Slashdot Mirror
'Descent' Creators Reunite For a New Game Called 'Overload' (steampowered.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer writes: In the early days of PC gaming, there was 3 major titles. Doom, Duke Nukem, and Descent. Descent was the first game to have true 3D environments and enemies, whereas Doom/Duke was considered "2.5D." Even though Descent never gained the popularity of Quake or Doom, it's had a dedicated fanbase that has continued playing and updating the game over the last 20 years.
The original programmers got together, and created a "Spiritual Successor" called Overload. Already garnering mostly postive reviews on Steam, the game features the same controls and overall feel of the original Descent, but without the frustration of having to set IRQ, DMA, and port jumpers for your sound blaster.
Engadget reports that the Overload devs "made sure to replicate what defined Descent and its two sequels, and what is still unique today: packing players in tight corridors to constrict their free-flying movement and transforming battles into maddening close-quarters space combat."
The game's lead designer tells them that first-person-shooter games "have evolved a lot, but that evolution has left some gaping holes in its wake."
The original programmers got together, and created a "Spiritual Successor" called Overload. Already garnering mostly postive reviews on Steam, the game features the same controls and overall feel of the original Descent, but without the frustration of having to set IRQ, DMA, and port jumpers for your sound blaster.
Engadget reports that the Overload devs "made sure to replicate what defined Descent and its two sequels, and what is still unique today: packing players in tight corridors to constrict their free-flying movement and transforming battles into maddening close-quarters space combat."
The game's lead designer tells them that first-person-shooter games "have evolved a lot, but that evolution has left some gaping holes in its wake."
Mike Kulas is an absolute legend. I remember hanging out in the Volition Inc forums back in the 1990s/2000s. I cut my teeth on game modding/design using the Descent Level Editor and the Freespace 2 level editor. I always wished someone would port the Descent 3 mission editor to Linux. The D3Edit sourcecode got released a couple years ago but noone's done anything with it.
So can you greybeards explain Descent? Read the articles, saw the videos, just looks like another game.
Read the Articles?? Why do you think I came to Slashdot? Ohh.. I see what you did there.
Descent was the first 3d game that let you travel in any direction, up down, left right,, forward, reverse, slide diagonally it was all there. It was intensely slickly packaged and it had very few competitors/analogues at the time. Forsaken was really the only other game in it's class. It basically created a genre (6dof shooter) all by itself. It is to 6DOF shooters as Doom and Quake were to the FPS Genre.
It was pretty unique for its time, really. Full 3D modelled enemies. Move in any direction. Came out a year before Quake so it will really first on the scene in terms of what these types of graphics engines could do. And it was an early example of advanced AI on the part of the enemies. They wouldn't just stay there and let you hit them on the harder modes. Pretty large modding community for the time as well. Not as large as Doom's, but still pretty darn big.
Great sound effects. Great soundtrack. Great level design. Definitely a highlight of mid-90s gaming.
I would think of it like this:
2D FPS games (original Wolfenstein) would be like driving a car in a simple grid of streets lined with buildings.
2.5D FPS games (Doom/DN) would be less like operating a car and more like operating a helicoptor - you have to maneuver in 3 dimensions with your vertical axis generally constant, and gravity is still a thing.
3D FPS (Descent) would be operating a starship in deep space with true vector-based navigation and 0 fixed axes...plus the ability to roll like an airplane.
Descent was devoid of gravity, so orientation was truly a challenge. To date it is the only game I've ever had to fight motion sickness.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
I believe this was one of the very first games that supported VR, although it was not so refined as with today solutions.
Terminal Velocity was another one, if my memory doesn't fail me...
Interplay sold the license way back in 2015, and a spiritual successor is in the works since then: https://www.brightlocker.com/g...
In FPS games, VR is known to cause motion sickness, because the vision is moving but the body isn't, so the mind get confused.
But in a 6DoF game like this one, the body wouldn't be moving at all even in a "real ship", so would this game still cause motion sickness in VR?
I ask this because I think this game is BEGGING to be played on VR...
I always thought of Fury3 and Terminal Velocity as being their own type of game because the ship couldn't stop moving and couldn't travel in reverse. Awesome flight games though :) I really wish that someone would pick up that style of game and make a modern version.
Descent 2 is already an actual game. Technically Overload would be Descent 4. Honestly though, it's amazing that we're seeing both Descent 4 and Overload coming out at the same time. It's great for fans of the genre to have so many options.
I played the shareware edition and ending up upside-down and backward was a pain in the ass. The commercials claimed it was like Doom, but better. Bullshit. It was nothing like Doom and there wasn't even any awesome violence. Blowing evil things to bits was so much fun.
