Someone recently asked if the source code from Descent 3 will be released. I reached out to my old boss (Matt Toschlog) at Outrage Entertainment and he gave me the go ahead. I'm going to work on getting this running again and I'm looking for some co-maintainers.
My wife and I met on a Descent forum, our 3 sons are named for Descent friends (KoolBear, Jediluke, and Mark392), and we've attended weddings (and sadly one funeral, RIP JinX) for Descent friends. Even though I considered D3 the weakest of the Descent games, this news makes me happy. Thank you, Kevin!
After years of lurking, I had to finally create an account to post this. I remember when you and Drakona got married. Congrats again!
It’s been a long 15+ years since I was last active in the Descent community. I lost access to my ICQ account when my PlanetDescent email went away, and I no longer go by DCrazy online, in part to distance my adult self from the preteen I was then. But Descent (especially D3) is heavily responsible for me getting into software engineering, and I will always be grateful for those memories.
Drakona, sitting next to me: "Dcrazy? I remember a dcrazy!"
There's still an active online community around Descent and Overload (Mike/Matt's spiritual successor.) If you look up Overload on Discord you'll find that server, and the #descent channel will have links to the various other Descent servers.
I backed Overload and left a note about how important Descent had been to my career. I think my backer rewards were a free license and an Overload keychain. :)
Writing D3 mods was a big reason I got a copy of Visual C++ as a birthday present. And I laid down an absolutely awful drum track for an album UNIX was recording with Stephan Jenkins (I think) from 3rd Eye Blind. An interview about those demos was the first thing I did after joining my college radio station, where I then became responsible for converting the PC workstations to Mac… which exposed me to Xcode and sent me across the country to work on software for Apple devices for the next decade and counting.
I love how many of us who are IT or software professionals now got our start cobbling things together at the dawn of online gaming. Not as professionals, just as people who happened to be there and wanted to make something work. The 90s were a wild and wonderful time.
It's fun to hear from you! I'm glad you said hello!
I thought about putting their actual names -- Michael, David, and Mark (even though Mark392 isn't really named Mark) -- but I thought it'd be funnier to just put their pilot names at first.
To add some missing context (though perhaps also to spoil my husband's joke) -
Koolbear, whose real first name is Mike, founded and was instrumental in the life of the forum where the two of us met and has been a hero and inspiration to both of us.
Jediluke, whose real first name is David, is the most vigorous and prolific competitor the game has ever seen, recognized by pilots of practically every era and environment as elite and dominant. He is also a close personal friend and the three of us ran the definitive ladder for the modern community together. And we are both big fans of him as a competitor.
Mark392 (whose real name doesn't matter for this purpose) is widely recognized by the modern community as the GOAT and is also a close personal friend for both of us.
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.
Not that you asked, but there's exactly one (popular) game that utilizes the same control scheme in modern times, Outer Wilds. Although it's not a shooter, it's quite a nice adventure game.
I wouldn't get nauseas when I played Overload in VR, but I definitely developed a cold sweat fast. 30 minute sessions were a push and I'd need to recover after. The developers did all the best practices, but there's something inherently mentally stressful about a 6DoF game in VR while you sit still in a chair.
Actually, it's exactly like that! Most games with movement as a physical body, either with or without breast/hip make me car-sick, but this game is mostly taxing mentally because of all of the input. The only game that doesn't affect me, at all and which I can play for many hours is Contractors Showdown.
I’m about to try it in VR. I’ve gotten over most of my VR nausea, but I will say, the original Decent series games gave made me nauseated/gave me vertigo and headaches if I played them too much. Therefore, I am a little worried.
Not everyone has it even initially; it really varies from person to person. I suspect that to some extent it is influenced by past exposure to fast-paced first-person games (e.g. FPS when played using the mouse).
I used to get nausea when playing Doom in the nineties, it never got better. But I never get nausea from fps games with slower movement. I suspect the problem with Doom is how quickly you can change direction while running. You can run quite fast and a 90 degree turn doesn't slow you down at all.
In pretty much any FPS that allows using the mouse to turn (which was already the case even in Wolf3D), you can turn as fast as you can move the mouse. When playing competitively, and with experienced players in general, it is common to set mouse sensitivity rather high, allowing one to perform very fast - but still highly precise! - turns, either to follow the target, or to switch rapidly from one target to another, or to scan the area etc. Really good players can do what's known as a "180 quickscope" like that, which is exactly what it says on the tin - a very rapid 180 degree turn & aim to shoot someone you know is behind you. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEC4AE6KbxY
If you don't have experience doing this yourself, watching such a player over the shoulder can be very nausea-inducing. I think to some extent this is innate, but I suspect for those who don't have a strongly pronounced response to begin with, playing such games (and doing those rapid turns yourself) desensitizes you over time. And I think that also transfers to VR to some extent; I've been playing first-person shooters with WASD+mouse for ~30 years now, and I had no nausea whatsoever the first time I tried VR.
Doom does some weird stuff with FOV and how it renders the environment though; newer FPS games have "real" 3D graphics, Doom used some interesting tricks to make things look 3D. The Quake engine was iirc the first "real" 3D engine.
Quake was the first widely popular "real" 3D engine, but ironically the first game in the series being discussed in this thread, Descent, pre-dated it by around a year with fully 3D graphics in 1995.
> The Quake engine was iirc the first "real" 3D engine.
There were many 3D engines before Quake. You had a bunch of Micropose combat flight sims, a ton of 3d driving games, even Elite on the BBC micro.
Hell, I'd written some 3D graphics on the Atari ST before Quake.
Quake was the first 3D texture mapped, dynamically lit, first person shooter...maybe...depending on your definition. It was certainly one of the first to have that ran at frame rates around 30fps.
As others have said, Descent was also around the same time too.
For me there was practically no sickness at all, first time I used the headset I felt a little weird after an hour, and after that had no issues playing a variety of genres, with no teleportation.
Okay except that one time playing COMPOUND. By accident I moved the analog stick to the left while turning my head to the right, and the image moving the opposite of what I expected made me feel bad. I finished the level there, and then had to go rest for a couple of minutes and stop playing VR for the day.
tl;dr for some people it almost never happens, until it does.
I've owned multiple VR headsets and have many, many hours of VR experience. With seated experiences (vehicles/aircrafts/rollercoasters) I never got nausea, not even initially.
The only experiences that made me nauseas were the ones that simulated movement of characters, where pressing a button would move the character and camera forwards. That was just too much of a disconnect. Movement by teleporting was not a problem.
It was worst the first few times, and I did not last long before I had to take a break, powering through was not possible. With experience it got better, the nausea/dizzyness was less intense and I could play longer sessions, but it never went away completely.
It may sound crazy, but I have never felt nausea with a computer. The only issue I had with VR was my hair trying to cover my eyes, in the middle of a race, and that was it.
However, once I rented a plane to go over the Nazca lines, and it was in a tiny plane, that was capable of changing direction very easily.
That day I felt nausea. By this, I mean you can't ignore it, it is a strong sensation. So much, that the guides will advise to do the flight on an empty stomach. And it was overpowering, one girl in the plane did not watch anything because she was focused on a paper bag close to her mouth.
Not even fast turning karts or anything else has been able to reproduce that feeling.
I've never felt nauseated from VR either. Tried it as a teenager in the 90s with an old-school Lawnmower-Man-style HMD, several generations of Oculus goggles, two different commercial HMDs in immersive gaming venues, etc. I do remember feeling disoriented when first playing the original Descent in the 90s, but no nausea.
In a small (3-4 seat) plane, I got a little nervous from the sudden changes in direction, but I didn't feel nauseated then either. I've been on one of those astronaut trainer 3-axis spinning chair contraptions a few times when I was younger and didn't feel any ill effects. I thought it was a fun experience.
I have gotten a weird variation on motion sickness a few times when I was on small boats. I'd be fine on the boat itself, but a day or two later, back on land, I'd feel like the surface of the Earth was bobbing up and down the way the boat had. It went away in a few hours or less, but it was hard to do anything productive while it lasted. I still didn't feel like I was going to vomit.
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.
Correct, according to general understanding from VR gamers and green my own experience. If you feel queasy stop immediately because pushing on will make it worse and cement the association in your brain. Leave it a while (a day or more ideally) then try again, repeat.
Maybe it differs on why you get motion sickness? Is it because the screens lag behind your movement with x millisecons or is it becase the eyes detect movement but the balance does not? Or a combination?
I'm guessing it's easier to get used to the motion/display lag than the balance sence issues.
I remember playing VR games with my HP Reverb G2 years ago and I did initially power through the motion sickness for a bit, but it did get better over the weeks until it just wasn't an issue at all.
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 brain being confused if they're real) But that also went away very quickly. The nausea, and 'am I still in the matrix' feeling got better within days, and went away within weeks. Now I can stomach any crazy topsy-turvy locomotion in any game. But I still feel the sweat and excitement, when swinging off 1000 feet high cliffs in Jet Island, or diving hundreds of meters deep in Subnautica.
It's just amazing how immersive it can be. I think you can only get there by having it at home and really giving yourself the time to get into it.
It's also re-ignited my love for single player games, especially modded triple A titles like Dragon Quest XI, or Resident Evil 2 (Remake) for example.
And btw, I run all of this on (arch) linux, on a Valve Index kit, using both SteamVR and OpenXR through Envision (Monado). It's been a bit of tinkering but that's only made it more satisfying for me. Plus, there are great communities like the Linux VR Adventure group: https://lvra.gitlab.io/
My experience is analogous to yours. Initial motion sickness, *strong* de-realization and de-personalization (especially with hands, but also my torso and legs).
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.
Yeah, add me to the list of people who have used the "stop immediately when you're getting noticeably queasy" technique to train my stupid brain to realize that no, it's not actually being poisoned, so it should stop fucking thinking it is and grow the fuck up. ;)
There are still some sorts of games that will make me queasy (games that have a lot of uncontrollable-by-me jumping around (think "leaping ninja fighting games') for instance), but by and large, I've no trouble.
