New updates…and new challenges.
Legacy
Our updates to Legacy to further enhance it’s unique style, capture a bit more of that 1.3 feel, and take more advantage of it’s far more relaxed ethos when it comes to realism to enhance it’s playability have continued this past month. Pretty much all of our updates and changes were made with these ideas in mind, particularly the changes around lighting in dark areas and at night. Users should find previously challenging and sometimes harsh low light / nighttime lighting conditions are now much more pleasant on the eyes and easier to deal with without torches or other light sources, mostly thanks to brighter nights, and dimmer block based light sources.
Legacy’s moon is also now more appropriately sized when compared to it’s larger than life sun, though if users wish, the size of both can be manually adjusted in shader options (and we’ve added even more options than were available previously, so it can be fined tuned to an even greater degree).
The exhaustive list of changes in this update can be found below. More to come!
Continuum Legacy Alpha Build 5 Changelog:Â
- Changed default moon size and it’s luminance to better reflect the unique visual style we are going for with Legacy.,
- Lowered the default blocklight strength from 800 to 200 to further improve nighttime playability and tone.,
- Tweaked bloom slightly to compensate for the above changes.,
- Increased clear cloud coverage slightly.,
- Added a few missing descriptions for some camera settings.,
- Added more options to sun and moon size sliders.
And a few screenshots with these changes:
All screenshots in the Stratum gallery below were taken with Legacy Build 5, so be sure to check those out as well!
Focal Engine & Continuum RT
dotModded wanted to bring a bigger and more technical entry this month, but some personal/health complications necessitated a shorter update from him (which is also partially why this blog released a bit later than usual); Jake has prepared a meatier update on what he’s been working on though. I’ll let them speak for themselves though!
First up, dotModded;
Hey guys, my time is going to be limited for at least a little while, given some recent medical concerns. Long story short: seizures and concussions. Not quite sure of the cause, but hopefully I’ll know soon.
That said, we have managed to complete the 1.20.4 Focal Updates UI and are in the final stages of testing on that version. This UI is backed by Minecraft, which as many of you may know, is something we didn’t want to do, but it was the fastest way we saw to get these updates out.
We’re still working on our own UI library, but in the meantime this should hold us over. Finishing our 1.21.X update is next and while we still want to get these updates out as quickly as possible, we’ll admit it really shouldn’t have taken as long as it has. Between forge changing dramatically and slowing us down quite a bit getting our development environment setup, and Minecraft changes requiring a bunch of code changes, plus personal stuff…it’s been rough.
Sorry for a short update from me this month, but Jake has been hard at work giving RT the love it deserves, so he should have more interesting stuff to share!
And now, Jakemichie:
With POM being the last thing left before the RT rewrite is finished, naturally I’ve been working almost entirely on that the last month. Unfortunately I haven’t made much progress as it’s much more difficult than I originally anticipated, which has led to me having to repeatedly scrap whatever I had as I kept running into roadblocks.
The two main issues that I’ve ran into is the sheer amount of data that I need to store and keep track of for POM, and getting POM to place nicely with the gradient estimation for our A-SVGF denoiser. I’ve mostly solved the former, though it has come at the cost of only supporting POM for the first bounce. This actually isn’t as bad as it sounds, as the first bounce is mostly where you will see the influence of POM on lighting. Even with the first bounce alone, POM should still cast nice shadows and cause highlights to pop within textures, without taking too much performance. As a bonus, the approach that I’m taking fixes the issue of blocks with different textures on each side breaking, as we now take the POM inputs from the gbuffer (whereas before we took them from the voxels).
The issue that I’ve had the most trouble with is the latter. Because we use A-SVGF to keep lighting responsive when you place or destroy a block, we have to estimate the temporal gradients of the image (in simpler terms, the relative difference in brightness from the previous frame and the current frame). This lets us pretty reliably detect changes in lighting outputs, but to ensure that these changes only come from changes in the environment, we have to project a bunch of data from the previous frame into the current frame so that the only thing that changes between frames is the environment. This is called forward projection, and it is the main thing that’s been problematic with POM.
Because POM introduces extra parallax shift as the camera moves, we have to account for that during forward projection to project the previous frame’s data correctly. This is where the issue stems from, as my approach of taking the POM inputs from the gbuffer is also affected by this, which has the effect of essentially double applying the parallax shift from POM to the gbuffer (the gbuffer already has parallax shift applied from POM, and forward projection applies even more parallax shift). This is causing all sorts of issues with forward projection, causing us to estimate the incorrect temporal gradients and further causing A-SVGF to constantly reject the previous frame due to a positive gradient, leading to flickering.
I have an idea for how to fix this, but it’s unfortunately going to take a bit. Hopefully I can have it fixed by the end of next month.
And a few random screenshots of Continuum RT Build 21 Jake provided earlier in the month, in case anyone missed them!
Continuum 2.1.1
While Continuum 2.1 didn’t receive a new Beta build this month, we have been pleased with the performance of the last few Beta builds in our Early Access program, and have kept 2.1 up to date with the latest fixes, enhancements and tweaks from Legacy over the last 5 or so months (at least where it makes sense to do so).
Given the lack of reported issues with these Beta updates, and the amount of improvements that have built up in our Beta program over that time, we are moving forward with preparations for a public release of Continuum 2.1.1.
With any luck, this will be ready to go in the next month or so. Stay tuned.
Stratum
Stratum got another sizable update this past month, bringing another fresh swath of new item textures, and a few new block texture updates as well. Not to mention a much needed fix for an unintended water texture issue that was affecting those using Stratum without a shaderpack (they exist, and we want them to have the best experience possible as well!).
On another note, and in the interest of transparency; due to the constantly growing size of Stratum updates, and the logistical challenges involved in keeping as many previous Builds of the pack available for download as we have been, we opted to remove a few of the oldest builds from the site this past month. So far it’s only a few of the oldest we’ve been hosting (at least since moving to the new site and the ‘Build’ version system from our previous GitHub), but it will likely evolve into us we only keeping a set amount of older versions available going forward, instead of the exhaustive/complete list we’ve been maintaining up to this point.
With that said, as usual, full update notes and screenshots are available below!
Stratum Build 53 Changelog:
Additions
- Bee Nest,
- Stick,
- Raw Gold,
- Raw Iron,
- Raw Copper,
- Sweet Berry Bush (all stages),
- Ender Pearl,
- Emerald (item),
- Beacon Beam texture (full Beacon block is now complete!)
Tweaks / Fixes
- Cauldron water now has its own unique water texture so as not to replace water_still and cause visual issues for users using Stratum without a shader.,
- Adjusted scaling of most items to better match their vanilla counterparts.
Click an image below to enlarge and enable gallery view
Summer will have officially started before our next progress update, so we want to wish you all a happy start to the Summer season before we go, and as always, thanks for your continued support!
