181–190 of 347 posts
Now lets see if someone can dredge up the Tribes 2 source code and we'll have a perfect recreation of my summers in the computer labs.
I loved Tribes! I'd play that after coming home from working on Descent 3. We did some multiplayer at lunch at the office as well.
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.
As a 12 yo I learned about IRC from reading the Descent FAQ and tried setting up IHHD to play over a 14,4k modem. I made levels in DEVIL. Today I'm an engineer and game developer. Thanks for putting Descent out into the world. It had a huge impact on me personally.
I often think about what you could learn from trying to run games back in the old days. It was a huge motivation to fix some problem to get a game running. Optimizing the memory in ms-dos because the game needed more etc. Most often getting a game was a journey on its own. Today kids just have 1 gazillion games on their phone. There is no more connection to the system beneath. No work or effort needed. Just download…
I still wonder how we managed to do that just by reading books or manuals and sharing info with friends.
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> It will go away eventually. No. It can actually get _worse_, as you get more sensitized to VR. The recommendation seems to be to _stop_ using VR if you get motion sick, rather than trying to power through it.
Not sure if the two of you are disagreeing or not, so genuinely asking: Could it be that you are both right? As in, you should stop right away when you start getting motion sick, but with time it will get better? Something like: play 15 minutes everyday, stop as soon as you are sick, and after a while you will be able to play 30min, etc. I have no idea, just asking for a friend :-).
I'm guessing it's easier to get used to the motion/display lag than the balance sence issues.
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.
Inverted Y players unite! Descent also contributed to my ruined brain, along with Flight Simulator 95. Cannot play without inverted Y.
The first game I played with mouse support in the 90s, I believe, was Flight Simulator 3.0, and I think by default (?) it was set up for inverted mouse (or was MS-DOS Star Wars: TIE Fighter, can't remember).
Since then, when I started playing other FPS games with mouse support (like Quake and similar), this mode prevailed.
However, the biggest challenge came years later with FPS games for smartphones - retraining my mind to play with non-inverted orientation. Quite an adventure!
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I often think about what you could learn from trying to run games back in the old days. It was a huge motivation to fix some problem to get a game running. Optimizing the memory in ms-dos because the game needed more etc. Most often getting a game was a journey on its own. Today kids just have 1 gazillion games on their phone. There is no more connection to the system beneath. No work or effort needed. Just download…
Tinkering with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys to squeeze some more Kbs was a challenge, and you learnt a lot about the SO doing that. I still wonder how we managed to do that just by reading books or manuals and sharing info with friends.
Our PC “only” had 4mb of RAM which was the minimum for Doom, but exiting Windows into DOS after boot left a lot of cruft in memory.
The first time I tried starting the computer and bypassing autoexec.bat (which I learned from reading on a BBS) I was scared it was going to be permanent. Luckily it wasn’t.
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.
There's a weird effect where sometimes one game in a genre will become so iconic that nobody wants to try and make another one, possibly out of fear of seeming like they're ripping it off? It happened to Descent, and I feel like it happened to e.g. Myst as well - everyone was expecting the huge success of Myst to launch a whole genre, and then it just... didn't.
So, I'd say there were plenty of myst-like clones mostly focused on the European market though and not necessarily very successful.
What did it take behind the scenes to get this approved? Can you go into some of the decision-making? This is nice but a far too rare event these days.
Neat. Linux port incoming! 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.
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Yes. The original language was custom and turning into a nightmare. We talked about it over lunch one day and came up with the idea of building a c++ code generator so the level designers could do most of the work with the GUI we made, but the code could be edited by hand as well. Fun fact, the editor was called DALLAS, which from what I remember stood for "Don't ask Luke for Levels And Scripts". Luke was the only de…
The source includes AngelScript. Is it actually used by the game?