Some time ago, indie game developer Eobet found himself in need of some distraction from his main project, and began looking at ways to take the game data from Ultima 4 and convert its top-down 2D tile engine into 3D. His initial results were rather promising in their own right:

That image, as you can see, was posted back in early March of 2024. Eobet continued to poke away at this idea, beginning with adding some background colour to some of the tiles. The two images below reflect this: the first (on the left) features the original tiles from Ultima 4 as they are, while the second (on the right) features a background colour that fills in the black spaces on the tiles with a base colour that varies based on terrain height:

What followed next was trees. Eobet didn’t want to use the “apple trees” from the 16-bit tileset available for the game, so he instead drew upon the tree graphics in the 8-bit game tiles, added a trunk thereto, and randomized the positioning of each tree just a bit. The result was, as you can well imagine, breathtaking:

It really is important to give a proper sense of just how this 3D wrapper for the game works. Fortunately, Eobet provided a set of screenshots showing how the original game tiles for Buccaneer’s Den were transformed into a basic 3D island, and then how additional detail and heightmapping were added thereto:

The ship’s sails are even animated, as is the water:

That video was posted last week, and since then Eobet has mostly focused on adding additional details and lighting effects:

No downloads are available as yet, so the newly-minted project entry here at the Codex is a bit sparse, That said, Eobet did release a massive overhead render of the continent of Britannia, a download link for which can be found there.