April 2024 Progress Update

The work continues.

As mentioned in last months blog, we hit some unexpected roadblocks when attempting to update from 1.20.1 to 1.20.4, namely in the GUI department. We are unfortunately still working through those roadblocks, and dotModded will have a bit more to say about that in a moment.

We also confirmed a report about world borders causing Focal to crash the game, found a fix, and have prepared an update to be rolled out soon. Thanks to the community member who reported that, and please, keep the reports coming!

Now for a bit more technical updates regarding our work on 1.20.4 and some Focal VK updates from our lead dev, dotModded:

The update for Focal Engine Alpha on 1.20.4 is still underway. The tool we use to get OptiFine running in a development environment is incompatible with this game version, along with Mojang changing how the GUI works. This has lead to a delay in the release as this tool typically doesn’t break often. We cannot begin work on the GUI until the tool is fixed. I have forked the project and am working on making it compatible with the latest game versions; I’ve already fixed a few things but I’m stuck with OptiFine interfaces not being in the classpath. I hope this issue is resolved soon, however with the complex nature of this project it may take some time. We may focus on getting 1.19.4 working first as little stands in the way of that release.

Focal Engine VK has also made significant progress. To retain compatibility with mods that do custom rendering outside of Minecraft/Forge/Fabric frameworks we create a custom swapchain for OpenGL to render to that Vulkan can then present to the screen. To develop this we create a windowless OpenGL instance for minecraft, supplying framebuffers that are managed by Vulkan to present. Unlike most Vulkan external implementations we enact a (mostly) lock-free system, allowing OpenGL to accept commands as soon as their ready, with Vulkan always presenting the latest complete frame. This allows the framerate to be unbound by Minecraft, delivering low latency mouse input, and reduced microstutter. Creating a system in rust to properly resize these buffers without deleting ones that are in use in OpenGL proved to be extremely difficult as the Vulkan and OpenGL render loops need to be syncronized briefly. Thankfully with Rusts built in thread safety we where able to create a safe way to manage resources between the 2 renderers while remaining lock-free for general gameplay. This marks a major milestone as now we can focus on compositing the two renderers, and connecting focal engine to Minecraft. Everything at first will still be rendered in OpenGL, allowing us to move rendering to Vulkan piece by piece.

Continuum 2.1 Beta took yet another step towards RC and eventually a full release this month, with more polish and bug squashing, as well as the Low preset being added! Next up is the previously mentioned ‘Potato’ preset, which we plan to have a bit of fun with. We may also do a Very Low, depending on how the Potato preset goes.

With the Low preset, we managed another ~10% performance bump over Medium, though this time around there were some notable sacrifices, such as Volumetric Fog, Volumetric Clouds, notable shadow quality loss, etc..  Still, for a Low preset, it is still fairly reasonable looking, in our humble opinion.

See below for our full Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 27 changelog.