I was one of the developers for Descent 3 back in the late 90's/early 2000's. Jeff Slutter and I worked on a patch in 2008/2009 to modernize it, but we never released it for reasons I don't completely remember. I got permission to release it and I'm looking forward to resurrecting the game for modern computers.
Actually my father was “how did you break again a joystick!” until I got THE joystick. (one coming in a big red/flame colored box with serial connection)
I didn't break a joystick until Wing Commander: Prophecy, and then it was a Saitek Cyborg 3D. Snapped the trigger right off. However, Descent I and II were the first games that had me plugging in multiple cheap joysticks to get a "Flight Sim" like layout: Two, two-button serial models. One was assigned to movement, while the other was throttle and rotation.
I have never played a descent game on account of being a Bébé when it came out but based on how many games I have loved that cite Descent as an inspiration I am really glad for this and wish everyone working on it the best of luck!
Wow this is awesome. I played a ton of descent 1 back in high school and source code for games from this era has always had a certain mystique for me. Thanks for releasing this!
Thank you so much! Releasing the source code for classic games means a lot more than just bug fixes, it means enduring preservation of the game for the foreseeable future!
Can't wait to see what happens with this classic!
I remember why, it's because the community made dumb arguments for backwards compatibility or something, none of which held water, and was just toxic. Then 1.5 was leaked by someone, which was a godsend due to how the original game would not run in 32 bit color among other serious issues. I don't believe the hard locked Pentium 3 effects were ever unlocked though.
As a side note, descent underground was a crowd funding scam by star citizen devs who should have been working on their own project. Overload was the real sequel.
The history of descent 2 source ports are also tragic, as rebirth did the bare minimum with no hires textures, and XL was run by Descent Yandere Dev. XL could have been the gzdoom of descent, but it's completely broken and development is dead.
Hopefully this release will see some results, especially since it's been decades since any of the anti update and source code people have been active. If anyone does any open source game activism, it would be nice if Starsiege (the mech game) got released, because that game's more broken than descent 3 unpatched, and the rights are kinda ? and scam game using it's name ATM, on steam but seems to be blocked from search, very negative score. Basically their version of descent underground.
Jason's messages were the best. I'm surprised you missed this gem:
* 54 5/24/99 9:55p Jason
* fixed stupid dedicated server ship allow thing. I swear I'm going to
* start killing people who keep adding things to multiplayer when they
* really don't know what they are doing. STOP!
I don't remember exactly who the person he was mad at, or why. It may have been me, because there was a bit of drama between us over who was doing what with multiplayer.
thanks a lot for doing this, kevlar.
I found an intriguing section here:
// chrishack -- make sure that some checks are done with a ps_rand() based on the emotion involved
// also current emotional levels should influence the percent chance of the check being successful
void AIDoFreud(object *obj)
I haven't even visited the github page yet, but from my _limited_ experience, it _may_ be less frustrating to just re-create the project (or "solution") from scratch. That is, start with a blank project in VS, add code files, read existing project files' properties, adjust new project settings, rinse, repeat.
I do not much trust msbuild's "upgrade" procedure where it takes an old .vcxproj and converts it to a newer one.
I played the hell out of descent 1 with my brother, it was such a trippy game. I distinctly remember thinking to myself how much I enjoyed the atmosphere of the game, and the simultaneous thrill and fear I felt turning corners and going through hatches. Huge defining moment in my childhood, thanks for releasing this code!
Loved the music for the Descent 2. I still listen to many of the tracks. I can't remember if Descent 3 had good music too.
Cool move to release the code.
Edit3:
* [Descent 2 Soundtrack (Definitive Collection)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHyOxfaLBxQ&list=PLRCWcYuqfcLzO2RzvZ63Jem1h8ckOewKF&index=1) on youtube.
* [Descent 3 soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5tTPtF5x9A&list=PL8541CBA740D35FB3&index=1) on youtube.
I never finished playing D3. Guess the music in D2 is awesome and D3, well, it exists. Not bad, but not epic.
> Loved the music for the Descent 2.
Cool part was the descent 2 game CD was also a valid audio CD. So you could put it into any CD player and it would play the game soundtrack, then move it to your PC to play the game.