I also found Dramamine to be helpful during the intermediate period where I'd still otherwise get nauseous after a while. I find it continues to be helpful for things like those stupid "leaping ninja fighting games".
Here's my experience.. got a Vive, ZERO motion sickness, was developing some games and toys with it for 6 months or so. Played about 20 minutes of some Resident Evil game on PSVR and got REALLY motion sick around the 10 minute mark and just powered through for another 10 minutes. I had to lay down and it took a good hour to fully recover. Now I can't play VR at all without getting sick, start getting the sweats and nausea as soon as I put my vive headset on. completely ruined VR for me, never finished my game I was working on, VIVE just collecting dust. Fuck the PSVR, I'm still mad about it.
«I am the CEO of Orbital Design Studios, and am the designer behind the canceled "Descent IV" project in 2002. This game is a thing I thought I'd never see, aside from prototypes in my company's archives.
A very warm welcome back to Matt & Mike and all of the old crew of Parallax and Outrage Entertainment who have returned to create this long dreamed of and hoped for creation. Thank you for putting my regrets that D4 couldn't get made, to rest. Overload will stand for all time in its place.»
"Overload" was a game made in Descent style, by the original creators of Descent (Mike and Matt), with a great deal of input from the Descent community. My wife and I spent a week at the studio (while ~6 months pregnant with a child we named for a Descent friend) working on Overload's flight model and tweaking some in-game stuff. The game is now largely maintained by fans, with significant multiplayer mod support and even a full remake of the D1 campaign!
Overload is awesome! However I wonder if some remnants of 90s game design like tight time limits and repeating enemy ambushes that make the game such a familiar and intense experience for the old school in reality disadvantage the game and the genre from reaching wider audiences.
There was also another classic Descent contender, Forsaken, that got remastared in 2018 to run on Linux and macOS in addition to modern Windows platforms. The original game was actually used as a graphics benchmark for early 3d accelerators due to its lighting effects.
That said, looking forward to playing Descent 3 on a modern platform!
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.
Yes, I was just rather facetiously making a point that the game is all the more interesting to its intended audience for not trying too hard to appeal to anyone else.
If we're including Outer Wilds, wouldn't almost every other space sim/pilot game also qualify? Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, etc. They all have 6 DoF for both rotation and strafing.
The fact the game has no items, no power ups, no levels, no enemies. Just one question: what is going on? And your job is to figure it out. Knowledge is your only way forward. Unfortunately that means the game can only be played once and any spoiler will ruin it for you.
I disagree with "ruining", I've resorted to looking up some hints; mind you, in hindsight I would've figured it out myself if I spent a bit more time on it.
Eh, I think that game definitely needed a bit more play-testing polishing. More than once I got stuck and had to look up a hint. Only to discover that I actually had attempted the correct solution, but the mechanics were so clunky I was mislead into believing I was doing something stupid.
As someone who also bounced off it initially - I would recommend getting through the tutorial area and flying out somewhere in the ship before you put it down for good. Once I started going out there and visiting places, it really grabbed me. The more stuff you scan and read, the more intrigued it made me, and eventually I couldn't stop until I'd unraveled every story thread and mystery the game had to offer.
The way Outer Wilds rewards curiosity is incredibly novel. More subjectively, I’m quite partial to how the narrative reveals itself. Wish I could relive that experience all over again.
For me it's how you discover one by one elements of the history of the "aliens" and how you use the physics to solve some puzzles. I also love the story. IMHO is one of the best videogames ever made together with Obra Dinn
Get past the tutorial into space, then open up the panel in your spaceship into Rumours mode, showing the equivalent of a madman's red yarn walls; there will always be one item in there that is incomplete.
Else, open the map, pick an unexplored planet and go there. There is no wrong way to go.
It’s all fits together in a very nice way. It’s very much a space archaeology game — if you like exploring the game universe and understanding how it works, you’ll like it, but that exploration is the bulk of what it has going on.
This. Everything or at least nearly everything is consistent and logical. The goal of the game is for you to piece out how all the element relates together.
It's basically a really well implemented Newtonian physics based platformer in a deterministic universe on a time loop that resets (22 minutes), so the loop is basically figure out how to get some place and then execute it (i.e. you could decide you want to de-orbit the moon into its planet, practice it, and get it right). Timing also matters as the celestial bodies orbit around and some of them fall apart.
So maybe it's less frustrating if considered like "a Mario level that's supposed to be difficult"
The story is understated, poignant, and one of those "ultimately nothing happened but the real story is what happened along the way". For reasons like this I consider it similar to Disco Elysium, a totally different game on the surface
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them all being so small - especially the ones closest to the sun - made me constantly worried about falling off), and I couldn't finish it.
(I did watch a YouTube play through to get some of the experience without the terror later)
I didn't get it either, and I play tons of walking sims and narrative adventure games.
It feels more like a roguelike or a survival game to me with it's anti-features like falling damage and time limited resources and inescapable holes to get trapped in. And then you die and have to start all over again from the beginning. The epitome of not respecting the player's time.
It's the only game I have ever refunded on Steam, and annoyingly I keep getting recommended it because it's "like" all the other games that I play even though it clearly is not. I feel like I am in bizarro world with the amount of people who rave about it.
I don't know, there are lots of games that feature the same die-and-repeat mechanics - roguelikes, soulslikes, metroidvanias, shmups, survival games - and I don't play those games precisely because I find them tedious and disrespectful of my time. This game for some reason gets grouped in with walking sims and adventure games but in fact it shares little in common with those genres due to the instadeath scenarios, time limits, resource limits, and so on.
It is not really die-and-repeat, but die-and-meaningfully-progress even though you seemingly start from the same place. It's so unlike metroidvanias and other stuff you mentioned that I'm wondering if we are talking about the same game.
It is absolutely an adventure game - aside from some arcade elements - you solve puzzles throughout entire game and you retain progress once you've solved them.
That's quite intentional on the game part. The best advice I can give you is reach the observatory / museum on your home planet, and from there try randomly exploring the entire solar system (Hint: what's literally the first thing you see when your character open their eyes?).
There also was a nice game called "Parkan" (and then Parkan 2), but it's not really well-known outside of Russian-speaking markets. It looks like it's available on Steam now.
Adding my vote for Overload. I'm not sure if it is the same team that built Descent(s) but some of them were involved in level design of the originals. I believe music composers were the same.
I really enjoyed the story too, that was probably the first game I played through to the end, just to find out how the story ends.
I believe the team has long disbanded which is a shame, it is a very _decent_ product (ha!)
> I'm not sure if it is the same team that built Descent(s) but some of them were involved in level design of the originals
Not the same exact team head-for-head but pretty close. Matt Toschlog and Mike Kula were both game directors on the original (and founded Parallax Software). They were the game directors of Overload as well and they're the founders of Revival, the studio that made the game.
The game is very well made, and as far as I know they delivered everything they promised to their backers (it was on Kickstarter). I bought the game (on PC AND on XBox) and left positive review on Steam. Hopefully they're working on something else that's just as awesome!
Most of the free roaming part of the game doesn't seem to make much use of this though; all the solar systems are effectively flat, space stations don't have a distinct up or down, granted, but you don't need to fly through tunnels etc.
The pvp mode (Arena?) does offer loads of use for that aspect of it though. But, I could never get on with the combat style, it feels like you spend a lot of time turning your nose to try and get aligned with your target. That may be me failing at it though, but trying to maneuver away to turn around means the enemies are on my tail.
I think a lot of the more experienced combat pilots will turn off flight assist so that the ship's nose doesn't have to be oriented with your momentum.
Having had a bit of this experience with Gravity Rush, I think a weakness for me is that 6dof games can end up feeling a bit like just pointing at some target and hitting the forward button. Basically, without the constraints of “regular” flight mechanics like having to maintain velocity, avoid stall, etc, the whole thing devolves into endless pointing and 3D circle-strafing.
One fun feature was you could shut off your suit power to go into a stealth mode. This turned off all the HUD elements, and, amusingly enough, turned off most gameplay noises (the explosions and bullets whizzing by) because, in-universe, all those noises are generated by the suit computer, because space is silent!
> When I bought Free space it was actually titled Descent: Freespace - The Great War.
I loved the series too, though the name was only prefixed with “Descent” to avoid a trademark conflict with an existing bit of software already called FreeSpace. It’s completely unrelated to Descent story-wise (and I’d argue is almost completely unrelated gameplay wise too)
Wasn't there a different control mode in ED that made it more realistic or more like Descent though? I believe the default is that, where inertia is cancelled out automatically for easier flight.
Of course, to make the game playable and fair there's a maximum speed you can achieve while not in hyperspace.
If there is it’s completely a surprise to me and I’m now quite interested in using it. My biggest beef with the game is how slow the ship is to turn in combat and that I can’t do strafing.
FA Off, or Flight Assist Off, is the mode in Elite Dangerous where your ship does not correct any momentum (angular or linear) that you have, except for imposing speed limits. In this mode, you will be using 6 strafe thrusts and 6 turning controls, and it's entirely up to you to use them to cancel momentum if you want to stand still or fly in a controlled direction.
It is absolutely incredible to play like this, and very hard but rewarding. It can be essential for high level combat, and there's an entire community of hooners (sp?) that fly among narrow spaces between mountains doing incredible maneuvers. They use extra things like opening the cargo hatch or landing gear as aerobrakes (lower ship speed limit). Many "normal" pilots will enable and disable Flight Assist situationally, mostly to gain extra turning speed during FA OFF. It's worth searching youtube for some related videos.
Unfortunately for mouse/keyboard users like me there's a couple of things in the control scheme that conspire to make it harder to use than it could be. Still, the first time I landed my Cutter (a massive ship with brutal inertia) in a rotating station with FA OFF, I felt like the king of the world.
Note that you don't need FA OFF to do strafing in all directions. I do it all the time. However with FA ON, the ship will counter your strafes to correct the ship's motion into the forward/back axis. Strafes in FA OFF are more powerful and can let your ship move at top speed in any direction while facing any other direction, but you only really need that for tight flight maneuvers.
