Hello there đź‘€
Legacy
Nothing crazy happened with Legacy this month, just another handful of nice enhancements and fixes we found in between working on RT and Focal’s upcoming updates. Most notably being us enabling cloud shadows by default for what I believe is the first time.
We usually don’t do this with our shaders, as the unique combination of realistically large and high altitude clouds, plus Minecraft’s usually quite limited render distances means that the shadows cast by clouds in our shaders usually cover most, if not all of the rendered land on your screen (or none at all). There ends up being very little visual variety and it’s just not all that fun to play in the shade half the time either. As many of you may know now, either through using it or reading our previous blogs talking about all the work that’s been done to cloud rendering, Legacy has smaller clouds that are very, very low to the ground. This turned out to be the perfect combination for some very interesting visuals with cloud shadows enabled.
We uploaded a little teaser clip of these shadows to our socials earlier in the month. Here it is again for those of you who missed it;
We got a bit of tunnel vision while testing / recording this though, and as some of the keen eyed among you may have noticed, the shadows don’t seem to quite line up with the clouds passing by in this clip. We noticed shortly after uploading (hindsight is fun like that), and fixed it before Aprils Legacy update however!
Speaking of that update, this isn’t the only thing that made the cut, here’s the full details:
Continuum Legacy Alpha Build 4 Changelog:Â
- Added block light clipping to the regular campfire to improve visuals in challenging lighting conditions.
- Fixed unmapped blocks (such as glow lichen) being treated as lightning bolts and glowing far brighter than intended.
- Enabled cloud shadows by default.
- Corrected misalignment between clouds and their shadows.
And a few screenshots with these changes:
Focal Engine
Work on Focal Engine, and particularly game updates has continued, with a few unfortunate roadblocks;
More on that, from dotModded himself;
Over the last year I’ve been having increasing numbers of seizures and those have lead to multiple concussions…rapidly accelerating in the last month or two (likely due to some medication I’ve been taking). It’s meant a lot of doctor’s appointments, and the concussions have made it very hard to work so progress is slower than I’d like. That being said, this month has still been fairly exciting for me!
I have begun writing our own GUI library for Focal Alpha. Currently we rely on Minecraft’s ever changing implementation making things janky after each revision. At the moment (since 1.20 onwards), we’re having issues layering text for dropdowns, along with other changes that are rather annoying to keep up with. Making this GUI library will simplify Minecraft updates dramatically as the code will be mostly unchanged between versions, and should also allow us to support even more versions of the game. The way we currently handle UI is the main thing that slows down updates outside of development environment issues.
There is of course challenges to writing a GUI library from scratch in OpenGL, however it’s nothing we can’t handle. I have been making amazing progress on it, and we’re targeting a UI library that fits in with the current GUI aesthetically, utilizing Minecraft’s existing textures. Resource packs will also still theme the UI if supported by the pack. After we get the Continuum account and product management UI implemented, we will be making our own settings UI and implement our own settings system supporting live updates to the various values that don’t require a recompile. This further separates us from Optifines code base, again easing updates and support for as many Minecraft versions as possible.
Having full control over the UI like this will allow us to make settings more intuitive for the user, hopefully opening up more possibilities for configuration. We plan to have a UI for changing settings where you can see the updates to the game in real time, drastically reducing the time it takes to dial in the exact look you’re going for. Taking inspiration from televisions we will keep things to a limited banner across the bottom or side (undecided, we would love some feedback as we get closer to a finalized design).
For now though we’re still working on getting our existing UI updated to the latest game versions (1.20.4-1.21.X) hopefully reducing the time it takes to get the next game updates complete sooner. Because of these updates being built on the existing UI though, there will still likely be some issues with drop downs text rendering due to how Minecraft handles that now, but we’re not going to hold those updates back longer than required once they’re fully functional.
Continuum RT
Jake has continued working on Continuum RT Build 21 this past month, and has made great progress! POM / Parallax is actually the only thing that needs re-implementation and polish before we can begin final testing. Unfortunately that’s no small task, especially when it comes to RT. We’ll have more to share on that front next month though, as for what actually went down this month:
The last bits of our 2.1 codebase update for RT were hooked up, and more notably, stained glass rendering was significantly improved! Not only from a purely aesthetic perspective, but ray traced refraction was also add/enabled on stained glass for the first time in RT! You’ll find a lot of screenshots showing this off in various lighting conditions vs the existing Build 20 of RT below (plus a few random scenes with just the new version):
Continuum 2.1
Continuum 2.1 Beta benefitted from some of the same updates as Legacy this month (thanks to their shared codebase). Particularly the block light clipping for the campfires that drastically improves the exposure handling around them on dark nights, and unmapped blocks blowing out due to a bug in the shader causing them to be handled like Lightning Bolts (basically, no more nuclear glow lichen!)
It’s probably getting to be about time to consider a 2.1.1 release with all the changes/fixes that 2.1 has built up in current Beta versions as well…depending on our workload the next month or two, that may be something we drop sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.
Here’s the full patch notes and a few screenshots:
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 36 Changelog:Â
- Added block light clipping to the regular campfire to improve visuals in challenging lighting conditions.
- Fixed unmapped blocks (such as glow lichen) being treated as lightning bolts and glowing far brighter than intended.
Stratum
April was a slower month for Stratum, with a few blocks being scrapped in the early stages and a fair bit of time spent trying to interpret how best to adapt blocks like the Bees Nest to Stratums realistic style, but we got to a fairly good spot in the end (even if we might come back and touch upon it again later!). Also jumped back over to some items again, with the addition of Sticks.
More to come!
Click an image below to enlarge and enable gallery view
Before we go, for those of you that enjoy that platform, we now have a TikTok. Drop a follow over there if that interests you, as we might be posting more random little clips here and there.
As always, thanks for your continued support!
