Summer comes to a close.
Focal Engine, Continuum RT, & 2.1 Beta
The work on our various projects has continued, though progress is much slower than we would like, due to both the difficulty of what we have been trying to achieve, and a few personal things cropping up
Our development lead dotModded has prepared a statement detailing our continued efforts and struggles this past month:
This month hasn’t been my most productive, with me having to take an unexpected trip to see my family in another state, and then getting sick afterwards. I’ve still been working on getting 1.20.4+ working with the new Forge changes despite everything going on, but this has been some of the most complex work we’ve done since initially designing the project, so progress has been annoyingly slow even without life getting in the way.
I’ve also still been poking at Lily Pads looking less than ideal in water reflections. As we’ve said before though, this is technically intended behavior that I have to try to ‘hack’ away. It’s been testing my knowledge quite a bit to get the HiZ march to skip on over them without introducing artifacts. So far my tests has been unsuccessful but I’m still trying. In the end, this might end up hurting performance slightly, so it may have to be an optional toggle. Not ideal, but I’m working with extremely optimized code so any change will likely introduce some overhead.
We’ve also given the task of updating RT to Jake, since there’s not much for him to work on with 2.1 currently, other than the occasional bug report coming in. This work will bring many of 2.1’s latest features into RT. Unfortunately, he is starting to move house at the moment, and a lot of his time is being taken up with that, so progress has been slower than we’d like there as well.
We’re doing our best to balance all these personal challenges and we really appreciate your understanding and support!
Next up, here’s a quick overview / changelog for the Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 31 release we managed to get out this month:
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 31 Changelog
- Actually fixed how the block breaking animation was blended into the terrain (we swear this time). Previous fix wasn’t pushed properly and we missed it during final testing
- Partially reverted a previous AP (Aerial Perspective) fix since it was causing issues with puddles
- Added POM to block entities (brought on by Stratum’s new Pistons)
Continuum 2.1 could probably go into the RC (Release Candidate) stage as is…but we still really want to push through and get that last visual issue cleaned up (the Lily Pad SSR issue we’ve been talking about for a few months now). Until we feel we have exhausted our current options in regards to fixing or mitigating that, we don’t want to just push this out the door.
We want this release to be our most complete, polished and all around complete shader ever. Something we can be proud of without any outstanding issues that we could conceivably have fixed. This means the release is going to overshoot our ‘end of summer’ target, but we feel it is the right path here, and hope you understand. We will continue to provide updates on our progress with this in our Discord and these monthly update blogs.
Stratum
We continued with our 2 month Stratum update cycle this month, releasing Build 49 with a hefty amount of new textures, a few fixes, and updated game support for both the main pack, and the Performance Leaves addon! We also finally added a bespoke block breaking animation, which in combination with all the other new textures, really makes the whole pack feel more cohesive than ever, in our humble opinion.
With the updates to our Official game version support, we expanded our support for the new dynamic pack versioning system to our Performance Leaves addon, and are pleased with the results. Now both the main pack, and the addon will not display any errors from Minecraft versions 1.20.1 through to 1.21.1. This should greatly reduce the confusion our less experienced users often face when trying to use both the main pack and this addon. We just wish Mojang had done something like this sooner!
Stratum Build 49 Changelog
Additions
- Powder Snow
- New Snow texture to better match Powder Snow
- Slime Block
- First pass of block destroy stages (block break animation)
- Piston
- Sticky Piston
- Chorus Plant
- Chorus Flower
- Dead Chorus Flower
Fixes / Tweaks
- Fixed multi Candle models
- Updated maximum pack version of 1.13+ version to 34 for official compatibility with Minecraft 1.21.1!
- Updated Performance Leaves addon to new dynamic pack versioning system (should now not show as ‘made for newer/older version of game from MC 1.20.1 to 1.21.1)
- Slightly tweaked Performance Leaves pack description
- Updated maximum pack version for Performance Leaves addon to 34 to officially support Minecraft 1.21.1
As always, thank you for your continued patience and support. It means the world to us here at Continuum Graphics!