That sounds quite a bit like decoupled mode for star citizen. Altough, there you still get automatic following the cursor for rotation, but no correction for linear movement.
I thought I had gotten this (Descent 3) for free with a graphics card I purchased, but Freespace was what I was thinking of, though it might have been Freespace 2.
The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!
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?
Given this was release at a time when in most games enemies simply roamed the levels and attacked the player when he crossed their line of sight, a simple automata based AI that actively pursued the player and tried to use cover when shot could be described as "adapting" to your play style.
AIMain.cpp is 7kloc. Searching for relevant words yields nothing, but it's not impossible to code something along the lines of "if the players flies around like crazy, do one thing, if he sits in the corner, do another".
I don't know how much Descent 3 shares with the original in terms of AI code, but Descent 3 seems to give NPCs a dynamic list of goals that's initialized based on their class ("stalker", "evader", etc.).[1] Each goal has a priority/weight, and criteria that will cause the goal to be enabled or not. Some of the goal enablers are straightforward, but others look more like state machine "emotion" states - fear, curiousity, etc.[2]
Seems complex enough to meet the description on the box for the original Descent.
Well, it's of course a marketing term, so I don't think it really needs to mean much.
In videogames sometimes the AI skill is adaptive in very simple terms, e.g. reaction times or see/aiming range or chance of hit are increased or lowered to keep the game engaging.
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.
Myst may not have launched a genre, but it did establish its own kind of game style.
3D world. Adventure game mechanics, with problems and puzzles - but where progress opens up more puzzles, and where instead of developing the character skills, you develop the story. Slow paced.
There have been plenty of games to tap into that style, but not enough or frequently enough to warrant calling them part of a genre. Black Dahlia. The Witness. Talos Principle. In a way, even a visual story like All That Remains of Edith Finch can trace its root to Myst.
> 3D world. Adventure game mechanics, with problems and puzzles - but where progress opens up more puzzles, and where instead of developing the character skills, you develop the story. Slow paced.
7th guest came out first. Too dark, while also being too campy to have the widespread lasting appeal of Myst, so no surprise why outside a niche one is mostly forgotten and the other always comes up even if only to hate for some. But they were basically the same game.
I don’t even know if 7th guest was first of its kind, probably not, but it sold bucket loads, partly because it was a pack in game for MPC kits and PCs in the early 90s.
Zork Nemesis one of my favorite games from the 90's was heavily inspired by Myst it was one of the first games I played where I felt immersed in the game world.
Nowadays this is the walking simulator genre with hundreds of titles available, but certainly I agree that it took an extremely long time to truly become its own thing.
I think Myst's innovation was mainly using a first-person perspective with (pre-rendered) scenes of a continuous 3D world. Otherwise it was a point-and-click adventure that arguably didn't reach the heights of some earlier Lucas Arts games. Unfortunately these games went out of fashion because most people want some amount of real-time action in their games. But they still get made occasionally by smaller developers on Steam or Android/iOS.
> The series caused a major shift in the adventure game genre. Unlike previous games, Myst attempted to keep players immersed in the world by removing all information not associated with the fictional world itself—no explanatory text, inventory, or score counters.
> I think Myst's innovation was mainly using a first-person perspective with (pre-rendered) scenes of a continuous 3D world.
The 7th Guest was released months earlier. It’s the exact same genre and technically more ambitious. It uses FMV, but all the 3D worlds are pre-rendered.
I think it is should be obvious to most here why Myst was more generally successful. But outside of story and atmosphere (the former of which is porn plot in both) mechanically they’re the same game.
There's Telltale games, but IIRC they are more visual/interactive novels, and I believe there were new Sam and Max games, classic adventure / point and click games. And a new Monkey Island.
My view is that both Myst and Descent were compelling at release because they showcased new technologies.
For Myst it was a high res 3d modelled world you could traverse, interspersed with video clips, all made possible by the new CD-ROM tech. It wasn’t actually that great a game. I loved it at the time but in retrospect there’s just not that much there. The most recent incarnation of a game like this is The Witness which is better in every way I can think of.
For Descent it was true 3D - was it the first? It predates quake. Maybe some people were captivated by the gameplay but for me it was “holy shit it’s 3d”. There’s a reason we have tons of FPSes and only a few Descent clones; the latter just aren’t that fun for most people.
There were tons of Myst clones that came out after. The most prominent example was probably Rama, based on the Arthur C. Clarke novels. But lots of others like Shadow of the Obelisk, Obsidian, etc.
There were quite a few myst like in the 90s. Lighthouse: The Dark Being is one I enjoyed as a kid.
Rheah is another one during that period.
Cryo released an entire series of Myst like with Atlantis (not great though). Mystery of the Nautilus and Return to Mysterious island are decent though.
So, I'd say there were plenty of myst-like clones mostly focused on the European market though and not necessarily very successful.
The Sims was like that too, and it's only recently that anyone's tried to launch a full-blown competitor, Life By You from Paradox, who also launched a full blown SimCity competitor, Cities: Skylines. It's run by Rob Humble, who managed The Sims 2 and 3.
Myst was the top selling game of all time until The Sims came along and dethroned it for quite some time. So you have a point about how some top selling games can become so iconic that there aren't any alternatives for a long time.
I think it's a great thing that Paradox eventually picked up the ball and made some competition for SimCity and The Sims, after EA strayed from the original designs, and enshitified them with all the expansion packs and online DRM bullshit.
Competition is great, and The Sims 4 and SimCity and the competing alternatives would be much better off and further along, if they only had viable competition all these years. EA should have released and documented and supported their internal content creation and programming tools for user created content, instead of putting all their effort into competing with fans and trying to squeeze the last penny out of it with expansion packs.
I've proposed and campaigned for EA to release the tools since before the release of The Sims 1 in 2000, and they did eventually give me the rights and pay me to develop and release some limited tools like The Sims Transmogrifier for The Sims 1, but they never followed through with releasing the internal tools like the Edith editor and SimAntics visual programming language, or the 3D Studio Max content creation tools, and they never officially supported or documented anything, the way Factorio and other games do such a wonderful job at.
This video shows Edith -- The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998:
And this shows The Sims Transmogrifier and some other tools I developed with it, and user created content programmed by fans with the limited tools available (iffpencil2 etc) -- Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
Decades later, it's now possible but difficult to develop and program user created content for The Sims 4 in Python, but it's terribly documented and practically unsupported. Here is the original proposal I wrote around the time we released The Sims 1 in March 2000, which outlined what we should do, but unfortunately they didn't take it nearly as far as I suggested, and never let me release the 3D Studio Max animation and object exporters, or the Edith editor and visual programming tools.
>A Proposal to Develop Third Party Content Authoring Tools for The Sims, by Don Hopkins, March 2000
>This is a proposal I wrote to Maxis after The Sims was released in March 2000, outlining some of my ideas for third party content authoring tools that I could develop. This led to The Sims Transmogrifier, but it touches on several other interesting tools and projects that Maxis never got around to.
>Problem Definition:
>There is a strong demand many from third parties who want to develop their own custom content for The Sims, including characters and objects.
>Proposed Solution:
>Update, clean up and document the content creation tools, so third parties can make their own characters and objects for The Sims.
>Port the tools to the latest version of 3D Studio Max.
>Make the tools self contained so they can be run stand-alone, by removing all dependencies on the Maxis environment and expensive software packages: Character Studio (Biped, Physique), Access, SourceSafe, MKS Toolkit (Korn Shell).
>Document the content creation tools with an overview, examples, tutorials, and a reference manual. Write down the folklore that has been passed by word of mouth. Read over the code and document how it actually behaves.
>Provide consulting, training and content creation services to third parties who want custom content authored for The Sims, but don't want or know how to do it themselves.
>Develop a Sims Content Authoring SDK, so it's possible for third parties to create specialized content creation tools, like FaceLift.
>Goals:
>Third Party Character Creation and Customization:
>Characters include virtual people who the user can play with, as well as autonomous non-player characters with programmed behaviors. Characters consist of bodies, heads and hands of 3D polygonal meshes with texture mapped bitmap skins.
>Characters are created at Maxis by highly skilled artists using expensive tools like 3D Studio Max, Character Studio, the CMX exporter, and Photoshop.
>Simplify the content creation tools and make them run stand-alone, so third party artists and designers can create their own characters and objects.
>Maxis' expert 2D character artists currently use Photoshop to paint body textures in layers, then flatten and dither them into 256 color bitmap files.
>"Flesh out" the process of applying layered clothing to naked bodies and dithering to 8 bits, so anyone can dress up their characters in all kinds of clothes.
>Maxis' expert 3D modeling artists create textured low-poly rigid meshes (like heads, hands and accessories) attached to individual bones, and the CMX exporter creates rigid suits.
>Make the CMX exporter easy for third parties to use, so many proficient 3D artists will be able to make their own textured heads, accessories, selected character pointers, and carried objects.
>Maxis' expert 3D character modeling artists attach textured low-poly deformable meshes (like bodies) to skeletons using Character Studio Physique and Biped, and the CMX exporter reads out the weighted vertex/bone bindings and creates deformable suits for the game.
>Character Studio is an expensive plug-in that enables a skilled artist to bind deformable meshes to skeletons, but there are other ways to do that with 3D Studio Max and other 3D tools.
>Enhance the CMX exporter to support Max's new way of attaching deformable meshes to skeletons, so third party 3D artists can create bodies.
>Maxis designers and programmers use the Edith tool to configure the behavior of characters and objects.
>Clean up and document Edith, so third party designers and programmers can program and modify their own characters and objects.
>Third Party Object Creation and Customization:
>Objects consist of pre-rendered z-buffered sprites, packaged together with character animations, sound effects and programmed behavior.
>Objects are created in-house at Maxis, by highly skilled 3D modeling artists, using lots of polygons and detailed texture maps in 3D Studio Max. The sprite exporter breaks the objects up into tiles and renders them in different scales and rotations, then writes out z-buffered sprites.
>Clean up and document the sprite exporter, so third party artists can use it with 3D Studio Max to make their own objects.
