Descent, ported to the web | Hacker News Reader

Descent, ported to the web

mrdoob.github.io

324 pointsmemalign69 comments

For anyone who enjoyed Descent, please go buy Overload. It's a pretty much perfect spiritual sequel, with a great soundtrack.

And I believe made by some of the people that formerly worked on Descent.

That is true, furthermore Overload has an usermade campaign called Overload: First Strike, which is a conversion and upgrade of the entire Descent 1 campaign to Overload. Additionally I recommend Desecrators, which is a Descent-like with procedurally generated maps. Think Sublevel Zero or Everspace, except good.

Forsaken for n64 was pretty good too.

Whoa, I just remembered playing forsaken multiplayer at sleepover when I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me!

Sublevel Zero is good

Everspace is good too!

Then imagine just how great Desecrators is :)

One of the first PC games I ever played, I was single-digit years old when this released. Fond memories.

Will have to have a play of this web version and try out Overload, thanks.

Now all that's missing is a spiritual successor to Terminal Velocity. Or at least I think so. There's like a 10% chance that game was one of those games that was seriously held up by how much its soundtrack slapped.

I haven't played Terminal Velocity, but I finished the Descent Freespace game decades ago, and I am also itching for modernesque space-sims with 6-degrees-of-freedom dogfights, with some campaigns and explorations.

I liked this teaser trailer of Remnant Protocol, it seems exciting and perhaps a spiritual successor to Descent and Terminal Velocity games: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vemaUWPs6Zo

No Man's Sky was interesting, but its combat is meh, and it is a sandbox with procedurally generated planets made of limited types of biomes. It's inventory management is very clunky, so I finally gave up on it.

I tried Everspace, it is good, but it is more of a roguelite comprising only of dogfights in space. Haven't tried Everspace 2 yet, which I believe has campaign mode and is a better space sim.

I steered clear of Starfield, since Bethesda is infamous for launching buggy games. I will try it after a few years, once the modding community has overhauled it nicely.

And it supports VR if you really need to separate yourself from your lunch.

Overload VR was one of the most intense VR experiences I’ve ever had.

It also really helps immerse you in the “there’s no up/down” feeling.

Sure, you start feeling sick after a few minutes, but it’s such a fun few minutes that you can’t wait to do it again.

I think we might have different risk/reward levels. For me, using VR can make me feel sick and vaguely disorientated for many hours afterwards. Almost nothing is worth that.

I love the idea of VR but my brain / balance system most certainly does not!

Specifically, Overload was made by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, who were the original Descent developers. There were also major contributions from people like Dan Wentz (who worked on Descent 3) and from people who spent a lot of time playing the original game, like me and my wife (our 3 sons are all named for friends we know from Descent.)

To add, I also loved Fury 3 because it had outdoor environments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmOtHKZHjxU - though Wikipedia tells me it's a rebrand of Terminal Velocity

Damn, Terminal Velocity, I probably haven't thought about this game in 3 decades! I played the hell out of it!

The gameplay in that YouTube video is very similar to "TV", so it probably is a rebrand.

Fury 3 was its own game, albeit an extension of the TV engine. Both had some underground areas, though IIRC were mostly and best above ground.

Descent 3 also had outdoor environments, but they were all barren rocks.

And, using Steam, it works on Linux too.

I haven't heard of it, but I loved Descent, and even bought Descent: Freespace back in the day.

I will have to check out Overload.

I'm a simple man, I see Descent, I make sure to mention Overload. Amazing game, likely the first game ever I got to the end just to see how the story ends (yes there is a story and it's pretty good).

I think the Revival studio didn't quite work out, I'm hoping the team is working on something else, they sure do know how to make good games.

I absolutely LOVED this game when it first came out. I played with a trackball + keyboard, and the 6 degrees of freedom, paired with an environment where there often was no natural sense of "up" or "down" (zero gravity, inside tunnels) really blew my mind. I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body.

For example, you approach a "T" junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up/down or left/right. But since there's no natural ground or sky, you can either maintain an orientation memory (I usually did automatically), or you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.

Occasionally you reach an area with some signs or printed panels, and then you realize what the regional up/down orientation was; but it didn't matter in zero gravity.

I used to consider it a form of flow-state when you’ve played Descent/Overload long enough that up/down stops being a thing.

It always took a while each session to get to that point, but once you were there it all just starting flowed so damn well, and manoeuvring the tunnels became so much faster/easier.

Yes. Especially when deftly rolling 90 degrees before taking the next turn to arrive with the desired orientation.

I used a joystick with a four-way hat that allowed simple and intuitive strafing in all directions along with thrust in four directions from the joystick itself. I got devastating with that combo. Spent hours mastering it.

Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital: https://ebay.us/m/Hxi8Wh

I had a Spaceball Avenger which made it so intuitive to play.

From my old reddit post about it, "The Spaceball Avenger is a gaming peripheral. It has the usual buttons, but the big ball is used for six degrees of freedom movement. With pressure sensors the ball is pushed up/down, left/right, and in/out for X, Y and Z axes. The ball can also be rotated for pitch, yaw and roll.

Plugged into the computer's serial port it came with drivers for games such as Doom, for which it was a good controller, but the Spaceball really shined for the Descent family of games. Descent is a FPS with no gravity, where your ship moves in ALL directions, and controlling with with the Spaceball feels like you're holding the spaceship in your hand and you're just moving it to where you want it to go."

You can see it here https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/gmusxs...

Since it's not linked anywhere that I could see, here's the source I found: https://github.com/mrdoob/three-descent

And Quake for web by the same author: https://mrdoob.github.io/three-quake/

Interesting: it was done with Claude, in about one day.

