February 2025 Progress Update

• Added Continuum 1.3 style vignette
• Improved cloud rendering over terrain
• Fixed weird fog cutoff
• Improved cloud sorting over translucents (water, stained glass, etc).
• Misc cloud improvements
• Added options for 2D godrays and vignette (currently available in miscellaneous settings).

And a few screenshots with these changes:

As promised last month, some updates directly from the devs:

First up, dotModded;

I’ve been working on Focal Alpha almost exclusively this month, better preparing us to continue support in the long term. I’ve taken a step back from our work with the development environment to focus more on what Focal relies on. The first steps of this involve implementing some of the features we relied on Optifine for directly into Focal; mainly shader preprocessing, custom uniforms, and settings.

Along the way we’re aiming to improve the experience using these features as well, both for shader development and end users. By doing this our features won’t be subject to change by external projects and it simplifies the update process substantially. We’re still looking around to see if there’s anything else we want to support ourselves, and I think we will find a lot more. This also has the benefit of us getting more familiar with the intricacies of the Minecraft renderer, which will be valuable insight for Focal VK’s continued development.

We have some pretty interesting plans moving forward we think you all will love, and I can’t wait to share more! For instance: the new shader preprocessing / shader settings will bring with it a new settings UI! This is currently very much in the early stages, however we have a solid plan on how it should look/function. The new settings also allow us to enable/disable things without reloading the shader, making sliders much more responsive. This may not be coming to the first release of this new version of Focal, but it won’t be far behind, as this is a major focus for us. The user experience will be vastly improved being able to see the result of their changes in real time.

More to come!

And now, Jakemichie!

This last month I’ve mostly been continuing work on our next Continuum RT update. Just to recap, as of this new update, RT will be running on 2.1’s latest code base, will have 2.1’s new atmosphere model, and it’ll be in a far better spot as far as maintainability goes.

This new update still functions the same as previous versions of RT, for the most part, but there will be some things fixed or improved, such as translucent block rendering, or the ability to choose exactly how many denoising passes you want. In terms of performance, it averages out to perform about the same as previous versions on my PC. Some scenes are a bit faster, others are a bit slower, most are about the same. Right now the bottleneck is the path tracer, but we have some ideas on how to improve that, some hopefully coming sooner than others. The update still isn’t finished yet, there’s some issues that need to be fixed and there’s some features from previous versions of RT that need to be added, but hopefully it won’t be too much longer!

Aside from RT, I’ve also done a bit of work on Legacy (see the Legacy section for more info on that) and have started building an expression parser for Focal Engine Alpha. To keep it simple, the expression parser should make Focal Engine Alpha a bit more flexible without having to hardcode features such as texture/render pass downscaling and dynamic SSBO sizing, as we do now. This will open up some more optimizations for all of our shaders, in particular RT in the short term. As for Legacy, I’ve recently fixed an issue with clouds rendering over terrain. Clouds are rendered separately and upscaled in all of our modern Focal Engine shaders, so having them render over terrain wasn’t as simple as just checking if the player is above the clouds, especially if you want clouds to render over terrain when the player is underneath them and they’re physically in front of the terrain.

That’s all for now!