Descent 3 Source Code Released
Вставка
- Опубліковано 12 чер 2024
- The source for the 1999 Interplay/Outrage Entertainment game Descent 3 was just released. The code is C++ based, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and is released under the MIT open source license.
Links
gamefromscratch.com/descent-3...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support : / gamefromscratch
GameDev News : gamefromscratch.com
GameDev Tutorials : devga.me
Discord : / discord
Twitter : / gamefromscratch
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Наука та технологія
Links
gamefromscratch.com/descent-3-source-code-released/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Support* : www.patreon.com/gamefromscratch
*GameDev News* : gamefromscratch.com
*GameDev Tutorials* : devga.me
*Discord* : discord.com/invite/R7tUVbD
*Twitter* : twitter.com/gamefromscratch
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and here I was reverse enginnering it lol. I'm seeing a lot of familiarity with the symbols
Oh cool someone was actually doing that? Well have fun with the source code now
I hope this becomes a trend with old games...
350 MHz with Overclocking... those were the days.
Great memories and plenty of hours in the Descent series.
Kudos to the devs.
I worked on the Saints Row series, and you could still find code from descent in some of the deep recesses. :) Also, Jeff Slutter is a wonderful human being and one of those 10x mythical programmers you hear about.
If you really want joy and happiness try playing the Freespace game series. The first one is called Descent: Freespace to capitlize off of the Descent name.
@@mythrando Damn I remember playing Freespace 2 for the first time. I thought at the time, this how space shooters should be. Thank for the great memories.
@@Xero_Wolf Oh awesome! Freespace is how I really got interested in Volition and eventually started working there. One of the most common questions I would get when out talking to people was.. "Are you working on a new Freespace? :) "
I don't remember how much I played of Descent 3 but I definitely did 1+2 to extremes. Absolutely loved them (and the later Freespace). Really hope they manage to get a modern upgrade sorted.
The decade may be far from over, but this one of the gretatest gaming news of the decade. I hope Descent 3 receives a visual update similar to the one Descent Freespace got from the folks at Hard Light.
This game was great. It was so beautiful back in it's day, the flames the fog and light.
This is nice source to see after so many years!
Looking forward to see the first path tracing build. :D
Bro, if you weren't losing your lunch, you _weren't playing descent right_ .
I have played this game, and loved this one. For me, it was the first game, when you have to "think in 3D".
Yes to more videos like this!
This game was a good part of my childhood along with Homeworld. Sooo good.
Pull Request: Added 7th degree of freedom
Time-travel.
Descent 1 & 2 were my favorite games back then. Good old days...
gotta love this sorta stuff. worst thing that may come out of this is it just being a learning lesson, but odds are, someone will turn this into a great update or source port for the OG files!
in some cases, like Freespace, whole new, often free games got spun out of the source code release.
Nice!
I played so much Descent 1, 2, and 3 back in the day. When everyone else was playing Doom and Quake, I was blasting infected robots in tunnels :D
I played a lot of Descent 1 and 2, and tried my hand at custom levels and other mods. One of my favorite prototype boss room ideas was specifically intended for an early level which didn't feature access to concussive weaponry (vulcan/gauss or missiles), against a boss that (due to Descent 2 boss types) cannot be defeated with energy weapons. As part of the design, the boss's minions reliably dropped missiles for you to use, so you'd need to farm missiles mid-fight to come out on top.
A later level idea would have been similar, except without the missiles: the boss appears at the start of the level but you don't have access to concussive weapons, and the minions only drop vulcan ammo, so your objective was to scour the level for a vulcan cannon to use on the boss. Never got around to actually building that level, though.
One of my personal favorite weapon mods was a shrapnel missile that released "mini-vulcan" shots upon impact. I generally hated how every weapon that launched secondary projectiles (smart missile, smart bomb, earth shaker) only ever released _homing_ secondaries, so I modded a weapon that didn't and allowed the boss to spam large quantities of it with basically no accuracy.
Fun times.
@@Stratelier I think one of my favorite maps I created features a sphere floating unsupported in the middle of a giant chamber with tunnel entrances on each axis leading into whole other maps. Took advantage of the way map cubes and their portal faces worked :D
@@ShadowDrakken Yeah, I saw that trick too. Any illusory (but not transparent) surface covering a connection into a cube/room that occupies the same general space but is technically a different space, lots of possibilities one could do with that.
