January 2026 Progress Update

We’re back from the Holidays and ready to dive into our first progress update of 2026!

In our last update of 2025, we left you all with a recap of dotModdeds health, Focal’s current status, and our future plans for it. If you’re unaware of the situation there, it would be best to go back and read the previous blog post first.

With that said, we’ve got some somewhat good news on these fronts to share today, and it comes straight from the man himself:

Hey everyone, it’s been a while! My medical issues have finally been mostly figured out after many hospitalizations and tests! I have been diagnosed with long qt syndrome, which leads to syncopes (fainting) and seizures, which both lead to severe migraines, nausea, and confusion/fatigue, sometimes lasting days. I have been put on some medication that has been helping, but hasn’t resolved my issues entirely (fingers crossed). I’m still dealing with some side effects like dizziness and fatigue. Because of this I have not been working much prioritizing my health and recovery.

The work I have done involves administrative tasks and the development environment update for getting focal alpha on the latest game versions. We’re taking a simpler approach as we’re all tired of dealing with such a complex system. This change will speed up new game version updates, but will take slightly more work keeping older game versions up to date as well.

I’ve also spent some time organizing focal standalone/vk a bit and rethinking some systems for better maintainability.

Nothing huge from me this time around but I hope as we move through the year my condition will continue to improve, and I can really dig in and get some stuff done. Thank you all for your continued support!

And here’s some news from Jake regarding his latest progress with our recent Volumetric Cloud updates:

While the past month started off fairly slow for me coming out of the holidays, I have managed to make some progress on Continuum’s new volumetric clouds toward the end of the month. If you haven’t been keeping up, I’ve been working on rewriting our volumetric clouds to be higher quality and more realistic, and have had a hard time figuring out where to place the clouds in the sky and what the general shape of the clouds should be, since both work very differently with these new clouds compared to the old clouds. While I’m still not completely happy with these, I do think that I’ve figured out a solution that I’m reasonably happy with.

If anybody’s familiar with the Local Coverage setting for our old clouds, this setting is now baked into our new clouds. During the generation of our cloud map (I’ve now renamed the weather map to the cloud map; see the August 2025 blog post for a description of this), a local coverage value is sampled for a large region of the sky, which dictates roughly how much cloud is present in that part of the sky. While I’m still figuring out the best way to compute this local coverage value, I have decided to use this local coverage value as a proxy for how easy it is for cloud to form, and by extension how tall the cloud can be and at what altitude the cloud sits at in the sky. In short, the higher the local coverage, the taller a cloud can be and the lower the cloud sits in the sky. I’m not sure if we’ll keep Local Coverage as a setting, we may just turn it into controls or scrap it entirely if the local coverage value is sensible enough, but I’m pretty confident that we’ll be keeping this approach.

Another thing that I’ve been working on is the noise composite. Previously, the new clouds were using a pair of 3D noise composites that are similar to the ones used by Guerrilla Games’ early clouds in Horizon Zero Dawn, with a low frequency noise composite comprised primarily of Perlin-Worley noise to act as the base shape of the clouds, and a high frequency noise composite comprised of Worley and Voronoi noises to add detail to the clouds by blending from wispy to billowy with height. While this worked, the performance cost wasn’t ideal since we had to sample two separate 3D textures, with the high frequency noise composite also being distorted by a third 3D texture storing curl to give it an even more wispy appearance. The final appearance was also quite hard to dial in, since you had two separate noise composites with independent scales, that you had to tweak through trial and error to find something that looked good and convincingly realistic.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been replacing the pair of noise composites with a single noise composite that is similar to the one used by Guerrilla’s newer clouds in Horizon Forbidden West. This new noise composite replaces Perlin-Worley and Worley noises with Alligator and “Curly-Alligator” (basically Alligator that’s pre-distorted by curl), and stores low and high frequency pairs together to form a final 3D noise composite that holds 4 noises in total. Not only does this help with both quality due to the new noises being better and performance due to only having to sample a single 3D texture now, but it also makes it easier to select which noise to use when, typically based on local density within the cloud. The problem is that this new noise composite is actually intended to be used with voxel clouds, since it requires a distance field to know which noise to use when, which we don’t have. While I *have* made it work with what we do have for the new clouds, it has taken some trial and error to figure out how to make it work, and it does need to be tweaked still. Regardless, the screenshots below should show off roughly what you can expect.

That’s about it for this month’s update for me, though. I’ll keep working on both cloud placement and the noise composite, so expect to see updates for that at some point. As for release blockers, they’re largely the same. I have cleaned the code up quite significantly, and integration with our atmosphere shouldn’t be too difficult, but the big ones are still finalisation of the shape and placement, and updating Focal for the new features that I’ve added while working on the new clouds.

Some shots of the absolute latest revision of our Cloud tech:

As many of you may have (hopefully) noticed, in collaboration with longtime friend and affluent Continuum Dev Tester, Uvraj, we released Continuum 2.0 Redux in a ‘surprise’ drop right before the Holidays. This edit was something long requested by members of our Discord community, and was something Uvraj decided they wanted to bring to the wider public. With that, and Continuum’s roots in shader edits in mind, collaborating on this just made sense to us, as well as simplifying the release for Uvraj.

For anyone just now learning about Redux, you can find more details over on our Continuum shader project page (scroll down), full compatibility info on our FAQ page, and free downloads for the latest version of the shader on our free downloads page.

As for the future, Uvraj is already working on an update for improved Minecraft 1.21.11 compatibility, as well as some additional bug fixes / polish. We will feature those improvements and updates on our social media and future blogs as they arrive.

Here’s a smattering of screenshots, courtesy of Uvraj, using the initial Continuum 2.0 Redux release:

And last but not least, a little showcase of the custom Nether effects Uvraj whipped up for Redux:

That’s all for now though. Thanks for sticking with us on this ride, and we’ll see you again next month!

PS: apologies to the avid blog readers out there for this one being a bit late.
I came down with Covid (again), and then had Jury Duty right after. Things have been…hectic, to say the least😩