August 2023 Progress Update

Summer is coming to an end, but the work continues 🙂

Work on Focal has continued, but we do not have a dev update from dotModded this month, as he spent the latter half of the month back in his home state of Nevada due to a family funeral and wedding. Jake worked on finishing up some work he was doing with LUA while dot was away, but then used most of the rest of the downtime to work on the updates we pushed out for 2.1 this month.

Next month should see a much more sizeable Focal status update though, so stay tuned for that.

2.1 saw some sizeable updates this month that pushed it ever closer to a Release Candidate build. As we had mentioned in the previous progress update, we would be moving forward with cleaning up settings as we move into this last stage of 2.1’s development, and that’s exactly what we did this month. The uncategorized menu, which was acting as a bit of a ‘catch-all’ for settings that were still a bit buggy or we hadn’t yet moved to their appropriate menus. We went through that menu this month and moved all but 6 options out and into their proper menus, creating new menus where appropriate, giving the options their proper names, as well as their proper descriptions. We also nixed a few depreciated options that no longer work/are no longer relevant, and set better descriptions for a few that still come with drawbacks.

In addition to this, and tying in nicely with this months Stratum Ice remake, we have vastly improved the visual aesthetic of Ice in 2.1 with certain styles of Ice texture. The basic gist is we added a similar form of volumetric lighting to water’s volumetric lighting to our Ice, and made refraction apply to ice in a way that adheres to ice’s normal map. We also later enabled POM on transparent textures as well. All these enhancements can be seen when combining the latest Stratum and Continuum 2.1 updates and checking out our new Ice.

Finally, we made a small enhancement to waving foliage. Previously, all foliage would wave at the same speed, no matter where it was in the game world. This was…quite odd when deep underground. So, we added a mask that id dependent on the sky lightmap to slow/stop waving when underground.

Going forward, we still have a few settings left to polish up, as well as the true last bit of major work before Release Candidates; the settings presets. These will take some fine tuning though and with the work we are still doing with Focal, we cannot yet commit to a timeframe for this work. Check back next month for more updates.

Here’s a little before/after of the changes to Ice in this build before we move on: