Someone recently asked if the source code from Descent 3 will be released. I reached out to my old boss (Matt Toschlog) at Outrage Entertainment and he gave me the go ahead. I'm going to work on getting this running again and I'm looking for some co-maintainers.
Readit News
https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/
There is, however, an outright continuation of the subgenre, in Overload.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMduxHsXko
https://steamcommunity.com/app/448850/discussions/0/38095358...
There was also another classic Descent contender, Forsaken, that got remastared in 2018 to run on Linux and macOS in addition to modern Windows platforms. The original game was actually used as a graphics benchmark for early 3d accelerators due to its lighting effects.
That said, looking forward to playing Descent 3 on a modern platform!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/327880/Sublevel_Zero_Redu...
This game is such an underappreciated hidden gem.
Glad D3 is in open source now, because the Steam version has broken multiplayer. I'd be glad to have a multiplayer session again one day.
I really enjoyed the story too, that was probably the first game I played through to the end, just to find out how the story ends.
I believe the team has long disbanded which is a shame, it is a very _decent_ product (ha!)
https://youtu.be/T2-IHgNYaKA
https://old.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/16xi20a/dua...
https://youtu.be/9U0KNVQmlcM
I miss this game...
> Never understood why this concept didn’t become a whole genre.
Spaceflight simulators have always been niche, unfortunately. Even more niche than flight simulators.
The pvp mode (Arena?) does offer loads of use for that aspect of it though. But, I could never get on with the combat style, it feels like you spend a lot of time turning your nose to try and get aligned with your target. That may be me failing at it though, but trying to maneuver away to turn around means the enemies are on my tail.
One fun feature was you could shut off your suit power to go into a stealth mode. This turned off all the HUD elements, and, amusingly enough, turned off most gameplay noises (the explosions and bullets whizzing by) because, in-universe, all those noises are generated by the suit computer, because space is silent!
Nowadays we have the modern version of Elite Dangerous, but its flight mechanics are too close to aeronautic flight mechanics to compare to Descent.
I wish the series had carried on, I really wanted to find out where the confusing plot threads of Freespace 2 went!
Of course, to make the game playable and fair there's a maximum speed you can achieve while not in hyperspace.
It was clearly a labor of love - way ahead of its time and would def hold up to this day in virtually every aspect
The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!
I had Descent 1 on PS1, and I remember the box claiming the enemies adapted to your play style. Now that I'm older and have studied machine learning and some other AI techniques, I've always wondered exactly what that meant. I'm sure my PS1 wasn't doing gradient descent (heh).
What tricks were behind the claim that the enemies learned and adapted to the player?
In videogames sometimes the AI skill is adaptive in very simple terms, e.g. reaction times or see/aiming range or chance of hit are increased or lowered to keep the game engaging.
3D world. Adventure game mechanics, with problems and puzzles - but where progress opens up more puzzles, and where instead of developing the character skills, you develop the story. Slow paced.
There have been plenty of games to tap into that style, but not enough or frequently enough to warrant calling them part of a genre. Black Dahlia. The Witness. Talos Principle. In a way, even a visual story like All That Remains of Edith Finch can trace its root to Myst.
For Myst it was a high res 3d modelled world you could traverse, interspersed with video clips, all made possible by the new CD-ROM tech. It wasn’t actually that great a game. I loved it at the time but in retrospect there’s just not that much there. The most recent incarnation of a game like this is The Witness which is better in every way I can think of.
For Descent it was true 3D - was it the first? It predates quake. Maybe some people were captivated by the gameplay but for me it was “holy shit it’s 3d”. There’s a reason we have tons of FPSes and only a few Descent clones; the latter just aren’t that fun for most people.
So, I'd say there were plenty of myst-like clones mostly focused on the European market though and not necessarily very successful.
Myst was the top selling game of all time until The Sims came along and dethroned it for quite some time. So you have a point about how some top selling games can become so iconic that there aren't any alternatives for a long time.
I think it's a great thing that Paradox eventually picked up the ball and made some competition for SimCity and The Sims, after EA strayed from the original designs, and enshitified them with all the expansion packs and online DRM bullshit.
Competition is great, and The Sims 4 and SimCity and the competing alternatives would be much better off and further along, if they only had viable competition all these years. EA should have released and documented and supported their internal content creation and programming tools for user created content, instead of putting all their effort into competing with fans and trying to squeeze the last penny out of it with expansion packs.