>The sprite exporter is very specific to 3D Studio Max, especially when breaking apart multi-tile objects.
>Maxis' expert 3D character animation artists create skeletons and animations of characters interacting with objects. They use Character Studio Biped, although the exporter supports other types of skeletons, like the bones built into Max or even hierarchies of normal objects.
>Clean up and document the CMX exporter, so third party character animators can use it with 3D Studio Max with or without Character Studio to make their own character animations.
>Enable Third Party Content Creation Tool Development:
>Develop and document an SDK (Software Development Kit) that gives third parties the information they need to make their own content creation tools for The Sims.
>Enable and encourage the development of tools like FaceLift and Blueprint by third parties.
>A "BodyLift" tool that enables anyone to mutate, breed and tweak deformable body meshes, like FaceLift lets anyone do with rigid head meshes.
>A skin tool that enables anyone to layer clothes and accessories on different bodies, skin colors, sexes, ages, etc. Allow artists to create 32 bit alpha masked layers of clothing that can be applied to any body.
>An animation tool that enables anyone to create their own dance sequences, walk loops and idle animations, by mixing, cross fading and mutating between many pre-existing dramatic poses, dance moves, walks and idle loops.
>Specialized object creation tools that enable anyone create their own customized objects from templates, like a PictureFramer that would create a framed picture from any bitmap, or a JukeboxFactory that would create a jukebox full of your favorite mp3 files.
I know why it didn't make it as a concept for me; the rendering in the game wasn't quite correct, so I used to get sea sick playing this for more than 30 minutes. And I hardly get sea sick on boats. So I stopped playing it after about a month.
This entire thread led me down a long, long rabbit hole; I remembered the name "Descent", but I couldn't recognize anything about it in the online videos I saw on Youtube.
After hours of searching google, I realize that I was actually thinking about Terminal Velocity. Great soundtrack, fun game (although I never finished it).
I looked it up, and as I expected, it was a .mod format. My favourite soundtracks of that era almost always had .mod soundtracks (I despised midis back then, although I guess Monkey Island was an outlier).
The composer of the soundtrack left a message here.
>
@kylerichards4410
7 years ago
Nu music, I wrote the music to this game almost 25 years ago. You just made my night. :) Cheers.
>
@kylerichards4410
7 years ago
Ha...it's really me. :) Yeah, those mod formats were pretty brutal on sound quality. 8bit and around 5khz samples, if memory serves. It's a little difficult to listen to the originals, so hearing your remix was fantastic.
Again, great work. Really enjoyed it. :)
I wonder if zero-g 360deg spaceship games never hit the popularity of FPS because of how samey they are. You can always go anywhere, hit any angle, move in any direction. All things equal even Quake has more dimension to its moment to moment gameplay because you can't just fly around the map. (well, you actually can, but it's a tad different)
Awful comment to write in a Descent 3 nostalgia thread tho, I admit.
I just remember growing up on Descent and Forsaken and immediately discarded them once I discovered FPS in the early 2000s.
The reason is because 6dof games tend to have really difficult skill expression around movement and positioning.
With any 3d game it becomes a bit of a circle-strafe fight. With space and 6dof games, it becomes a flight simulator fight, which is an intense genre.
Additionally it removes some verticality from levels. IF EVERYTHING is accessible, it removes choices around taking the high ground / sneaking through the low ground.
I agree they are cool games, but they have some quirks that are not everyone's cup of tea.
The Descent series was my favorite of all time. Got the hotas setup for myself and others in the office did too. We had the best LAN parties. Being semi-lost and trying to get out in time before everything blew up was such a rush.
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.
> Never understood why this concept didn’t become a whole genre.
The subgenre is called 6DOF, and it does have games. But I agree it's not as big as it could be, and that the magic hasn't really been recaptured. Game developers seem to frequently have this same thought. Descent was good! This should be more popular! Someone tries every couple years or so, but the result generally disappoints.
It is my opinion that 6DOF games are difficult to make good, especially to the standards and expectations of modern gamers. The combat and level design are much more technical (or perhaps just differently technical) than someone from a flat FPS perspective expects, and as a result, the game design seems to have a lot of opportunities for technical mistakes to be made. I think more generic FPS developers, who remembered liking Descent back when our standards were lower, don't realize how much we've learned since then and how very much there is TO learn about the genre.
I find that aggravating. Every few years, the Descent community gets excited about a big 6DOF attempt, and every few years we get disappointed by the result. Even more aggravating, they generally make design mistakes that I think show ignorance of the genre. How does this keep happening? You wouldn't think of making an RTS, or a MOBA, or even a flight combat sim, or really any other very technical genre of game, without the expertise of the veterans and elite players of the genre. And yet 6DOF developers seem to me to do just that. I can only conclude that the problem looks from the outside to he easier than it really is.
I don't mean to sound arrogant! What I mean is that, I think the answer to your question "Why isn't this more of a thing?" is that it's a much harder thing than it appears to be. I think Descent's success can be attributed to a lot of things: to lower standards 30 years ago, to lucky or prescient design decisions, to a brilliant team enjoying the unique freedom of the wild world of 90s software passion projects, and to a lot of community involvement over time. And I'm not sure that's the whole list. I do think it should be a bigger thing now - there is a delicious flavor here and no reason this generation shouldn't love it too. But it's also apparent that Descent caught lightning in a bottle, and even I couldn't tell you everything that went into making it happen once but not twice. I can point to reasons that I think attempts to repeat it have been less successful, reasons that make sense to me as an expert player in the genre, problems I think I or a couple dozen pilots like me could help anyone avoid. But I'm not sure that explains all of the difficulty. Every now and again, some veteran pilot will take the problem into their own hands and try to make the next big 6DOF, and those projects are rarely finished and rarely good. It doesn't seem that hard, from a software point of view, and they know the game! Or think they do. And yet they fail. So genre expertise can't be the only ingredient, even if I think it's a necessary and usually missing one.
The problem is clearly harder than it looks. I think I know what to do, or at least one piece of the puzzle, but better warriors have been slain on that battlefield, and I haven't actually made the attempt, so I don't actually know. But I can definitely say this much: Developer beware! Here there be dragons!
when you add the extra degrees of freedom in Descent-like games, relative to Quake-like games (or flight/space sims but in different ways), there are some emergent behaviors that change how the game fundamentally feels. What frequently happens when random devs take on a 6dof project because they enjoyed Descent back in the day is they'll make a game that feels like a shooter with vertical flight, and is missing some of the key things that make Descent feel good. I've heard some 6dof games described as "it feels like I'm flying a camera, not a ship" (lack of turning momentum), or "it feels sluggish when I try to move in multiple directions" (lack of vector independence / trichording), or "it's just spray-and-pray combat" (undersized ship hitboxes relative to projectile speed/size and level size.) There are a lot of things we've learned over 30 years of playing Descent and Descent-like games that don't always get taken seriously by devs of other 6dof projects. And even when they do take everything seriously, there are things none of us have figured out how to articulate but that can make a 6dof game feel bad.
I think it'd be possible to build a great game in the genre, but you'd need a bunch of key things to come together, and then you'd also need great marketing to get the thing in front of millions of eyeballs to make enough sales to keep the community going.
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 and play the next best thing.
Today's kids also play Roblox, Garry's Mod, Minecraft and Fortnite, all of which allow them to create their own games and tools and write code alongside it, like Verse for Fortnite [0], LUA for Roblox [1], IDK what language it is but there's something for Minecraft bedrock edition [2] and of course the old Java edition, and also LUA for gmod.
This is how thousands, if not millions of people will have their first foray into coding, and it's a much, MUCH larger amount of people that get in touch with the deeper levels of tech than "our" generation had.
Don't underestimate "this generation"; don't generalise them either by trying to state they only spend mindless time on their phone.
This is a good point. If I would have grown up today I would possibly have done other things that aligned with the same kind of interests, and perhaps even have gotten further. Kids these days can, and do, build actual robots and UAVs with onboard processors with more FLOPS than you could even dream of back in the old 75MHz pentium days.
And this is why I setup a mister fpga running an atari st for my 3 years old son's first foray into using his own computer. Eventually, we can also use the 486 core to run ms dos :)
I think old computers have a certain amount of simplicity that I think make the user less passive when using them. I also think that older games tend to be both less addictive and leave more to imagination.
Of course that won't be sustainable forever eventually he'll be influenced by his peers to play whatever they're currently playing but I'm hoping that having been exposed to older computers will be beneficial.
The biggest culprit was the cd-rom drivers and the mouse driver.
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.
All I can think about was trying to muck with IRQ conflicts or messed up awful windows 95 drivers later on to get my game working. I'm not sure I miss either of those much but I also switched to Windows NT early and kept an old decked out Pentium 1 for dos games that ntvdm wouldn't play nice with.
Nodding though, oh man that got me into developing things like you wouldn't believe.
Quake 1, 2 had a huge community around coding or map making. Tribes 2 was absolutely all about mods. Command and Conquer with it's rules.ini or StarCraft with its gui scripting stored in map files I spent so many hours messing with. It was all about making something crazy to show off when you went back to school or later to a lan party to wow everyone.
When I was young, my parents bought me a copy of X-Wing (CD-ROM) for our Win95, Pentium 100 machine. My parents were not computer savvy, and being only 13 myself, I didn't know much about computers. My dad couldn't get it to work, and so the box sat on the shelf for months, maybe even a year. (Time's warped when you're a young kid. =P ) I'd leaf through the manual and gaze longingly at the box art, and look through the little technical leaflets that were included. The latter of which may have been written in hieroglyphs. I set it aside, played the Descent demo over and over that came with out PC, and surfed AOL.
I kept learning more about the computer in the meantime.
One day I was performing my old ritual, when I noticed one of the paper leaflets in the box. Rather than being hieroglyphs, I knew now what it was saying. X-Wing needed DOS EMS (Expanded memory), and this paper was telling me I needed to edit CONFIG.SYS on Windows 95 machines to get this to work. My parents had forbid me from touching anything in the "WINDOWS" folder (there be dragons, according to them) and after having wiped a lot of my mom's files on our earlier Tandy, they didn't want me messing with things I didn't understand that they couldn't fix.