Quake was a game changer. It was exactly 20 years ago that I bought an Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo card with the Voodoo Rush 3D chip and played GL Quake for the first time. Braingasm.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Back in the day, 2.5D meant only the environment was 3D modeled, the actors/sprites/enemies were all 2D sprites, scaled big or small depending on distance.
I'm streaming multiplayer live on twitch right now.
This game was so awesome and we would play multiplayer with 4 or so people. I bought a CH Products Flightstick Pro for this game, the 8-way hat and throttle controllers were game changers. My best friend was so pissed that I could fly circles around him!
That's pretty strange.
I'd say descent was defined by true 3D rendered environments with collision and polygon fills and 6 degrees of freedom for motion.
There were a few 3d mesh games prior with 6 degrees -- echelon comes to mind.
As for your definitions, sort of:
2D -- you move around in an {x,y} maze, you, your enemies, and everything else all had a fixed Z axis.
Wolfenstein was a good example.
2.5D -- can mean a lot of things, but I think for most people the *defining* characteristic was that you could move in the Z axis; but the world itself wasn't truly 3D. Gravity certainly isn't required, and you could even have a 6 d-o-f camera and 6 d-o-f movment in a 2.5D game.
The key to a 2.5D game is that at any given x,y coordinate on the playing field, there is one z value for the floor, and one z value for the ceiling, and an open interval between them, and the gameplay at that x,y coordinate takes place in that vertical interval.
3D takes that restriction away. At a given x,y coordinate, there might be more than one floor and ceiling interval.
The upshot is that in a 2.5D game, "rooms" cannot be stacked, for example you will never see a balcony that you can either stand on or under at the same x,y coordinate. One tunnel can never pass under another one, etc.
Yes, unlike later games like Quake, where all level design were much more freeform from a data-structure point of view, Descent was much more restrictive. Like Doom, which only allowed 2-D convex empty rooms with varying heights for the floor and ceiling but could simulate more complex rooms by joining multiple such rooms together with transparent sides, Descent only only allowed hexahedron (ie: deformed cube) rooms, and you needed to join multiple such "rooms" together to create more complex room shapes.
Buy Overload. It's a terrific game. I've been playing it on and off today, and it's everything you'd hope for from a modern version of Descent.
The only reason I'm giving it a 7.5 instead of a 9 out of 10 is because it does not contain any anime tiddies.
But seriously, Overload is very, very good.
You are welcome on my lawn.
By all accounts I've read, Overload feels more like the successor to Descent than D:U. Here's one video comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
it wasn't so much about the angled floor as the idea you couldn't have one path directly above another. the Z axis was rendered graphically, but it didn't actually exist as a calculated, functional axis in the game code. like, you could see ledges and go up or down in elevation, but you'd never have, for example, a building with multiple floors stacked on top of each other.
i could live a little longer in this prison
What a good piece of news ! I was aware of the development of Descent:Underground, but I did not heat about Overload. I am really looking forward to playing this, as 6DOF games have really been missed during all these years. This game seems to have all the required mechanics of a modern-day Descent, with tri-cording and limited turn rate. I wonder how it will play on consoles with a game controller, when it will be released.
Descent was great, but bigger than Quake for that list?
1. None of these were in “the early days of PC gaming”; they were a decade plus after PC gaming exploded during the Commodore 64/Applie II/etc era. Games like Catacomb, Ultima Underworld, and early ID entries like Hovertank 3D and Wolfenstein 3D had already birthed the FPS genre. Doom was a huge deal and certainly catalyzed things for the mid-90s and established FPSes as a prestige genre (as well as helping the popularity of online play).
2. Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 2 (the latter of which came out the same year as Doom) were side-scrolling 2D platformers. The “2.5D” version was Duke Nukem 3D, which came out like 3 years later than Doom during the explosion of post-Doom FPSes. It was closer to the Quake era than the Doom era. Claiming that it's part of some “big 3” is really weird; it's better grouped in with the rest of the 2.5D-era post-Doom games like Marathon, Heretic, Hexen, Star Wars: Dark Forces, etc.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
"The upshot is that in a 2.5D game, "rooms" cannot be stacked"
I'm guessing you've not seen Zandronum port for Doom, which allows exactly this to happen and hasn't been a thing in 2.5D shooters for ages.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Amen. The learning curve was huge, disorientation a huge problem, and finding the exit even when I knew where it was pure adrenaline rush. Plus figuring out to win the level of hell.
