Britannia Relit

Produced by: Max
Website: Britannia Relit @ pages.dev
Videos: Maximilian M @ YouTube

Britannia Relit is a fork of Exult, the open-source and cross-platform Ultima VII engine. It adds a modern lighting renderer to Ultima VII: The Black Gate while leaving the original 1992 pixel art untouched. It’s the work of Max, a 3D VFX artist with more than twenty years of experience, who wanted to give the game the look of Octopath Traveler‘s HD-2D style. As the game draws each sprite, the renderer works out where each pixel sits in 3D and which way it faces, using Ultima VII‘s own shape data. It then traces light from the sun, both of Britannia’s moons, and up to fourteen lamps in any given scene at once. Using that data, it then renders real-time shadows that follow the in-game clock, lamplight in the streets at night and true-colour effects. Max wrote it in C++ for an SDL 3 GPU renderer running on Vulkan.

The fork also adds a simulated year in Britannia, with four seasons, a calendar, weather fronts, snow that lies on the ground for days, and the phases and light of Trammel and Felluca, Britannia’s two moons. It adds a redrawn sea with surf and ship wakes, wildlife in the towns and the countryside, and glowing magical effects. On the gameplay side, the party glides smoothly between tiles instead of stepping. There are also companions who chat on the road, an optional red/cyan 3D anaglyph mode and a reworked real-time combat system that pauses itself when it matters. A full voice-over of the game is in progress. Every effect can be switched off, and F7 flips between the new look and the original at any time.

As of October 2026, Britannia Relit is in beta and runs only on Linux, with ports to other platforms planned. A public release and the source code are expected, but are not yet available. Relit requires the player’s own copy of Ultima VII: The Black Gate (the GOG version works), and the mod ships with none of the original game data.