Continuum 2.1’s first Release Candidate is here!
Continuum 2.1 RC, Focal Engine, & Continuum RT
Most of our development focus has been on getting Continuum 2.1 out of Beta and into it’s final stage of development, the Release Candidate stage! We managed this, with a few caveats that we will go over a bit later in this update. When time permitted, work on resolving our 1.20.4+ update issues with Focal Engine continued as well, as has some background work on updating RT with the latest applicable features from the latest versions of 2.1. You’ll be hearing at good bit more about both of those early next year.
As usual, our development lead dotModded has prepared a statement detailing what we got up to with our shaders and Focal this past month:
Another somewhat slow month for me, with a lot of my time being caught up in the administrative side of the business. Focal Alpha has made slight progress towards updating to 1.20.4+. Again the reason it’s taking so long is because forge significantly changed how it loads mods, breaking our development environment beyond repair, this is an extremely frustrating task that is testing my sanity.
Speaking of sanity, my initial Lily Pad SSR fix caused some new bugs, specifically some dark black triangles on the left and right of the screen in reflections, mostly when looking down and being more apparent at higher FOVs / wider aspect ratios (which is how I missed it the first time around).
They’re failing due to a self intersection, from what I’ve gathered in papers, books, and blog posts it seems like no one has actually come up with a solution to this, instead using magic number offsets that “seem” to work (at lower FOVs) to prevent the self intersection. This bug is also testing my sanity and made be bring back out the notebook to do some math and test a couple theories. I’ve made a lot of progress figuring out all the ways I can break it in a different exciting fashion. This has not been fruitless however as I’m coming up with a proper solution to completely prevent self intersections at any FOV. We have made the triangles smaller, and It’s now barely noticeable with the default FOV, though settings like quake pro will potentially have some missing reflections. In the meantime we have mitigated the issue as best we can for our RC build. I hope we can fixe this before 2.1 leaves RC stage, but if not, it’s mitigated well enough that we cannot justify continuing to delay.
Until next blog though, Happy Holidays and I hope everyone has good food and good company!
Here’s a quick overview / changelog for the Continuum 2.1 Release Candidate build we released this month:
Continuum 2.1 Release Candidate (Build 33) Changelog
- SSR now has the ability to reflect the backs of surfaces, which vastly improves the reflections for items like Lily Pads. Our changes to accomplish this caused some knock on issues elsewhere with SSR, & our best attempts at fixing them lead to a few small visual tradeoffs. Specifically a ~1 pixel border in reflections in some specific circumstances. We have mitigated this as best we can for the moment, but they’re not yet fully resolved. Despite this, we believe the benefits outweigh the tradeoffs. This will likely be further improved in future versions, but we cannot justify holding back this release for them any longer.
- Added a more accurate lens model for DOF
- Further tweaked our camera settings to more closely line up with real world cameras
- Slightly improved GI performance
- Several misc. code cleanups
Check out the gallery below for a comparison between the old and new SSR (click to enlarge & quickly compare before/after)
With Continuum 2.1 now in it’s last stage of development, we are testing internally, as well as continuing to take feedback/bug reports and monitoring the general stability of the shader. If no major issues with this build are uncovered over the next month, 2.1 will likely be fully released quite soon! In the meantime though, all early access testers should keep their feedback and bug reports coming. It can only make the shader better!
Stratum
We continued fleshing out the remaining farmable plants in Stratum this month, adding the remaining Potato plant stages, Beetroot plants with full stages, the Potato held item, as well as the Poisonous Potato.
Check out the full patch notes for Build 50 below:
Stratum Build 50 Changelog
Additions
- Bamboo (Stalk and Leaves)
- End Portal Eye (hand item and ‘block’)
- Potatoes (all stages and hand item)
- Beetroot (all stages)
- Poisonous Potato
Fixes / Tweaks
- None
Click an image below to enlarge and enable gallery view
Before we go, we’d also like to let you all know that we’ve been doing more giveaways than usual over in our Discord server to get in the holiday spirit! So far this month we’ve put 12 games on offer, and as of this blog going live, there are still 10 game giveaway’s active. There’s no cost to enter or any real requirements. Just join our Discord community server, head to the #free-stuff channel, and join whatever giveaway’s you’re interested in! We might be offering more as the month goes on as well, so keep an eye out for that and Happy Holidays from everyone here at Continuum Graphics!
