Taking care of business, and other ‘fun’ challenges…
Focal Engine, Continuum RT, & 2.1 Beta
Our work with Focal Alpha (OGL) updates, Focal VK, Continuum 2.1 Beta, and Continuum RT has continued this past month, with the most notable being sizable updates to Continuum 2.1, and RT seeing some extra attention.
Per usual, I’m going to step back and let our lead developer, dotModded, take it from here:
This month has been pretty grueling, with it being the time of year where business paperwork stacks up. Because of this I haven’t been as productive as I would have liked to be. I’ve mostly been working on Focal Alpha this month, trying to come up with ways to update to 1.20.4 and beyond, and working on some nice features for shader development.
For example; I’ve been building a string evaluator for our JSONs to build custom uniforms and dynamically drive textures. This should allow us to progress a little further into what we want RT to be, and bring some minor performance uplifts and code cleanliness to Continuum 2.1 and beyond.
Speaking of shaders, I have started working on bringing over the new features in 2.1 Beta to RT, matching the overall look and feel of the shaders and bringing them closer to feature parity. This should have some minor performance benefits, as well as improving atmospherics, tonemapping, and general polish.
Sadly my update isn’t that big this month, but I’m hard at work getting new features into Focal Alpha to hold us over until Vulkan is ready.
Next up, here’s a quick overview / changelog for the Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 29 release we put out at the end of July:
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 29 Changelog
- Fixed the skybox cubemap not taking the camera altitude offset into account
- Fixed noise remaining animated in a couple places, even with TAA disabled
- Fixed the underwater volume not using the underground light leak fix
- Fixed the underwater volume material sometimes breaking on some AMD drivers
- Fixed Aerial Perspective not being shadowed correctly when viewed underwater
- Fixed the SSR block light fallback applying to non-metals
- Changed Tinted Glass to be treated like Stained Glass
- Added some missing block IDs to block.properties
- Fixed visual issues with Sun Path Rotation value of 0.0 at certain times of day
- Added SSS to various blocks, such as Cherry Leaves, Pink Petals, Sugar Cane, Bamboo, Cobwebs, Snow, Snow Blocks, Fire & more!
- Added a setting for Planar Cloud density
- Tweaked values for various settings to be more sensible/give users greater control
A few screenshots of Build 29 & Stratum, showing off the Cherry Groves now that the Cherry Leaves and Pink Petals have Subsurface Scattering enabled!
Stratum
Stratum Build 48 landed this month, and it was a big one. Introducing not one, not two, but three animated textures (Lava, Fire, and Soul Fire), a host of other new textures, improved visual game version support by taking advantage of the new pack version range system (starting with Build 48, all MC versions from 1.20.1 onwards should no longer display a red warning about the pack being made for a newer version of the game), and notably improved visuals for all sub 2048x resolutions, by way of the downscaler tweaks we talked about in our previous blog!
Suffice to say, this is another sizeable update, mostly enabled by once again having a two month update cycle instead of one. We may fully switch to this update cadence, as it both gives us more time to pack more content and fixes into these updates (preparing for an update eats ~5 days out of the end of the month), as well as saving us a bit of storage space, since new Stratum builds are not small, and only get larger with each subsequent update. but haven’t fully decided yet. Still not 100% though. Kind of playing it by feel for the moment.
Stratum Build 48 Changelog
Added:
- Barrel
- Candle (all variants)
- Animated Lava
- Animated Fire
- Animated Soul Fire
- Sculk Sensor
Tweaked:
- Notably improved overall quality of almost every texture in the pack via changes to our downscaler (affects 128x through 1024x)
– Please check out our previous, June 2024 Progress Update Blog for before/after images showcasing the downscaler tweaks! - Fixed some issues with transitions from metal materials inside textures that showed up with some shaders (also via some tweaks to our downscaler)
- Updated pack format to take advantage of the new range system, so Stratum should now show up in game as fully compatible for 1.20.1 through 1.20.4, & this should persist to future updates after 1.20.4!
- Fixed normalization of various normal maps that were causing some issues
- Tweaked Lava flow speed (may be further tweaked in the future).
Here’s a little gallery showcasing many of the new textures available in this update. Click an image to expand for a larger view.
And last but not least, here’s a short ‘timelapse’ showcasing Stratum’s new animated Lava, both at sunset and night:
As always, thanks for your continued patience and support. It means a lot to us here at Continuum Graphics, and we hope you continue to join us for future progress updates!
