DEV Community: ALIS — World Reborn

Explore real cities in ALIS — play release 2.0.0

ALIS — World Reborn — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:02:09 +0000

Explore real cities in ALIS — play release 2.0.0

For players:

Pick Kazan or Manhattan right from the main menu
Fly over vast city territories with fast overview controls
Terrain, water, roads, greenery and buildings rebuilt from real geography

For developers:

A deterministic pipeline that builds both cities from real geographic data
Unreal Engine 5.8, with the same generated world assets the release ships
Automated gates for world generation, streaming, gameplay routes and performance

Still an early prototype, so expect rough edges. Download, source and signed checksums:
https://github.com/fallintodusk/alis/releases/tag/v2.0.0

ALIS will be featured at PlayB3yond Indie Game Fest 2026

ALIS — World Reborn — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:02:12 +0000

ALIS will be featured at PlayB3yond Indie Game Fest 2026

ALIS — World Reborn will be featured at PlayB3yond Indie Game Fest from September 21–27.

Explore a survival world built from real places, where streets, routes, terrain, metabolism, vitals, inventory and world interaction shape how you survive.

ALIS is an open-source Unreal Engine 5 project with a free Windows prototype available now.

https://playb3yond.com

PlayB3yond2026 #indiedev #survivalgame

Exchange

ALIS — World Reborn — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:01:23 +0000

Exchange

One of the key locations is an abandoned shopping mall, based on a real place. We conveyed an atmosphere of desolation and looting - silence, dust, and traces of haste.

Rare resources may still be hidden here; exploring the supermarket remains tense and necessary for progression.

Nanobots

ALIS — World Reborn — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:04:42 +0000

Nanobots

Previously, having many detailed objects caused sharp FPS drops and required manual LODs. Now Nanite renders highly detailed models in real time without manual LODs: the engine streams detail where the player looks and simplifies distant objects, keeping the scene smooth.

Nanite prebuilds an optimized hierarchy of geometry and splits it into clusters, dynamically adjusting their detail by distance and visibility. We enable it deliberately - we profile and use it where it delivers real gains.

In Unreal, we use visualization modes to see how Nanite groups triangles into clusters, how detail changes with distance, where overdraw occurs, and which clusters are occluded from the camera - and we fine-tune rendering and scene performance based on that.

Lumen and Nanite are flagship Unreal Engine technologies for real-time lighting and ultra-detailed geometry

Black and white dances

ALIS — World Reborn — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:03:44 +0000

Black and white dances

The rhythm of the scene is set by a dynamic day-night cycle that runs on a combination of technologies - Lumen handles indirect light and reflections, VSM handles shadows, and post-processing polishes the final palette. This lets the player feel the natural passage of time - the essence of an open world - without precomputed light and sky maps.

The sun and moon update lighting in real time, shadows stay soft and detailed, and post-processing adapts color, contrast, and light effects to the current lighting - bringing to life a cold, fresh morning, a bright, clean day, and a warm, soft sunset.

Flexible settings let us control transition speed, atmosphere, clouds, fog, and flares.

Control Randomness

ALIS — World Reborn — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:01:30 +0000

Control Randomness

To preserve variety in the environment without losing scene cohesion, it’s important to balance randomness and spatial harmony.

We achieve this with flexible Foliage Type settings - a special asset that links to vegetation meshes and small props. By tuning fine parameters - density distribution, scale, random rotation, surface alignment with slope and height in mind, as well as view distance - we can quickly and efficiently populate scenes, as if ‘painting’ the landscape with objects.

This approach delivers an organized, harmonious, and optimized environment without templated sameness, staying faithful to our references.

ALIS 1.0.0: first free playable Windows build — walk a reconstructed real city district

ALIS — World Reborn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:10:48 +0000

ALIS 1.0.0: first free playable Windows build — walk a reconstructed real city district

The first free playable build of ALIS is out for Windows.

ALIS is an early single-player prototype — not a finished game. It reconstructs a real city district you can walk through, with a metabolism simulation running underneath: vitals follow real medical timelines, and a dying state cannot simply be powered through.

In this build:

a walkable reconstruction of a real place
the vitals and metabolism system driving survival
the full source, open for inspection and contribution

Not in yet: polished gameplay loops, tuned performance, final content. This is a prototype for early testers and curious developers, and it will misbehave in places — reports are welcome.

The build ships as a release on the project's GitHub, under fallintodusk/alis, with signed checksums so anyone can verify exactly what they downloaded.

If you walk it: what broke, what confused you, and what made you want to keep going?

