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"Descent" Goes For a Crowdfunding Reboot (and a Linux Version)
New submitter boll writes A bunch of Star Citizen alumns have taken it upon themselves to resurrect the hit game franchise Descent, backed by a Kickstarter campaign. If you are a semi-oldtimer on the PC gaming scene, you may fondly remember how the original Descent was among the first to provide 6 genuine degrees of freedom during intense late night LAN gaming sessions."
Reader elfindreams adds: It will be released as a PC/Mac/Linux game and will include a single player campaign and multiplayer with up to 64 combatants on a map! They are working with a number of members of the current D1/D2 community to make sure the flight/gameplay feels "old school" and they are updating the technology and game to a new generation.
For maximum bazooka barfing!
There was no game more puke inducing than Descent 2 on the VR headsets of the day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The kick starter page clearly says it has a single player campaign as does the video.
the summary didn't but who reads the article anyway
"Peterson has big plans for Descent Underground, which will be both single- and multiplayer and will be set as a prequel, telling the story of how the games' Post-Terran Mining Corporation came to be. "
Even 64 player games are already "arm rocket launcher, fire blindly for maximum frags. Don't worry, you'll be dead before you're out of rockets" most of the time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Depends on your definition of "pure 64-bit"...
Many games offer a 64-bit client, but they generally either default to the 32-bit client and you have to manually launch in 64-bit mode *or* they have a launcher that decides which client to launch for you.
World of Warcraft, for example, has a 64-bit client.
There was another version - Descent: Online - that was featured on one of the first online game services, ENGAGE Games Online, launched by Interplay in 1995. That was my second IT job. I think we supported up to 32 players in a single game, divided into two teams.
I was more into Rolemaster: Magestorm (a multiplayer FPS/RPG from Mythic Entertainment, same studio as Dark Age of Camelot),.
Edith Keeler Must Die
How the fuck can you be an "alumnus" of something THAT ISN'T EVEN RELEASED YET?
Seriously, the dizzying anticipatory (or desperately self-justifying, depending on how you view people pouring $70+ million into the kickstarter) hype has now apparently even crossed the bounds of 'pedestrian' chronology.
Any day now I'm expecting the nostalgic articles about how "great" Star Citizen was, along with triumphal marketing videos about how it redefined an entire genre and 'set the standard' for all the games that followed.
-Styopa
Man, can you imagine how AWESOME a Zork reboot would be? Think of what you could do with it these days. User-selectable fonts, boldface *and* italics, and... dare I dream?... SUB-PIXEL RENDERING! How spooky would it be when your torch goes out to have your text dim turn by turn until you're finally eaten by that grue! To have subtle changes in typeface be a clue in the maze of twisty passages, all alike? To bask in the awe-inspiring majesty of Flood Control Dam #3 as represented by 72pt text?
Damn, where's the Kickstarter page? I wanna pledge NOW!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Just HOW MANY & which games ARE pure 64-bit nowadays?
There is a reason why most games are still 32-bit apps.
The big advantage of 64-bit instructions is that they can handle large amounts of RAM. If you aren't using a ton of RAM, there's little benefit to switching instruction sets. Until recently, most high-budget games were targeted at consoles with tiny amounts of RAM.
Even today, brand new computers are shipping with 4GB ram. I'm not just talking about Surface Pros and Macbook airs... Alienware is selling a dedicated gaming PC with only 4GB.
PC game developers know that requiring more than 4GB would sacrifice a chunk of their audience. So why bother porting to 64-bit? They can't really take advantage until all those 4GB machines go away.
Things are starting to turn around, though. Sony and MS have finally released consoles with 8GB ram, so we should expect to see 64-bit games appearing in the form of console ports.
I'm not particularly a fan of what they're doing with this new Descent game. Tech trees? Mining? Monetization? I know they're trying to bring it to the "Modern Age," but if they're going to change so much, I'm not so sure it will be a Descent game to me.
Sol Contingency, meanwhile, looks great and seems to be a lot closer to a proper Descent game, being made by fans who really know what they're doing. Sadly, although Interplay showed initial interest in them early last year, it seems they weren't enough of a "AAA" developer. So Interplay sent them a Cease and Desist. Fortunately, Sol Contingency is still being worked on, albeit with changes in the assets so that it doesn't infringe on the Descent IP. I'm a lot more eager to see what comes out of that game.
Then it doesn't matter whether you play 64, 128 or 256 people. Making the playing field large enough that the population density becomes one per cube mile where I'll be essentially duelling the one guy I can find means that the number of players doesn't matter anymore.
The point here is that at a certain cutoff it doesn't get better or more interesting anymore by adding more people and compensate it by stretching the maps. As soon as you can't sensibly put everyone into "viewing distance" anymore without making my scenario a viable one, you've reached the sensible limit of players. And I think 64 is pretty much where this is.
Of course it CAN be done sensibly if you start adding logistics, strategic positioning and such where you are essentially starting to play a MilSim game. But that's a totally different ballpark. Think Quake vs. ArmA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The makers of this game are working with the competitive Descent community to make sure the important elements are in the new game. This set of developers has a really good track record of involving the community in design decisions.
You don't even get 4 GB of addressable memory. Windows will give you 2 GB, or 3 if the user enables the "3GB switch". And that's straight process addressable memory, you're not actually going to be able to utilize the entire thing. You can do the sorts of heavy-handed memory management that game engines do on consoles to avoid fragmenting it too much, but your addressable space is being chopped up in variable amounts by third party shared libraries (Nvidia's driver takes a bit of memory over here, Steamworks takes a bit over there...), so you can't count on reliably allocating large pools out of it.
You also get access to *far* more registers in 64-bit mode.
This has a large potential to greatly improve performance.
Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a company that built protocol analyzers. During lunch break we would sometimes play Descent (2?). One day, a couple of us took a protocol analyzer and figured out which packet to push into the network to cause more mega missiles to appear (normally, there was only one or two in existence at a time).
When we played at lunch that day, we had a hilarious time when the biggest super weapon in the game became the primary weapon. Once the other players figured it out it became a grab/shoot/die fest.
One of the guys we pulled this on afterwords: "I picked up one mega missile and was like 'cool' then I got another, and another and another then I thought 'Holy Crap! These things are like water!"
Good times. Now, get back to work.
No matter where you go, there you are.