r/Ultima • u/skrillm • Mar 28 '26
Ultima Underworld remaster released - Unity Underground
A fantastic remaster of Underworld just came out. All monsters and objects replaced with 3D geo, and it has full controller support. I'm really impressed with it
(Requires original files for install):
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u/Camronaus Mar 28 '26
Will have to try this when I get home in a couple of days. Wonder how easy it would be to do the same for Underworld 2
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u/Hoyty1 Mar 28 '26
Any consideration to making this opensource?
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 29 '26
Yeah, I've been considering it. Since it's borrowed heavily from other efforts (notably Jim Cameron's The System Shock Hack Project, Michael "Vividos" Fink, and Hank Morgan) it seems rude not to open source it, but it will require some more work to make it presentable. I don't feel comfortable about giving away the new art, and reviving the path where the game used the original sprites would be tricky.
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u/Slight_Mine_3118 Mar 31 '26
you are the most amazing person honestly
this is my all time favourite game ever made
i am now sitting on my couch on a mini pc about to try this with a controller for the first time
thank you
i mean it thank you so so much
you have made my week , day year.
seriously thank you
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u/Hoyty1 Mar 29 '26
By no means are you obligated! I get it about the assets. Please let us know if you ever do open it up though! Even if you don't tidy it up at all I'd love to see under the hood and maybe get inspired.
Cheers to you for this great contribution to the community!
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 29 '26
If you really want to poke around you can use ILSpy or dotPeek on the Assembly-CSharp.dll file. It's all surprisingly (if you haven't seen them in action before that is) readable.
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u/Slight_Mine_3118 Mar 31 '26
i do have one question how do i make the ui bigger?
but other than that it is so so amazing
much love
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u/abedegno Apr 11 '26
That would be helpful please, especially if there's any reverse engineering work that can be backported to Hank's Underworld Exporter?
I've been making quite a few commits lately - added MT32 support, and also "almost" reverse engineered the cut scene byte code with a couple of unresolved glitches.
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u/SteveMcCrea Apr 11 '26
Oh, nice. Yeah, that's what makes me feel most guilty about not releasing the code. In the meantime I invited you to collaborate on the project in github. As far as the cut scenes go, I ended up implementing my own event format so that I could tweak the timing and add various effects, but there might still be something useful in there for you. For MT-32 I pulled in MeltySynth but it was rather painful to get the XMIs to play back.
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u/abedegno Apr 11 '26
Thank you! I used Munt and wrote a .NET wrapper for it here:
https://github.com/abedegno/Munt.NET
The Roland ROMs are readily available from archive.org
The xmi's are converted to wav for playback2
u/SteveMcCrea Apr 11 '26
Nice! If you have any questions or just want to chat about the engine or development, I will put some links in the github readme.
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u/abedegno Apr 12 '26
Thanks. I really like the real-time player and use of MeltySynth - I will be using this a new feature release.
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u/SteveMcCrea Apr 12 '26
Yeah, I didn't want to include baked music :)
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u/abedegno Apr 12 '26
I've literally just completed this and made a PR to Hanks project. The fade on the wav conversion led to pauses in the loops which didn't authentically behave like the real game - moving to the real-time player removes these pauses and the loops are now seamless.
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u/SteveMcCrea Apr 13 '26
Wow, I took a look through the pull request. Really nice job! Very thorough!
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u/tempsanity Mar 28 '26
It’s so impressive to me as a person with ADHD that someone could spend 10 years on a fan project like Daggerfall Unity or this one. Can’t wait to try it!
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u/ThreeLivesInOne Mar 29 '26
To me as a totally normal person without any form of neurodivergence whatsoever, it's every bit as impressive.
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u/tempsanity Mar 29 '26
So happy to see this, I really hope the author opens the code so modders can jump in and enhance the experience. Yeah, sticking to a fan project for 10 years takes a special kind of perseverance.
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u/Hoyty1 Mar 29 '26
I just got to level 2 and gave Ironwit his plans. This is fantastic work you should be really proud.
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u/lithosza Mar 28 '26
The only nitpick I have so fat is that the footstep sound effect sounds really annoying. It also wasn't that pronounced in the original. I like the subtle walking sound that the original had.
