UA Reforged

Editions

Four ways to play. One game underneath.

Same Urban Assault in every one of them. What changes is how much of 1998 you keep, and whether you're holding a mouse or a Quest controller.

The 1998 original, untouched

Classic

Frozen at 0.5

Urban Assault as Microsoft and TerraTools shipped it in 1998: half real-time strategy, half vehicle shooter. You command from a Host Station, build squads, and jump into any tank, helicopter or jet you own. Here it runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs on OpenUA, Marisa-Chan's open-source re-implementation of the engine.

  • Same game, same art, same rules. Including Metropolis Dawn (Ghorkov and Taerkasten campaigns).
  • Classic 0.5 is a frozen build that never changes. It is the reference we check everything against.
  • Game data is yours. It is Microsoft's copyright and never part of anything we ship.
Survey of the original sets before we touched anything: about 400 building meshes in total.
The six 1998 building sets. Survey of the original sets before we touched anything: about 400 building meshes in total.

The original, with the rough edges sanded off

Reforged 0.6

Frozen at 0.6

Same models, same art, a sharper picture and a smarter enemy. This is the build where the project got its name. It's frozen now, so the New Look can move fast without breaking it.

  • Native resolution, crisp UI text at any size, a 3x HUD.
  • Draw distance raised from 9 to 17 sectors, for almost no cost.
  • DualSense and game controllers, with rumble you can switch off.
  • An AI commander with 46 tunable constants and an influence-map brain, tested on 21 recorded A/B runs.
  • Radio chatter: 84 hand-written lines in the game's own message ticker.
  • Multiplayer between copies of our engine over a private network.
Distant ground in a level: Reforged 0.6
Before the fix Reforged 0.6
Calm ground at last. Distant ground shimmered because texture filtering had been silently off since wave 2. Drag to compare.

The flat remaster. Faithful, but battle-worn.

New Look

In active development

Reforged with new 3D work, built by hand in Blender and in the engine. Same silhouettes and colours as 1998, modern detail, real wear. Every remastered model drops in at the original size and fire points, so the game plays exactly as it did.

  • Remastered vehicles for all five factions, including the Metropolis Dawn ones, on one shared worn surface.
  • Host stations for Resistance, Ghorkov, Taerkasten, Mykonian and Black Sect. Plus the train.
  • Softer smoke, stronger laser and lightning hits, animated electric arcs on the aliens.
  • The CITY1 apartment block with damage stages. More towers in review.
  • A graphics menu with presets from Original (pixel-identical 1998) to Ultra.
The sandstone block with balconies and pilasters, then battle damage you can read from the street: scorch, broken windows, shell holes. Far LOD is 98 triangles.
CITY1 apartment block: original vs ours. The sandstone block with balconies and pilasters, then battle damage you can read from the street: scorch, broken windows, shell holes. Far LOD is 98 triangles.
Explosions and energy hits, before vs after
Explosions and energy hits, before vs after. Same battle, side by side. Softer smoke, stronger laser and lightning hits, a faint ground light, a gentler Tekh flame.

Standalone on Meta Quest 3. No PC.

VR

In play testing

A separate VR edition running natively on the Quest 3 inside our engine, using the New Look models. Sit in any open cockpit, or put the whole battlefield on your real table and command it like a general with very small toys.

  • Classic VR: open cockpits, a readable dash, a target card. Haptics instead of camera shake.
  • Comfort first: level horizon, bump filter, tunnel vision you can tune.
  • Living diorama: the real battle in miniature on your table through passthrough. Grab a unit and dive in.
  • Commanding by hand: a build wheel over the miniature, laser-pointer orders, floating bridge screens.
  • 120 Hz in combat. The biggest maps fit on the table after sector batching.
The real map in miniature, live: terrain, buildings, units. In the headset it sits on your real table through passthrough.
Living diorama on the table. The real map in miniature, live: terrain, buildings, units. In the headset it sits on your real table through passthrough.
Real headset eye capture: open cockpit frame, readable dash, target card. P4 took Quest frame rate from 41 to 120 fps.
Inside a Wiesel, on the Quest. Real headset eye capture: open cockpit frame, readable dash, target card. P4 took Quest frame rate from 41 to 120 fps.

Graphics presets

From pure 1998 to everything on.

One menu inside the game's own Options page, with a "back to original" button and a first-launch benchmark that picks a preset for your machine. Every feature has its own levels, so you can mix and match.

The same city level at 4K on the High preset

High

Today's New Look, plus medium shadows and more glow.

  • New Look models High
  • Shadows Medium
  • Glow Medium
  • Floor detail Medium
  • New skies Medium
  • Trails & flashes Medium
  • Battle marks Medium
  • UI upscaling Low

Around 98 to 101 fps at 4K in a busy city level on a Mac mini M4.

Screenshots: the same frame of a busy city level at 4K, one per preset. Exact feature levels per preset are still being tuned, so treat the meter as a guide.

What it actually costs

Most of these features cost close to nothing per frame on an M2 Max. The real price of a remaster is memory and load time: HD models add about 1 GB and several seconds on a big level. So HD models now load only for the units a level actually uses, which took one big level from 9 seconds to 6.3.

System needs (what we actually know)

EditionKnown to run onNot tested yet
Classic / Reforged 0.6Apple Silicon Macs (macOS 11+ for the packaged build). A Windows 10/11 64-bit installer was built and tested once on a gaming PC.Intel Macs, Linux, minimum specs
New LookMacBook Pro M2 Max, Mac mini M4 (16 GB)Windows build, minimum RAM and GPU
VRMeta Quest 3 (standalone)Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3S, PC VR