171–180 of 347 posts
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.
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.
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.
Great! Brings back memories of descent 1 & 2. I played d1 for hours over the early internet. My favorite level was Minerva and my arch enemy was named “upinya”. Amazing what the brain remembers from so long ago.
I know what you mean about remembering weird stuff from many years ago. I still remember the IP address of the server of my first website in 1995 (because it had no domain name, I had to know the IP address to show people the website). Occasionally I'll think of the name from a random IRC/AIM/etc. user I talked with 20+ years ago. :)
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.
A mouse for Descent? We used to play with both hands on the keyboard- look, slide, and spin on the number pad, move, fire, etc. on the far left side. We're we alone?
gabbagabbahey!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making it a 6DOF shooter at all probably severely hampered any chance of achieving mass appeal. If it had been 40-80 hour open world, character-based, third-person action adventure game, their chances would likely have been much higher.
The target audience was always going to be people trying to relive descent so the narrowness I suspect was just accepted
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?
Ooh, time to take another crack at a level scripting language - AFAIK the original was ripped out right before release due to being too limited and replaced with just compiled C libraries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40051289
Here's what I'm doing for Micropolis (open source SimCity), where the rubber hits the road. There are a bunch of comments in the code describing the approach and constraints. (Obviously analyzed and written with the help of ChatGPT!)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/Microp...
Implementing a JavaScript scripting SDK is the first step towards integrating browser-based visual programming languages like Snap! and Blockly, which make it easy to program extensions, like Sandspiel Studio!
Snap!:
Blockly:
https://developers.google.com/blockly
Sandspiel Studio:
https://studio.sandspiel.club/
I've written lots more about Sandspiel Studio on Twitter and Hacker News:
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1777401152260247673
>I bet you could make Sandspiel Studio compile those Blockley-based visual programs into WebAssembly or GPU shader code! But actually it might be too fast since the fun is watching the flowers grow. I taught your flower blooming code to grow potatoes too!
https://studio.sandspiel.club/post/7718
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561910
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36003900
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044329
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044498
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39601709