Descent to get Unreal Engine 3 makeover

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.