*Insert witty intro here*
Continuum 2.1.2 Release!
Thanks to the support, testing, and feedback from our Continuum Early Access supporters, we’ve once again packaged the last few Continuum 2.1 Beta builds into a new, free, public release!
This new version, Continuum 2.1.2, further polishes what is without a doubt our most complete and polished shader ever, and it can be downloaded right now, by anyone who wishes to try it, directly from within our Focal Engine! No purchase or even Continuum Graphics account required!
Here’s a short changelog (which you can also see on our recently revamped free downloads page), and a before/after screenshot of one of the larger fixes/changes:
Continuum 2.1.2 Changelog:
- Fixed normalmap directions being incorrect on entities.
- Excluded Bamboo Shoots (Bamboo Stage0 / Bamboo Saplings) from waving foliage.
This is a subtle change, to be sure (which is why it took so long to catch), but it adds that extra bit of polish to the shader, and we’re very happy to have found and fixed it!
Focal Engine / Shader team updates
Thankfully, DotModded’s health has remained stable since our last update, and things are still on the upswing. Unfortunately he’s still not back to his usual self, so we don’t have anything terribly positive on the Focal front again this month.
I’ll let him take it from here though:
Hi all, Dot here. As many of you know, I’ve been dealing with some ongoing medical issues over the past year or so now, and although things are gradually improving, my capacity is still limited. As a result, I haven’t been able to contribute to our projects at the level I’d like, which includes Focal Engine.
Lately my focus has been on business administration. Taxes, state and city bookkeeping requirements, etc.. It’s not the kind of progress I’m most excited to share, but it’s necessary work that keeps everything moving forward while I work toward getting fully back on track. Thankfully Jake and Soulshot have been managing to keep operations running in my absence. They take on a lot and I greatly appreciate them.
Hopefully we’ll have more positive updates to share in the coming months!
We also have a (much shorter than normal) update from Jake:
Unfortunately I don’t have much news to share as my grandmother had to go to the hospital a few weeks ago due to a serious infection, and the rest of the month went slower than normal as a result. She’s been out of hospital for the last week or two and is recovering very quickly, all things considered, but it’ll still be a few weeks until she’s fully recovered.
In the meantime, I did manage to make some progress on Continuum’s new volumetric clouds, but it’s nothing major. I mainly touched up the 3D noise textures and lighting a bit to get closer to the look that I want, and cleaned up the cloud map to be a bit faster and easier to maintain. They still look generally the same, so I don’t have any fresh screenshots to share just yet.
Moving forward, I’m going to pause work on the new volumetric clouds and focus on the move to Vulkan. We’re not yet ready to announce our plans as we want to be able to actually present something before we commit to anything publicly, but we are making the move to Vulkan our main priority moving forward for a number of reasons, so we felt it best to focus on moving to Vulkan above all. If moving to Vulkan ends up taking too long for any reason, we may consider pivoting back to releasing the new volumetric clouds in an update for our current shaders, but we’re hoping that it doesn’t come to that. Because of this, if enough progress hasn’t been made, next month’s progress update may not bring much news from me beyond a simple “I’m continuing to move us over to Vulkan”.
Rest assured though, things are happening.
Stratum
We launched another new build of Stratum this April, bringing with it another selection of new block and item textures, as well as new game version support. All that will be detailed in the changelog and shown off in the gallery below though. Before that, Mythical has some dev notes of his own to share!
Mythical here; I’ll likely be lighter on words than last time, though there’s still a few things I can add.
I’m mostly happy with how the glazed terracotta turned out, but one area that I’ll still be messing around with in the near future is the grout on them as that still has some quirks I want to deal with. Eventually will also look into doing intricate patterns on them, the current floating idea is a single pattern spanning across multiple tiles but the way they are now should at least hold fine for a while.
One thing I randomly got reminded of when working on the brick item is that our old nether brick block textures could use some looking at again after all this time, I may experiment with improvements or possible replacements at some point for them (To be honest a lot of the nether blocks could use some improvements). Haven’t started the nether brick item yet, though I might just do a simple modification of the recent brick for a decent placeholder.