I've proposed and campaigned for EA to release the tools since before the release of The Sims 1 in 2000, and they did eventually give me the rights and pay me to develop and release some limited tools like The Sims Transmogrifier for The Sims 1, but they never followed through with releasing the internal tools like the Edith editor and SimAntics visual programming language, or the 3D Studio Max content creation tools, and they never officially supported or documented anything, the way Factorio and other games do such a wonderful job at.
This video shows Edith -- The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY
And this shows The Sims Transmogrifier and some other tools I developed with it, and user created content programmed by fans with the limited tools available (iffpencil2 etc) -- Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8
Decades later, it's now possible but difficult to develop and program user created content for The Sims 4 in Python, but it's terribly documented and practically unsupported. Here is the original proposal I wrote around the time we released The Sims 1 in March 2000, which outlined what we should do, but unfortunately they didn't take it nearly as far as I suggested, and never let me release the 3D Studio Max animation and object exporters, or the Edith editor and visual programming tools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040329181128/http://www.donhop...
>A Proposal to Develop Third Party Content Authoring Tools for The Sims, by Don Hopkins, March 2000
>This is a proposal I wrote to Maxis after The Sims was released in March 2000, outlining some of my ideas for third party content authoring tools that I could develop. This led to The Sims Transmogrifier, but it touches on several other interesting tools and projects that Maxis never got around to.
>Problem Definition:
>There is a strong demand many from third parties who want to develop their own custom content for The Sims, including characters and objects.
>Proposed Solution:
>Update, clean up and document the content creation tools, so third parties can make their own characters and objects for The Sims.
>Port the tools to the latest version of 3D Studio Max.
>Make the tools self contained so they can be run stand-alone, by removing all dependencies on the Maxis environment and expensive software packages: Character Studio (Biped, Physique), Access, SourceSafe, MKS Toolkit (Korn Shell).
>Document the content creation tools with an overview, examples, tutorials, and a reference manual. Write down the folklore that has been passed by word of mouth. Read over the code and document how it actually behaves.
>Provide consulting, training and content creation services to third parties who want custom content authored for The Sims, but don't want or know how to do it themselves.
>Develop a Sims Content Authoring SDK, so it's possible for third parties to create specialized content creation tools, like FaceLift.
>Goals:
>Third Party Character Creation and Customization:
>Characters include virtual people who the user can play with, as well as autonomous non-player characters with programmed behaviors. Characters consist of bodies, heads and hands of 3D polygonal meshes with texture mapped bitmap skins.
>Characters are created at Maxis by highly skilled artists using expensive tools like 3D Studio Max, Character Studio, the CMX exporter, and Photoshop.
>Simplify the content creation tools and make them run stand-alone, so third party artists and designers can create their own characters and objects.
>Maxis' expert 2D character artists currently use Photoshop to paint body textures in layers, then flatten and dither them into 256 color bitmap files.
>"Flesh out" the process of applying layered clothing to naked bodies and dithering to 8 bits, so anyone can dress up their characters in all kinds of clothes.
>Maxis' expert 3D modeling artists create textured low-poly rigid meshes (like heads, hands and accessories) attached to individual bones, and the CMX exporter creates rigid suits.
>Make the CMX exporter easy for third parties to use, so many proficient 3D artists will be able to make their own textured heads, accessories, selected character pointers, and carried objects.
>Maxis' expert 3D character modeling artists attach textured low-poly deformable meshes (like bodies) to skeletons using Character Studio Physique and Biped, and the CMX exporter reads out the weighted vertex/bone bindings and creates deformable suits for the game.
>Character Studio is an expensive plug-in that enables a skilled artist to bind deformable meshes to skeletons, but there are other ways to do that with 3D Studio Max and other 3D tools.
>Enhance the CMX exporter to support Max's new way of attaching deformable meshes to skeletons, so third party 3D artists can create bodies.
>Maxis designers and programmers use the Edith tool to configure the behavior of characters and objects.
>Clean up and document Edith, so third party designers and programmers can program and modify their own characters and objects.
>Third Party Object Creation and Customization:
>Objects consist of pre-rendered z-buffered sprites, packaged together with character animations, sound effects and programmed behavior.
>Objects are created in-house at Maxis, by highly skilled 3D modeling artists, using lots of polygons and detailed texture maps in 3D Studio Max. The sprite exporter breaks the objects up into tiles and renders them in different scales and rotations, then writes out z-buffered sprites.
