DXU24 is neither a port nor a remaster, but a tool to bring Unreal Engine 1 games to the latest iteration.

The anonymous developer of the project has posted a 27 minute video on YouTube summarizing how to port games running on the original Unreal Engine to Unreal Engine 5. He did not make an engine port (like Daggerfall Unity), but a toolkit to make UE1-UE5 ports run. On the project’s Patreon page, he explained exactly what he was talking about: “You need a copy of the original game to run this at all. The general idea is that the original game is booted as usual and communicates with another running instance of Unreal Engine 5 through my software. Through this communication link, the game state, assets, everything, is communicated to Unreal Engine 5 and reinterpreted as a modern game asset, all at runtime.

DXU24 gives Ion Storm’s Deus Ex huge potential: in addition to advanced rendering techniques, it gives the game access to features it couldn’t use before due to its technological limitations, such as Lumen Global Illumination and VR support. DXU24 is all about VR. And the result is not exactly what you usually get with a crappy HD remaster (more than one publisher has come up with that in the last decade).

However, we will have to wait a little longer for DXU24, as the developer plans to release it sometime in mid-2024. So we’re about half a year away, and when the project is finished, we should be able to buy it on Steam for $12. But here we can ask a question: will Epic Games compete? The technology is not released for piracy, they have done a lot of work on it, and (as it says on Patreon) we should have the original game from the modernization…

Source: PCGamer