Unreal Tournament came out in 1999 and people are still playing it. They are still making things for it, too — one Monster Hunt server on my own machine carries 515 community-made maps, most of them by people who have never met each other. The maps are alive. The engine underneath them is not.

UT Ants is a new engine that takes those maps and plays them properly on a modern machine. Same levels, same weapons, same feel — shadows that move, fog you can see light cutting through, and surfaces that look like something rather than a flat picture stuck to a wall.

The three things that are wrong today

The look cannot be fixed from inside. UT99 paints its shadows into the walls when a map is built and never changes them. There is no way to add moving light to that, and there never will be: the code was never released, and the game was delisted in 2023. The ceiling is permanently 1999.

The computer players cannot play Monster Hunt. Those maps are built around switches that open doors and plates somebody has to stand on while the rest of the team goes through. UT99's bots understand none of it — they walk into the closed door and stop. So a Monster Hunt server with a couple of humans on it stalls, and somebody has to shepherd the bots through every puzzle by hand.

The library is trapped. All those maps only run on an engine nobody can change, for a game nobody can legally buy any more. Every year it gets harder, not easier.

What it will do

• Read the maps you already have and rebuild each one as a modernised version of itself — real lighting, real materials, fog and light shafts — while you still recognise it the moment it loads.
• Feel identical to play. Running, dodging, hammer-jumping and shock-combos have to land exactly where your hands already expect. If that changes, the project has failed, and it is written down that way.
• Teach the bots to solve the puzzles — find the switch, press it, go through, and leave one of them standing on the plate.
• Hand you a map you have never seen when you join a server, so you are playing within a minute instead of hunting for a download.
• Let anyone make things for it — a map, a monster, a player character — and have other players see them without installing anything by hand.
• Play a full round on a controller, and show you the level map with where you and your team have been.

What it deliberately does not do

It ships none of Epic's content. You bring your own copy of Unreal Tournament and the game reads it from your own disk; it refuses to start without one. Nothing of Epic's is committed, published or sent over the network, and that line is checked automatically on every change.

It also will not talk to UT99's own servers, will not have a single-player campaign, and will not have Capture the Flag or Assault before version 1.0. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Monster Hunt are the three modes it is being built for.

Where it stands

Very early. There is nothing to play and nothing to download. The project started in September 2026.

What exists is the reading and the drawing. It reads a real map end to end — its walls, textures, sounds, lights and everything placed in it — and rebuilds the old textures as modern materials. Point the first program at your Unreal Tournament folder and it lists the maps in it. Pick one and it is rebuilt and opened, and you can fly a camera through it — lit, shadowed, with fog and light shafts — on a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad. There is no player, no gravity, no weapons and no monsters yet. Windows and Linux are both built and tested on every single change — not one first and the other later — and the tests pass on a machine that has never had Unreal Tournament installed.

Dark rooms get a torch of their own. Our lighting is now physically accurate, which left a few rooms in Arcane Temple much darker than the original game showed them. Where a room was under half the original's brightness, we add a torch, a copy of one the map already uses, so it looks as if it was always there. Four rooms in Arcane Temple got one. An option when starting the game turns every added torch off, and the map then looks exactly as it did before.