The team is working on the fourth book as well as porting the whole game to the new Unity engine (Unity 5), which might take a while but hopefully will introduce performance improvements for modern PCs (better utilizing multicore CPUs).

RTG has recently started a dev log here:
http://redthreadgames.com/blog/

The posts are worth reading if you are not concerned about spoilers for the released chapters and minor ones for the story ahead, and they talk about what they are currently working on and what they have learned from feedback and their development cycle so far...

The team is back in action and at the time, hard at work.

We've been teased with new taglines, some new art and, of course, an episode title: "Revelations".

Ragnar has tweeted quite a bit about voiceover work. Besides teasing the return of a voice actor in two known roles (which we immediately assumed to be Roper/Westhouse), he recently praised the dynamics between Enu and Zoë. Which personally gets me hyped a bit... :)

Don't make the mistake and expect an October release. I don't quite see that happen, although miracles occur once in a while. One fine November day should be it.

Fingers crossed...

The team is working on the fourth book as well as porting the whole game to the new Unity engine (Unity 5), which might take a while but hopefully will introduce performance improvements for modern PCs (better utilizing multicore CPUs).

I do not know much about these Unity engine things, is it possible to upgrade the first three books created on Unity 4 to Unity 5?

That's what they're doing right now, absolutely.

As I understand it, upgrading the entire game to Unity 5 is also a prerequisite to bring DFC to PS4.

We're all hoping for a performance boost as a result.

Yes, it is possible for them to do it, and since the episodes are released as patches that are integrated into the original game (instead of being released as separate games like TellTale does), they can't just upgrade one episode to the new engine version and leave the old ones to the old engine.

In theory, the upgrade to the new engine has quite a few benefits - one of them being the improved performance because Unity 5 can make use of multithreading. In practice though, we're just have to wait and see. Transisioning to a new engine mid-development or otherwise is never a painless process (especially when custom code had to be written to extend the old engine) and not one that won't introduce a bunch of bugs on its own.

"Yes, it is possible for them to do it, and since the episodes are released as patches that are integrated into the original game (instead of being released as separate games like TellTale does), they can't just upgrade one episode to the new engine version and leave the old ones to the old engine."

That explains it then. I did hear some time back they were going to give the characters in the game a more life-like approach (using Unity 4), by creating expressions on their faces, but I have not seen this; maybe with Unity 5 we will see this improvement!

Unity 5 doesn't automatically give them facial expression... that is something to be considered very early in game development, not in the middle of an episodic release.

Sorry, I would have loved to see more emotion in those faces, but that's not happening. :(

Red Thread Games say they are passionate in the quality of how good and realistic they want to make their games look. However, when I played Dreamfall (before Chapters), the characters in the game when walking towards a door for example or into the distance, they would just suddenly "disappear", instead of opening a door or their figures gradually fading away as they moved out of sight. And there are other areas of the game when a character is handing over an item to another character and instead of putting the item directly in their hand, we only see gestures of this happening. Surely, a little more programming into these areas would not have been too much for them to handle.

Even Dreamfall Chapters are still doing this: making gesture movements when a character is handing over an object to another character; so, still no improvement in quality, considering the time gap between Dreamfall and Dreamfall Chapters.

There are more things to consider though.

Dreamfall cost six million bucks and had FunCom's comparatively huge workforce behind it. DFC will eventually have cost, well, I estimate about two million $; their team doesn't exceed a dozen people.

I didn't think they were able to deliver THIS quality with such scarce resources, but they did. I think they're doing really well, considering all that.

The release of book four is delayed (they didn't mention a date) due to the work on porting the game to unity 5

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey/posts/1376378

Thanks for the info.

So, now we know that book four is called "Revelation" (same name as one of the "Myst" games coincidently). I had a bet with someone on here that book four may be called "Revenge" (not to be). Since the titles of all three books by that time all begin with the letter "R"; this other person I had the bet with a few weeks back guessed the next book will be named "Revelation" - how could he have known this, was it a lucky guess?

P. S. I wish I could find his post - I think he must have deleted it!

It's actually "Revelations" with a plural s, so if that person bet on the singular, he was still somewhat wrong! :)

The definitely first official mention or rather tease of that name was on Ragnar's twitter on September 29th.

"The definitely first official mention or rather tease of that name was on Ragnar's twitter on September 29th."

Twitter is probably where he heard the name then and not just a lucky guess.

If book five is going to be the final episode and brings about a happy ending, then maybe they could call it “Renaissance”; this will still be befitting in keeping in with the letter “R” for the beginning of each title name of each book (just a my own prediction).