. We’re taking a lot of care to allocate and do as little possible on the GPU and CPU giving plenty of room for shader developers to utilize the full capabilities of the hardware. For now though we’re still going to be working on getting the backend for Lua to hook into, until that point expect more news soon for shader developers and artists in how they will likely be interacting with the engine and the current limitations we foresee having. Hopefully in the coming months we can have this in Minecraft and drive the geometry of the world with Focal Engine!

As many of you may also know, we also released a version of Focal 1.0.6 for MC 1.19.2 during this time, so both Continuum 2.1 and RT are now both usable on this game version. 1.18 may still come sometime down the line, and 1.19.3 is being investigated, though some changes Mojang has made with this update are troubling, to say the least, and will definitely affect the timeline for such an update.

Stay tuned to future blogs, exciting things are coming on this front.

Despite Focal being the main focus, RT is still getting small fixes and quality of life updates, much like 2.1. Thanks to your bug reports, we managed to launch 2 small updates to RT since our last update, and we have a few more small fixes in the queue.

Continuum RT Build 16 and 17 changelog:

• Shifted Voxel volume and Atmosphere Camera Position up by 64 blocks/meters to account for world height going negative in MC 1.19
• Added support for most new blocks from 1.17 to 1.19.2, including emissives, like Froglights, Glow Lichen, and more.
• Fixed light leaking through Dripstone blocks