Why Early Access?

“The dearth of features in targeted games is formidable. It will take time to cover all the bases the community desires for each product we support.

With Early Access we can acknowledge that Surreal 98 is currently not feature complete, but with the communities' help, we can power toward supporting all the rendering features of Unreal Engine 1 and more!

Currently Surreal 98 targets the base version of Deus Ex and Unreal Tournament, but we also want to help support legacy mods for the titles, and improve feature support so they run just how you like 'em. Because Unreal Engine 1 is quite broad in its feature set, we don't currently support all of it, just what we need to run the base games.

With early access we also want to give ourselves time to add support for other titles like Unreal Gold and Rune GOLD.

We also want to use the time to generalize the Surreal 98 transcoder language so it can fit a broader range of titles, and not just be limited to Unreal Engine 1 games. Potentially we want to add support for id tech 1->3 (Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3) based games as well, but to do that we need to do a bit of a refactor.

While we work on that, we'll be maintaining support for our base titles, porting them over to this new transcoder language.

We want you to be to start experiencing the potential of Surreal 98 now, and we need the community feedback to help us shape it into the product you want, as it's very likely we haven't gotten everything right yet.”

Approximately how long will this software be in Early Access?

“2 years”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Surreal 98 aims to support all common rendering features from Unreal Engine 1, whilst also transitioning into a common and generalized architecture anyone can potentially use to bring an old beloved game into the future.

By the time Surreal 98 comes out of early access, we would like to have close to 100% support for Unreal Engine 1's feature set, and robust modding tool kit plugin for the Unreal Engine Editor.

We hope that the full version of Surreal 98 should have gained access to Rune and Unreal GOLD, with experimental support for Id Tech games.

We plan to generalize the transcoder language, such that it will allow us to release a community game upscaling SDK kit, for developers brave enough to tackle the challenge.

We would like Surreal 98 to have a more robust upscaling architecture for textures and materials vs. what is currently available.

We plan to have Surreal 98's modding architecture and API solidified, so modders should be able to make mods without fear of them no longer working after an update.

We also plan to have fleshed out the modding SDK documentation.

Finally, we plan for the release of Surreal 98 to have reasonably good VR support.

Work will be done towards a base modding/art pass on target games to make sure our base level upscaling is consistent across the board. Currently there are many art / material inconsistencies we hope to have resolved by release.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Playable with Deus Ex and limited support for Unreal Tournament only

VR Support partially implemented
Modding SDK is partially developed and not ready for release
No modding documentation currently exists
The transcoder language is currently very Unreal Engine 1 informed and not generalized at all.
There has not been a full art pass done on any target games for the base level material and texture replacements, it currently very spotty and inconsistent
”

Will this software be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“No”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“In the Steam discussions and on the Discord, we will engage with those that welcome it to help find the gaps we've left open. Which Unreal engine mods or full conversions have features we've missed?

Ultimately however, we want to take encouragement and direction from customers to help inform the future of Surreal 98.”