I finally figured it out.

Long story short, I am bad at game development.

Lighting got an absolutely necessary overhaul. Things should finally start to work and brighten up and be seen as intended. I should finally get the results ive been aiming for when I implement parallax mapping and volumetric fog, along with the light strips on the early Arena map. I have been envisioning essentially a dark warehouse filled with ambient neon lighting, laser tag lights cutting through the air and lighting up the air around them, stuff like that. I have not been able to achieve that result, and have landed on the Mainline map, where the map is just generally bright.

Now, it should feel and start looking like my original vision. I hope you guys enjoy the original direction the game was meant to take, and fingers crossed on positive feedback. That's not to say it isn't a WIP still. The lighting and volumetric fog could still use some love, I have a lot to learn about lighting effects in order to get what I'm looking for.

This will also help the Practice Range quite a bit, and allow me to finally nail down the parallax mapping testing, volumetric fog, and a lot of other things I've been having trouble with in the past that I'm now excited for again in the future. Practice Range and Mainline XL have both been re enabled in the published version so players can see what I am experimenting with. Things in the Practice Range are either WIP waiting to be finished and implemented into the regular maps, or they are finished and are used for tutorial.

Thanks for playing and thanks for reading, and as always I hope to see you in the Arena.