This site has been carrying claims that were written years ago and never corrected. Some of them were optimistic at the time and are simply wrong now. This post is the reset: what Around The Ground actually is at the end of August 2026, and what I am deliberately not saying.
Kish was the study, and it is concluded
ATG Kish ran from 2017 to 2019. It was an open world rebuild of a real island in the Persian Gulf, set up to establish what one person could do with a real place. It established it, and it concluded on that result.
What it produced still matters. The island was modelled from GIS data at roughly twice the area of the GTA V map. There was a customization system, mod support, a granular synthesizer for engine audio, and a water drop windshield shader that I released free and that people still write to me about. The Kish page keeps all of that together.
ATG Racing is where the physics gets solved
ATG Racing runs in a browser. That is a hostile place to run a vehicle simulation, which is exactly why it is useful: anything that survives WebGL is not going to fall over in a native build. Vehicle physics is NWH Vehicle Physics 2, the tracks are called Grounds and are built in an editor that has grown well past what it started as, and the customization settings move real handling numbers.
The build people last saw is stale. Getting a current one in front of anyone is the near term job, and when there is something worth playing the link goes on that page. I am not putting a date on it.
ATG is the game the rest of it is for
ATG is a Windows game built in Unity 6, and its islands are called Grounds. Kish was the first one. The next is Pardis: an invented island in the Caspian, four seasons, small enough that one person can actually finish it and dense enough to be worth driving around. Wheel users get DirectInput force feedback, SimHub is supported, boats run on Dynamic Water Physics 2, and the whole thing is free and noncommercial. I am not selling it.
Racing and ATG are separate products, and the relationship between them is one directional. Racing is the donor: I prove a system there, then carry a stripped version of it across, deliberately and one at a time. Code shaped around a browser does not belong in a native game, and pretending otherwise is how projects rot.
What I am not promising
No release dates. No countdowns. Both sites had them, and both are gone, because a made up date is just a lie with a clock attached.
No posting schedule either. I work on this around a life, roughly thirty hours in a good week, and committing to a monthly post would only produce padding on the weeks where nothing photogenic happened. Posts appear when there is something real in them.
ATG R/C is parked. It was a good idea and it may come back, but it is not being worked on and its page now says so instead of showing store buttons for an app that does not exist.
Why bother saying all this
Because the alternative is a set of pages that quietly overstate the project, and then every real update has to compete with the impression left by the fake ones. I would rather this site be boring and accurate. If something ships, you will see it here or on X, and it will be a link to a thing rather than a paragraph about a thing.
Dan