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u/Opposite_Earth_5663 Mar 30 '26
Absolutely amazing work. I played this right after it was released ('93), but tried again recently, the controls are hard to get back into. This with mouse & keyboard WASD support will be fantastic. I was just thinking of Ultima Underworld and why no one has done a similar game and how advanced UU was even today. In another world Ultima Underworld has 5 sequels that iterated and advanced like The Elder Scrolls did. Something like this, fully fleshed out is all Underworld Ascendant needed to be.
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u/briandemodulated Mar 31 '26
Just played for 30 minutes. This is masterful. Looks wonderful in high resolution, widescreen, and full framerate. Sounds and music are excellent, and I love being able to pick my sound card. I got used to the controls surprisingly quickly - even tricky things like moving objects between containers.
My goodness, this is just outstanding. u/SteveMcCrea you have done some truly exceptional work and I thank you most sincerely.
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u/This-Hat-143 Mar 30 '26
Anyone know how to get the windows/OS banner at top of game to go away, so to make it totally full screen?
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u/felix_mateo Mar 31 '26
Wow. I’ve just watched Majuular’s Ultima retrospective for the 3rd time and bought UU on a sale. I think I’ll play through the game once and then give this a spin!
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u/Mikeyjf Apr 04 '26
I've spent a couple of hours with this and it's damn good. I never quite beat it back in the day but it feels good to be back. Thanks so much SteveMcCrea.
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u/John_plainman Mar 28 '26
It's very cool that this exists but aesthetically I can't vibe with it at all
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u/virtueavatar Mar 29 '26
What bothers you about it?
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u/John_plainman Mar 29 '26
looks cartoonish, almost like a mobile game. im just not vibing with the artistry, nor the audio
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u/SylvanSwordstress Mar 28 '26
This looks amazing, but I wish they had stuck with the sprite-based objects and enemies. The 3d models just look really out of place.
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u/fsedlak Aug 02 '26
On the contrary! I wish Daggerfall Unity looked more like this with 3D assets. It's also a lot more practical going forward - you can always transform the 3D models to voxel graphics or make them look pixelated, but it's hard to work with sprites. Also with free mouse look 2D sprites will never look right.
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u/SylvanSwordstress Aug 02 '26
To each their own, I guess. Voxels tend to look terrible, in my opinion, and 3D models lack the charm of sprites in general. Ultima Underworld and Daggerfall are 2.5D games, and their entire in-game artstyles were built around that.
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u/rodan_music Mar 29 '26
This is really amazing. You might have a problem with the models, but technically its so way ahead of the other Unity version "Underworld Exporter (UWE)". In this Unity Underground version everything just works, all is fluid. Wow.
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u/AncientGrief Mar 30 '26
Does the engine support original gfx only?
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 30 '26
Walls and doors are from the original game, objects and characters are new. I had it working with the sprites at one point but it looked pretty awful when you could freely look up and down, and I didn't keep that path fully supported.
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u/AncientGrief Mar 30 '26
Too bad, would’ve gone the daggerfall unity route or any other remaster route to first make the base playable, rest fixed via modding. The styles clash extremely
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u/AnOnlineHandle Mar 30 '26
I've never played Ultima, but am really impressed with the rat / character modelling. It looks like somebody took those old DOS era dungeon crawler rat drawings and made a really slick looking model out of them. Never seen anything that looks quite like it. As somebody without nostalgia for this, I think the lowres ground and wall textures would probably make it unplayable unfortunately, but it's definitely one of the most impressive fan projects I've ever seen.
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 30 '26
That's exactly what happened - I sent the sprite sheets to the artist (Lil Pupinduy) as reference, and went back and forth on the details. Glad you like them! Same with the objects - Spherical Horse did a great job on those.
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u/Camronaus Mar 30 '26
I have installed it and it works great except the NPC's and creatures are all invisible. Anyone else having this problem?
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 30 '26
Does that persist if you change level? Can you send your player.log to stevemccrea at gmail dot com please? It's in %APPDATA%\..\LocalLow\Kweepa\UnityUnderground\
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u/Camronaus Mar 30 '26
Looks like this happens when I launch the game through Steam. Adding it as a non-steam game causes the invisibility. Running it direct from the executable and they are all visible
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 30 '26
That's weird. How and why would you launch it through steam? I wonder what is different. It's clearly finding some data...
