The Informal Synthetic Orchestra has shared a video showcasing one hour of gameplay from the unofficial Unreal Engine 5 port of System Shock 2. Using Unreal Engine 5, System Shock 2 can now take advantage of its Lumen technology. So there is no lightmap baking or manual lighting placement. Instead, the game now uses emissive materials, global/indirect illumination, and reflective illumination.
What’s also great is that you can now play the game from start to finish. Unfortunately, The Informal Synthetic Orchestra did not present this project to the public. However, this extended gameplay video can give you an idea of what you can expect from it.
As The Informal Synthetic Orchestra stated:
“All the levels themselves are a one-click import process. Most of the Dark Engine logic, quirks and all, is implemented now. Level persistence and transitions, links, traps, triggers, quests, statistics and leveling, inventory, signals / responses, PDA, hacking, etc. – everything works. However, I still haven’t gotten to a single child with AI. I haven’t yet adopted enough of the animation from the original game as I need to find the best way to do it. I also need to merge separate systems and fix small bugs. Annoyingly, I didn’t realize until I started writing that I didn’t re-import any levels other than medsci1 with the last importer. So there are no cutscenes/ghosts in this video. There are a lot of little quirks here and there that I need to iron out with a little testing.”