>Clean up and document the sprite exporter, so third party artists can use it with 3D Studio Max to make their own objects.
>The sprite exporter is very specific to 3D Studio Max, especially when breaking apart multi-tile objects.
>Maxis' expert 3D character animation artists create skeletons and animations of characters interacting with objects. They use Character Studio Biped, although the exporter supports other types of skeletons, like the bones built into Max or even hierarchies of normal objects.
>Clean up and document the CMX exporter, so third party character animators can use it with 3D Studio Max with or without Character Studio to make their own character animations.
>Enable Third Party Content Creation Tool Development:
>Develop and document an SDK (Software Development Kit) that gives third parties the information they need to make their own content creation tools for The Sims.
>Enable and encourage the development of tools like FaceLift and Blueprint by third parties.
>A "BodyLift" tool that enables anyone to mutate, breed and tweak deformable body meshes, like FaceLift lets anyone do with rigid head meshes.
>A skin tool that enables anyone to layer clothes and accessories on different bodies, skin colors, sexes, ages, etc. Allow artists to create 32 bit alpha masked layers of clothing that can be applied to any body.
>An animation tool that enables anyone to create their own dance sequences, walk loops and idle animations, by mixing, cross fading and mutating between many pre-existing dramatic poses, dance moves, walks and idle loops.
>Specialized object creation tools that enable anyone create their own customized objects from templates, like a PictureFramer that would create a framed picture from any bitmap, or a JukeboxFactory that would create a jukebox full of your favorite mp3 files.
After hours of searching google, I realize that I was actually thinking about Terminal Velocity. Great soundtrack, fun game (although I never finished it).
Awful comment to write in a Descent 3 nostalgia thread tho, I admit.
I just remember growing up on Descent and Forsaken and immediately discarded them once I discovered FPS in the early 2000s.
With any 3d game it becomes a bit of a circle-strafe fight. With space and 6dof games, it becomes a flight simulator fight, which is an intense genre.
Additionally it removes some verticality from levels. IF EVERYTHING is accessible, it removes choices around taking the high ground / sneaking through the low ground.
I agree they are cool games, but they have some quirks that are not everyone's cup of tea.
Arcade-style 6DoF games are so rare. And we have all the hardware now, just not the market to justify the effort. This D3 opensource could kick off a whole new round of games!
Level-editing in VR seems like it would be so much fun too.
Probably needed to develop a less-repetitive story-line to keep people engaged... The traps were so cheesy sometimes. =)
Deleted Comment
The subgenre is called 6DOF, and it does have games. But I agree it's not as big as it could be, and that the magic hasn't really been recaptured. Game developers seem to frequently have this same thought. Descent was good! This should be more popular! Someone tries every couple years or so, but the result generally disappoints.
It is my opinion that 6DOF games are difficult to make good, especially to the standards and expectations of modern gamers. The combat and level design are much more technical (or perhaps just differently technical) than someone from a flat FPS perspective expects, and as a result, the game design seems to have a lot of opportunities for technical mistakes to be made. I think more generic FPS developers, who remembered liking Descent back when our standards were lower, don't realize how much we've learned since then and how very much there is TO learn about the genre.
I find that aggravating. Every few years, the Descent community gets excited about a big 6DOF attempt, and every few years we get disappointed by the result. Even more aggravating, they generally make design mistakes that I think show ignorance of the genre. How does this keep happening? You wouldn't think of making an RTS, or a MOBA, or even a flight combat sim, or really any other very technical genre of game, without the expertise of the veterans and elite players of the genre. And yet 6DOF developers seem to me to do just that. I can only conclude that the problem looks from the outside to he easier than it really is.
I don't mean to sound arrogant! What I mean is that, I think the answer to your question "Why isn't this more of a thing?" is that it's a much harder thing than it appears to be. I think Descent's success can be attributed to a lot of things: to lower standards 30 years ago, to lucky or prescient design decisions, to a brilliant team enjoying the unique freedom of the wild world of 90s software passion projects, and to a lot of community involvement over time. And I'm not sure that's the whole list. I do think it should be a bigger thing now - there is a delicious flavor here and no reason this generation shouldn't love it too. But it's also apparent that Descent caught lightning in a bottle, and even I couldn't tell you everything that went into making it happen once but not twice. I can point to reasons that I think attempts to repeat it have been less successful, reasons that make sense to me as an expert player in the genre, problems I think I or a couple dozen pilots like me could help anyone avoid. But I'm not sure that explains all of the difficulty. Every now and again, some veteran pilot will take the problem into their own hands and try to make the next big 6DOF, and those projects are rarely finished and rarely good. It doesn't seem that hard, from a software point of view, and they know the game! Or think they do. And yet they fail. So genre expertise can't be the only ingredient, even if I think it's a necessary and usually missing one.