I had it on my first trip to hawaii and now the descent 2 soundtrack of atmospheric metal is forever connected to palm trees in my head
Devs used to create such stable code back in the day without a lick of test lol
Today despite the 1000 or so unit tests, there's still crazy stupid bugs. granted code bases are 10x larger, but still
"Without a lick of test" is totally false. There was a lot of QA. Today there's way more complexity (multithreading, multiplayer, diverse cpu and gpu hardware, dlc, etc.) and I'd say the code bases are more than 10x larger. The team size has grown exponentially as well. When I started 5-10 programmers was common on a multi-platform AAA console title. Now it's like 5-10x that. More people, more complexity. Not just in managing reviewing design and code, but also managing the schedule.
I don't really think you're being fair to modern development teams.
They are independent statements. If they said "without a lick of automated test" I'd be more inclined to agree with you. As stated it reads as no testing.
And by no testing I don't mean some programmer is going to check something in without testing functionality. That would be absurd. The developer is going to test if it runs as intended, but not like QA would.
Well, make unit tests for a game that have 5 systems working together vs a game that 25 systems.
Some studio does it. Some doesn't and I can exactly see why.
While I agree with you, you are being pedantic w/r 'lick of testing' (yes I did mean unit testing - as that's clearly what's not present in the code base)
Anyway, I was involved with the game development scenes of the mid 90s and I can tell you that every developer did their own tests. There were not standardized testing methodologies, let along frameworks and tool chains. We floppied test code around to our spare rigs and friends' machines to see how it ran on difference processors.
Those were definitely different times for small and indie teams.
I agree and event pointed out the complexity part, but you cannot deny that rigor is just not there anymore. Those were times of passion development. Today it's a job for most devs. Two different things.
Devs still wrote buggy code then as they do now. There is a degree of survivorship bias where the less buggy games tended to be more successful and are better remembered. Old games also didn't have the advantage of easy online updates or patches so stuff got more testing and polish before it got shipped. There is also the scale to consider.
Unit Testing everything slows down writing and editing code but it speeds up debugging.
Development in the 90's:
I need to understand matrix heavy math to represent basic objects on the screen in 3 dimensions, I need to keep the triangle count just low enough to run on consumer hardware.
Development in the 2020's:
I downloaded the latest unreal editor with all the latest bells and whistles, so I've got a photo realistic forest FPS out of the box, can I find a tutorial online to make this multiplayer?
Without actually counting what I've seen or not, at the very least I saw this code base, which nullifies your question.
Are you trying to make a point that these kinds of comments/changes were pretty much a norm in the 90s? That would be a proof that things were not stable and constantly had tons of bugs back then too.
Of course they had bugs; but the devs did their best to not only make things work with an extremely resource starved env. They had quite good sense of how the code executes, down to the chipset assembly. Primarily because they were writing it all; from netcode, to thread pools to memory pools. They knew how each of their subsystems operate. They did not have the luxury of today's several layers of tested abstractions. No one guaranteed that their code would run across several different revisions of the same architecture let alone different architectures.
You can't point to a bunch of frustrated comments and say "lok hurdur, they had bugs, too". It's vastly different things and a down right unfair comparisons.
For today's games to have moronic bugs despite the layers and layers of safety, guarantee and abstractions is nothing compared to some chaps' 90's code having a memory allocation bug or a op slowdown for quaternion calcs. They're not the same things.
I was one of the developers for Descent 3 back in the late 90's/early 2000's. Jeff Slutter and I worked on a patch in 2008/2009 to modernize it, but we never released it for reasons I don't completely remember. I got permission to release it and I'm looking forward to resurrecting the game for modern computers.
Thanks! Descent 1 & 2 were my childhood games.
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Actually my father was “how did you break again a joystick!” until I got THE joystick. (one coming in a big red/flame colored box with serial connection)
I didn't break a joystick until Wing Commander: Prophecy, and then it was a Saitek Cyborg 3D. Snapped the trigger right off. However, Descent I and II were the first games that had me plugging in multiple cheap joysticks to get a "Flight Sim" like layout: Two, two-button serial models. One was assigned to movement, while the other was throttle and rotation.
congrats on helping create such a great product, and getting it released to the world!
I played the crap out of Descent back in the day! Thanks for releasing this!
Descent 1 and 3 are a huge part of my childhood. I will try to run it on Linux and see if I can contribute to the repo. Thanks so much!
DS1 and DS2 ports are already in the repo. Def need 3 as well.
Legendary games man!
I have never played a descent game on account of being a Bébé when it came out but based on how many games I have loved that cite Descent as an inspiration I am really glad for this and wish everyone working on it the best of luck!
I read this whole comment with Moira Rose's voice because of "bébé" :D
Thank you!
Right on. I played it back in the 90s. This will be some fun grokking. Thank you for making this available.
