Getting closer…
Focal Engine, Continuum RT, & 2.1 Beta
Work on our various projects has continued, with Continuum 2.1 getting very, very close to being ready for it’s first Release Candidate build. 2.1 in general is by far our most polished and feature rich shader project ever, even as is, in it’s current Beta state, but that doesn’t mean we are ready to push it out just yet. Our standards for overall quality and polish have gone up exponentially from our early days, and this will be no exception.
We have cleaned up almost every bug or shortcoming that is feasible with current versions of both Focal Engine and the game itself (or at have fixes incoming that just didn’t quite make it into this months build), but we have one final visual pain point that we are trying to at least mitigate before we are comfortable moving out of Beta, and that pain point is how 2.1’s SSR interacts with Lily Pads, particularly with darker/realistic texture packs (like Stratum), in Swamp biomes. We think it is too extreme of a visual blemish to push forward with a release without trying out best to at least mitigate it, and thus, our lead dev has been splitting his time between business duties this time of year, Focal updates and attempts to fix this particular issue.
I’ll let dotModded take it from here:
This month I’ve started taking a look at our SSR on Lily Pads. (See images below)
As you can see in the images, Lily Pads occlude (block) rays from going through them. This is actually SSR behaving correctly, as rays are hitting the Lily Pads surface and get stuck there. This is the downside of pixel perfect SSR.
We use a hierarchal depth buffer which dramatically speeds it up, but also complicates things. When tracing for every eligible pixel, we send a certain number of rays, these rays use the depth buffer to check if the ray has gone behind a surface, and if it has, how much. If it’s near the surface the hit is accepted, if not, it is rejected. TL;DR: rays stop when they go behind something.
We have a solution for marching behind thin geometry like iron bars or chains, but the Lily Pad is so close to the water it allows the ray to hit. I have a couple of ideas to make it look less jarring, such as resolving the rays on the Lily as if it where a reflection of the bottom, but sadly this has undesirable effects in other areas of the shader. I’ll continue working on this to hopefully come up with a visually appealing solution.
I’m also still working on Focal Alpha, trying to get things working for 1.20.4/1.21. The single jar build should soon include 1.19.4 as well. Continuum RT’s round of updates, mentioned in the last blog, are still being worked on in the background as well, but aren’t the immediate priority.
Sorry to not have a lot to show, the business stuff behind the scenes is just taking so much time away from programming right now. As always, thanks for your continued support!
Next up, here’s a quick overview / changelog for the Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 30 release we put out this month:
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 30 Changelog
- Fixed a few small visual issues with fog and water volumes
- Added dithering to the sunlight marcher for volumetric clouds
- Fixed planar clouds using the dither meant for volumetric clouds
- Removed the LUTs for the old atmosphere model, significantly reducing the download size of the shaderpack
- Removed subsurface scattering from snow since it tended to look weird in snowy biomes
- Fixed DoF
- Reduced the default scattering coefficient for volumetric clouds. They should now appear brighter, cleaner and in general, less like they may be rain clouds. Users that prefer the previous look can simply set the scattering coefficient in volumetric cloud lighting settings to 0.07.
- Changed how the block breaking animation was blended into the terrain, and made lightning emissive (lightning is still WIP)
- A few other small code cleanups
Here’s a few screenshots of Build 30, mostly showing off the Cloud changes.
Stratum
Stratum continued to get new additions and texture updates this month, including Powder Snow and a brand new, revamped Snow texture to better match that new addition, as well as the return of Slime! That’s a texture those of you who’ve been here from the beginning may remember was actually already in the pack at one point, but had to be removed due to some material licensing issues. We’re quite happy to finally have a replacement, especially now that we’re more educated as far as material licensing goes 😅
We did opt to once again forego a Stratum update this month. We’re thinking this may become the norm, just to ensure updates are always a bit more substantial, as well as save on storage space a bit…so at least for now, expect Stratum updates every 2 months. We will update you in a future blog if that changes though!
Before we go though, here’s a few screenshots of the additions to Stratum this month that you can look forward to in the next update!
Again, thanks for your continued patience and support. It means a lot to us here at Continuum Graphics!
