New Year 2024 Progress Update

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!

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.

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!