The last 3 months since the last update have been a bit slower for our team, with life events and other distractions. But we expect the next 3 months to improve in that regard as some developers return from time away.
Colliders
Something we wanted to get done early was the usage of the original colliders, including invisible walls. We wanted to ensure that any sort of boundaries or out of bounds escapes were the same as people remember.
Thankfully this process was pretty simple. Working with the Oxide guys, we were able to determine the format of the files the colliders were stored in. From there, it was pretty straight forward to load that data into a format Unity would understand and then link that with the correct models.
Sky, Lights, and Zone Transitions
One of the more tricky things that we have been working on since the last announcement has been the sky dome, lighting, and their interactions with the zone transitions.
Each area in the game defines a given sky dome. Think of this dome as the background, the part of the game that is visible when other things are not in the way (trees, buildings, players, etc). Finding how this was defined, and what all the data in the definition means has been a bit of a journey, with us still not entirely understanding how some aspects of the texture gets shifted and scaled. Presently, we have an understanding of where all of the related data comes from and all of the sources for it, but some of the applications and meaning of this data is an ongoing investigation.
Lights are another tricky thing to get right. Unity and ForgeLight (CWA's engine) differ somewhat substantially in their interpretation of lights. Some of what we have been working on in these last couple months has been trying to get an accurate understanding of how lights were applied to objects. We have a mostly complete understanding of how they work, but translating that into Unity's systems has been a bit tricky and is an ongoing process.
We also mentioned last announcement post that we were working on getting the movie-like transitions between rooms implemented. We currently have a proof of concept implemented, but the exact transitions have not been finished. Shortly after finishing the proof of concept, we moved on to other development tasks, which prevented us from getting the promised follow up update announcement ready.
Our current goal is to get the above features to a 80% complete state soon so that we can start providing more visuals in our announcements.
Notes on Updates & Final Thoughts
Earlier this week, we released an update for the Alpha. This update, as mentioned in the change log, was for a Unity issue, and did not include the work we have been doing. As for when that work will be released, again there is no exact date yet, but are in the window of possibility that was mentioned in the last announcement. Given that things slowed down for a bit in the last 3 months, I believe this update window is going to shift back to ISO Week 50 (Dec 8-14) through ISO Week 9 of 2026 (Feb 23-Mar 1). However, once we have a date in mind, we plan to announce it about 2 weeks before it goes live.
As always, if you want to help us out, you can apply for the development team here. We were originally planning on creating a demo video to go along with this announcement, but there were some features we felt needed a little bit more work before sharing them. That video should be ready sometime in the next 2 weeks.
October 12, 2025 by Wald Deliglide