I don’t know if it’s AI tools making this sort of thing more accessible, or just a new crop of extremely talented developers who happen to be Ultima fans, but there’s been a run of jaw-droppingly impressive projects lately.

Here’s another one. A developer who goes by Max got in touch with the Codex by email to tell us about Britannia Relit, which he describes as follows:

I’m working on Britannia Relit, a fork of Exult that keeps Ultima VII’s original pixel art and adds modern GPU lighting: real-time shadows, torches and lanterns that light the streets at night, weather and true-colour effects, in the spirit of the HD-2D look of Octopath Traveler. The party also glides between tiles instead of stepping, and there is an optional red/cyan 3D mode. A full voice-over of the game is in the works as well.

Max is a 3D VFX artist with more than twenty years in the trade. That pedigree shows, because the project’s dev page is something to behold. Almost every scene has an original-versus-relit comparison you can drag a slider across. What’s more incredible is that in all of the screenshots, none of the 1992 art has been touched. As the game paints each sprite, the new renderer notes where each pixel sits in 3D space, and which way it faces, using Ultima VII‘s own shape data. It then traces light from the sun, both of Britannia’s moons, and up to fourteen lamps within a given scene. The result is shadows that move with the party and the time of day, lamplight pooling on the cobblestone roads, and a street that goes gold at dusk, where the original simply swapped palettes at 8 PM.

It’s worth remembering that Ultima VII is not quite as 2D as it looks. Every object in the game has a Z-value coordinate along with its X and Y position. The original game used it to decide which floor sat above which, since Britannia’s buildings could have upper storeys and walkable roofs. But because that’s technically a true 3D coordinate system, it has tempted people before. Most notably, the long-defunct Exult 3D project tried to present Ultima VII as a full 3D game built from nothing but the original game data. Britannia Relit seems to draw on the same information, but it goes the other way: it doesn’t rebuild the world in 3D. Rather, it keeps the 2D picture and uses each object’s height and dimensions to work out how light and shadow should fall across it.

And that’s only the lighting. Max has also added four seasons and a calendar, with weather fronts rolling in from the west and short winter days. Snow lies for days and keeps your footprints. The sea now has surf and ship wakes, Trammel and Felucca have their phases, and the world has even more hens, cats, bats and gulls populating it than before. Companions now chat on the road, and a brand-new real-time combat system pauses itself when it matters. Every effect can be switched off, and the F7 key flips between the new look and the original at any moment.

You can get a feel for it from the beta clip below, which follows Trinsic from day to night. Two more video showcases, including a walk around Britain and out into the caves, are on Max’s YouTube channel.

Britannia Relit is still in beta and runs only on Linux for now, with other platforms planned. A public release and the source code will follow soon. As you’d expect from an Exult fork, you’ll need your own copy of Ultima VII: The Black Gate (the GOG version works), because the mod ships with none of the game’s data. Serpent Isle, the dev page notes, is planned for support in the future. There is no public release of the mod yet, but you can — and should — check out the screenshots available at the project’s official website, a subset of which I’ll soon be adding to the project entry for it here at the Codex.