The problem is clearly harder than it looks. I think I know what to do, or at least one piece of the puzzle, but better warriors have been slain on that battlefield, and I haven't actually made the attempt, so I don't actually know. But I can definitely say this much: Developer beware! Here there be dragons!
Overload's good though. :)
when you add the extra degrees of freedom in Descent-like games, relative to Quake-like games (or flight/space sims but in different ways), there are some emergent behaviors that change how the game fundamentally feels. What frequently happens when random devs take on a 6dof project because they enjoyed Descent back in the day is they'll make a game that feels like a shooter with vertical flight, and is missing some of the key things that make Descent feel good. I've heard some 6dof games described as "it feels like I'm flying a camera, not a ship" (lack of turning momentum), or "it feels sluggish when I try to move in multiple directions" (lack of vector independence / trichording), or "it's just spray-and-pray combat" (undersized ship hitboxes relative to projectile speed/size and level size.) There are a lot of things we've learned over 30 years of playing Descent and Descent-like games that don't always get taken seriously by devs of other 6dof projects. And even when they do take everything seriously, there are things none of us have figured out how to articulate but that can make a 6dof game feel bad.
I think it'd be possible to build a great game in the genre, but you'd need a bunch of key things to come together, and then you'd also need great marketing to get the thing in front of millions of eyeballs to make enough sales to keep the community going.
probably some nostalgia there but great memories
Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding what descent is about?
It’s been a long 15+ years since I was last active in the Descent community. I lost access to my ICQ account when my PlanetDescent email went away, and I no longer go by DCrazy online, in part to distance my adult self from the preteen I was then. But Descent (especially D3) is heavily responsible for me getting into software engineering, and I will always be grateful for those memories.
There's still an active online community around Descent and Overload (Mike/Matt's spiritual successor.) If you look up Overload on Discord you'll find that server, and the #descent channel will have links to the various other Descent servers.
Today kids just have 1 gazillion games on their phone. There is no more connection to the system beneath. No work or effort needed. Just download and play the next best thing.
I think this generation is missing out.
This is how thousands, if not millions of people will have their first foray into coding, and it's a much, MUCH larger amount of people that get in touch with the deeper levels of tech than "our" generation had.
Don't underestimate "this generation"; don't generalise them either by trying to state they only spend mindless time on their phone.
[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-pro...
[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/scriptap...
I think old computers have a certain amount of simplicity that I think make the user less passive when using them. I also think that older games tend to be both less addictive and leave more to imagination.
Of course that won't be sustainable forever eventually he'll be influenced by his peers to play whatever they're currently playing but I'm hoping that having been exposed to older computers will be beneficial.
I still wonder how we managed to do that just by reading books or manuals and sharing info with friends.
When I was young, my parents bought me a copy of X-Wing (CD-ROM) for our Win95, Pentium 100 machine. My parents were not computer savvy, and being only 13 myself, I didn't know much about computers. My dad couldn't get it to work, and so the box sat on the shelf for months, maybe even a year. (Time's warped when you're a young kid. =P ) I'd leaf through the manual and gaze longingly at the box art, and look through the little technical leaflets that were included. The latter of which may have been written in hieroglyphs. I set it aside, played the Descent demo over and over that came with out PC, and surfed AOL.
I kept learning more about the computer in the meantime.
One day I was performing my old ritual, when I noticed one of the paper leaflets in the box. Rather than being hieroglyphs, I knew now what it was saying. X-Wing needed DOS EMS (Expanded memory), and this paper was telling me I needed to edit CONFIG.SYS on Windows 95 machines to get this to work. My parents had forbid me from touching anything in the "WINDOWS" folder (there be dragons, according to them) and after having wiped a lot of my mom's files on our earlier Tandy, they didn't want me messing with things I didn't understand that they couldn't fix.
