Another classic has been given the open source treatment, with Descent 3 from Outrage Entertainment now available under the MIT license. This release was put up on GitHub by Kevin Bentley, one of the original developers.
Awesome news, and I look Forward to what folks make of this.
Shout-out to “Overload”, the spiritual successor that is great fun. VR version is included in case you need to aggressively lose your lunch. Fantastic game.
Descent is what got me into gaming. I mean, I occasionally gamed before, but never like after discovering Descent.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Another classic has been given the open source treatment, with Descent 3 from Outrage Entertainment now available under the MIT license.
This release was put up on GitHub by Kevin Bentley, one of the original developers.
It has a bit of an interesting history as it was originally ported to Linux way back in 2000 from Loki Entertainment, which didn’t age particularly well.
This includes the ‘1.5’ patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago.
Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format).
A lot of this code was written by a really great team, but keep in mind we were much younger and less experienced back then.
The original article contains 302 words, the summary contains 120 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.
“We had very little time and were crunching for months”
“I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”
“I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”
It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.
Was 3 any good? Last one I played was 2 and that was pretty awesome.
I loved them all, but if I had to choose
Descent 2 > Descent 1 > Descent 3
3 was a well done transition into a new type of game engine. Good advancement of the story. Worth playing if you are a fan of the first 2. Felt like the developers cared for and stuck to the vision.
I only played 1 and that was awesome! 6DOF master race!
Playing Descent II online was one of the highlights of my childhood back in the early days of internet gaming. The community was excellent too, with a lot of custom maps created using the D2 Level Builder, which I got pretty good with myself haha.
nice
I smell a Descent 3 HD remake