DESCENT 3 Source Code Released (with unreleased modernization patch)

[HellRazor]

Reddit post from Kevin Bentley:

"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."

Github comments for the source code:

"This is the latest version of the Descent 3 source code. This includes the '1.5' patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago. At the time, it worked for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format). I have that code if someone wants to help make a converter so the old cutscenes work. It'll take some effort to stub out that code so it compiles.

The first thing I want to do is get everything compiling again, and ideally some CI/CD actions. After that, the code needs to be cleaned up some, to remove old version control comments, etc. 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.

If you're interested in helping maintain it, please send me a message. Otherwise, I'm happy to take pull requests.

This is the last update I put out there showing different architectures playing along. Yikes, that was a long time ago, sorry we never released a 1.5 patch. Some logistics got in the way!

Thanks to Jeff Slutter, who did most of the work modernizing the code from the 90's. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community does with it!"

The Reddit post is here.

The Github repository for the source code is here.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

I played Descent 1 ages ago, and had quite some fun with it !

 

[Carnifex]

Same, was a long time ago that I played the first one and I'm not sure I'd care for the style these days, yet it was a great time back then,

 

[Redglyph]

I remember the enemy AI in the first game was very good, at the time.

 

[Zloth]

The first game was great! It was easy to get lost and the map, being all wireframe, was pretty hard to deal with - so I learned a lot about how to keep from getting lost in a 3D maze.

The second game was pretty good, but they gave you a guide bot to help you navigate through the tunnels. That hurt. The game also had a thief bot, though, and chasing after that thing was pretty fun - and really wouldn't have been possible without the guide bot to help me after blindly chasing the thief around.

 

[JDR13]

I never got into the Descent games much as they were already pretty dated by the time I discovered them. There's a spiritual successor called Overload that's pretty good.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

It was easy to get lost and the map, being all wireframe, was pretty hard to deal with - so I learned a lot about how to keep from getting lost in a 3D maze.

Yes, I also got lost within the map so many times ...

 

[Zloth]

Yes, I also got lost within the map so many times ...

And particularly nasty when somebody's counting down the seconds before the whole place explodes. "Having trouble remembering? Here, let me give you a shot of panic!"