Unreal Tournament (1999)

SolKutTeR · 13. August 2026

Von GHWST gibt es eine Standalone Version von Unreal Tournament für Quest 2 und aufwärts.

Unreal Tournament, Native on Meta Quest.
It runs on the headset. Nothing is streamed from a PC, and it isn't a flat screen floating in front of you. I rebuilt the 1999 engine as a 64-bit ARM binary so it renders real stereo through OpenXR, with the gun in your hand and the whole original game behind it.
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The whole game, in VR, standalone
Every map, every weapon, every bot, the menus, the mod support. This is actual Unreal Tournament, not something built to look like it. What I changed is everything sitting between the game and your eyes.

Real stereo
Two eyes, two separate frustums, handed to the compositor as a real projection layer. You can judge distance with it.

The gun is in your hand
The weapon is attached to your controller and fires where you point it. Shots come out of the barrel, not out of the middle of the model.

Lean, duck, peek
Moving your head moves the view in the world, so you can lean around a corner without moving your feet.

Menus in the room
The menus sit on a panel a couple of metres out, anchored where you opened them, and you point at them with a controller. The HUD stays level with the horizon no matter how you tilt your head.

Sniper scope that zooms
Alt-fire actually magnifies the view. It also switches your aim to your head and puts the crosshair dead centre, because aiming a scope with a controller at 8x is not workable.

Online works
The client runs the 469 packages that live servers use, and the app installs them for you, so you match what everyone else is running. Open the server browser, pick a game, play. This is new and I've tested it myself rather than extensively, so tell me if a server gives you trouble.
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What actually had to change
Unreal Engine 1 was written in 1998 for a 32-bit x86 PC with one screen. Hardly any of the real work here was VR features. Most of it was getting a rendering model that predates programmable shaders to produce something a modern compositor will accept.

64-bit, on ARM
The engine assumes 32-bit pointers in places that matter, like struct layouts that got saved to disk as a file format. On 64-bit those go wrong quietly instead of failing to compile.

Stereo without a view matrix
UE1 has no view matrix, so there isn't one to give two of. The separation comes purely from where each eye sits. Anything that moves an eye has to move the head and add the eye offset back, or the 3D quietly turns flat.

The 2D layer is a quad
The HUD, console and menus are flat 2D draws. They get mapped onto a plane sitting in the world so they have real depth, and the controller pointer runs that same mapping backwards to work out what you clicked.

Optical zoom, done properly
The scope divides the eye tangents rather than the angles, because that's what magnification actually is. The field of view handed to the compositor is deliberately left alone. Narrowing both cancels the zoom out completely, which I found out the hard way.

Downloads that finish
Joining a modded server meant pulling tens of megabytes through UT99's 1999 file transfer. It now downloads over HTTP and unpacks .uz files on the headset. Last measurement was 45 packages, 24.8 MB down and 50.5 MB on disk, in under a minute.

Measured, not assumed
Frame timing is logged per eye. Standing still it sits at the display's full 90 Hz with about 7 ms of the budget spare. A live bot match on Deck16 measures 74 to 90 fps.
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Where it's at
It's playable and I'm playing it. It isn't finished. Here's the honest split.

Stereo VR, standalone on Quest 3. Full bot matches, all the original maps and weapons

Motion controls. Controller aim, the weapon in your hand, snap or smooth turn, and movement that follows the way you're facing

Roomscale lean, kept inside what the player can physically fit through

Menus and HUD on a panel in the world. You point at them, and they stay level

The server browser and the downloader. The list populates, a click connects, and custom packages pull down on the headset by themselves

Sniper scope, with the zoom, the aim and the crosshair all working together

Online multiplayer. The client is retargeted to 469, the app installs those packages itself so every install matches what servers run, and I've played a live match. Newer than the rest of this list, so treat it accordingly

Frame rate under load. It drops into the mid 70s in a heavy firefight. The engine currently does a full draw pass per eye where it only needs one per frame.

Comfort options. Smooth locomotion only, no teleport. There's a movement vignette in the build but it isn't doing enough to notice yet, so I'm not counting it.

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Hoshi82 · 23. August 2026

Ich lebe noch!

c4rD1g4n · 23. August 2026

D..h. ich kann auch Unreal Single Player spielen, wenn ich die entsprechenden Dateien in UT reingefummelt habe??

SolKutTeR · 23. August 2026

Es ist schon ein wenig bei mir her, aber Singleplayer wäre dann nur gegen KI. Für den Story Part würde sich aber Unreal VR anbieten, weiß allerdings nicht, ob es noch funktioniert und wie weit das Projekt entwickelt wurde.

c4rD1g4n · 24. August 2026

Nee, Unreal VR ist leider tot.

Aber was UT angeht, rede ich nicht von "UT gg. Bots", sondern davon, dass man IN Unreal Tournament auch das originale Unreal spielen kann.
Sieht dann SO aus:

...und da ja wohl die PC-Installation inkl. Menüs komplett übernommen wird, KÖNNTE das ja funktionieren, was ich dann mal ausprobieren werde.

SolKutTeR · 24. August 2026

Ach so das war auch möglich, okay cool, dann würde ich mich der Frage gerne anschließen.

c4rD1g4n · 24. August 2026

irgendwie funktioniert es....HALBWEGS zumindest.
Wirkt alles ziemlich unfertig, Texturen flimmern und wirken sehr niedrig aufgelöst, obwohl ich HD Texturen drin habe.
Das LOD/Filtering haut irgendwie nicht hin.
Teilweise musste ich cheaten ("ghost"/"walk")

Aber ich habe schon zwei Brutes und paar Tentacles gekillt...in VR!!!

Unreal Tournament (1999)

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