But I was confidant. I edited the file, and hoped for the best. The computer restarted, and just as I'd done countless times before to no avail, tried to start up the game.
Listening to the Star Wars theme play MIDI over the speakers, I jumped up, ecstatic. It was late at night, and my parents were watching TV in the living room. I ran downstairs. "I GOT X-WING WORKING!!!!!!"
It was a feeling of accomplishment, that to this day I look back on and say "that's when it started". I think I knew it then, to some tiny degree, that this was going to be my path.
I'm 40 now. I'm a solutions architect at AWS. My computers were all built by me. And my X-Wing box sits on my shelf still.
I've talked with my niece, and with some other kids over the years about their gaming, experience with PCs, and the like. There's not much to figure out. I don't blame them; I don't shake my fist at these kids. After all, I recall the frustrations too. Building PCs that wouldn't start for no reason (well, this still happens), the unreliability of early home routers. Many early games that just wouldn't start on your PC but run just fine on your buddies. I remember LAN parties with my colleagues with a combined technical know-how in the room of several CCNAs, MCSEs, etc, and we still can't get our Unreal Tournament server to be seen by everyone's PC. Don't get me started on copy protection woes.
But there was a joy in finally getting it working, and through the stress, we learned a lot about how it all worked. The current internet and computer environment doesn't have that in that you need to know how it works in order to enjoy it. I wouldn't reverse the state of affairs; things are much more mature and stable now. And it's not as simple as saying "well go off and do these projects". We can motivate some to do so as a stretch, but nothing was motivating the same way as sheer necessity like we had it.
So I see it as just something to observe and note and appreciate for how we had it then, both maddeningly frustrating yet glorious in how genuine and unrefined it all was. Hopefully later generations will find their own versions of what we experienced.
I'm glad to have lived through it. It kick-started a love of computing and a lifelong career.
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?
I would sometimes play “co-op“ with my little brother, navigating with a flight stick and the number pad while he managed weapons and firing. It’s fun to see decades later that we weren’t the only ones to play Descent this way!
That’s the way I started but eventually used two FlightSticks. Banking movement with one hand (forward, backward, sideways), rotating around two axis with the other (barrel roll, pitch), and the thumb sticks I used for up/down and left/right. Although I might misremember some details. There was a time when I really wanted to add a pair of pedals, too. Ah, to have that much time to spare again.
The Macintosh version of the FlightStick had an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) plug that had a port on the other end so you could plug in another device. It’s been 30 years. Do you think I might misremember? Maybe it was a FlightStick and a Saitek joystick? If you are running the original game on period hardware and tell me that the software wouldn’t know how to tell two different joysticks apart regardless of which type, then I guess I’d have to admit that there’s something fishy with my memory.
look into "period hardware" which is itself a "dual joystick" (typically literally sold for use in descent). it's a gimmick that sold i.e. why have one joystick when you can have two. Then you should just have a single i/o interface to your MIDI game port.
I dug around in my archives and found this post, someone is running Descent in DOSBox on an XP machine and using two USB joysticks and xpadder to set it up.
THE way to play Descent was with a Spaceball Avenger. I was a beta tester for one, holding it in your hand was like your brain interfacing directly with the ship. Sadly the sensors broke over the years and I'm settling for joysticks.
The wingman was amazing. Lot's of leeway and light and smooth. It seemed to have been built for environments like descent, where your fighter swooshed gracefully through space under any 3d angle.
I got made fun of for being a Y-inverted person, but I had my revenge when none of my non inverted friends could reliably control the bucket on a front-loader I had rented. Neener neener.
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!
I got so used to the inverted-y that it's the first thing I change in the game setting as I just can't play on normal settings on any FPS. I wish that inverted-y was the default for all games. I don't know when I got used to the inverted y, perhaps while playing X-wing or maybe Quake.
For me it’s entirely context based. If it’s a flying game, I can only play it if Y is inverted. For an FPS, I can only play without inverted Y.
There’s no real difference between except the context. I just got used to playing FOS games one way, and flight sims the other, and now my brain is wired that way.
Even in games where you can frequently switch between FPS and flying, I can only do both if there’s a separate Y invert setting for each context.
It's exactly the same for me. With one exception: Freelancer. There "pointing" with the mouse just felt more natural because you control the guns at the same time and don't really control the ship but instead tell it where to fly.
I also think that's where they wanted to go to. I read some previews that they planned on having an even more indirect control scheme with you being able to buying better control computers that offer better maneuvers. But we all know how messy the development process of Freelancer was...
For me, I can't play with inverted y on mouse at all, can't with gamepad for ground based games, but for flight based games on gamepad, I can't play without inverted y.
X-wing contributed, but so did any flight game really, like Star Fox for the SNES. It only made sense to play Duke Nukem, Quake, and Descent with the same controls.
I genuinely have no idea how people can stand inverted Y in an FPS. It makes no sense! You're controlling the way you look, not nudging the nose of a spacecraft. I'm very thankful that it's not the default.
If i remember correctly, inverted y used to be the default even for early FPS games. The option to turn it off (opt-out) was added later. The default was inverted (opt-in) even later.
It wasn't a universal default, some games like Quake and Chasm did not have reversed Y by default while others like Duke3D and SkyNET had reversed Y by default. Though all of them had an option to reverse Y, i can't think of an FPS that did not have the option.
And TBH i'm not sure how much defaults played a role back then, they all pretty much had very weird defaults :-P.
I recently came across my first game where not only is the non-inverted Y the default, there's also no way of setting inverted Y as an option! Consequently I can never play Genshin Impact. The lack of a setting is seemingly a long-running issue in forums, as the developers seem to be ignoring requests to implement it.
I wonder if I am the only one who wanted to invert both axes when playing a third-person game on a gamepad.
Ultimately, I found both control schemes equally unintuitive in practice, I'll have to wait until someone manages to make modern Zeldas work with a mouse.
Some friends of mine played Descent competitively, and I was amazed to learn about so-called trichording: to maximize your speed, you need to press multiple keys at the same time to travel along all 3 axes at once, e.g. forward/right/up. The best players zip around the map diagonally.
I always assumed this was a bug-turned-feature, like skiing in Tribes. When I saw the repo just now, I looked for clues, but didn't spot any related comments around the line of code where this ultimately happens:
AFAIK a similar thing worked in in lots of shooters: running diagonally by strafing and going forward gave you sqrt(x^2 + y^2) speed probably because of a design oversight (and because running in each direction was equally fast). In Descent you just added up/down for another axis, which gave you a speed of about 1.7x compared to forward only.
In Descent 2 and 3 you also had the "afterburner" which gave a speed boost forward, but it had limited (albeit quickly recharging) energy, and the speed boost it gave you was greatest at 100% energy and effectiveness dropped as remaining energy dropped towards 0%. So people learned to pulsate it multiple times per second so that it would recharge between the fraction-of-a-second uses and keep at ~95% all the time instead of quickly dropping to low figures.
So if you wanted to go really fast you'd both run diagonally in three dimensions and keep pulsating the afterburner multiple times per second.
It wasn't really considered either a bug or a feature by the original designers, it was just not something they put any thought into. After it was discovered, some designers had a negative opinion of it, others had a positive opinion, and it was a point of contention when the team got together to make Overload after years away from Descent. My wife and I tried some alternatives (by modding D1) and flew a demo for Mike/Matt/Luke/Dan and whoever else was in the studio that day, and eventually settled on "vector independence just feels good" which is why Overload has the ability to change from a normalized flight mode with faster 1D flight into the trichording mode.
In 2D, the diagonal across a 1x1 rectangle is longer than just its sides.
A naive implementation of just adding the x and y vectors together will become their sum, totaling up to the diagonal length, 1.41x faster. In 3d even more.
This is a very common bug (feature) in many old games.
Quake famously did consider this bug while walking but not while jumping, leading to a more complicated trick to speed up called strafe-jumping.
Yeah looks like the calculation doesn't renormalize the final thrust vector after adding together the component inputs. A simplified example for a 2d game would be like this:
var playerX_input = Input.GetHorizontal(); // float in range -1 to 1
var playerY_input = Input.GetVertical(); // float in range -1 to 1
var playerVelocity = new Vector2(playerX_input, playerY_input);
// The player can now move 1 unit/frame in X and 1 unit/frame in Y, which means that if they're moving diagonally, the length of their velocity vector is the length of the vector (1,1) which is sqrt(2) (~1.41)
// This can be corrected by doing something like
if(playerVelocity.length > 1)
{
playerVelocity = playerVelocity.normalized();
}
> Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format). I have that code if someone wants to help make a converter so the old cutscenes work. It'll take some effort to stub out that code so it compiles.
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.
I've had the code all this time, and about 15 years ago(!!!) we were working on a fix for some bugs that had been around a while. At the time, there was talk about releasing the code, but we wanted to get a patch out and find a replacement for the MVE decoder first. I sent an email to the owner a few days ago (after a comment on a different post here) asking if we can just go ahead and strip the code we can't release, and he said "go for it".
> A study published in 2002 used Descent 3 to study hawkmoth flight activities. Using the game's editing module, the researchers created a virtual environment consisting of a flat plane with rectangular pillars, across which the animal successfully navigated.
Some crazy stuff… they Clockwork Oranged a moth to a VR machine with pheromone misters and electrodes
> In this paper we describe a novel insect flight simulator design that combines realistic, interactive visual environments with mechanosensory and olfactory stimuli in conjunction with state of the art multichannel neurophysiological recording techniques. This system takes advantage of currently available computer technology and MEMs fabrication techniques and we use it to examine activity from many CNS neurons in parallel during realistic closed-loop flight of the hawkmoth, Manduca sexta.
I heard many people loved Descent and it looked great to me, it even seemed like a mix between X-Wing and Quake... but I couldn't play it for more than a few minutes, probably the first game in my long career as player that I dropped that quickly. There is something unnerving about it, it's like playing with magnets while wearing boxing gloves. Even watching gameplay videos I get the same sensation.
