So, this has been a pretty long year for Atlas. Basically since it is the year in which all started. We are very excited to be able to share with you the insights of what we have made this year.
2025 was the year in which we started our journey towards making the Game Engine we have always wanted to have. We have been working hard to make sure that it is the best engine out there. We have been working on it for the past year and we are very proud of what we have achieved. The feature list of what we made this year is astonishing. We have added support for multiple platforms, improved the performance of the engine, and added new features such as physics, Vulkan support, and more.
Although we have made a lot of progress, there is still a lot of work to be done. We are committed to making Atlas the best engine out there and we will continue to work hard to achieve that goal. Atlas is not in a 'production-ready' state yet, but we are working hard to make it so. We are excited to share more about what we have achieved this year and what we have planned for the future.
We are going to show the evolution of each release we have made this year from the first one to the latest one to show the evolution of the engine.
Prealpha 0.1.0 (September 27, 2025)
This release was the beginning of our journey in Atlas. The first commit dates back to September 11, 2025 in which we started working on the engine. This first release was a very very basic one, but packed with features. Here you can see the highlights of this primitive release:
- Window creation and customization
- Object rendering
- Texture support
- Camera support
- Lighting (basic)
- Render targets
- Skybox support
- Shadows
And we can see the first release of Bezel here! This was Bezel 0.2.0 Beta, the first release of Bezel Native. Quite horrible, but it was a start.
And here's the link for the release: Prealpha 0.1.0
Prealpha 0.1.1 (September 27, 2025)
Another release was made in September 27, 2025 which introduced the famous atlas CLI, with support for faster creation of projects and assets.
Also a tiny error with the Scene class was fixed in order to ensure proper initialization of the scene.
Here's an image, although there are no graphic changes since the previous release:
And here's the link for the release: Prealpha 0.1.1
Prealpha 0.2.0 (September 27, 2025)
This was a kind of little release, but it introuduced the base system of entities and objects that Atlas uses, and it has been mantained this day.
Component support was also added, allowing for more complex and dynamic scenes.
And here's the link for the release: Prealpha 0.2.0
Prealpha 0.3.0 (September 28, 2025)
Moving from September 27, 2025 to September 28, 2025, we introduced the first version of the Finewave Engine, which is still the sound engine used by Atlas.
Finewave makes its first release with support for everything you might need, including: sounds, music and even 3d audio. And it is untouched since its inception.
And here's the link for the release: Prealpha 0.3.0
From here, we thought that we met the things we wanted to make, but we wanted to continue. This is when Alpha Releases started.
Alpha 1 (October 5, 2025)
This was the first alpha release of Atlas which introduced very important features for the development of the engine. Here is a list of them:
- A Particle System
- UI (text) support
- Model / Mesh loading
- Environment Mapping support
- Bezel Native 1
Most of these things are still intact today, mantaining the nature of the engine and its original implementation.
For some reason, we cannot provide you an image of this release, since it is not working due to the structural engines we have made.
Here's the link for the release: Alpha 1
Alpha 2 (October 15, 2025)
This was a huge release, since it leveraged render targets to its maximum by introducing the Deferred Rendering Pipeline. This was a huge graphics and performance improvement, and here are all the features we introduced:
- Normal and Parallax Mapping
- Post-processsing effects
- Shadow support for point lights
- HDR Support
- Bloom Support
- Depth of Field Support
- SSAO Support
- Deferred Rendering
- Instancing support
- Better multisampling
- The very first Atlas website with the documentation
And this is the image we have from the release:
You can see the FPS count is super low, something like 12 FPS. That's going to be important for the next release.
Here's the link for the release: Alpha 2
Alpha 2.1 (October 15, 2025)
This was a small release in which we fixed the performance issues from Alpha 2. Here you can see the same scene running at a much higher frame rate:
Here's the link for the release: Alpha 2.1
Alpha 3 (October 26, 2025)
This is probably one of our biggest releases, including:
- PBR Support
- IBL Support
- Aurora 1 (terrain generation and rendering)
- Area lights
- Volumetric lighting
- Motion blur
- Physically based bloom
- Rim lighting
- Chromatic aberration effect
- Posterization effect
- Pixelation effect
- Dialation effect
- Film Grain effect
- LUT Table Support
This is one of the most important graphics releases we've ever made. Leveraging the Deferred Rendering Pipeline, we were able to achieve stunning visuals and performance improvements.
And here's the link for the release: Alpha 3
Alpha 4 (November 2, 2025)
This was a small release, but introducing incredible atmospheric and graphical improvements:
- Hydra 1 (atmosphere, volumetric clouds, weather, fluid rendering)
- Screen-Space Reflections
This is the release's link: Alpha 4
Alpha 5 (December 7, 2025)
This was an incredible release, packed with features that are worth mentioning:
- General Fixes
- This very website!
- Opal 1 Ellipse
- Vulkan Support
The creation of Opal (our in-house core rendering engine) is probably the best desicion we've made. Vulkan is now supported in Atlas, making the experiences even better.
This is the release's link: Alpha 5
What to expect next?
So we've got a lot of plans regarding the next releases of this year, and we want to share them as well as the planned flow of this year, although this can change a lot!
- Alpha 6 will be released in January with the Atlas Tracer debugging interface and Jolt Physics as well as some fixes to the Vulkan backend.
- Alpha 7 is planned for March with our new Global Illumination engine (Lumen), Ray Tracing, better material support and more.
- Alpha 8 is planned for June with a new UI system and more.
- Alpha 9 is planned for August with our new visual editor application, scripting support and a project management system as well as a runtime.
- Alpha 10 is planned for September with an Animation System, better UI and a blueprint system
Finally, we hope to jump to Beta this year with the Release Candidate coming in October and the final Beta 1 release in December.
Conclusion
This year has been amazing and we hope to continue this trend next year as well! We're excited to see what the future holds for Atlas and we can't wait to share it with you!
We also want to grow our community this year and attract more developers to join us since now we aren't a lot of developers.
Thank you and happy 2026!
Max Van den Eynde, Head of Atlas Development
