a less real question: how often do you think about what it would take to get dnf2001 off the unreal engine?
It would take a lot, unfortunately.
Unreal uses a subtractive map format as opposed to an additive one as seen in many id Tech based games (which includes HL's Source engine). This format is so Byzantine that writing a converter has been next to impossible.
On top of that, the model format used is some weird hybrid of skeletal- and vertex-based animation we hadn't seen before and which took a while to get a functional Blender plugin written for.
Thus, porting this game isn't simply a matter of translation. The textures are easy to extract, but maps would have to be rebuilt from scratch, and all the models would have to be re-animated.
There's a lot of other little details in code and such, enemy behaviours and weapons; it's not impossible, and I have toyed with some map ideas using those assets, but know it would be like making a new game almost from square one.
There's also another issue: licencing, which seems weird considering how the game was dumped out, but it could be the saving grace of the DNF2001 Restoration Project that we are staying in the same engine. Switching engines might cause some invisible wire to be tripped, and that would be that for the endeavour.
Who knows if that would really happen if ported? But it's something that does sit in the back of my mind, and probably keeps me from doing much more than some mock-ups.
