DEV Community: ALIS — World Reborn

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

Unreality Layers

ALIS — World Reborn — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:46:51 +0000

Unreality Layers

Material Layers is a builder for creating complex materials from multiple layers that stack on top of one another.

Each layer adds color, texture, or an effect, and we easily control their combination - adjusting order and blending intensity. We configured the material so a layer can be applied to different objects, both with our seamless world material and with an atlas material. And if a layer is not used, we disable its computation, which saves resources and improves performance.

This lets you quickly create beautiful, realistic surfaces, adding details from our library like dirt, rust, and scratches without changing the base material each time. The approach saves time and resources, letting you adjust only what you need - simply and efficiently.

World Scale Matters

ALIS — World Reborn — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:59:49 +0000

World Scale Matters

World Material works as a universal, flexible wrapper for static objects, where textures keep a constant scale in world space. No more stretched or tiny texture patterns when scaling a model - they fit properly both on a tiny screw and on a building roof. Any model rotation angle is handled as well.

All channels are synchronized with each other (color, height/relief, metalness, roughness), using a single coordinate system and scale.

One World Material - with every pixel used as efficiently as possible - instead of dozens of one-off solutions where a unique texture bloats memory, increases project size, and complicates development focus. We use simple yet flexible controls - toggles to add gloss or remove metalness, and intensity parameters that adjust the strength (how pronounced the relief will be) - allowing quick assembly of any variations, from plastic to rusty metal.

This approach speeds up the entire development process and opens the door to a multilayer material system, where you can add dust, dirt, and wear effects layer by layer.

Rhythm and Improvisation

ALIS — World Reborn — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:37:16 +0000

Rhythm and Improvisation

Patterns and noise are foundational tools for creating believable, varied, and efficient materials. They save significant resources because they are not baked into a unique texture, and they also let us build universal materials without a primary object-bound texture.

With them, a base material can be quickly modified by layering different patterns, wear, scratches, relief, and other effects without creating new textures. Via material parameters they are easy to tune - adjusting the intensity, scale, and character of patterns and noise - which simplifies making variations and adapting to different objects.

Patterns can be combined and layered in multiple passes. Their combinations and scaling create more complex visual effects - for example, metal wear with subtle rust and scratches. Noise is often used as masks for blending materials and layers (for example, dirt over paint), producing rich, detailed compositions with smooth transitions. Patterns and noise also help fine-tune roughness and normal maps, making reflections and lighting more realistic and less plasticky and flat.

In the future, we aim to implement procedural generation and combination of patterns and noise to save memory and improve project performance.

Open-source repository: github.com/fallintodusk/alis

Mastering Entropy: Embodiments

ALIS — World Reborn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:58:27 +0000

Mastering Entropy: Embodiments

Objects is a repository of grouped game entities with unique identity, placed in the game world.

As in Elements, the structure keeps a clear split into Human Made and Nature, each with its own internal hierarchy and subcategories.

An object folder contains static or skeletal meshes and, when necessary, unique materials and textures, blueprints, and other relevant assets required to fully describe the object.

The main issue with many unique objects is significant project size growth, degraded performance, and increased complexity in controlling and maintaining code and assets.

We aim to build a universal and scalable structure based on combining reusable abstractions of materials and meshes.