Decent progress this month, despite some more personal trials and tribulations.
An update on the devs
We haven’t had the best news in recent months regarding our lead shader developers, and unfortunately, we’ve once again had a trying month. Jake has still been dealing with the implications of the personal matters he alluded too last month, so he’s not had much time to work on things this month. He did still manage to put together a few fixes/improvements for Continuum RT, as well as push forward a bit on our newest iteration of Volumetric Clouds, and we’ll detail / show off some of that later on in this update, but he didn’t have time for much else, including a quote for this blog. Hopefully he’ll have the time to put something together next month.
As for dotModded, the situation wasn’t much better, though he did manage to whip up a quick little update on his month, which I’ll share with you all now:
Hello everyone, I unfortunately missed the last blog and even more unfortunately, this one won’t have much good news on the shader/focal side of things. I’ve still been having seizures, which increased in frequency to the point of multiple a day this month, and lead to me being hospitalized for about a week. These things have really killed my ability to make decent progress because I’m usually completely wiped out after I have them.
That said, I’ve have finally been diagnosed with epilepsy and I have an appointment with a neurologist at the end of November so things should hopefully be looking up soon! I can’t wait to be able to get back to work on our projects without this hanging over my head, because it truly is my passion. Thank you all for your continued support, until next time!
There it is. Not a ton to be said, but hopefully things continue to look up for the shader lads and we can get back in the swing of things. For now though, let’s move on to what we did manage to get done this month!
Continuum RT Build 23
Thanks to some detailed reports from some of our RT Early Access subscribers, and Jake managing to carve out some time to push a few changes to RT, we managed to put together a decent little update this month.
Aside from a smattering of smaller fixes, the standout feature of this update is a change to the shaders default roughness threshold. Previously this value was too high, and certain glossy PBR textures would exhibit unintended visual artifacts when their roughness went below a certain value. This was always a balancing act, as we cannot complete disable this system, both for performance and visual reasons. Still, we found a better default value for use with PBR texture packs, like Stratum, and took it a step farther, by adding a new settings slider to the shaders options menu so users can tweak this value to their personal needs. You’ll be able to find some before and after images in the gallery below that show off the impact of this change.
Continuum RT Build 23 Changelog:
- Added a separate glossy roughness threshold for water, and reduced the default threshold for everything else to minimize abrupt roughness cutoff on some textures
- Added ‘Glossy Roughness Threshold’ setting to Raytracing settings for further user adjustment
- Switched the glass override to act as a fallback instead
- Added moss carpet to the don’t-voxelise list
- Made End Rods emit light, and hardcoded that light color for visual consistency
A selection of Continuum RT Build 23 screenshots from this month (click to expand & open gallery view)
Continuum 2.1 & Legacy
Not a ton to report this month, due to what we talked about in regards to Jake in the dev update above, but as we mentioned in that section, he did manage to push forward a bit with the latest iteration of our Volumetric Cloud tech this month…just enough to have a few new, albeit highly work in progress screenshots to share (which you can find below).
Just a few little details about these new clouds before we move on though; they have much more natural Aerial Perspective calculation than before, and we’ve also reworked how the clouds are/can be placed vertically, so we can properly support variable height; which basically means we’ll be able to have clouds with varying altitudes and height (from top to bottom). This should not only make clouds look better, but will enable us to render more varied, visually interesting cloud types, for more dramatic (and realistic) clouds overall. This and more will eventually make it’s way into Continuum 2.1 and Legacy. More to come!
Stratum
We once again delivered a juicy Stratum update this month, and continued our recent Focus on item textures with said update. That said, Mythical is back to detail what’s been going on with Stratum, and what’s next, so I’ll let him take it away!
Last month, the new item frame gave me the urge to do more item textures (after tediously getting all the stained glass colors done). The GrabDoc addon for Blender has been a great help for baking item models to textures (despite enduring many random crashes from the addon for unknown reasons, ctrl s my beloved), there’s a chance some current procedural item textures will get replaced with proper baked models down the line. The material being used for the fire charge model bake is actually a newer lava material attempt that ultimately ended up being unused in favor of another one more fitting for Minecraft’s lava. That got a tempting idea floating around in my head to actually replace the current magma block with that material, I might play around with it and see if that works better (despite current magma looking fine, it’s not very unique as it’s simply a modified CCO-licensed material that I’ve seen elsewhere more than once, unfortunately ruining it for me a bit overtime).
Next on my list is to try and finish up the wood replacements, as I keep forgetting that I haven’t done the boats yet. From that I also got reminded that beds will need to be adjusted and increased in resolution (right now at 2048×2048 they are actually equivalent to 512×512 when compared to normal 2048x blocks, they get hit hard at 128x) though I can’t go the full way as they’d need 8192×8192 textures to match vanilla’s size ratio (thanks Minecraft you’re so cool, I’m totally looking forward to the 16384×8192 end crystals). I’m also still experimenting with a new log top and stripped logs, they’ve continued being a pain to get right so I can’t say for certain if they will be sooner or later. I did give the warped and crimson logs some small improvements while adjusting the other crimson/warped stuff, but I’ll likely be avoiding tediously doing that for all the other logs as everything there will be revisited when I manage new stripped logs anyway (that includes revisiting the regular non-stripped logs too, I have bones to pick with some of those).
Lastly, there are plans for fences to get their own special textures, however I’ll need to look into if there will be any complications with overlapping UV islands on their models (if so I’ll possibly just apply a simple non-plank wood texture onto them just to have something better than the current plank texture reliance, at least until I find a better solution). Hanging signs are also on the to-do list, but will potentially wait for new stripped logs if I decide to use stripped wood on them.
That’s all for the moment though. See you all next time!
Full update notes and screenshots are available below!
Stratum Build 55 Changelog:
Additions
- Better Crimson & Warped plank textures (that also match vanilla colors better)
- Adjusted other Crimson & Warped items to better match vanilla style & colors
- Stained Glass (all colors)
- Lapis Lazuli item
- Tinted Glass
- Redstone item
- Nether Portal animated texture
- Snowball
- Slimeball
- Paper
- Firecharge
- Dragon Fireball (entity texture)
- Egg
Tweaks / Fixes
- Fixed missing normals/specular for Seagrass item
- Added padding to some items that didn’t have any
- Tweaked Egg shape
And before we move on, a 4K 60fps video of that new animated Nether Portal texture 👀
Updated Project Showcase
A small thing, but we’ve once again updated our Project Showcase page with even more of our best shots from 2025 (so far). It might be worth checking from time to time for new images!
Last but not least, we kicked off our first screenshot contest in a while near the end of September to celebrate the start of Fall. The contest is currently planned to conclude on Wednesday October 22nd at midnight (EST), and the full list of rules and prizes up for grabs can be found in our #contest-rules-and-info channel in our Official Discord server!
Anyone who wants to participate is welcome. Don’t be intimidated by the professional looking previous entries/winners…many where done by users relatively new to taking such screenshots! If you have any interest in it at all, toss your hat into the ring!
That’s all for now. As always, thanks for standing by us, through our good…and not so good times!
