June 2023 Progress Update

Summer has arrived.

Work on Focal VK and the 1.19.4 update for Focal OGL (the currently available version of Focal), has continued (with dot himself working on the latter as well, out of necessity). Instead of hearing what’s been going on from me though, here’s an update from our lead dev, dotModded:

1.19.4 has taken a long time to get moving, between our DevOps person being unavailable to update our workflow, and both Minecraft and Optifine making a number of changes that have been substantial blockers for us. We have had to come up with solutions to keep all features as they were, while also balancing trying to not delay Focal VK any longer.

On that note, Focal VK has made significant progress relating to the OpenGL state communication. Getting Vulkan thread managing OpenGL objects without locking or any read on free errors has been a test of our sanity. Focal Engine is simultaneously synchronizing a Vulkan and OpenGL instance’s resources, including textures, semaphores, and buffers. This is the foundation of Focal Engines compatibility, and is a requirement for mod support. We believe trying to translate OpenGL calls into Vulkan to be an uphill battle, full of potentially far worse challenges. The solution of running both and synchronizing them together is a far better way to handle the inherent randomness of rendering. We have built a proper message bus for handing OpenGL state changes in Rust in a thread safe way, having up to 3 frames in flight for both Vulkan and OpenGL at the same time introduces numerous issues when resizing specifically without locking either side. At this point we’re moving to the final stages of this system allowing us to focus on getting Minecraft piped into Focal for an initial test.

At the same time much of the Lua system has been flushed out for shader developers to actually start registering shaders, resources, and more. This will be the system that shader developers will most interact with, and will likely be the portion of the project that will require the most planning and communication, not just within our team, but externally as well. We will be soon reaching out to developers who we believe may have inherent issues with Focal Engine, and come up with solutions to make sure they run together as seamlessly as possible. Thank you again for the continued support, and we can’t wait to get this into everyone’s hands!

Before we move on, a reminder; work on a Minecraft 1.20.X update for Focal Engine will not begin until Optifine has exited Preview. We have this stance because of past experiences with the bugs Previews can have, and working around them, when they will likely be fixed by the end of the Preview stage anyway, is not something we feel is a good use of our limited development resources at this time.

2.1 got a small update this month, fixing another community reported issue, this time with a setting carried over from Alpha builds of 2.1; High Quality Skylight. This setting used to provide higher quality lighting, mostly for our Volumetric Clouds. With the release of Focal versions of 2.1 however, it became depreciated, due to the increase in quality of the base Skylight from the Focal rewrite. Enabling it after Build 13 not only caused some visual artefacts during some times of day, it also resulted in an overall degradation in cloud lighting quality. A user brought it to our attention early last month, and as such, that toggle has been removed.

We also added more steps to the Sun Path Rotation slider, by community request. Please keep your bug reports and requests coming, and we will continue to squash bugs and tweak options where we can/where appropriate!