Before we begin, we hope you all had a great holiday season / break!
This blog comes a bit later than what many of you may be used to, but between us struggling to get back up to full speed after the holiday season, which has included shaking off the sleepiness from too many big holiday meals, as well as sicknesses some of us picked up from travelling, plus the sheer amount of things we wanted to accomplish before releasing this progress update…well, we hope you understand.
And we’re not kidding about the amount of things we wanted to cram into this update, so lets get right to it:
Continuum 2.1's release and Focal Engine 1.0.9
As many of you may be aware, we finally launched our Continuum 2.1 shader from Early Access, to a full, free public release last month. We managed to hit our goal of getting it out before Christmas, but to do so, we had to settle for a less than ideal distribution setup, due to time constraints. At the time of release, anyone that wished to use Continuum 2.1 had to have an active (free) Continuum account, and would have to navigate to the Continuum Early Access section of Focal Engine’s in game UI to download the full Release (as Build 34). Since then, we’ve been hard at work updating both our Focal Engine, Account/Downloads page, and API to clean up the download flow and enable Continuum 2.1 to be downloaded by users without a Continuum Account.
As of today, and the new Focal Engine version 1.0.9 launching with this blog, we have rectified most of these usability issues. Continuum 2.1 is now in the Public Release section, alongside it’s predecessors, Continuum 2.0 and 1.3, and can be downloaded without being logged into a Continuum Account.
We’ve also cleaned up some aspects of Focal’s UI, squashed a few bugs, updated some old descriptions, readied the mod for some exciting future releases, improved shader sorting, and lined things up more with the site download page terminology wise to reduce confusion. The amount of changes across all of these aspects of our services does mean that this 1.0.9 update is a required update. Focal’s UI will cease functioning properly on older versions as of today, and you must update to the latest Focal version to retain functionality. This is a very simple in place update though. Just download 1.0.9, copy it into your mods folder, and delete your previous Focal Engine Jar. Due to this, and to further simplify the downloads page experience, we will also be removing all old Focal Engine downloads.
The only remaining issue to be solved short term is our free downloads page. It’s currently in dire need of some UI improvements, but those are not yet ready for prime time, so for the moment, it’s a bit cluttered, between all of our free products, and the latest Focal Engine builds being made available there to enable 100% account free usage of Focal Engine and Continuum 2.1. Lookout for updates on the free downloads page in future blogs!
Here’s a quick overview / changelog for Continuum 2.1’s full release:
Continuum 2.1 Full Release (Build 34) Changelog
- Various small settings description cleanups
- Added option for colored shadows from translucent blocks for volumetric fog
Check out the gallery below for some showcase screenshots of this release, many of which take heavy advantage of the many user configurable options available in Continuum 2.1! (courtesy of our dev tester, and friend, Uvraj)
Click to enlarge
What's next for Continuum Early Access?Â
With Continuum 2.1 now released, some of you may wonder what’s next for our Continuum Early Access package? Well, fear not, as we already have some improvements to 2.1 in the pipeline that will be made available to CEA users first, as a new beta build. Once these changes are well tested by CEA users, they will make their way to the public as Continuum 2.1.1, and so on. We plan to support Continuum 2.1 with fixes and improvements like this for many years to come.
The first thing we’re considering implementing sometime soon is a new settings menu for configuring a few star related settings for those that want to tweak their night sky a bit. More improvements to our SSR are also on the to-do list, but as previously stated, since we never quite got it to a point where we are 100% satisfied. And as mentioned in a previous update, we cannot justify devoting the majority of our development efforts on that one effect any longer, so future improvements to SSR will come more slowly/sparsely. It’s still absolutely something we want to improve further though.
But that’s not all we have in store for Continuum Early Access users…
Re-introducing...Continuum Legacy!
That’s right, the wait (and the subtle teasing) is over. Continuum Legacy is back on the menu!
We’ve been quietly working on Legacy for about a year now, tinkering with it whenever our devs had some downtime away from 2.1 or Focal. It’s provided a nice little change of pace from time to time, and allowed them to ‘reset’ a bit when stuck on a particularly annoying issue with our other projects, instead of spinning their wheels on it, getting nothing done.
The project has evolved a fair bit since we first announced it years ago though; originally it was concepted as an updated version of Continuum 1.3 with some modern quality of life additions/changes you’d expect to find in new shaders…but in all honesty, this idea was rather short sighted. Bolting on updates to a shader as old as 1.3 is really not the best idea in the short or long term, so when we picked the project back up a year ago, it was with a new vision: using Continuum 2.1’s modern, established and far more polished/capable codebase as a starting point for Legacy. This not only makes working on Legacy easier, since it’s based on a modern shader that our devs are intimately familar with, but it enables us to create a far better looking and optimized end product, with less potential for major developmental issues.
Legacy will still be aiming to capture that classic Continuum 1.3 vibe, that hasn’t changed. And we’ve already got a good solid base in place, with new Volumetric Clouds, tweaked Planar Clouds, entirely new color pallete to capture 1.3’s unique and colorful vibe, classic unrealistically huge Sun/Moon, and more! We also have some other classic 1.3 features planned, but not yet (at the time of writing) implemented, like the classic, overexaggerated screen space god rays and fog to obscure the end of your render distance!