We didn't have any interaction with that team. Interplay was just the publisher, the developer was outrage Entertainment in Ann Arbor Michigan. This is back when 10 programmers seemed like a pretty big team for a game.
Nice! I sent this to the guy that helped me convert NetPanzer (20+yo code base) from SCons to Meson and he also took the time to setup GH actions etc. Hopefully you get some help!
We originally used Microsoft Source Safe, which added the comments for us. I think Source Safe made us lock a file to make changes, which was a PITA. I think we made a lot of the decisions on where to break out code on a file by file basis because of that. Later, we moved to Perforce, which is good for larger binary files.
I worked with VSS for a while and remember the workflow you're describing (lock, edit, check in) and there being a culture of not bundling related changes into commits but instead tossing files in as you realized they were out of date.
I would still like Git to have some kind of memory of a file being edited in some kind of branch. It would make it easier to communicate work done on the same file because you can discover what is being done to it.
The Descent series was my gateway to the Internet, and really paralleled my coming of age.
I played D1 dialing up my friends when I was 10, which was amazing. I swapped numbers with some folks on the local BBS and played 1-on-1 deathmatches. My brother installed DEVIL, and I learned how to launch things from DOS, interact with a CLI and filesystem, and of course make my own levels.
We got Internet service and then D2 multiplayer, facilitated by Kali/Kahn for match-making completely blew my mind. I think I was 12 or 13, and discovering things like IRC and webpages describing advanced techniques like chording were hugely eye-opening for how big the world was. Making friends on ICQ, and discovering warez was like living in a sci-if novel. I also got into building and upgrading PCs to be able to play at higher resolutions and frame rates.
Descent 3 was a huge step forward graphically, and brought about sniping with the mass driver. It had worldwide rankings, and making the top 100 leaderboard as a 16 year old still ranks as one of my most mind-blowing moments. It was the first time I had high speed internet, and really ushered in the modern era of gaming for me.
Thank you for this. I’ve since moved on in my life (obviously), but it is amazing to have spent some moments today reflecting on all this. I doubt I would be a child of the internet or a software engineer today without Descent.
I could never get into Descent. I liked the flying around in 3D bit, but the fact that the levels were truly 3D (ie, didn't have a ground and up/down) meant I was always getting disoriented and lost. I just didn't enjoy that feeling.
I've had a dream of buying the IP to some older, obscure PC games from this era and then releasing the source code. I hate how many games are getting lost to time.
I think I have more changes beyond what you have. It's been a long time though. If you want to email me I can get them to you to dig through.
Funny to see this :)
Back then I played the trailer over and over and over, waiting for the release... That line is carved deep and immediately pops up every time I think of Descent 3:
> Now, after years of waiting, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Just as fitting today as it was back then :D
EDIT: ha, an internets uploaded it. What a trailer that was...
I had the pleasure of working closely with Jeff Slutter early in my career. Was the first really fantastic engineer I worked with - he’s at Santa Monica Studios (God of War) these days. I think Matt Toschlog is there too now. Glad to see these folks working on an awesome AAA franchise.
Try not to read too much into that, the MIT license was in the original blank repo I started with. There are a few questions I need to get answered, so the lack of that file doesn't necessarily mean anything about the license. The previous Descent 1&2 releases were under the license seen here, I would expect that at minimum (minimum permissibility-wise):
I think I prefer the more “internal” style levels from Descent 1 and 2 over the more open levels found in Descent 3.
To that end, I sense a huge opportunity. We could potentially port the D1 and D2 maps to run in Descent 3, as well as utilizing the newer graphics APIs the game supported. Could be a great opportunity for an all-in-one style remaster.
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 to the game. So if you only pushed forward, you got 100%, but pushing forward and sideways, you only got ~70% of each (trigonometry). But with a keyboard or buttons, you could get 100% of each.
I also ended up mapping forward / back to buttons because it was less annoying to hold down a button constantly for movement.
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.
Yes, the world (and the net) seemed much smaller back then. My first real taste of multiplayer like that (not counting LAN parties) was playing 4 player doom over modem... it required some expensive hardware and software back in the day. I even paid long distance to do it. The BBS running it had to have a special dongle and then the APCiDoom software. Man that was cool.
I used Kali too, for Descent and other games. The chat rooms were true communities, probably one of the first times as a kid that I connected with other like-minded people (aka nerds).
There was also Kahn, which was a similar competitor.
I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.
The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.
That’s how a lot of people got started with Kali! It was bundled with the original WC2 CD. WC2 didn’t support battle.net until much later, as Diablo was the first Blizzard game to use it.
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.
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 designer who could make things work with the original language.
We (Jeff Slutter and I) wanted to use it, but we were just in the 'exploration' phase. It's not connected to anything at the moment. Keep in mind this was 15 years ago, there are probably better options now.
I'm so glad you mentioned that important topic! See what I wrote about using JavaScript as a scripting language for games compiled to WebAssembly with emscripten and exposed to JavaScript with embind:
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!)
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!
>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!
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. :)
Haha wow! Freespace got me into real programming because I had to start with compiling the OpenChrome drivers and then had to edit the code to let it load textures (which were too big) onto the device. Never looked back.
Descent holds a special place for me, as it was the first game I ever saw played on a PC (I watched my dad play when I was five, ~30 years ago). I recently was able to reminisce by playing the modern successor, Overload: https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
Descent 3 had so many bugs on my graphics card... which I want to say was an ATI Rage.
Consequently I played D2 more until we got our hands on a Voodoo3.
Someone out there has the Tribes 1 source code. The directory listing/dump has been leaked a couple times but never the full code (last time around the "InstantAction" era). I really, really wish it would be. Right now all the Tribes intellectual property is locked up behind "Hirez Games" and they only make microtransaction/pay2win games. "Tribes 3" the recent release is made by employees of this company unfortunately. Not quite a Tribes game.
T2 would be cool too. But nothing tops T1. That said, there's no reason to wait for the source to be leaked to play. http://playt1.com/ has everything you need. The community maintains both the game client and have written multiple custom master servers.
That's EarthSiege universe, eh? I've been working on and off to decompile EarthSiege 2. Might take another stab at it this summer... maybe there are code similarities, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
about how important Descent had been to my career. I think my backer rewards were a free license and an Overload keychain. :
Writing D3 mods was a big reason I got a copy of Visual C++ as a birthday present. And I laid down an absolutely awful drum track for an album UNIX was recording with Stephan Jenkins (I think) from 3rd Eye Blind. An interview about those demos was the first thing I did after joining my college radio station, where I then became responsible for converting the PC workstations to Mac… which exposed me to Xcode and sent me across the country to work on software for Apple devices for the next decade and counting.
https://core-ball.org/
This is fantastic. I was obsessed with Descent and played with my friend over our... 14.4 Kbps modems (along with Warcraft II). When Descent II came out, I would go to Best Buy to play it on a demo machine. I remember how amazed I was at the missilecam. That absolutely blew my mind.
I don't think I ever really played 3, watching the trailer. But I _did_ make the jump to Volition's Descent: Freespace. THAT game was the first one where I made the concerted effort to save up, as a 9th grader, for an NVidia Riva TNT after seeing my friend's, and how awesome the particle rendering was in it. If only I just, you know, dumped a few hundred bucks into $NVDA at the time instead.
What led to this being possible: There was recently a discussion about elevators on Hacker News, and somebody mentioned SimTower and asked about the algorithms it used, so I gave Yoot a call to ask him, and he mentioned he wanted to open source it. I enthusiastically agreed to help him, and contribute my efforts porting the code and navigating the licensing and trademark issues, benefiting from my experience developing the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC:
>I know Yoot Saito (creator of SimTower) from my time at Maxis, so I just gave him a cold call out of the blue and asked. ;) I caught him drinking Jack Daniels in a Japanese bar, but he had some time to chat.
>He said he once did a big interview with BBC about SimTower (which would be worth looking up and watching if you can find it), and had a friend who worked in the elevator industry, who told him generally about how elevators worked, but much of it was secret and proprietary, so he had to come up with how they worked in the game himself, based on the general ideas he learned and his own experience and imagination.
>He also said he's interested in releasing the original source code of SimTower as free open source software, like I did with the original SimCity Classic source code, so I volunteered to help him and find other people who could help. Anybody interested? ;)
Yoot recently sent me a huge code drop of the Windows sources as well as the Gameboy SP and DS versions and production documents, and I'm sorting it out and cleaning it up to make a version that compiles with emscripten and runs in the web browser. We've decided it release it under the MIT license, and develop a version that runs in the web browser using emscripten and SvelteKit. I'd appreciate hearing from people who are interested in helping out, especially people who know Japanese, since there is a lot of great content in The Tower II that was only released in Japan that needs translating to English and other languages.
I've also started the process of porting the Micropolis (open source SimCity) code to run in the web browser in the same way as Yoot Tower, since they are both from the same era (and from Maxis) and share a lot of technologies and requirements, so they will both be able to share much of the code and infrastructure (WebAssembly, emscripten, embind, SvelteKit, canvas, html, css, user interface code, github actions, etc), with the eventual goal of being able to embed multiple Yoot Towers in your Micropolis city!
>Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.
>MicropolisCore C++ Core
>This is the source code for Micropolis (based on SimCity), released under GPL-3. Micropolis is based on the original SimCity from Electronic Arts / Maxis, designed and written by Will Wright, and ported to Unix by Don Hopkins.
>The origin of this repo is the "MicropolisCore" directory of the full micropolis repo, https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis , but it's been stripped down and simplified.
>I am now in the process of converting it to build for WebAssembly with emscripten and bind to JavaScript with embind, and implementing a SvelteKit front-end.
Since I know the SimCity code well already and have ported it to many different platforms, and put years of effort into cleaning up the old code to be well organized C++ code with clean interfaces and doxygen documentation, it's a great way to learn the new technologies, work out the approach, and prepare for porting SimTower the same way.