As for some more log-posting, doing colors has ended up making me less happy with the current attempts and I’m getting that scary urge to start from scratch again. Here’s where the prior ones shown are at right now:
They’re technically in a “fine” state the way they are, but something is still heavily nagging at me about them. Probably not helped by the fact that the color texture has gotten them back to looking slightly too noisy which I was trying to avoid but can’t seem to with the ways I’m doing it, the stripped wood in particular is tough to get right here and has been overall neglected more than it should (not shown very well in these shots, but the few different versions of it were a bit too quickly thrown together for testing on the log top). On the plus side I did find a way to improve how “square” the rings are, a blurred “pyramid” shape mixed into the base rounded ring gradient helps a lot (also previously mixed in a couple central blurred squares, but this wasn’t as effective). Here’s roughly what that node setup looks like:
I also forgot to show the wacky way I’m doing the center rifts last time using a squished and cut-off sphere shape:
I think that’s all I have for now, I’ll be slowing down on the log stuff as it has definitely taken more focus than I originally intended and it still somehow feels like I’ve only made a small amount of progress despite that (my wood references folder is overflowing compared to everything else I’ve done). The unfortunate part is that I wanted hanging signs to wait on new stripped wood, but since it’s taking longer than I’d like there’s a lingering chance I’ll instead just go back and try roughly correcting the old logs to be more consistent with the new planks in color and just start figuring out the hanging signs off of that.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed that peek behind the curtain. Big thanks to Mythical for providing it!
And here’s the changelog for the Stratum update released this month:
Stratum Build 58 Changelog
Additions
- Blaze Rod
- Blaze Powder
- Amethyst Shard
- Nether Quartz Item texture
- Lodestone
- End Rod
- All 16 Glazed Terracotta
Tweaks / Fixes
- Added dirt to bottom of Bamboo Sapling to better ‘ground’ it in the world.
- Increased maximum main pack and Fast Leaves addon pack versions to 84 for Official compatibility with Minecraft 26.1.2
↳ Shader support on these game versions is still highly problematic, this is not the fault of Stratum, so please do not report shader issues on 26.X versions to us at this time!
Last but not least, some shots of Stratum Build 58:
Further Free Downloads page updates!
A few months back, we finally got around to updating our free downloads page UI to be more in line with the logged in downloads experience. This included access to more than just the latest builds / updates, ability to view descriptions / changelogs, and overall a less cluttered, messy experience.
We said at the time though that we weren’t done polishing, and we’ve already implemented some much needed changes!
- First up, Continuum Redux has been renamed from ‘2.0R’ in the downloads list, to ‘2.0 Redux’.
This should hopefully go a long way in reducing confusion when new or returning users are searching for the latest version of Uvraj’s 2.0 Edit! - The UI now also defaults to the latest / newest released build when users switch from one shader version to another.
For example, switching from Continuum 2.1.2 to 2.0 Redux would previously leave the user on 2.0 Redux Build 1, when Build 2 is the actual latest available, and many users would understandably miss this, due to the differences in versioning / update naming between those two shader releases. Rather than change the way either of those shaders are named or labelled, or remove access to older versions of 2.0 Redux, we’ve done the work to change the UI logic and default users to the latest available build upon version switch! - We’ve begun going back and updating older build descriptions / changelogs now that both our download box formatting has improved, and we have better backend tools to easily edit these descriptions. This will mean no more massive blocks of text when you open the description for an older build!
There are quite a few older builds available on our site though, and we’re doing this when time allows, so this may take a bit. Newer builds have been prioritized though, so most users should only see the newer, cleaner description formats as of right now! - Finally, we’ve removed free user access to Continuum 2.1 Beta Build 34 (the Beta release that ended up being Continuum 2.1), so there will no longer be a confusing ‘Continuum EA’ box on the free downloads page, or free users account download page.
This was only ever available as a workaround to a last minute bug during the Holiday release of our first public Continuum 2.1 build, so that affected users could still get the first Continuum 2.1 release during the Holiday season. While the bug was fixed shortly after the Holidays were over, we opted to leave free access to this build for a while after so that users still using it didn’t have any confusion or weird authentication issues inside of Focal Engine.
That said, Continuum 2.1.1 and now 2.1.2 have released, and anyone still using the initial 2.1 build (and by extension Beta Build 34), should update for the best experience. It was time to shelve this workaround.
Hopefully these changes further streamline your download experience, and help more users enjoy our work!
Be sure to keep the feedback coming as well. We’re happy to make additional changes, where they are feasible of course!
There’s another one on the books! Bit of a mixed bag news wise, I know, but we do have some exciting stuff cooking that we hope we can share in due time.
Thanks again to everyone who supports our work and enables us to do this. We truly couldn’t do it without you.
PS: it seems the 8th is becoming the new day for longer blogs like this one to drop. Bit behind my preferred release window, no doubt…but it enabled us to shove just a bit more into this one. Hopefully that’s okay with you guys!
