I am doing an experiment, trying to port an old game called Vampire The Masquerade to Unreal 5 All AI
This session was Claude fable plus sub agents trying to crack the old engine (alpha source models from 2000's) mesh blends and animation with weapons and attachments
All automated using Unreal MCP service soo Claude can hook inside the engine and test live and see live data
<3 love Claude
Well, I will just leave this here, after the cursed video I have made nice progress into vtmb animation, timing is still cursed.. Rodrigez vs prince clash is getting overloaded, secondary animations and effects missing ~~
While I am still working to crack the models and broken animations :) soon I decided to explore lights, what I made is a debug UI inside unreal using Cog, a menu to watch what is going on the game live while walking on it. I want to see what's going on live
And almost compactly forgot wired the sound system to unreal too, SOUNDS! lol
About lights (generated text ok, can't do myself better....)
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VtMB’s original maps contain hundreds of light sources, which is incredibly useful—but the original game did not use them to light the walls and floors in real time. That lighting was calculated beforehand and baked into the map, while shiny surfaces used fixed cubemap “photos” instead of real reflections. The light data was still used for things like characters and props, so it is not unused data; it just was never designed to be dropped directly into a modern real-time renderer. In Unreal, I can reconstruct those sources as actual lights and let Lumen produce real bounce lighting and reflections.
That creates a strange problem: many of those old lights were fake fill lights placed by the artists to imitate bounced light and keep dark rooms readable. Lumen already calculates that bounce for real, so spawning every light effectively adds the same contribution twice. The result can explode the brightness, wash out VtMB’s noir contrast, and even create shadows from lights that have no visible source. A surprising amount of the work is therefore walking through each map, separating real lamps, candles and neon signs from old lighting tricks, then disabling or reducing the fake ones without accidentally destroying the original atmosphere.
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About OPs intention and wtf I am doing
THIS NOT A PORT - I am not releasing it officially, I might release the papers and documentation to help other devs, maybe source when I get something stable, but you wont see downloads from me
WHY - it is already proven, no distrib, don´t want CeD letters down on me
so WHY are you doing it? Because I want lol, research, curiosity, how that f this old game worked
I’ve been messing around with building an Unreal Engine 5 client for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
At the moment it’s very barebones: I’m still decoding VtMB’s wonderfully cursed asset formats and getting them to run in Unreal. No visual upgrades or remaster work yet—just the original assets being loaded by a very unfinished engine-side pipeline.
This clip is from sp_theater: the animation is playing, but the skeleton mapping is failing pretty spectacularly. Still, seeing it move at all feels like progress.
Maybe I’ll share more in the future, assuming I actually manage to finish it.