ChatGPT has been a huge help, especially analyzing the code and writing documentation and translating the Japanese comments, and now I'm using Aider for them both:
Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal (github.com/paul-gauthier):
Here's a code map for each source file that I made with ChatGPT that focuses on helping me get a high level view of the code, its dependencies, purposes of each file, and porting issues:
The Nintendo Gameboy SP and DS versions of Tower have a whole lot of proprietary Nintendo SDK code and also their precious proprietary content and characters like Mario, which we are certainly not able to release ourselves under the MIT license, so I'm working with the more generic Windows version instead. Yoot owns the rights to the source code to his own games, but we can't just release stuff with Nintendo's crowned jewels like Mario and their SDKs in it as open source.
We are being extremely careful not to infringe on anyone’s copyrights or trademarks, of course! Maxis got into a lot of trouble with Godzilla just because they had a big monster on the box but didn’t mention Godzilla by name (but a review in a magazine did, which was too much), and Maxis (now EA) own the SimTower trademark, so we’re calling it Yoot Tower. The Nintendo Gameboy and DS console ports of SimTower have a lot Nintendo content (like Mario), so we definitely don’t want to make Nintendo or EA mad by infringing on their trademarks or copyrights.
Jeff Braun (CEO of Maxis) told me the story of what happened decades ago with Maxis and Godzilla, so I want to be careful to avoid stomping on anybody’s property:
>Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement. I doubt you will need to worry about Toho, as long as there are no magazine reviews that call the monster Godzilla.
I guess the lesson is to always make sure to give your monsters a unique name, and don’t leave that up to the user’s imagination.
> Anybody want to help, or know somebody who does, please? ;)
SimTower and Yoot Tower are some of my favorite games. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I'd be interested in working on fixing up the C backend and doing a new interface (probably either in Qt or SDL+Dear ImGui). I tried doing an Emscripten version of one of my other projects (https://github.com/ndiddy99/openmadoola) but found that it required restructuring the code to work with the "browser calls your loop" paradigm, and after I did that there was significantly worse input lag than running natively, which made the game less fun to play. I ended up scrapping the whole thing.
It's different for console games Madoola that are already low level and efficient and interacting directly with the hardware, but The Tower code needs to be de-windowsified (like I de-macified the SimCity code), because trying to add a layer of Windows emulation without restructuring the code is always going to be much slower and laggier (and vastly worse user experience) than stripping down the code to its essentials without any user interface, and then layering a new user interface on top of it.
It should be easy to compile the stripped down gui-less MicropolisEngine and YootTowerEngine with a native C++ compiler and make a new desktop user interface to it, once the work of stripping it down and removing the user interface code and replacing it with abstract interfaces is done. After I did that with the SimCity/Micropolis code, I integrated it with Python using SWIG, and wrote a PyGTK interface, and also a Python web server based interface that ran the user interface in the web browser with OpenLaszlo/Flash, communicating via AMF.
I want to push as much of the user interface out of the engine and into JavaScript/HTML/Canvas/SvelteKit as possible, since it's so much easier to make much better more advanced user interfaces with a modern stack than trying to deal with a crufty Windows emulation layer, and make improvements to that kind of code.
One thing I want to do is to make both Micropolis and Tower able to export lots of raw and cooked data, telemetry, and events, so I can use d3, Grafana, and other off-the-shelf data visualization tools to analyze and display the game state and history.
A couple decades ago an Earth Science professor Upmanu Lall at Columbia University proposed a great idea about developing an educational version of SimCity to use in his classes aimed at engaging students from other departments and getting them interested in data analysis and science. He wanted SimCity to simply be able to export spreadsheets of data, and have the students perform experiments and analyze the data using standard tools like Excel. A game like SimCity or SimTower would be an engaging way to pique the student's interest, that they could relate to, and motivate and teach a general literacy and understanding of spreadsheets and data analysis and visualization tools!
Here's the Educational SimCity proposal I wrote, but it didn't go anywhere until many years later when we finally talked EA into relicensing SimCity under GPL-3 for the One Laptop per Child project.
>Educational Multi Player SimCity for Linux Proposal
>Back in March 2002, Maxis told me they were interested in supporting the educational use of products like SimCity. Earlier, I had developed a multi player version of SimCity, which runs on Linux/X11, and was scriptable in TCL. Educators and researchers from Columbia University, MIT, IBM, Xerox and other educational and commercial institutions were excited about gaining access to this version of SimCity, and adapting it to teach and stimulate students' interest in urban planning, computer simulation and game programming.
>So I wrote this proposal and presented it to Maxis. Maxis was quite enthusiastic about the idea, invited me in to discuss it, and said they would write up a contract which enabled me to distribute Multi Player SimCity for Linux, and adapt it to the needs of our educational users.
>Unfortunately, it's been almost two years since I sent the proposal, and I have never heard anything back from Maxis about this project. The software still exists, works very well, and is ready to distribute. But I can't distribute this Educationally Oriented Multi Player SimCity for Linux, until I hear back from Maxis about the contract. Despite my repeated email and phone messages asking about the status, Maxis never got back to me about this, or offered any explaination. So as far as I know, it's still tied up at EA Legal. I still wonder if they dropped the ball, or if they will finally come through after two years.
>SimCity.edu Proposal to Maxis
>Don Hopkins ported SimCity to Unix in 1991, working as a contractor for DUX Software, who licensed it from Maxis for a ten-year duration. He developed a cooperative networked multi player version of SimCity, released in 1993. He subsequently worked with Will Wright for Maxis/EA, developing The Sims character animation system, content pipeline, programming tools and user interface. Hopkins ported SimCity to Linux and optimized it, so it's a viable product as well as an engaging educational tool.
>Hopkins has demonstrated Multi Player SimCity at ACM's InterCHI Conference, IBM's New Paradigms Workshop, the Exploratorium's Multimedia Playground, Interval's Electric Carnival, BayCHI at Xerox PARC, and MIT Media Lab's corporate sponsors meeting. Audiences are consistently excited about the possibilities of using SimCity educationally.
>The ten-year contract between Maxis and DUX Software to distribute the Unix version of SimCity has expired, so it's not currently available as a product. Hopkins would like to license the rights from Maxis/EA directly, to develop an educational version of SimCity Classic. It can be distributed and played over the Internet like the popular ActiveX SimCity Classic, and extended to support educational uses.
>Columbia University uses SimCity and SimEarth to help teach Civil and Environmental Engineering. They are actively redesigning the curriculum to incorporate simulation games like SimCity and SimEarth, as well as developing a new simulation platform. Professor Upmanu Lall has applied for an NFS grant to develop an open system called OPTIMUS (Open Platform for Teaching Integrated Modeling and Urban Simulation). Don Hopkins is collaborating with Columbia University to develop simulation tools for education and research.
>The educators at Columbia University are excited about and willing to financially support the development of educational versions of SimCity and SimEarth. Hopkins hopes to make Multi Player SimCity for Linux available at low cost for educational use, while also selling it commercially to the small but enthusiastic Linux gaming community. The NFS grant can fund the development of the current Multi Player SimCity Classic into an educational tool, for Columbia and other universities to use in their Civil and Environmental Engineering curricula.
>This project doesn't require funding or work from Maxis/EA, and will support itself by generating a positive stream of royalties from commercial sales. The long-term benefits to Maxis, EA and society are quite positive: Columbia University will measure the effect of SimCity and other simulation tools on their goals of improving student enrolment and test scores. They will publish the results at conferences and in research papers, and make them available for other schools to use.
>Maxis's intellectual property and time will be protected, because Hopkins will insulate Columbia from the SimCity source code, and will also insulate Maxis from supporting the educational version of SimCity. Multi Player SimCity is already extensible through the TCL/Tk scripting language, and Hopkins will provide the hooks necessary for Columbia to use SimCity educationally, though scripting languages and component technology, without releasing any proprietary Maxis source code.
>The initial proposal is for Hopkins and Maxis/EA to enter into a contract granting Hopkins the right to commercially develop and distribute SimCity Classic, and also possibly SimEarth. Hopkins will further develop the software for Columbia University's educational use (at no expense to Maxis or EA), with the overall design subject to the approval of Maxis and EA. Maxis/EA will receive royalties on all sales of the product, and will also receive proper credit for its educational uses. This proposal is a rough draft, to start a dialog toward an agreement that will benefit everyone.
Would it be possible to put the original Sim Tower/Yoot Tower code up as well as the Web version? I know people who are interested in porting out some of the Mac DLC to Windows platforms in particular
Once we get it cleaned up and have added MIT licensing and copyright notices to the code, it should be possible to build and release the Windows sources, but the Nintendo Gameboy sources are chock full of proprietary Nintendo stuff. I would love to release a Windows build that fixes the save crashing bug that LGR encountered in his excellent video about Yoot Tower. He says the Mac version was rock solid but the Window version crashed. But I don't have the Mac code, just the Windows.
>My Mac: When you developed YOOT TOWER and were preparing it for release, you made it very clear that you wanted the Mac version to appear first before the Windows version. Why did you do so and what resistance did you encounter?
>Mr. Saito: In making the initial prototypes, the Mac was a great sketchbook. However, in America, much more so than in Japan there is a lot of skepticism toward the Mac market. That was a very difficult point from a marketing angle.
>Yutaka Saitou was at one point considered a Mac Evangelist. He published "Under the Apple Tree" (Ringo no ki no shita de, 林檎の樹の下で) which details the turbulent events between the first Apple computer being imported into Japan and Apple Japan being established. He also published "The Secrets of Macintosh's creation" (Makkintosshu Tanjou no Hiwa, マッキントッシュ誕生の秘話), which features interviews with both the founding members and other core developers.
>Yoot Saito was previously best known as a Mac-focused developer who created The Tower, a tower management game that SimCity studio Maxis released worldwide as SimTower. (Its sequel, The Tower II, came to be known as Yoot Tower outside Japan.) After Seaman and its PS2 sequel, Saito designed Odama, a pinball-strategy hybrid for the GameCube where players used voice commands to direct soldiers on the table.