I remember trying to make a room with some kind of structure inside of it (that you can fly around and observe from all angles), but the engine's cube-based rendering really wasn't optimized for it, making the process super cumbersome to even attempt.
Tinted walls were another fun effect to work with ... I remember tweaking a color palette so that the top of its lighting ramp was actually lighter than the base color allowing you to create walls with bright tints instead of dark tints ... it wasn't without a few bugs, but it sure was fun to try.
I wanted to play this game back in the day but our family PC didn't meet system requirements.
Another game from the same era, _Warzone 2100,_ also saw a source code release (less than 10 years later IIRC) and has since been updated/ported by the community.
5:44 I looked it up and Interplay still exist. I thought they had died sometime ago.
The source code for this was actually found quite a while ago. I remember someone refusing to publish the game on GOG, though I'm not sure why. I just remember that this was why I refused to buy the game when I bought 1 and 2.
In the cheatcode file, they list dummy strings to throw off hackers, and there are different cheatcodes for different release (demo, oem...). Very interesting.
By the look of those header tags educated guess is that they're from CVS or RCS which were popular back in the day before much better ones took over. :)
But cool to have sources for something old.
This is very exciting news, hoping for some nice updates for this great game.
I played this so long ago, it was crazy they had "online multiplayer" that we never figured out how to get it working hahaha.
I've never had a problem with motion sickness when playing Descent. Plenty of people around me got nauseous watching me play.
I _have_ had something like vertigo while wearing a VR headset standing up, I had a sensation of falling backward even though that wasn't the case.
Interplay does appear to still exist. Their last release was a rerelease of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on modern consoles and PC in 2021. They're website is still up. That said, they have been in and out of bankruptcy court since the early 2000s.
It's a shame, because they were a far better steward of Fallout then Bethesda has been (come at me).
Cool. If you have ever seen what those lunatics/miracle workers did to the Freespace 2 Engine to make Freespace Open look comparable to modern games in terms of graphics. It will be exciting to see what happens here. If you compare Freespace Open and Freespace 2 and told people that not only are they same and running on the same engine, people wouldn't believe you. Though I think this game made me motion sick too.
I loved the Descent games back in the day :)
Excellent. This was one of my favorites in my late teens. A source code release means eventual source ports and further development. It's going to get the ZDoom treatment. Can't wait!
Nice, I'm hoping Dr Beef and team can port this to run in VR on a Quest or even PC
Ha my childhood. I was killed on the first descent but on D2 I took over. So many great games from that era
The music for Descent 2 was amazing. For Descent 3, not so much.
I thought some ost of Descent 1 were truly awesome. Especially map1, map2 and map8
Descent 2's red book music is absolutely insane. Probably my first true exposure to industrial metal.
Yes please, do cover!
Wow running that in VR next lvl motion sickness
When we used CVS back in the day, the act of checking/ commiting put those comments at the top. We never did it manually
my body is ready
awesome!
Was 1 or 2 source released, those are the ones that confused me to giving up?
3
@@domsau2 well maybe I should have added "ever" or "also" but I thought contextually we all could assume I'm not a moron but hey, why not.
The source code for 1 and 2 was released quite a while ago. There's even a couple source ports as well.
Great game series.
I remember reading back in the day they used a point cloud for some environmental bits. I wonder if that code is there.
Decent 3 RTX mod incoming i hope
I wonder if the source to the prior Descent engines will be re-licensed to MIT.
The D1 and D2 source was already open sourced under GPL years ago
@KingThrillgore yes, hence why I said "re-licensed". Pay attention, next time.
I remember playing all three using a joystick.
Wonder how difficult it would be to convert this to Unreal engine five.
Damn I loved that game!
no one:
me: lets port it to godot!!!! xD
if i had free time i would try, but probably would be too lazy and not have enough experience
How long till someone adds raytracing/ pathtracing to the game.
Actually, back then, the last x commits from revision control systems were copied into the source as comments at the top automatically.
Was Freespace part of the Descent titles? I seriously loved that game... but Descent was great
It was at first, but after the first game they dropped the "Descent" name and just called it "Freespace".
@@The8bitbeardright... that rings a bell. such a great game... it's really the only video game i've ever played and loved. thanks!
So happy to see old Reddit still being used. The layout back when Reddit was good. Such a shame.
Any new source code for our A.I. overlords is a good thing if they are used for good.
