Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
insectoid.budwin.net
insectoid.budwin.net
We wrote a business plan, got $10k in investment from friends and family, rented space in the mall, bought the best PC at the time, two VFX1 3d headsets, licensed Descent for our use case by snail mailing the company with our idea and receiving a contract back from them which we signed and sent with a check, and my dad helped us design, build and weld a custom desk with arms to hold the headsets when they weren’t in use. It was designed as a standing desk so you could just walk up underneath, reach up and put the headset on, and play. I think we had Nintendo style controllers for the hands.
Unfortunately we were terrible salesmen (sales boys?) and then the Quake demo came out and we just played that non stop for 2 months without charging for it because we’d run out of budget for licensing.
Thankfully by August we were able to get construction jobs and managed to pay off our loans a few months ahead of the original plan (I think the terms were 10% over 12 months).
Great game, great learning experience, and a lot of fun. Haven’t failed at a business venture since. Ended up being an entrepreneur for the next 14 years before taking a more standard day job as a software engineer.
- https://share.cleanshot.com/Y2DTKHFN - https://share.cleanshot.com/Ym6sFMLZ - https://share.cleanshot.com/hK7qQrVw
I took a 25 year hiatus playing, from 1996 to 2021 but I'm back at it now, playing on a period appropriate Windows 98 machine.
I love the original Descent and Descent 2 look and feel and graphics, I pass on the rebirths.
If you want a modern game from the same team with similar gameplay, try Overload on Steam.
Only downside is that it is self-calibrating, so if you have a joystick pot that sometimes jumps to very high (or very low I suppose) resistance, it will scale the axis to that very high value; calibration on the PC in that case will give you terrible resolution (since it is quantized before being sent to the PC). I suggest cleaning the pots with DeoxIT if that happens.
Early applications of Pythagorus' theorem in action!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_JQsmrkXU
Really a terrifying game for kids. I remember I used to get sweaty hands after blowing up the reactor and trying to remember where the exit was with the female computer voice counting down. No help, it was brutal.
The psx version came with :
- dedicated studio produced soundtrack that simply stands the test of time
- voice over FMV sequences with symphony orchestra track
Descent 2 & 3 continued the trend on the playstation with the same formula.
The story also had a nice element of modern realism. You are a cynical mercenary for a major space mining corp with a machiavellian corporate executive just using you. I won't spoil it but one of the best endings ever in a game.
I've also read Peter Telep's novel based on Descent universe. Yeah I'm kinda obsessed with this game.
- Doom and Doom2
- Heretic and Hexen
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Rise of the Triad
Descent was special in terms of the freedom of movement. Back then basically all games in this genre felt magical and transportive.
They were are great early games. I kept one of my office mates transformed into a chicken in Hexen for hours, his cries of frustration still ring in my ears!
It sometimes goes on sale for pretty cheap.
We used 2 pneumatic cylinders and a U-joint to move the chair so it rotated on 2 axes. I now know that hydraulics would have let us stop in the middle, but that did not occur to me at the time. The chair still moved a lot, banged around, and generally made a lot of noise.
It was great fun to strap a small student into the chair and let them start playing. It was all OK until they got hit from behind with the first missile, and their space ship started spinning, and the chair started massive movements. Then they started high-pitched screaming like in the movie "Jaws." After 90 seconds, they were having the time of their lives shooting up alien-hacked mining equipment that had become ersatz weapons.
It only worked with small students because we lacked large enough pneumatics, and because the chair rotated about an axis below the chair, so that it would flop one way or another and not have the power to right itself id we strapped in a large (200 lbs) student.
Those were good times.
I wasn’t able to play it too much until that computer became mine as a hand-me-down some years later but it was the first “real” video game I’d ever played and it left an impression. For a couple years in the early 2000s it was a minor obsession of mine to hunt down custom levels on the internet to play with it. It was also the first game that I found an alternative client for, when I ran across versions built for OpenGL and GLIDE that could run at higher resolutions.
I played Descent, Forsaken and Hellbender that all followed that formula. Only later did games like Incoming, G-Police and Yager take the 3D-flyee-shotee genre to the wider outside and it became less nauseating.
I don't get dizzy, but I'm sure almost anyone would when they watch me play.
Other games don't really have the six degrees of movement that Descent had.
Most people can only think in 2D.
Do you ever think the source of Descent 3 could be released?
Short answer is yes. It's probably on me to get official permission and strip out some code we can't legally distribute. I'm not sure how many people I want to look at my code from the 90's though. :)
I'll shoot an email to the owners and see if it's ok to get it up on github. It's not too much work for me to strip stuff out.
Afraid not, funny that I share a username with someone from Kali though.