>On Commodore 64, “Micropolis” had been a full-screen game controlled entirely with a keyboard and its palette of tools was laid out at the bottom of the screen. On Mac, it became a windowed application with mouse control, a MacPaint-inspired tool palette and menu system, and a separate window for the mini-map. It was, in essence, an interactive paint program — a MacPaint for city building. As the player painted her city on the canvas, its population would fall and rise and its visual appearance would evolve before her eyes. Its roads would come to life with traffic, its busiest districts patrolled by a helicopter, and its residents would build (or sometimes abandon) homes and businesses. [...]
>SimCity made a particularly great impact on Japanese Macintosh enthusiast Yutaka “Yoot” Saito. He felt the Nintendo Entertainment System games he had played before SimCity were more suitable for kids. They had bright, colorful graphics and animation and cute, synthesized sounds, and they tended to be fast-paced. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in loudness — in frantic button presses and lots of on-screen action. SimCity seemed totally different. It was visually very static, and it wasn’t even displayed in color.
>Above: Yoot Tower, the pseudo-sequel to SimTower
>But Saito thought it was very smart. In its simple graphics he could imagine many rich and colorful scenes around a city. “I didn’t leave the Macintosh for almost twenty-four hours,” he recalls. “I so much admired who created this genius and crazy software.” SimCity had an aura not unlike the Mac itself. Saito had been attracted to the Mac’s revolutionary air soon after it first came out. Apple’s presence in Japan was tiny at the time, as Japanese computers such as the NEC PC-98 and MSX dominated, but he grew fascinated as he learnt more about the Mac through advertisements and magazine articles. It appealed to him as a charismatic counterculture, a kind of rock ‘n’ roll for his generation. He desperately wanted to be part of it.
>But it seemed so far away — almost unreachable. Neither the thriving online Mac shareware scene nor the Apple team and the excitement of all the top developers appearing at the Macworld Expo were at all accessible. Japan had a few Mac-centric magazines and a small (but growing) Macworld Expo in Tokyo, but with limited online access it was very much detached from the happenings elsewhere in the Macintosh world.
>In homage to SimCity’s brilliance, Saito decided to make his own simulation game for the Mac. Rather than asking the player to plan and manage a city, he opted for a single skyscraper.
>With an interface similar to SimCity, The Tower swapped residential blocks for condominiums and hotel suites; commercial zones for offices, restaurants, and shops; and industry for parking, medical centers, housekeeping and laundry facilities, recycling facilities, and the like. In place of roads and rail, it had stairs, escalators, and elevators. The goal was to build a hundred-floor tower with a five-star rating. To get there, the player divided her time between expanding the tower, managing elevator traffic and capacity, monitoring the happiness of tenants (their silhouettes turned increasingly red as their happiness decreased), and handling business affairs such as number of staff and cost of a room, office, or condo.
>The Tower took around three years to develop. It came out for Mac in Japan in 1994. “It became a kind of phenomenon,” Saito says. “I was introduced on a TV show and in some magazines.” He also received multiple offers to adapt the game for the console market. A short time later Saito heard from Jeff Braun, the president of SimCity publisher Maxis, who had been informed by Will Wright that his game was “interesting”. Maxis cut a deal for international publishing rights and re-released it as SimTower. Its international success didn’t match the celebrity scale of the Japanese release, but SimTower nonetheless became a bestseller and cult favorite.
Have you asked Mr Saito if they still have the Mac version in particular? A lot of the content seems specific depending on the platform it was released on. Getting everything archived would be great for preservation
I will ask him! It would be great to have the original Mac versions. There are some other weird versions like 3DO and Sega Saturn, but I'm afraid they may be lost in the sands to time. I'm collaborating with some game archivists (like Phil Salvador, who wrote the article about SimRefinery that led to its recovery, and his Video Game History Foundation), and Olde Sküül game developers Rebecca Heineman, who can help preserve the original sources, and even recover the original tools and SDKs and get them to build, so people can study and build and renovate the original sources.
I played a big game of Project Highrise (and of SimTower too) just recently, to immerse myself in the games and make them fresh in my mind before working on porting. I think Project Highrise is great! But in the same way I also appreciate the original SimCity 8-bit pixel graphics, and low-tech graphics in The Sims 1, I think SimTower still stands on its own as a game that can still be thoroughly enjoyed.
Especially once we develop an SDK to enable user created content, that lets you add your own rooms and people, and program them with JavaScript, thanks to the way emscripten + embind lets you subclass and implement C++ classes in JavaScript, calling back and forth between the core C++ game engine and the JavaScript user interface and plug-ins.
The YootTower repo README quotes some info about TowerKit that was used to develop many expansion packs for The Tower II that were only released in Japan, and I plan on making a more flexible modern version of TowerKit in the form of a Yoot Tower SDK that lets you dynamically script and download extensions in JavaScript instead of modifying and recompiling C++ code.
>Tower Kit is optional software for The Tower II. In The Tower II, you can select the stage where you want to start the game using the concept of a "map." The Tower II package comes with three maps: "Shinjuku Subcenter," "Hawaii Diamond Head," and "Kegon Falls," and the "Tower Kit" adds these maps. By installing this tower kit, a new stage game will begin. Tower kits don't just add more stages. Each map has new features, allowing you to play a completely new game.
>Please try the "Tower Kit" which allows for infinite variations.
>A love story between you, the person in charge of the Liberty Island redevelopment project, and two men and women who are your subordinates. Your work will have a subtle influence on the course of your love life. The Tower II is the first attempt at a crossover between redevelopment and love, set in New York. What is the ending...?
I did a similar thing for Micropolis/SimCity more than a decade ago, but with Python and SWIG, instead of emscripten and embind, so you could program your own agents (like PacBot, who follows the roads and eats traffic) and zones (like the Church of Pacmania, which worships and attracts PacBots, and causes lots of traffic to feed them).
A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins.
Back when I was porting SimCity to Unix in the early 90's, Maxis gave me the source code to SimEarth too, but I never had the chance to port it, and don't have permission now unfortunately. I'd love to make a modern version of SimEarth and SimAnt too, but neither of them were as successful or engaging a game as SimCity. Will Wright discusses SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000 in this 1996 talk he gave to Terry Winnograd's user interface class, and also demonstrates a very early version of The Sims when it was called Dollhouse. His point was that SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, but SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse was the next thing he was working on, which became The Sims. I'd also love to make a modern version of The Sims 1, but I don't have permission for that either, and have never been able to talk anyone at EA to reproduce the miracle it took to release SimCity.
But I'm delighted and grateful to have the chance to work with Yoot Saito on SimTower instead, since he retained all the rights to his code, and we're both on the same page about educational games, constructionist education, and our respect for Alan Kay and Seymour Papert's philosophy about teaching kids to program and motivating it with games. A visual programming language in Micropolis and Yoot Tower would be great (that's the long term plan), like the SimAntics VPL in The Sims 1 (but much easier to use and extend).
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26:
Here's an article I wrote about that talk right after attending it, that I updated in later years after working with Will on The Sims, and then even more recently when Stanford finally published the video of the talk decades later:
Oh man, used to play this sooo much. Single player and multi...what a wonderful game. This was back when Softice ruled the world so I'd have infinite health/ammo in SP mode =]. I'd love to get this building. If I wasn't crap at c++ I'd try to help.
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.
I don't. That was developed by Volition. Parallax was split into Outrage and Volition. I never had access to that code, and I think Mike Kulas would need to be the one to release it.
And now, for free, an opinion. I enjoyed descent, but did not like freespace, I am sure there is fun subtlety to the game, but I bounced off it hard, combat in open space ended up being just these really boring circle battles. Much funner combat when you have tight claustrophobic corridors to deal with.
I personally loved the Freespace games, and have taken advantage of the awesome work by the FreeSpace Source Code Project to replay them over the years. That said, FreeSpace is Descent in name only, and totally understand how folks who had very fond memories of playing Descent feeling a bait in switch when getting FreeSpace and having it not be very Descent-like. I mean, heck, aside from the Glide mechanic, there's no real Six-Axis style movement, you know, the hallmark of Descent.
They're just different games. I love them both for what they are. It's a shame that Interplay tried to use the Descent name to sell more copies, because even if there was some minor inspirations in development, Freespace definitely stands solidly on its own two feet without the tie.
I was thinking about Microsoft’s Terminal Velocity, and I miss that you can play the sountrack CD. Descend and TV are exactly the same, do they share the same codebase?
To whoever downvoted me... you clearly never played Descent or looked up the cheat codes.
I dusted off D1-D3 a few years ago and played them in DOS Box and man, what a trip! Going from playing it in my teens to playing it in my 40's was something else. It was a lot harder than I remembered, but also a lot BETTER than I remembered.
I'd kill to see a modern reboot in 4k. Keep the gameplay largely the same, but get the graphics and physics up to snuff.
Back in the day, I played for hours and hours on my 486DX2-66 on Windows 95, with something like 64MB memory, and a 120MB and 40MB drive compressed with DriveSpace. Those were the days. I played mostly with keyboard. I tried switching to mouse, but it didn't feel as good as the keyboard.
I thought I was good at the game, and fast, until I joined an Internet game one day and kept getting pwned by some dude with a pile driver who was camped out at spawn. I realized I'd never be that fast, and never played the online version again :D
I know I will be in a small minority, but I miss the way changes were
documented and explained at the top of the source code.
Makes it super easy to get a feel for it and super easy to search for
comments on changes or jump to the part of the code you need to work on.
Yes the drawbacks are sometimes a huge list of comments before the source
code even begins, but you can quickly jump with a search for " */"
It makes the files larger, and you should be able to pull the same from whatever versioning system you use, but that involves context change
and a separate program (though if you an IDE it may be integrated).
Would be fun to have a git tool that mimics this.
Best of both worlds.
You can give a path to git log, e.g., `git log --follow -- file.txt`
If you'd put some text markers in the file's headers, e.g., `<history></history>`, you could create a script that gets the git log for each file that contains the markers and puts the log between those markers. Keep the markers to be able to rerun the script. Also need a script to purge the log when commiting.
wow, I can't imagine having to scroll through 500+ lines of "logs" in every single file of that source code as a developer every time I need to find/edit code.
