We hope the start of the Holiday season has been good to all of you, here’s what we’ve been up to though:
Focal Engine
It’s been a busy month finishing off the development environment updates so we can update Focal Alpha on our own more easily, as well as actually working on those updates, and testing AMD fixes for the problems introduced by some of their newer drivers in our various projects. Work on much of this is coming to a head, but because of this, there will be no direct update from dotModded or Jakemichie this month.
To be more specific though, we’ve hit quite a few roadblocks with our Fabric version, but the Forge version is in active testing (for 1.20.1), We hope to have Fabric up to speed soon, and then knuckle down on testing to get this out as quickly as possible (while still being good to go that is).
On the Focal VK side of things, Jake has been continuing to beat his head against the wall that has been the tracked value system. He’s slowly chipping away at it, but is on his 5th or 6th rewrite as of the time of writing this. It’s been rough going, to say the least, but we want this done right, and important lessons are being learned.
We hope to have more positive news on these fronts in our next update. Thanks for sticking with us.
Continuum 2.1 & Continuum RT
We released Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 24 this month, fixing that low level / superflat world specular bug we mentioned in our last blog post. Not the most impactful change, and certainly one many won’t notice, but that’s the nature of the late Beta stage of development we are in with 2.1.
Looking forward, we hope to find the time to finish building out the settings preset system in 2.1, get those presets nailed down, tested…and push 2.1 into the RC (Release Candidate stage). Current internal target for that is January, but due to the development workload we have right now, that is just a tentative timeframe.
On the RT side of things, we also pushed Continuum RT Build 20, another small update, this one better addressing RT’s limitations when it comes to non-cubic emissive blocks when using a texture pack. Previously many of these would not emit light. Now they are hardcoded and will always do so, making gameplay with PBR resourcepacks more viable. This is hopefully a shorter term solution to the current Alpha’s limitation.
We will share more info on the above as we have it.
Stratum
We hit a few easier blocks this month, like the Pot and background of the Item frame, since the bulk of the work went into what ended up being a fairly complex TNT texture! We’re quite proud of what Mythical whipped up here, especially on the first pass. There will of course be more updates coming to this block in the future though. Potentially some more small details (like a fuse system), and of course a custom set of explosion particles, all in due time of course.
See the changelog below for detailed update notes.
Stratum Build 43 Changelog
Added
- TNT
- Pot
- Item Frame
- Glow Item Frame
Tweaked
- None
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Holiday Screenshot Contest
We ended up updating the name of our latest screenshot contest from ‘Fall’ to ‘Holiday’ 2023, since there was no small amount of voiced confusion about a potential theme. Some thought that they would be limited to a Fall / Autumn theme for their screenshots, when that was not the case. We will be taking this feedback into account for future contests, and we also subsequently extended the contest period by one week due to the confusion.
The contest will be ending ~4 hours after this blog post goes live, so if anyone reading this would still like to submit an entry, we encourage you to give it a shot!
And as always, thank you for your continued support!