That's kind of like saying, "explain Star Wars, it looks like every other SciFi space battle movie." Yeah. Now. But at the time, Descent was cutting edge and unique.
geek. lawyer.
Descent + this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
was awesome !
You knew how to straff in Doom or Duke, then you learned how to 3D straff in Descent. ... Easy frags !
Poor LAN parties firends stuck with keyboard and mouse
Totof
I would think of it like this: 2D FPS games (original Wolfenstein) would be like driving a car in a simple grid of streets lined with buildings. 2.5D FPS games (Doom/DN) would be less like operating a car and more like operating a helicoptor - you have to maneuver in 3 dimensions with your vertical axis generally constant, and gravity is still a thing. 3D FPS (Descent) would be operating a starship in deep space with true vector-based navigation and 0 fixed axes...plus the ability to roll like an airplane. Descent was devoid of gravity, so orientation was truly a challenge. To date it is the only game I've ever had to fight motion sickness.
Really Nice thanks for sharing https://www.funnyhappybirthday...
Where I'd argue that removing that restriction means that's its now a proper 3D shooter now.
Yes - but at the time - which is the only important part they couldn't hence the 2.5D. Build Engine could kinda 3d stack, but Duke3D had very careful level design in the movie theatre for example to hide this. The Doom engine couldn't. Doesn't matter if later Doom compatible engines fixed this and added true 3d look around. The way the maps are made only allowed for one floor.
I remember on 3d shooter by epic that faked a descent style game in a doom style engine including one tunnel section which had a crossover which one could fall down if not paying attention or use as a vertical short cut. Ah - Radix beyond the Void from '95 played better than Terminal velocity, worse than Descent. But a decent shooter.
I'd like to have a cross platform descent redo. All three with a new engine that scales from old hardware to newest and runs on all consoles and all big desktop operating systems. That would be neat. .... A few years back there was a fourth version in the works - whatever happened to that, does anyone know? I think it was crowd funded or something.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
YOu can play it on Home of the Underdogs.
Also Descent Freespace was written in assembly so the levels are remarkably huge.
Descent: Freespace is a different game than the one discussed in this thread, and not part of the Descent games (weird naming). Descent: Freespace is a 3D space simulator in the mold of TIE Fighter. Space is huge.
Old consumer VR (VFX-1, Cybermaxx, i-glasses) used LCD micro-displays, only some of the professional ones used CRTs. The resolution also didn't even reach 320x200, but was instead some oddball number like 262 x 230. It wasn't quite the era of 800x600 yet, Descent, Quake and Co. where still mostly played in 320x200, while 640x480 was used in some strategy games (e.g. Warcraft 2), it's use in 3D games was still a few years away and only really started to go mainstream with the rise of 3D accelerator cards.
I think what killed VR back than was the lack of a standard 3D API due to DOS and most games like Doom not even being real 3D, which meant you couldn't have generic injection driver or headtracking. But probably even more important however was just the lack of progress. VR back when it was first released was quite impressive and held up well enough next to a 320x200 game, but it never really advanced beyond that initial point. The rest of the PC world made heaps of progress, 3D accelerators started appearing and VR just was kind of stuck. The VR companies started folding before they managed to put out a headset that could do 640x480 and those that survived a while longer shifted to business use instead of gaming. Took a good 15 years until the VR landscape started to advance again with the Rift.
https://smsala.com/
From the second line of the summery: "Descent was the first game to have true 3D environments and enemies"
No sig today...
I'm guessing you've not seen Zandronum port for Doom
Using the Doom sprites does not make it a 2.5D game. Zandronum is very much a 3D game. The 2.5D games were very much defined by the lack of vertical information that firstly made it impossible to stack rooms, but also made it impossible to actually look up and down without weird perspective problems.
If your game has the ability to look up or down without the walls remaining vertical in your viewport (y shearing) or if your game allows you to look straight up or down, or if your game allows you to have two objects on top of one another and allows you to travel between them (i.e. there's more than 1 "floor") it is no longer a 2.5D game.
So can you greybeards explain Descent? Read the articles, saw the videos, just looks like another game.
You had to have been playing multiplayer before networked gaming was figured out - AKA using kali/kahn IPX emulation over modems. The beauty of Descent 1 /2 was in the multiplayer, the single player was nothing to write home about because it was before the rise of the cimeatic set piece game.
Ah, excellent! Thank you for that. I was aware of omitting part of the title, but I spent more time worrying about my analogy instead of getting the full title out there. I wasn't even aware of a non-3D Wolfenstein.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
OpenBSD is not dead in any aspect. It isn't chained into place and owned by a commercial entity that controls access to it. Only in the mind of a commercially besotten chattel slave does that make it dead. Fuck off, lying crapflooder. Just fuck off.