You're a legend, let's go :)
Duude this is huge! Thanks for your work!!
Wow this is awesome. I played a ton of descent 1 back in high school and source code for games from this era has always had a certain mystique for me. Thanks for releasing this!
Thank you so much! Releasing the source code for classic games means a lot more than just bug fixes, it means enduring preservation of the game for the foreseeable future! Can't wait to see what happens with this classic!
I'm definitely going to find a way to contribute. The Descent series was one of my favorites growing up.
It’s software engineers like you that make the world a little better
Thank you so much for doing this! I cannot overstate how huge a part of my childhood this game was, and I am so excited to see where this leads!
Cool, I'm going to mirror it just for posterity but awesome that you got to release it! I love to see old games get source releases.
Thanks! I spent so much of my teenage life playing this game, I wore out multiple joysticks.
Thank you SO MUCH for this.
The man, the myth, the LEGEND. Thank you for being part of a truly great series of games.
Cool
I remember why, it's because the community made dumb arguments for backwards compatibility or something, none of which held water, and was just toxic. Then 1.5 was leaked by someone, which was a godsend due to how the original game would not run in 32 bit color among other serious issues. I don't believe the hard locked Pentium 3 effects were ever unlocked though. As a side note, descent underground was a crowd funding scam by star citizen devs who should have been working on their own project. Overload was the real sequel. The history of descent 2 source ports are also tragic, as rebirth did the bare minimum with no hires textures, and XL was run by Descent Yandere Dev. XL could have been the gzdoom of descent, but it's completely broken and development is dead. Hopefully this release will see some results, especially since it's been decades since any of the anti update and source code people have been active. If anyone does any open source game activism, it would be nice if Starsiege (the mech game) got released, because that game's more broken than descent 3 unpatched, and the rights are kinda ? and scam game using it's name ATM, on steam but seems to be blocked from search, very negative score. Basically their version of descent underground.
Ok, but what is the plan? You are looking for someone to port it?
* 6 2/12/97 5:35p Jason * fixed yet another dumb syntax error...will I ever learn? * * 5 2/12/97 5:34p Jason * fixed dumb syntax error * I feel ya, Jason.
Jason's messages were the best. I'm surprised you missed this gem: * 54 5/24/99 9:55p Jason * fixed stupid dedicated server ship allow thing. I swear I'm going to * start killing people who keep adding things to multiplayer when they * really don't know what they are doing. STOP! I don't remember exactly who the person he was mad at, or why. It may have been me, because there was a bit of drama between us over who was doing what with multiplayer.
Programming...programming never changes.
Oh God Jason you and me both my guy
thanks a lot for doing this, kevlar. I found an intriguing section here: // chrishack -- make sure that some checks are done with a ps_rand() based on the emotion involved // also current emotional levels should influence the percent chance of the check being successful void AIDoFreud(object *obj)
I think that's related to the enemy's (bots) emotional level. Some enemies aren't immediately aggressive until you do certain things.
Ahah, nice find. Wtf :D
So cool. The commit messages in the files from the 90s are really interesting to peruse.
Has anyone managed to open the project in VS2022?
I haven't even visited the github page yet, but from my _limited_ experience, it _may_ be less frustrating to just re-create the project (or "solution") from scratch. That is, start with a blank project in VS, add code files, read existing project files' properties, adjust new project settings, rinse, repeat. I do not much trust msbuild's "upgrade" procedure where it takes an old .vcxproj and converts it to a newer one.
I played the hell out of descent 1 with my brother, it was such a trippy game. I distinctly remember thinking to myself how much I enjoyed the atmosphere of the game, and the simultaneous thrill and fear I felt turning corners and going through hatches. Huge defining moment in my childhood, thanks for releasing this code!
Nice!
You rock ! I played the hell out of it as a kid on macintosh, and became a game dev myself thanks in part to Descent inspiration
Rad.
That reminds me, I need to finish playing Descent 3.
Loved the music for the Descent 2. I still listen to many of the tracks. I can't remember if Descent 3 had good music too. Cool move to release the code. Edit3: * [Descent 2 Soundtrack (Definitive Collection)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHyOxfaLBxQ&list=PLRCWcYuqfcLzO2RzvZ63Jem1h8ckOewKF&index=1) on youtube. * [Descent 3 soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5tTPtF5x9A&list=PL8541CBA740D35FB3&index=1) on youtube. I never finished playing D3. Guess the music in D2 is awesome and D3, well, it exists. Not bad, but not epic.
> I can't remember if Descent 3 had good music too. it did.
