I believe Age of Empires 2 was rebooted on Steam because someone discovered there were about 3,000 games daily played on GameRanger, every day, for 5 years.
Descent was recently rebooted on Steam despite a much smaller community. I don't think they're particularly looking for big communities.
(The Steam version of Descent is basically a Dosbox container. If it's a game you really loved, pick up the Retro source port to replace Dosbox. Instructions: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php )
That site links to direct downloads of DXX-Rebirth and explains how to use them, but never actually links to the DXX-Rebirth home page. If you'd like to know what you're installing, go here: http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/
DXX-Rebirth is great, by the way, especially if you want to play with modern joysticks or gamepads. It's entirely unclear what the difference is between Rebirth and Rebirth-with-Retro-mod, which is annoying. I can at least confirm that unmodded Rebirth plays fine in single-player.
Retro was originally envisioned as a simple mod for Rebirth -- essentially a testing ground for fixes to be put into the next version. Over time, Rebirth development has slowed significantly (still hasn't incorporated the homing missile fix from August of 2013 [0]), and Retro has gotten pretty far ahead. It's now the de facto standard for the active multiplayer pilot community, including the Descent Rangers [1]. The developers of the two mods have different goals -- the Retro developer [2] is a competitive pilot [3] who wants the game to feel like the original with improvements in the metagame, while the Rebirth developer is a casual pilot who likes to make sweeping software architecture changes for stylistic reasons, which sometimes have unintended side effects. (No offense to zico; he's done a lot of good work and we're all grateful for it.)
The key improvements in Retro:
- homing missiles follow original trajectories (important for single player as well as multi!)
- netcode fixed. Shots travel in the same direction for all players (Rebirth's compression algorithm introduced errors of up to 30 degrees in shot direction.)
- gauss/vulcan ammo no longer duplicates inappropriately
- raised network PPS limit (30 packets per second max; it's beautiful!) as well as other network fixes [4]
- collision detection fixed. Shots which were almost exactly one frame away, and aimed at the edge of the ship, were detonating prematurely due to a vector math bug.
- host options: add extra primary and/or secondary weapons, cap the number of secondary weapons allowed in the level, reduce vulcan ammo, allow players to select their own ship colors
- improved calibration settings for joystick, mouse, and gamepads
You can find more at the github page and the bountysource page [5].
[2] Disclosure: I'm married to the Retro developer.
[3] Video from her perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLuTJz-pDaM#t=263 . That's a girls-vs-guys team game with Lioness, against the legendary "kiln" (Mr_1994) and "Arch-Angel" (Stan), at the Descent in Denver LAN in August.
Thanks for this, it's very helpful! It would be great if this (or a condensed version) was available somewhere front-facing and obvious, like the README.txt in the GitHub project, or else linked from there. I have a pet peeve about informative links that assume the reader already knows what the thing is. :)
Developer here. Sorry about that. I really do need to make a web site.
So far, Retro has been oriented toward the several dozen active competitive pilots out there. There are so few of us; we know and see each other regularly. When someone wants to know the difference between Retro and Rebirth, they just ask me. Actually, anymore what they say to each other is, "Just get Retro". ;)
I, uh, haven't really been thinking about new players.
The differences between Rebirth and Retro in a single player game are slight; Retro is mostly oriented toward fixing pain points in competitive multiplayer. That being said, there are a few differences.
Homers and smart missiles in Retro use the game's original algorithm for tracking, while those in Rebirth use something different. So both your missiles and the superhulk's missiles will behave differently in the two versions. Rebirth homers are better at going around corners, and while they're easier to dodge the first time, they're harder to ultimately lose. If you like to dodge homers in an open room on the higher difficulties, that's where you'll see a difference.
Homers in D1 Rebirth track proxies over robots / pilots. This is accidental D2 code contaimination, and has been removed in Retro. You'll notice this in levels where the robots lay proxies -- it was a particular problem for me on level 20, back when I was playing a lot of Rebirth.
Retro has dug a couple bugs out of the collision code, one of which was introduced by Rebirth, and one of which goes back to the original game release. If you like to make ninja close dodges, especially with homers, Retro performs the same every time; Rebirth will sometimes clip you with something that you actually dodged.
Other than that, it's little HUD chrome things. Retro has shield, energy, and ammo warnings. I like them in single player, but traditionalists generally don't.
Anyway -- Rebirth isn't a bad choice for single player. I've said in the past that the Rebirth community is more focused on single player and coop, while Retro is for hardcore competitive anarchy. That is okay with me. :)
The initial reluctance to put something like that together stemmed from not wanting to split the community (we're still close friends with some of the guys doing Rebirth development.) We'd still like for all of this to be mainline Rebirth stuff. The projects just keep going in different directions, and eventually we'll bite the bullet and put together an actual webpage describing what Rebirth is.
(If you're interested in multi, follow the directions in the initial link to get on the Rangers mumble server. If you have a particular interest in cooperative play, Whoskyd is the guy to talk to.)
