We hope everyone had a happy Spooktober!
Dev Updates
Our news from the devs hasn’t been great in recent months, and while it’s not gotten worse, it’s still not much better either. DotModded has still been in and out of the hospital for his seizures and has unfortunately picked up a few bouts of random sicknesses along the way. He’s still dealing with a bit of that currently, so we won’t be hearing from him today, unfortunately.
That said, Jake has prepared a little update for you all to enjoy this month, so I’ll let him take it from here:
The last 2 months has been quite slow progress-wise for me, as I’ve been consistently stuck in placing and shaping clouds horizontally. As a quick recap, I’ve been working on a new implementation of volumetric clouds for several months now, largely based on the Nubis system that Guerrilla Games uses for clouds in Decima Engine. My new implementation, much like Nubis, uses a 2D weather map to determine where clouds are placed in the sky and how thick and tall they are. This is where I’ve really been struggling, as every single approach that I’ve tried for procedurally generating the weather map just doesn’t look right without tons of hardcoding and cherrypicking.
Early on while I was working on just getting some clouds to show up at all, I followed a similar approach to Nubis, using multiple layers of noise to artistically model clouds. This did end up producing some decent looking clouds after a lot of tweaking, but the moment I tried adding any semblence of control to it, it quickly fell apart. This was a dealbreaker as the clouds need to respond to in-game weather, and I would like the user to have some control over the shape and appearance of the clouds, so I ditched the art-driven approach and starting digging into any resources that I could find that covered meteorology and cloud formation, with the goal of taking a principled approach towards cloud modeling by building a massively simplified weather model.
Long story short, that approach didn’t work, either. While I learned a ton about cloud formation, any attempt at building a weather model failed, largely due to the constraints that we have. I may decide to revisit this approach in the future, but for now it’s back to an art-driven approach, which leads me to today. In short, I still haven’t made much progress on that front. I can get some decent looking clouds in some areas with heavy tweaking and cherrypicking, but it all falls apart the moment I try to add controls. Additionally, correctly varying cloud type across space is still an unknown, as I’m unsure of how to do so artistically without even more cherrypicking.
And before we go, some assorted screenshots from Jake showcasing some of his progress with Clouds this past month:
Continuum 2.1 and Legacy Early Access
Nothing super crazy this month shader wise, but we did find and correct a little issue with normal mapping that our texture artist Mythical discovered. Very basically, normal maps were not being rendered properly on entities (like the Boats). It’s subtle, but it’s still something we’re happy to have found and fixed.
Both 2.1 Beta and Legacy Alpha received this fix on Halloween, and it will make it’s way into a future 2.1.2 build for our free shader users eventually!
Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 37 + Continuum Legacy Alpha Build 7 Changelog:
- Fixed normal map directions being incorrect on entities
Some before/after screenshots to showcase the fix:
Stratum
We’ve showcased some pretty cool (in our opinion), textures this past month for Stratum’s next update, namely the Respawn Anchor. It’s easily one of our favorite complex block textures yet, and there will be plenty of juicy screenshots of it (taken with Continuum RT) below!
With that said, I’m going to get out of the way and let Mythical take it from here:
I unfortunately don’t have a huge amount to talk about currently, spent way too much of my time entirely remaking the magma (and probably still doing so when you’re reading this). Was originally going to just use the material I used for the fire charge, but looking at a bunch more references ended up giving me the urge to just start from scratch and try to get something more realistic and closer to those. Still not quite happy with it yet and will keep looking into better ways of doing it, I want to get it right but may end up pushing something not final in the mean time at least until I manage something that gives me the proper vibes. I’ll likely leave the old one in a temporary “old” folder inside of the pack incase someone still wanted to use that one without having to download an older build, it may eventually get removed after I’m fully happy with a new magma.
The boat updates, well not much to say about them besides that they gave me a chance to yell at Jake about the entity normal map issues in Continuum 2.1/legacy, glad those are finally fixed (by extension, chests are fixed too and I will be pushing a correction to their normal maps as I previously inverted their Y axis to try and compensate for the issue, making them now wrong). I may look into doing more stuff with the boat textures eventually to make them a bit less simplistic, like potentially doing some rounded normals to fake some curvature on them now that normals are fixed.
Since Christmas is next month, I’m also going to try experimenting with getting out some simple Christmas chests this month (I haven’t forgotten about them, at least not this time).
Stay tuned for Stratum Build 56 next month!
Fall 2025 Screenshot Contest Winners!
We had another successful screenshot contest end this last month as well. Thanks again to everyone who participated!
You can find the winners and runner-ups below!
That’s everything we have for you this month! Stay tuned for a few little surprises as we head into the Holiday season, and thanks for all of our continued support!