I used to do ports as means to get a taste of new programming languages, now it hardly seems worthwile the trouble with most AI tooling.

Mr. Doob has been doing experiments like this for at least a decade, glad to see that he's still at it.

He's the creator of three.js, and it looks like this uses that for rendering instead of being a straight port.

He also remade quake a couple weeks ago (on three.js as well I believe).

https://mrdoob.com/#/160/threejs_quake

(It's also his homepage now, but I included the full link for posterity.)

Edit: How do you actually play? I keep getting trapped in the Shareware Dimension!

Need WebGL2.

WebGL1 WASM version based on https://github.com/dxx-rebirth/dxx-rebirth -> https://midzer.de/wasm/descent1/

Descent was a huge part of my childhood (and surprisingly my little kids are now big fans as well)! Unfortunately this seems to stutter pretty badly with audio issues as well for me on Firefox on Linux. As a huge fan of three.js and other past work... I guess I'll blame Claude?

i have no issues in brave on linux mint

I play inverted mouse on every game because that was the default on Descent, my first 3D game. At least that's what I remember.

However this version uses mouse up/down to do up/down, and that seems so wrong. Can't play it :(

Yeah. Same. Looked all over for an option to flip the controls!

You might be able to invert it on your OS.

Grew up with an Acer running Windows 95 that came with this preinstalled… now that’s bloatware that ain’t bloat. Descent floatware.

Very impressive - graphically it runs very smoothly on Firefox under Linux - but unfortunately the audio is extremely choppy.

Yeah, same experience here.

I remember buying this at fry’s with my dad in the 90s!

I’ve been following Mr. Doob since the flash days. Cool to see they’re still doobing cool things.

Impressively faithful, right down to weapons functioning incorrectly at a high framerate!

I remember mostly playing the port of this to the PS1, which had a fully animated opening cut scene. When I got the PC port like fifteen years later at a Goodwill, I was disappointed to see that that was a Playstation exclusive.

Descent is good, but I do think the series peaked with Descent II, if for no other reason than the rocking soundtrack. Very awesome, cool, industrial rock; I used to put the game CD in my car to listen to it since it was Red Book audio.

Yes, Descent II OST is on a totally different level compared to the MIDI-only Descent I soundtrack. And by famous musicians to boot - like Type O Negative and Ogre of Skinny Puppy, who created my favorite "Glut" and "Ratzez" tracks. It was the time when games became big enough to bring popular musicians aboard for the soundtrack, Quake with Trent Reznor being a perfect example.

Also, the series was followed by Descent Freespace I/II, leaving a significant impact on the genre of space shooters. Though there are completely different games that have nothing to do with the original series.

That Descent II map editor was a top level utility for making some super creative levels.

I was the king of Descent for a long time at a place I worked at. 4 of us would play at lunch just about every day. I was so f'n good at that game. That and Duke Nukem.

DOS Games, where every game was a completely different game engine.

The VGA era was something special.

Seeing this kind of games so beloved by the HN greybeards, makes you wonder what will be the equivalent nostalgia games for the next generation. Pokemon red maybe? Perhaps Fortnite?

Descent came out in 1995. Pokémon red came out in 1996.

Sorry to be the one to ruin your concept of time.

> Sorry to be the one to ruin your concept of time.

Was this necessary?

Minecraft, very likely.

My money: Minecraft, Breath of the Wild and Undertale are going to feature prominently.

That was my first thought, too. I and a couple of my kids have great affection for Minecraft. However, I don't think that affection really matches the absolute foaming-at-the-mouth excitement we felt for Descent.

I don't think it's that video games have gotten worse (though perhaps they have). I think it's more that it's impossible to recreate the way they impacted us back then. It wasn't just about the games, but also about the times. DOOM today is a fine game and even a classic, but back then it was the first time anyone had ever seen anything like it and we were inventing online play and fps tactics and amateur map design in real time. Descent had that same blockbuster feel, but that for me that feeling faded from new releases over the next few years. (Though I won't deny Minecraft caught something of that old bombshell energy.)

I suspect the way I feel about the video games I grew up with is a feeling my kids will never exactly have. Sure, they love their games, but the 90s were an incredible time for the art form. By analogy, I love the music I grew up with, but I don't feel about it the way my parents feel about the music from the 60's. Music is always special, but that was a particularly special time for music and if you weren't there, you weren't there. In time the absolute electricity of the British Invasion became "So what kind of music do you listen to?" So I think it will go with games.

Surprisingly faithful! Works great on Safari, latest Mac OS.

I was lucky enough to have a flight stick with a hat switch. Absolutely unfair, but I tore up my peers in the dorm because of that. Fantastic memories.

I wonder if anyone knows how to get Descent running on Linux (Debian), if someone doesn't want to run this on the browser.

This is the JavaScript port anyway, https://github.com/mrdoob/three-descent

Is there a way to play this without geting vertigo?

Try configuring WASD controls, mouse look, turning off auto roll / leveling. Use your choice of 'jump' and 'crouch' to slide up and down. Then it feels more like an ice-skating FPS than a flying game.

Keeping the cockpit on screen may also help provide a frame of reference.

I found that helped me enjoy the game more now that I'm older and less tolerant of 6DOF movement.

I need to replay this game with a dual stick controller. Previously played it on a serial joystick and keyboard.

There's something wrong on Chrome + MacOS Tahoe, the bottom text in the intro is getting cut off.

Same with FF on Tahoe.

Also the audio is clicking hard, had to mute it.

I used to play this game incessantly. Audio on Firefox on Linux is, sadly, very very garbled.

works excellent on m2 max -- thanks! good times.

Oooh. All this needs now is gamepad support

this game was so next level at the time.

Now I gotta find a modern Gravis Gamepad!

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