Will it evolve to play all three descent game assets? Will it make birth to a freedescent analog to freedoom? Will it be ported to every hardware?
So many questions!!!
wait this is what Decent to Undermountain was made in wasn't it? does this mean we can make that game playable now? get on it GOG
This game has a history. There was an unofficial 1.5 patch that people argued against releasing for really ignorant reasons, very toxic community. Probably what kept the source from leaking earlier. There's also some graphics features literally locked to Pentium 3 CPUs, like sparkles. The game also supports bump mapping, and a3d 3d audio. It REALLY needs a modem port that enables everything and works on modem systems instead of stupidly running over glide. Glide does not support the best visuals. Descent underground is also a scam from Star citizen devs trying to steal money, even released on gog after development stopped, and they banned forum users from speaking out. Overload is the real sequel. As for the source code, idk if d3 will take off, the descent 2 guys did not do a great job if you look at d2xl, and rebirth is practically dead with no hires texture support. XL needs a new developer, the current version just doesn't work, but has the best mods. It's like gzdoom for descent, but like i said broken, old developer was incompetent kept adding useless garbage. If you know yandere Dev, that's basically the XL guy. Which is why I don't have high hopes for 3, because the community has been toxic and incompetent from day one. Not the casual enjoyers, the people running the sites who argued against descent 3 1.5 being released, and probably a chunk of descent underground supporters.
What kind of arguments were out there against 1.5 releasing? From what I've seen, it sounds like it would've been nothing but a positive.
@@kveller555 at the time there wasn't a download for Mac, and cross patch networking incompatibility. You are correct that the patch was all positive, but like I said, the descent community was toxic. They also argued about only using joysticks, which was dumb then and insane today. Microsoft basically killed joysticks with the API changing for Xbox controllers. The game ultimately played best on the PlayStation port dual shock or emulator, PC controls were trash, players were elitist joystick users, they also hated descent 3 for supporting mouse and being more modern, although the balancing was kinda worse. The older descent games didn't age well either due to bugs in the code tied to fps. XL was cool while it worked, but the Dev was insane and didn't care about stability, constantly breaking the game. If you've played descent 2, that game is rather schizo dark souls in space, and that's the type of community it had. So of course there were arguments against releasing the 1.5 patch. In fact, there was a clique of users who had exclusive access and didn't want to make it public, as well as the dumb arguments, but the patch got leaked and it was not the end of the world, just toxic people who enjoy being toxic, trying to keep the game exclusive to themselves. Which extended to the IP owners as well, which killed every potential sequel. Why does descent 3 have effects exclusive to the Pentium 3? They all loved being exclusive, killed the IP. If there's hope for open source, it's going to be because the old community is no longer around ruining the game, but that also ruined it's reputation among the non clique players. So what's left? IDK. You don't want to bring back those people who ruined the game, and who's left that cares? I'd replay the game with a modern update, but this isn't the doom community that cares about open source, and being a good community, so you're basically creating a new community from scratch for a dead game and hoping the toxic guys don't come back and take over.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oqThank you for the detailed reply! It sounds really rough, man. I love the series, but yeah, it's so damn niche that at this point it's basically impossible for any newcomers to take over, especially considering that even fewer people care about D3.
Funny that you mention the Doom community as a point of comparison, as I frequented it for a few years and yeah, from what you're saying the Descent community seems like its polar opposite. It's hard to even imagine.
@@kveller555 It was tolerable when the game still had active dev support, but after the game got bought out the toxic community had a monopoly on running the game, because they ran the community forums, servers, and websites. I'd say the majority of casual players were not bad people, but they weren't the ones arguing to exclusively use joysticks, and banning people in multiplayer for using the mouse, or setting server flags to disable mouse, etc. Descent 3 challenged this mentality, required 3d accelerators, and was really buggy until 1.5, so it had the worst player base even though the game was great. The best API was also direct x, but as we know older direct x are more broken than openGL/glide. So patching the game further could possibly act like a remaster since many people have never experienced descent 3 using the max graphics or 3d audio.
I played 1 way more than 3, but this is really cool to see.
But I liked Descent to Undermountain
i can't play the old descents
and this is worst. motion sickness
i almost had a stroke playing single player Star Wars Battlefront 2 spaceships level
Is more "easy " update Doom 3 source code than this😂😂😂😂
Yeah, I find this kind of news interesting as well, so keep talking about source code releases.