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One of the most polished "flight" games in VR too, extremely immersive and perfect controls.
Did you have trouble with nausea?
I loved loved loved this game. Never understood why this concept didn’t become a whole genre. No actual up, 360 degree freedom, enemies that were smart and could snipe you. Wasted many hours back then and very eager to try this out.
> enemies that were smart and could snipe you 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?
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Data points would be interesting too. Someone saying "I used to get sick after 15min, and now I can play for 60min without a problem. I always stop playing right when I start getting sick". You know, just to see that it has happened to someone :-)
edit : well this became a bit longer than I initially planned, I think I just had a lot to share when it comes to my recent VR adventures. Well here I am: I initially got queasy as soon as I moved, then I'd immediately stop and take a break, longer breaks in the beginning. Initially I got a strong sense of de-realization / depersonalization after getting out of the digital world (i.e. looking at your hands and your b…
Nausea didn't get better and seemed to be present when my head was turning but the camera was moving either the opposite way or in the same direction but too fast.
I have some really good memories of spending hours inside of Obduction VR (highly recommended if you liked Myst / Riven / The Witness / etc), but the de-realization was so severe that I ended up abandoning that form of entertainment out of concern for my sanity.
Descent's control system is for me what cemented the "invert Y axis" on the mouse for controlling first person gaming forevermore. My brain absolutely clicked with the 6DoF mindset, but it has meant that all FPS games from that point on had to conform to it, even if the game wasn't in any way flying-based.
I played the original Descent over kali.net back in the day. Man, what great memories.
I've brought up Kali a few times on HN and never had anyone say they used it too. Glad to finally see another person! What an amazing piece of technology. I used it to play a modded version of Diablo's expansion Hellfire, which without Kali was single player only / LAN with a little hack. There was a great little community on that app.
Fond memories of Descent. I bought a flightstick to play it. Also Descent was the first game in the 1990s I've played with a VR headset.
I also used a flight stick with Descent and Descent 2. I configured the hat switch for strafe up / down and strafe left / right. Later, I also bought a [Logitech Cyberman 2]( https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Logitech_CyberMan_2 ) 6-DoF controller for playing Descent, but it wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. Part of the issue was moving / turning along multiple axes which limited the range of input from the controller…
Thank you for this, kevin42. So many great games around the 2000s. If Tim Sweeney could open UE1, a lot of games could benefit from it like Quake being open sourced did.