Shadow Wisdom

ALIS — World Reborn — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:05:25 +0000

Shadow Wisdom

To achieve clean, believable shadows, we use Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM). VSM computes shadows primarily where the player is looking: nearby areas render in high detail, distant areas are simplified and streamed in on demand, without keeping full shadow maps in memory.

Flexible settings let us control resolution, edge softness, draw distance, and anti-aliasing - keeping the scene lively and readable.

In our tech stack, roles are split as follows: VSM provides direct lighting and shadows, Lumen handles indirect light and reflections, Nanite - renders ultra-detailed geometry, and post-processing polishes the final frame.

This approach delivers stable, artifact-free quality and preserves scene realism at a reasonable performance cost.

Life Echoes

ALIS — World Reborn — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:45:31 +0000

Life Echoes

In the game, we capture the atmosphere of people’s lives and carefully weave realistic household items into the residents’ stories.

We show untouched, cozy comfort through family details, neat furniture, and appliances.

The mood of an apartment abandoned in haste is anxious and unfinished, with scattered belongings and furniture - as if life suddenly went on pause.

We depict an elderly couple’s apartment with a typical Soviet interior, using timeworn details: a rocking chair, carpets on the walls, simple curtains, and medical supplies.

We show the decline of everyday life through broken furniture, trash, and dirty belongings. This setting underscores neglect, hopelessness, and the hard lives of those who have hit bottom.

Players - after facing the intrigue and challenge - can explore these locations, soak up the atmosphere, and find useful resources.

Dusk Light

ALIS — World Reborn — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:02:21 +0000

Dusk Light

Lumen is a real-time system for dynamic lighting and reflections. It reacts to movement and time-of-day changes and works well with Nanite (a technology for highly detailed models). Lumen handles indirect and diffuse light, as well as highlights - direct light and shadows are computed by a separate real-time system.

We tune the quality of Lumen and shadows through quality levels and global scene settings to balance image quality and performance.

This approach delivers a realistic atmosphere without long light baking and extra files. For perfectly mirror-like surfaces and clear glass, we use dedicated reflection methods.

Lumen and Nanite are flagship Unreal Engine technologies for real-time lighting and ultra-detailed geometry.

Magic of Lies

ALIS — World Reborn — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:08:37 +0000

Magic of Lies

Material Layer Blend - a principle for combining material layers that creates a lightweight, quickly tunable system for blending surface effects - whether paint, dirt, rust, or scratches layered on top of one another.

Control comes down to simple, clear parameters that set the order and intensity of each layer and decide which layer will dominate in the blend.

Beyond texture blend patterns and channel selection, we added fine-grained control via inversion and per-pixel math operations. Reusing the same texture patterns also improves performance - reducing memory usage and simplifying streaming.

Layered materials also make it possible to apply external, dynamic weather and other physical effects to a surface.

Free open-source UE5 content automation: JSON to DataAssets to live editor updates

ALIS — World Reborn — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:42:11 +0000

A free, open-source Unreal Engine 5 editor toolchain is available for developers working on data-heavy projects.

The core idea is simple:

change game content as plain JSON, and the editor-side pipeline carries the update end to end — it detects the changed data, regenerates typed DataAssets, and propagates the new definition into actors already placed in the editor scene, without a C++ recompile or manual asset rebuilding.

This makes content:

text-based
version-controlled
diffable
reviewable
safer for scripts, CI, and AI agents to propose

The pipeline is split into four public plugins:

ProjectDefinitionGenerator (Plugins/Editor/ProjectDefinitionGenerator) — watches JSON-backed definitions, validates changes, and regenerates typed DataAssets from source data.
ProjectPlacementEditor (Plugins/Editor/ProjectPlacementEditor) — creates configured actors from generated definitions, then reapplies or replaces placed actors when definitions change.
ProjectAssetSync (Plugins/Editor/ProjectAssetSync) — keeps JSON references correct when assets are renamed or moved, and fixes redirectors.
ProjectEditorCore (Plugins/Editor/ProjectEditorCore) — a small shared contract layer. The stages communicate through its events instead of hard-wiring the pipeline stage to stage, so they stay loosely coupled and each one is easy to read, fork, or extend.

Useful for Unreal automation, data-driven gameplay, CI content generation, and agent-assisted content authoring.

Want to test the public build, review the architecture, or contribute to ALIS?

Start here: https://github.com/fallintodusk/alis/discussions/1

Practical feedback is welcome: what should be clearer, more stable, more useful, or more convincing?

Source: github.com/fallintodusk/alis