We plan to treat this shader as a sort of a playground, where we can loosen our traditionally fairly strict stance on realism a bit, and have more fun. This means we will be considering some other often requested features such as Volumetric Clouds in the shape of the vanilla clouds, square sun and moon to match the base game, etc.. We’d love more suggestions in this area as well. If enough people in the community want something to be added, we’ll look into doing so (provided it’s feasible of course).
Now, we’re sure there’s one question most of you want to ask at this point: Legacy when? Well, with any luck, the first Alpha build of Legacy will be available to all Continuum Early Access users at the end of this month (January)! We’re putting the finishing touches on it now, and the new 1.0.9 version of Focal Engine released today should be ready for it’s release as well!
Before we move on, here’s a few screenshots we’ve taken over the last month or so (ones without a watermark come courtesy of Uvraj). You can expect more screenshots and details between now and the proper Continuum Legacy release blog!
A special thank you for our earliest supporters...
As a little thank you to those of you that backed our dream with the Continuum Early Access program back at the start, when it used to be offered in Continuum Tier’s, anyone that is still on a Continuum Tier 1 or Continuum Tier 2 package has been upgraded to full Continuum Early Access status!
This means users that previously only had access to Beta and/or Release Candidate builds will now have full access to all builds that Continuum Early Access has to offer; Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate; past, present, and future!
This change has already been made, and all affected users should now be able to view and download the entire available backlog of Continuum 2.1 Early Access builds. We’ve also removed the Continuum Tier upgrades from our store, so there should be less questions/confusion for potential new Continuum Early Access users as well.
Newer game version support for Focal Engine
Work has continued on updating Focal Engine to newer game versions, but with the holiday season, our other projects, and the sheer scope of this task, we were not able to bring any new game version support with Focal 1.0.9.
With much of this holiday crunch time work, and festivities behind us though, we can focus the bulk of our development efforts back on getting new game versions supported. It’s still not going to be an easy task, especially with all the work required for us to hopefully build better update systems for future versions, but it will be our priority, and should hopefully see minimal interruption. DotModded has a bit to add in his personal message below, but we should have more to share on this front in some future progress updates, hopefully sooner rather than later.
A message from our lead dev, dotModded:
Wow, 2024 feels like it went by so fast…culminating with us finally releasing 2.1 for free to all users! Ahead of that release in December, I was mostly still focused on SSR and getting Focal ready for 1.20.4+ with the Forge changes previously discussed. I’ve also been completely redesigning the build system to remain compatible across all game versions.
I haven’t made as much progress as I would’ve liked for SSR, it seems that every HiZ method documented has this issue in some way, the developers just never noticed I guess. It has to do with the first step of the ray when it leaves the surface, all implementations I can find just use a magic number to get the ray to escape. I’ve been working on calculating the correct distance for a ray to escape the surface, I’m still figuring out the quirks of my idea though, so I wasn’t able to make any additional improvements to the implementation for 2.1’s release, and I’m not sure when I’ll have something new to show on that front. Still working on it though.
Looking forward into 2025, we will continue pushing new features into Continuum EA, as well as getting Legacy polished up and ready for its debut to EA users (as mentioned above). Most importantly though we’re going to sit down and properly reevaluate Focal Alpha and Focal VK, coming to a proper distribution of work, and hopefully accelerating the timelines for each project. Focal Alpha was never intended to last this long, but it looks like we’re stuck with it for the time being as I vastly underestimated the time it would actually take to accomplish VK while juggling all the other responsibilities our small dev team has. So I’m going to spend some time getting Alpha more organized, and potentially bring in some features to enable further optimization to our shaders, and even new effects. We have a lot of ideas that we have been waiting for Vulkan to accomplish, features that don’t technically need Vulkan at all, just deeper integration with the data provided by Minecraft.
We also absolutely must come up with a better way for handling our build environment as it seems to break with every major update to Minecraft, Forge, or Fabric; delaying releases and sometimes entirely blocking us from being on the latest game version. This cannot continue this way. It is my hope we will get things figured out fast, and turn this into a well polished machine that spits out new versions, while maintaining all the other game versions we want to support.
Here’s to 2025, we’re going to be busy!
Continuum RT
Last but not least, Jake has continued his previously mentioned work on Continuum RT’s partial rewrite / update to the latest 2.1 codebase. We’re making decent progress here considering the other projects we’ve had rolling the past month or so. Hopefully this new RT version will be available in the coming months, and might include a few bonus enhancements if we can manage to shove them in, in a reasonable amount of time.
Stratum
Stratum development continued for the first part of December, seeing both the Netherite block (our first Netherite texture!) and the Beetroot Item being added before the holiday season began in earnest and things tapered off.
We’ve got more textures (including more items) coming in the next few weeks, so keep an eye on our socials for a first look at those!
And one last thing before we go; we’ve got a lot of little site updates to do, both for the new year, as well as to reflect the state of our projects now that Continuum 2.1 is released, Continuum Legacy is on it’s way, and Focal Engine has been updated. These will be slowly rolling out over the coming week or so. So please bare with us while we work on getting all our info up to date! Just wanted to get the most important, impactful stuff handled first.
As always, thank you all for your continued support