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Ill just keep playing my Descent 3 against others on the net, for free, thank you very much.

Yayaya Descent is dead (despite the enjoyable game I played in a level called circumference last night) yada yada.

Weeeeeeeeeeelllllll. Oh geee. There is Core Decision coming soon which will have the same server based gaming system, allowing users to play against each other GASP for free. Minus the cost of broadband of course.

Wonder what big greedy pigopolists like EA will think about that?

I don't know. Descent was pretty damn fast.

GameSpy is one of the worst offeders of this tactic. Which is unfortunate since my online game of choice for years has been Descent 3 and PlanetDescent is hosted by GameSpy. Over the past year, I have noticed that more and more, when I visit PlanetDescent that my CPU gets maxed out and its always certain adds from GameSpy doing it. More over, GameSpy has taken to putting up a splash add when you visit PlanetDescents top page. And the splash add will not go away untill you let GameSpy set a cookie.

Well recently this behaviour made me blow my stack. Even though Ive chatted with the maintainer of PlanetDescent a couple times and kind of like the guy, I basically told them to SHOVE IT right on thier forums and told them to remove my account.

I disslike having to use add blockers and havent up until this point, but I have been pushed over my threshold as another /.er already put it.

All this is very unfortunate because Descent 3 is still to this day a great game and there are still quite a few who play it online. But that number is slowly but surely dwindling. And behaviour like this by a major clearinghouse website for all things Descent, only serves to excelerate that trend.

*sigh* I guess my favorite online game truely is dead or on its death bed, and it seems that no game developer is going to come out with another 6DOF any time soon.

But PlanetDescent and GameSpy can GTH for all I care.

I know that there are actually a great deal of fans of Descent 3 who happen to be coders, who would be overjoyed if Volition would open source the code.

I must disagree with you on the "most human eyes can't distinguish the difference between 40 and 80fps." This may be somewhat more true of movies which are made with motion blur that blends the frames together. But you can certainly still tell the difference for the better when a movie is captured at 60fps rather than 30. Its not as big a difference as changing the framerate in a game is due to the motion blur but its certainly more visually pleasing when a video is captured and played at a higher framerate.

Back on track though, games have no motion blur... each frame is sharp and leads into the next with no blur. So in order to get a smooth look to it the framerate must be much higher in order to trick the brain into seeing a smoothly transitioning scene. I can easily tell the difference between framerates up to about 120fps, after which it becomes very difficult to discerne the changes.

Of course if you are playing a game and bump up your framerate without increasing your refresh rate as well, you are basically wasting rendering power as the monitor is only drawing the same number of frames as the current refresh rate. Keeping your refresh at or higher than your average framerate will make for a much more pleasant gaming experience.

Here is an ancient but still very much valid write-up on Framerate and Refresh Rate in regards to gaming:
Framerate and refresh rate write up

What's about Descent? Think it was released in 1994 and was already true 3D.
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Or just release the rights for it. There was a fan-written D4 in full-swing, but got canned by Interplay+Parallax. From what I understood, it was well along too.

Info here and here.

Sigh. Coulda been.

Or just release the rights for it. There was a fan-written D4 in full-swing, but got canned by Interplay+Parallax. From what I understood, it was well along too.

Info here and here.

Sigh. Coulda been.

I read in "Maximum PC" that HL2 was designed to run at a decent framerate on a DirectX 6 card.

This page shows what's turned off for various cards. Apparently Valve went out of their way to make a playable game on as many cards as possible.