Descent: Freespace is one of my favorite games of all time! It had a very interesting story line, and you really felt like you were part of the story. The missions were varied with interesting combinations of intelligence gathering, offense, and defense. The graphics were fantastic for the time, and even when you were playing a mission, it felt like playing multiplayer, since you had pretty intelligent AI companions to whom you could give orders. I particularly liked the names of the ships, most of which came from ancient religions: Bhema, Nephilim, Sheitan, Aruna, Manticore, Taranis, Lucifer, Galatea, etc.
Not first 3d game that let you travel in any direction... those had been around for the past 10 years before Descent came out (Starglider 1, Starglider 2, Epic and dozens of dozens of others).
What was different with Descent was that the environment was texturemapped.
I was too late for the release date of Descent and Descent II, but when I got ahold of the game as a youngster, I absolutely loved those! If I had time for multiple games in my limited free time, I would try Overload.
The whole 6dof was not lost on me, even though I have little frame of reference. I got pretty good at fine control with my QWEASDZXC and numpad.
* Driller
* Flight simulator 2
* Elite
"In the early days of PC gaming, there was 3 major titles. Doom, Duke Nukem, and Descent."
And then there was Myst, which was of the same era and sold more than all three of those games put together
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I loved Descent. The action was top-notch, and the graphics were as good as anything up to that point, without slowing down enough that the game was unplayable. I had many hours of playing descent, never with anything but a keyboard for controls. It rocked majorly!
Or SpaceOrb360
Right, and this is why it didn't sell well, and the game evolved back to a space shooter in Descent: Freespace.
It will be remembered for it's technical achievements, but not because it was a satisfying game. In zero gravity shooters , people like their 3d spaces to be mostly 2D. Hence why most space ship games travel in just a single direction, and use turret cameras to fill-in the 3D experience.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Descent was the first game I played that made me nauseous / motion sick. It was the combination of those tight quarters and truly unrestricted 3D movement.
A VR version of Descent would be interesting...
Nope actually, the game didn't evolve into Freespace 2 at all. Mike Kulas left Parallax software who made Descent and founded Volition Inc. Freespace 1/2 was made at Volition. The Descent name was slapped on Freespace 1 by the publisher Interplay to cash in on the existing popularity of the Descent franchise.
I, for one, welcome it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well yes, but the franchise died after selling just a million games between descent 1 and 2.
You can call it whatever you want, but it was a rebranding for a already-dead game genre. Because it was just a demanding, impressive tech demo with zero legs.
And it's not as if the branding was inaccurate. Freespace was one of the toughest space shooters I could remember, after Tie Fighter.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Well, Doom to me became a big snooze. I'd grab the chainsaw and roll through the game. Descent was glorious in its intensity.
"The Doom engine couldn't."
Actually, yes it could with some level-building trickery, and an old WAD called Alien Vendetta did it for its pyramid level before any of the engine ports came around with the ability to allow faux or real vertical stacking in level design.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And I can tell you've never touched the Zandronum engine (because it still needs all that data and info from the actual DOOM/II WAD file to work otherwise it would work standalone with many other WAD files,) let alone actually played Doom or any real mods for it, because several WADs out before modern engine ports did exactly what BUILD did, in a different manner (Alien Vendetta is one such WAD, which did hall over hall in pyramids, with crossover sections) on just the plain DOOM engine.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Cool story, now what at all does it have to do with Zandronum not being 3D? Just because it used the original files doesn't make it any more fitting of a specific definition.
I've played plenty of Doom mods, including Alien Vendetta. If you think it had hall over hall, congratulations you fell for exactly the kind of foolery that developers put a lot of effort in to create. You may think you were in a 3D game that supported hall over hall, but there's actually no where you as a character can go that put you in a different Y plane depending on the path you took to get there. Feel free to take a look at the map files yourself. They are an incredible tight clusterfuck which is precisely required to achieve this effect, but there isn't a single hall over hall. Here I'll even give you the link to a map of Misri Halek so you can see yourself. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/MAP2...
There are plenty of doom ports and mods that are still 2.5D that obey all the restrictions I set out for 2.5D. There are also plenty of ports that modify the game engine to full 3D while using all the original stuff, e.g. Zandronum.
You are simply mistaken.
" (because it still needs all that data and info from the actual DOOM/II WAD file to work otherwise it would work standalone with many other WAD files,)"
Not relevant. You can make a true 3D engine that uses doom wads. The original doom engine was 2.5D; the wad files describe the level, the wad files adhere to the limitations of the original 2.5D engine to work with the original executables, but there is no technical reason that would ever stop you from rendering the wads with a true 3D engine, and lots of doom ports are exactly that, including this one.