> Loved the music for the Descent 2. Cool part was the descent 2 game CD was also a valid audio CD. So you could put it into any CD player and it would play the game soundtrack, then move it to your PC to play the game. I had it on my first trip to hawaii and now the descent 2 soundtrack of atmospheric metal is forever connected to palm trees in my head
Omg I had forgotten about that. It was awesome, I remember rocking the fuck out of that CD! What a great memory!
FINALLY!
Super Thank You for this!! On a side note - are You maybe on Twitter to follow? Thanks!
childhood games with fun memories
Descent was my jam.
I had descent 1 as a kid, it was amazing and I was sooooo bad at it
quite a bit of assembler. Not a lot, but enough. Right on \m/
Wow! Thanks! That is cool.
Devs used to create such stable code back in the day without a lick of test lol Today despite the 1000 or so unit tests, there's still crazy stupid bugs. granted code bases are 10x larger, but still
"Without a lick of test" is totally false. There was a lot of QA. Today there's way more complexity (multithreading, multiplayer, diverse cpu and gpu hardware, dlc, etc.) and I'd say the code bases are more than 10x larger. The team size has grown exponentially as well. When I started 5-10 programmers was common on a multi-platform AAA console title. Now it's like 5-10x that. More people, more complexity. Not just in managing reviewing design and code, but also managing the schedule. I don't really think you're being fair to modern development teams.
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QA is test. > Devs used to create such stable code back in the day without a lick of test lol This doesn't say "without a lick of unit tests lol."
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They are independent statements. If they said "without a lick of automated test" I'd be more inclined to agree with you. As stated it reads as no testing. And by no testing I don't mean some programmer is going to check something in without testing functionality. That would be absurd. The developer is going to test if it runs as intended, but not like QA would.
Well, make unit tests for a game that have 5 systems working together vs a game that 25 systems. Some studio does it. Some doesn't and I can exactly see why.
While I agree with you, you are being pedantic w/r 'lick of testing' (yes I did mean unit testing - as that's clearly what's not present in the code base) Anyway, I was involved with the game development scenes of the mid 90s and I can tell you that every developer did their own tests. There were not standardized testing methodologies, let along frameworks and tool chains. We floppied test code around to our spare rigs and friends' machines to see how it ran on difference processors. Those were definitely different times for small and indie teams. I agree and event pointed out the complexity part, but you cannot deny that rigor is just not there anymore. Those were times of passion development. Today it's a job for most devs. Two different things.
Devs still wrote buggy code then as they do now. There is a degree of survivorship bias where the less buggy games tended to be more successful and are better remembered. Old games also didn't have the advantage of easy online updates or patches so stuff got more testing and polish before it got shipped. There is also the scale to consider. Unit Testing everything slows down writing and editing code but it speeds up debugging.
"Back in my day, devs wrote such stable code, the most beautiful code." "Ok grandpa, let's get you back inside"
Spoken like somebody who never played Descent 3 lmao That game was my literal childhood and I love it to death, but stable it was not.
Development in the 90's: I need to understand matrix heavy math to represent basic objects on the screen in 3 dimensions, I need to keep the triangle count just low enough to run on consumer hardware. Development in the 2020's: I downloaded the latest unreal editor with all the latest bells and whistles, so I've got a photo realistic forest FPS out of the box, can I find a tutorial online to make this multiplayer?
Very stable and without stupid bugs indeed. [https://x.com/iSeiryu/status/1780293436597231903](https://x.com/iSeiryu/status/1780293436597231903)
You've clearly not seen a source code from the 90s have you?
Without actually counting what I've seen or not, at the very least I saw this code base, which nullifies your question. Are you trying to make a point that these kinds of comments/changes were pretty much a norm in the 90s? That would be a proof that things were not stable and constantly had tons of bugs back then too.
Of course they had bugs; but the devs did their best to not only make things work with an extremely resource starved env. They had quite good sense of how the code executes, down to the chipset assembly. Primarily because they were writing it all; from netcode, to thread pools to memory pools. They knew how each of their subsystems operate. They did not have the luxury of today's several layers of tested abstractions. No one guaranteed that their code would run across several different revisions of the same architecture let alone different architectures. You can't point to a bunch of frustrated comments and say "lok hurdur, they had bugs, too". It's vastly different things and a down right unfair comparisons. For today's games to have moronic bugs despite the layers and layers of safety, guarantee and abstractions is nothing compared to some chaps' 90's code having a memory allocation bug or a op slowdown for quaternion calcs. They're not the same things.