But I was confidant. I edited the file, and hoped for the best. The computer restarted, and just as I'd done countless times before to no avail, tried to start up the game.
Listening to the Star Wars theme play MIDI over the speakers, I jumped up, ecstatic. It was late at night, and my parents were watching TV in the living room. I ran downstairs. "I GOT X-WING WORKING!!!!!!"
It was a feeling of accomplishment, that to this day I look back on and say "that's when it started". I think I knew it then, to some tiny degree, that this was going to be my path.
I'm 40 now. I'm a solutions architect at AWS. My computers were all built by me. And my X-Wing box sits on my shelf still.
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I've talked with my niece, and with some other kids over the years about their gaming, experience with PCs, and the like. There's not much to figure out. I don't blame them; I don't shake my fist at these kids. After all, I recall the frustrations too. Building PCs that wouldn't start for no reason (well, this still happens), the unreliability of early home routers. Many early games that just wouldn't start on your PC but run just fine on your buddies. I remember LAN parties with my colleagues with a combined technical know-how in the room of several CCNAs, MCSEs, etc, and we still can't get our Unreal Tournament server to be seen by everyone's PC. Don't get me started on copy protection woes.
But there was a joy in finally getting it working, and through the stress, we learned a lot about how it all worked. The current internet and computer environment doesn't have that in that you need to know how it works in order to enjoy it. I wouldn't reverse the state of affairs; things are much more mature and stable now. And it's not as simple as saying "well go off and do these projects". We can motivate some to do so as a stretch, but nothing was motivating the same way as sheer necessity like we had it.
So I see it as just something to observe and note and appreciate for how we had it then, both maddeningly frustrating yet glorious in how genuine and unrefined it all was. Hopefully later generations will find their own versions of what we experienced.
I'm glad to have lived through it. It kick-started a love of computing and a lifelong career.
I usually did navigation, and my grade school aged son did the shooting while sitting on my lap.
Now he's 33 and I'm 64, we'll have to switch places.
Dead Comment
Descent also contributed to my ruined brain, along with Flight Simulator 95. Cannot play without inverted Y.
The first game I played with mouse support in the 90s, I believe, was Flight Simulator 3.0, and I think by default (?) it was set up for inverted mouse (or was MS-DOS Star Wars: TIE Fighter, can't remember).
Since then, when I started playing other FPS games with mouse support (like Quake and similar), this mode prevailed.
However, the biggest challenge came years later with FPS games for smartphones - retraining my mind to play with non-inverted orientation. Quite an adventure!
There’s no real difference between except the context. I just got used to playing FOS games one way, and flight sims the other, and now my brain is wired that way.
Even in games where you can frequently switch between FPS and flying, I can only do both if there’s a separate Y invert setting for each context.
I assume they took it from aircraft controls, that are pull = pitch up (both stick, joystick and yoke-controlled). Counter-Strike ruined it :)
Ultimately, I found both control schemes equally unintuitive in practice, I'll have to wait until someone manages to make modern Zeldas work with a mouse.
Sidewinder Pro reporting in. Is there any other way?
I always assumed this was a bug-turned-feature, like skiing in Tribes. When I saw the repo just now, I looked for clues, but didn't spot any related comments around the line of code where this ultimately happens:
https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/142052a67d4318...
In Descent 2 and 3 you also had the "afterburner" which gave a speed boost forward, but it had limited (albeit quickly recharging) energy, and the speed boost it gave you was greatest at 100% energy and effectiveness dropped as remaining energy dropped towards 0%. So people learned to pulsate it multiple times per second so that it would recharge between the fraction-of-a-second uses and keep at ~95% all the time instead of quickly dropping to low figures.
So if you wanted to go really fast you'd both run diagonally in three dimensions and keep pulsating the afterburner multiple times per second.
A naive implementation of just adding the x and y vectors together will become their sum, totaling up to the diagonal length, 1.41x faster. In 3d even more.
This is a very common bug (feature) in many old games.
Quake famously did consider this bug while walking but not while jumping, leading to a more complicated trick to speed up called strafe-jumping.
It made people really difficult to hit when you were behind them.
I played against some ladder players and was amazed at their other order of magnitude skill.
Part of the reason those og games were so compelling to me is because they didn't really have a skill cap.
It would have been amazing to watch some of those matches in a streaming platform.
For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40009248
Very cool — thank you!
FWIW, FFMPEG seems to support these formats.