" (Alien Vendetta is one such WAD, which did hall over hall in pyramids, with crossover sections) on just the plain DOOM engine."
No they didn't. I promise. It couldn't do it. If it runs on the original doom engine there is no hall over hall. The level designers did their level best to make it look like it did, with clever level design, with platforms that raised and lowered when you couldn't see them operated by silent triggers, but it didn't ever actually have a single x,y coordinate anywhere on the map where if you put two players on it, that they could be in different places.
For example, if it had a two tunnels cross at different levels... like a + for example but the tunnels didn't actually meet, then where the east-west tunnel crossed over the north-south tunnel, the junction was really just defined with a floor and ceiling that platform that moved up and down when you couldn't see it. Take a look at the WAD in an editor, or play around with no-clipping in the original game and take a look, or play it multiplayer, and try to cross the junction at the same time; one of you will find it blocked, or one of you will be in the junction, and the other will trigger the elevator and either get to ride it up/down, or perhaps get crushed out of it before it moves. (some levels mods did a crush as part of the platform movement to clear monsters and corpses off the platform to further try and hide that it was a moving platform.
"Take a look at the WAD in an editor"
How the fuck do you think I figured out how it's being done? It's not being done by any sort of raised platform, AT ALL. I'VE CHECKED THE ENTIRE WAD.
I'll give you a protip - teleports.
Did you know there's no actual second weapon slot for the super shotgun in the engine for DoomII? That little bug opened up the doors for a future mod - complex doom with nearly 100 accessible weapons.
Source: I'm a current beta tester for the invasion mode of complex doom. I know lots more about these little engine hacks than you probably do, because I'm an actual code contributer.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
OK, I'm thinking the editor didn't live though that era or play those games.
1) Doom was out a LOT earlier than any of those. Doom II would be a more appropriate example.
2) Oh Duke Nukem 3D, what fun you were... (also there were plenty of "Duke Nukem's", but only one 3D, but I'll give them that one)
3) No Quake? Yeah because that wasn't a major title I guess.
4) No Warcraft II? Again, was probably just a minor release (sarcasm)
5) While Descent was definitely fun for nausea, or loosing you mind while high, it was more of a proof of technology than an actual game.
I knew a lot of people who played Descent and thought it was really cool, but I don't think anyone played it for any amount of time. Doom II was only played until DN3D/Quake came out. Thinking back it is still kind of funny to think that the ability to "jump" was a feature lol! Warcraft II while a bit of a different genre was probably just as big or bigger than any of the rest (arguably a lot bigger than any of them).
"How the fuck do you think I figured out how it's being done?"
Given that true room stacking isn't being done in Doom, I'm going to go with... 'you haven't figured it out'. :)
"I'll give you a protip - teleports."
Lol, really, that's an even more obvious trick, since you can trivially see that you are teleporting simply by watching the map. Teleports aren't generally as good as clever platform trickery because there are few tells when you teleport.
If you knew if it was teleports, why were you arguing that it allowed room stacking?
IIRC the VFX-3D was 800x600. But way too late and way too expensive, also company was on a shoestring. IIRC they were just highly modified VFX-1s.
There was also a decent hacking community. But, by the time you replaced the screens and tracking on your VFX-1, all you had left was the shell and headphones. I never bothered, no software anyhow.
I will say, for the record, Decent2 on the VFX-1 was the most instant puke inducing VR experience I've ever played.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Lol, really, that's an even more obvious trick, since you can trivially see that you are teleporting simply by watching the map."
Again, I can tell you don't (and haven't) played, because watching the automap will not tell you - it looks exactly as if everything is going over everything else.
But you have no clue how real vertical hacks work, so I'll let you keep floundering. Meanwhile, I need to gimp Sonic in the jail room. Too many insta-death rings spawn on hit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Nice ditty.
I just posted my comment because nothing at all has changed with regard to the BSD operating systems. They are all robust and ongoing projects.
"But you have no clue how real vertical hacks work,"
I haven't spent any time with Zandronum; and I'm not aware of any trick that lets you teleport without that being obvious on the automap. Not to mention the question of how it avoids being disruptive to combat.
Can you explain how that trick is done or link to an explanation? And is it supported in classic doom or does it require a newer engine to work? I spent a LOT of time with Doom, albeit years ago now, and I'm open to being wrong here... but what you are describing doesn't add up to anything I (think) I know about classic doom.