We hope you all had a great Holiday season, and a happy New Year!

As many of you might have noticed, there were no end of month updates from us over the Holidays. We felt it was a good idea to use the time we had before the Holiday season really kicked off to get as much done as possible, and then fold both December and January’s updates together, rather than rush to push out small updates before everyone left for their various family obligations, so that’s exactly what we have done!


Focal Engine

Good progress was made on our Minecraft 1.20 update for Focal Alpha before the Holidays, and we’re just tracking down a few lingering issues before we transition to the final testing stage. We’ve also spent a good bit of time stabilizing our new development environment for Focal Alpha, so hopefully future version updates for Focal Alpha come quicker, between the lessons learned in actually creating these new 1.20 versions, and fleshing out the development environment itself. The work on the dev environment may also facilitate a single jar build of Focal Alpha that works on multiple versions and loaders (Forge/Fabric), thought that is still TBD.

In the (somewhat rare) downtime Jake or dotModded have had working on the above, some more progress was made on nailing down Focal VK’s Lua scripting engine. This has admittedly been rewritten several times now, but we are trying to ensure we get this right the first time, as sweeping changes to such a system down the line, particularly after a public release, have the potential to be quite disruptive.

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Continuum 2.1

Continuum 2.1 saw a few small tweaks / additions this month, from an option meant to reduce emissive blocks self lighting, to making the moon luminosity option a slider instead of a single button with multiple values, as well as a bit of spellcheck to its various menus and options. These changes will find their way into the next build at the end of January.

We also got the settings preset system implemented on a development build of 2.1, and will be starting work on fleshing out each presets settings / quality levels soon. Once this process is done, we will prepare and launch the first Release Candidate build of 2.1. That means Legacy Continuum Tier 1 users should be seeing a version of Continuum 2.1 sooner rather than later! Check back in our next update for more info on the development of settings presets as we work towards that RC release!


Stratum

With us folding December and January’s texture developments together, Stratums upcoming Build 44 is likely going to be one of the biggest we’ve ever released. With just December alone, we have 11 new textures, many of them fairly complex, including the Blast Furnace, Hopper, Redstone Repeater, Redstone Comparator, and many of the Chest Boats (Oak, Dark Oak, Spruce, Birch, Acacia, Mangrove and Jungle), as well as a growing list of tweaks and enhancements to existing textures!

Check out some screenshots of some of those down below, and keep an eye on our socials over the next month for teasers of the rest and other not yet mentioned textures that will be coming in Stratum Build 44!

Click an image to enlarge and enable gallery view


Holiday Screenshot Contest Winners!

-Our Holiday screenshot contest also concluded last month. As usual, we would like to highlight the winners, and the runners up.

Congrats to all the winners, and a big thank you to all who entered!

Click any image below to see an enlarged version


Looking Forward

The last few years have been trying for many of us, but your continued support has enabled us to weather all the challenges we’ve faced and continue to do what we love.

Everyone here at Continuum Graphics appreciates that continued support. Thank you.

Here’s to hoping 2024 is our best year yet!