Release notes

Version: 1.1.0 Release date: 2026-07-28 Target Unity version: 2022.3 LTS or newer, including Unity 6 Render pipeline: Built-In only (see the matrix below) Package root: Assets/EQBlockoutLab

EQBlockoutLab is a standalone Unity editor product for building blockout layouts, spatial plans, gameplay zones, routes, cover, terrain, water, and exported scene geometry from one package-local workflow.

Highlights

• Customer-facing menu moved to Tools/EQLabs/EQ Blockout Lab.
• Standalone package content remains under Assets/EQBlockoutLab.
• No dependency on a separate EQLabs asset folder or another EQLabs package.
• Compatibility target is Unity 2022.3 LTS and newer editor releases, including Unity 6.
• Dedicated blockout layout asset with floors, layout bounds, grid/ruler display, snapping, pivots, colors, procedural settings, and element data.
• Clear Select and Draw authoring modes, so designers can keep drawing the current element type or quickly return to editing existing elements.
• Category-based Elements picker for Structure, Terrain, Water, Navigation, Cover, Zone, Gameplay, and Annotation workflows.
• 2D canvas authoring for rooms, walls, openings, stairs, terrain, water, paths, bridges, obstacles, zones, markers, sightlines, route flows, and cover lines.
• Reference image overlay support on the 2D layout canvas, with import, visibility, opacity, size, and center controls for tracing floorplans or designer sketches.
• Scene Tool authoring with selectable handles, labeled move and opening controls, snap feedback, and Shift-hover point insertion previews.
• Live 3D preview with orbit, pan, zoom, wall shells, opening cutouts, marker meshes, line meshes, projected-grid blockout surfaces, water-style materials, and zone visuals.
• Axis-colored structure grid faces for rooms, walls, and stairs, making top, X-facing, and Z-facing surfaces easier to read in the 3D preview and exported scene.
• Semantic line visuals for paths, route flows, sightlines, cover lines, boundaries, and tree lines, with non-grid route notation and path-distance UVs for cleaner repeated marks.
• Scene export and re-export with generated meshes, materials, colliders, export tags, wall-opening cutouts, scatter instance groups, floating element labels with connector lines, and stale export cleanup.
• Scatter Zone generation with editable child POI markers and optional weighted prefab or mesh export through Blockout Asset Sets.
• Projected-grid, zone, water, and semantic-line shaders targeting the Built-In Render Pipeline. See “Render Pipeline Support” below.
• Verified by a 106-test EditMode suite that runs headlessly, plus a clean-import gate on both Unity 2022.3.62f3 and 6000.3.14f1: the customer package is built, imported into a throwaway project, and compiled there. On 2022.3 the behavioural suite is also run inside that clean project (77/77), so the declared minimum version is a measured result rather than a stated intention.

Behaviour changes you may notice

Exported geometry is now single-sided, and authored opacity means what it says. Every generated face used to be emitted twice, with reversed winding, on top of materials that already disable backface culling. Both copies rasterised, so every transparent surface blended twice: an authored Zone Opacity of 0.5 reached the eye at roughly 0.75, and closer to 0.94 seen through a zone slab’s top and bottom caps. Each face is now emitted once.

• Exported meshes are roughly half the vertices and indices they were, with correspondingly less transparent overdraw. Nothing about their silhouette changes.
• Built-in defaults were re-baselined so a new zone, water body, river or semantic line looks the way it always did. The default Zone Opacity moved from 0.5 to 0.75 for this reason — 0.75 is the value a 0.5 zone was really rendering at.
• An existing layout that deliberately authored a low opacity will now render more transparent than before, because that authored value is no longer doubled. If a zone looks thinner than you remember, raise its Opacity — the slider is now honest.

Render pipeline support

Render pipeline	Supported in this version
Built-In Render Pipeline	Yes
Universal Render Pipeline (URP)	No
High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)	No

Built-In Render Pipeline only; URP and HDRP are not supported in this version. The four shipped shaders are single-SubShader Built-In CG passes with no SRP variant, no RenderPipeline tag and no LightMode tag. Layout authoring, the scene tool, geometry generation and scene export are pipeline-independent; the generated materials are not. The editor window warns once per session when a Scriptable Render Pipeline is active.

Earlier releases described these shaders as neutral across render pipelines. That wording described the absence of a URP/HDRP package dependency, not verified behaviour under those pipelines, and has been replaced with the matrix above.

Known limits

• Several broad element families intentionally share the same first-pass area or marker primitive behavior. Their categories, names, defaults, colors, and export tags are distinct, while the main route and annotation line families now use semantic line visuals.
• Scatter asset-set export creates one scene object per generated scatter instance rather than a batched renderer path.
• Scatter presets store generator and export settings, not generated child marker positions.
• Auto-connect paths creates straight graph edges from existing path endpoints.
• Custom zone materials should expose compatible property names if they need to respond to every authored zone parameter.
• Preview floor planes are editor-only and are not exported as scene geometry.
• Invalid or extremely thin room polygons can fall back to solid extrusion instead of automatic wall-shell repair.

Recommended first smoke test

1. Open Tools/EQLabs/EQ Blockout Lab/Open Editor.
2. Create a new blockout layout asset.
3. Draw a Room, Wall, Path, Obstacle, Spawn Point, and Zone.
4. Select each element and confirm movement, color, height, pivot, and point editing behave as expected.
5. Add a Door or Window to a selected wall.
6. Orbit, pan, and zoom the 3D preview.
7. Click Export to Scene.
8. Inspect the exported hierarchy, generated materials, colliders, and wall opening cutouts in the Scene view.