So I think some — many — of you have probably heard of this ambitious Ultima Underworld remake by now, but if not, here’s pretty much everything you need to know about it: someone who goes by the handle of mrob76u is remaking the Ultima Underworld demo using Unreal Engine 4…with Oculus Rift support.

This project began in 2011 as an attempt to remake the demo for Ultima Underworld — essentially, the first level of the Stygian Abyss — using a modern game engine. The developer looked at a few different 3D engines at the time, including Unity3D, Torque 3D and shiVa 3D, eventually choosing Unity. However, he shifted his focus to the Unreal engine (then at version 3) some time thereafter, and set about building assets and laying out the uppermost region of the Abyss.

Asset creation and level layout, as the above (now dated) screenshot attests, proved to be an easy enough task, but scripting events in the Unreal engine proved to be too daunting a task, which forced the developer to switch back to Unity (which, thanks to its plugin repository, has several excellent visual scripting options that make complex programming somewhat easier for non-programmers). However, the project was put on hold soon afterward, as real life asserted itself.

In 2013, the developer ordered and received an Oculus Rift, and his experiences with it rekindled his desire to complete his remake of the Underworld demo. A few months later, Epic Games released the fourth version of the Unreal engine, which included their powerful Blueprints visual scripting feature. This, coupled with the fact that the Unity engine never could quite deliver the visual fidelity the developer desired, prompted yet another engine change…and since then, mrob76u seems to be making quite good progress on the project.

His first test of the engine, making the Avatar walk around, went well enough:

And he has even been playing with some of the DirectX 11 features in UE4, such as distance-based tessellation to improve performance. Most recently, he got torches working:

This is…pretty darn exciting. I don’t own an Oculus Rift myself (and I have no plans to acquire one), but the concept behind this project is just awesome. Naturally, a project entry has been set up for it.