The Tech Report writes first-person shooter Descent is in process of being replicated using the Unreal Engine 3. The project is headed by Maximillian Schulz and follows the example set by Black Mesa, the fan-made remake of Half-Life. Further details can be found on his website.
Apparently, making Descent's six degrees of freedom work in the Unreal engine is somewhat complicated. Instead of walking along the floor with a fixed horizon, as in most shooters, you pilot a ship through zero-gravity mining environments that don't always have a consistent sense of up, down, left, or right. For the uninitiated, the sample video below provides a sense of what to expect.
Maximillian Schulz, the man responsible for the port, hopes to follow in the footsteps of the Black Mesa remake of Half-Life. He'd like to replicate Descent without using its name or any of the original assets, which will hopefully keep the lawyers at bay. That approach requires all the in-game content to be created from scratch, and Sculz is inviting the modding community to help out on that front.
