March 2023 Progress Update

Marching through March…(ha-ha😜)

Almost all of our focus remains with Focal Engine, but we still pushed a small update to 2.1 this month. This updated corrected a small oversight on our part with 1.19.X support, namely, not adding all new foliage block ID’s to the shader. This caused many of the new vegetation blocks to not wave. Specifically: Mangrove, Mangrove Propagule, Azalea, Flowering Azalea Leaves, and Twisting Vines.

Thank you to the user that reported this to us, Keep the reports coming!

RT also got a minor update this month, with us fixing a similar bug with enchanted armors that was causing the texture to distort and glow much brighter than it should.

We have a few more small improvements in the pipeline for RT in the coming months as well. Nothing crazy, due to the aforementioned focus on Focal, but a few more much needed quality of life items.

Work on Focal has continued in earnest, and we have recently made a promising…pivot. We are quite optimistic about the benefits of this change in direction, but we have not yet reached the point where we can 100% say that we will be sticking with it. Until then, we do not want to share further details on it, but we are hopeful that we will reach that point soon.

We also had a small poll on our Discord server this month, specifically for shader devs. We wanted to get an idea about which of the following options sounded more convenient;

• A: Lua Scripting engine, backed by emmylua for a object oriented styled experience for filling out resources and logic for textures, uniforms, the works.
• B: WebAssembly scripting engine. Official api’s supplied through AssemblyScript and Rust. Benefits of this include picking your own language that compiles into WebAssembly (list keeps getting longer).

We got some helpful feedback, and will be taking it into account going forward. That said, if any shader devs are reading this that are interested in potentially using Focal Engine in the future, please consider joining our Discord server if you haven’t, and please participate in potential future polls/discussions!

And finally, with Optifine moving out of Preview for Minecraft 1.19.3/1.19.4, and fixing the issues with the texture Atlas that came with those updates, we have begun work on a 1.19.4 update for the current live version of Focal Engine. We do not have an ETA at this time, but we hope to have that out soon!