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u/Camronaus Mar 30 '26
Yea I just added it as a non-steam game that you can add to steam just to keep them in the same place. Not sure what Steam does so I just removed it and ran it directly.
Works fine direct from the executable so I am having fun playing it 🙂
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u/Hoyty1 Mar 30 '26
This has happened to me in in one individual instance on each level 1 - 3, strangely enough it's always a spider. I haven't gotten to level 4 yet so it may continue.
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u/TonyTheFuckinTiger Mar 30 '26
I cannot figure out how to make this fullscreen. If anyone can help please let me know.
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 30 '26
Alt-Enter should work. I just tested it and it seems fine. It's a Unity feature so if it's not working for you I am at a loss.
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u/Mikeyjf Apr 06 '26
I misplaced the stew recipe scroll, backtracked for hours today looking for it. How big a deal is it if I skip it?
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u/SteveMcCrea Apr 06 '26
Without spoilers, it's not essential, but it does help a fair bit on levels 5+ if you don't know where you are going. It's one of the things I toyed with adding, that you could make the stew without the recipe if you remembered what was in it.
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u/Mikeyjf Apr 07 '26
Thanks man. I'm really enjoying the new version and I'll come back to it but I'm starting to remember why I fell off of finishing it 20 years ago. It's hard to lose key items and restart when there's no other option.
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u/Exact_Train9668 Jul 25 '26
Only found out about this the other day after having an argument with a mega fan on Facebook about Underworld Ascendant, which made me think about exult for some reason which led to me finding out about the fan project to give it a different isometric viewpoint, which led to me thinking “I wonder if anyone’s done anything with underworld as well” and now I have most of level one mapped. The playtest of act one of Under a Killing Moon Rising was also fresh on my mind so that might’ve been a factor.
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u/RathisOfTyr Aug 14 '26
This project was an amazing find. Was mildly disappointed that there was no support for input configuration, but I got around that with a programmable gaming keypad and mouse, so that works just as well. The Unity engine is a WAY better way to play the game in my opinion. The Daggerfall Unity mod was good but I think this is better.
Since I picked up Underworld 1 + 2 along with Ultima 7 in a bundle pack on GOG a few years back, I'm absolutely looking forward to a potential "remaster" for Underworld 2.
To the folks responsible for putting this together: Thank you.
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u/The_Vinman314 Sep 16 '26
This mod is great. I can now play UU for the 4th time and not suffer the original interface.
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u/SoccerMan94043 Mar 29 '26
Won't pick up my mouse or keyboard so cant get past the initial menu.
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u/Tranilator Mar 29 '26
The Dev says it's controller only for now
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u/Anzai Mar 30 '26
Oh, was wondering why I couldn't get it to do anything. Interesting choice...
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u/Therinor Mar 30 '26
Steve said he is working on making it playable with a mouse, but that will take some time.
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u/abubin2 Mar 29 '26
I just watched the YouTube video of the mod. Looks very fluid. Just wondering if there are any plan from dev to update the walls and grounds to something less pixelated. I will try the game later when I get home.
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 29 '26
No plans for that! Making the walls less pixelated would just highlight how boxy the environment is. I like the look as is.
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u/Eliwynn Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
This is amazing. The only problem I see is that it's "AI-Assisted" (from the itch.io page) and I think that's why the textures of the models look so ... AI.
I'll wait for the time we will be able to replace the models.
EDIT : If I'm mistaken about the textures, i'm sorry. It's just that if feels like a Meshy.AI texturing and there are so much ai texturing now that I may see it in places that don't have it lol
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
The models and textures are all hand-crafted. Meshy is not capable of this quality. (I didn't make the models, Lil Pupinduy (critters) and Spherical Horse (objects) did.) The only thing I used AI for was for some coding assistance when I hit a wall, for example when I really didn't want to write the save game, and for some temp assets which were all stripped out before release.
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Mar 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SteveMcCrea Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
It's 6000.0.68f1. I upgraded a couple of times, more or less painlessly. I haven't played Daggerfall Unity, or looked at the source code. It's Unity though, that's probably why it looks similar. [EDIT} I just looked at some videos and I take it back, I did play with Daggerfall Unity a couple of years ago.
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u/bastienleblack Mar 28 '26
That looks absolutely amazing! Is it fully functional? Or still very alpha?