As for the Descent 3 code, that would be awesome! D1 and D2 have been modernized through source ports, but getting D3 to work on modern systems has always been rough, and a source release would be an awesome starting point.
What would be the best place to keep tabs on for the release happening?
Ask and you shall receive! https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3
> This includes the '1.5' patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley several years ago.
wrote several years ago?? ( no biggie, just a heads up )
It changed my life. (See my post above about a senior project.)
This series and FreeSpace 1/2 (spinoff) were fantastic, The latter had an active modding community over at Hardlight for over a decade.
Actually the community that got me into figuring out how to make computers dance for me.
Loved the FreeSpace Source source Code Project. Loved the Universe. Game engine was awesome. So many hours wiled away as a kid on FreeSpace/Silent Threat/FreeSpace 2.
IMO they nailed the look and feel. I haven't gone too far in the game though, not a whole lot of time or carpal-tunnel-budget left for playing games sadly :|
Gabbagabbahey
Pretty sure it came with my S3 VIRGE.
It was mostly worthless. At the time, games were almost all using the Glide API.
Shame we don't have innovative games like this anymore.
In my mind, if you can strafe, it is an FPS.
I'd finished first chapter many, many, many times and never can kill final boss robot of first chapter. I didn't understand, that it is unkillable in my version.
The best way to keep viruses off your computer is always use diskettes with write protection on. Only remove the write protection when you actually want to write something to the diskette. It's just a small physical tab you slide to the side.
The game magically started working one day when I moved it to a ramdisk on my new Atari STe with lots of memory. Turns out that Nethack needs to write Level 1 to disk before it can allow you down to Level 2 in the dungeon... What a wonderful error message? :-)
It’s nice to see a submission with a usable, clutter-free, retro design that’s fully compliant with web standards and not loaded with tracking cookies and requiring JavaScript to display text like so many modern sites.
I blame Descent for my good spatial memory. Getting turned around in those levels really challenges how well you remember your location and where to go next.
I still remember carrying those heavy CRT monitors…
Show HN: Play Descent I from 1995 in the browser
I just loved the full freedom of movement/any orientation ‘thing’. It had a really unique ‘vibe’ that I’ve never really experienced with any other game.
The robots with the hitscan gattling gun just plain aren't a fun design they're just a shield-cost you pay for not knowing exactly where they are in the level - and worse there's a bunch of keycard pickups where the moment you grab the card you're stuck dead center of a room where 4-6 of the things then come out of unopenable secret doors (which basically makes them impervious to foreknowledge - you can't complete the level without going through there, you need a minimum amount of shields to survive the alpha strike, and even knowing it's going to happen doesn't help).
Still a heckin' fun game, but yeah once they start throwing those things at you en masse (around the Mars missions) my tolerance fell off pretty rapidly since there wasn't really any "puzzle" to solve.
They mention some games basically require you to memorize levels (Battletoads) or otherwise have things happen that aren't telegraphed. They remove player agency from the equation and make a game punishing rather than challenging, and punishing games just aren't fun.
When I played this in the 90's, I had a sidewinder joystick, and then used the keyboard for strafing. Once you master circle-strafing, the ai enemies don't really stand a chance.
Circle-strafing is a must in general, though.
In fact, last week I bought all three games in Steam.
Since getting hit makes the robots lose their ability to shoot (or move) for a brief, sub-second moment, you can use that to kill them without getting hit yourself despite their ridiculously quick aim and hitscan weapon.
Even if you don't know exactly where they are (or whether there even is anything behind the corner), you can start shooting that way around a corner preemptively and slowly and progressively slide around the corner until you'll be actually hitting them or seeing that there wasn't anything there.
Of course if you don't know where they are, you'll have to be doing that preemptively at lots of corners just in case, spending energy which can also be in short supply on higher difficulties. It also means you basically have to creep carefully around corners a lot. And it doesn't help in other kinds of cases.
I agree that those robots were frustrating when I played through the game again after years some time ago. Interestingly, I don't think there are hitscan robots in Descent 2.
I would look fast, see where the Gatling gun sparks appeared, hide fast, wait a second for the bullets to hit something, then move again, shoot at where the sparks were an instant before, and hide again.
This was my tactic for the invisible ones, the others were easy, as they can't aim while being shot. For the visible ones, the missiles were made just for them.
You can use that tactic effectively to deal with other kinds of robots without taking a hit because their projectiles take time to travel. And Descent 2 and 3 had gatling gun robots that IIRC were not quite hitscan, so you could in principle do that with them too.
Homing missiles are great against the (visible) vulcan robots but you still need to know where they are, or spend missiles speculatively.
Now I just need some flashback to Hexen.