DescentBB

Hey.

I wanted to set up Descent 3 for some nice LAN play with some friends, but after trying for hours to get the game working satisfactory, I am at a dead end now. At least I got hires widescreen working. Anyhow...

First, the buzzing. There's some sound effects that're causing continuously buzzing/crackling, and it's awful to listen to (I think it's the ship engine's sound effect, anyhow). I have found no fix for this.

I tired:

Low/high quality sound modes

Windows compatibility modes

The only sound mixer I can select is that DirectSound one. The others are grayed out.

Is there a fix for this? Maybe a sound mixer wrapper? Like there's for video modes, like 3DFX glide.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

Now the awful, awful mouse feel in this game. What's with that? It's either too slow, or too unstable with smaller crosshair movements. If I turn the sensitivity all the way down the pointer feels precise and stable, but way, way too slow. If it's even medium fast, it becomes unstable, too sensitivity with the smaller hand movements. It's skipping a lot of pixels, it feels like.

Slightly faster hand movements feels good. Like, making medium size circles with the crosshair. It's the smaller movements that is awful when you add just a small amount of extra sensitivity.

I, of course, tried both mouse modes, but ultimately not one of them was good enough, I felt.

I do know a lot about mice, and I have a Logitech G400 with no acceleration, only using native 800DPI (Trying 3600DPI didn't produce a magical fix for it in any configuration of sensitivity/precision), 1000 poll-rate and 1:1 tracking, mostly. I am quite sensitive to bad mouse tracking, yeah, but there's something weird about this game and mouse movement.

I just played Descent 2 rebirth and the mouse feel was really good. Precise smaller movements with the crosshairs and a good turn speed, too. There isn't any disconnect in the mouse tracking in that game, at least, which makes sense seeing as it is a source port, I guess.

Anybody feel the same way?

You can turn off ship noises in the interface. I forget where, but I believe it's available from the F2 menu in game. Mine buzzed pretty badly too when I installed it on this computer, shut them off immediately.

Okay, thanks. It did helped a lot, but the buzzing is still there when playing many of the other effect sounds, so it's still a major concern. Does the GOG version fix this issue?

BTW: I just realized that I didn't post this in the tech forum, as I should have done.

The D3 single player campaign has a huge amount of "ambient" buzzing sounds, see if it still does it in some user made levels. Also try turning down the number of sfx that can play at once (can only be done from the main menu before loading any level, options --> sound, sfx quantity).

Make sure you select 8bit sound.

You may also want to mute any line inputs that are unmuted by default
- Line in
- CDROM (analog)
- Digital CD

D3 uses calls to DirectX 5/6 where DirectSound and DirectSound3D were seperate and new implimantations of their API before they were merged into Direct Audio in version 8.

IOW D3 was designed for Win98 and NT4.0 and their (M$) new unsupported features (or limitations compared to today's standards) in hardware manufacturing. This gave them the ability to cover a wide range of hardware

I tired to disable all other sound devices, but this didn't change anything.

Also, 8-sounds, no banana.

Here's my how my exe looks like:

-launched -nointro -nooutragelogo -nosparkles -playermessages -z32bit -framecap 120 -bumped -nocompress -mousesens 1 -lowmem -width 1920 -height 1080 -aspect 1.78 -pilot BigBalls

At least I found a okay mouse setup mix with:

-mousesens 1 + 0.20 sens (in-game). That's the setting that comes closet to 1:1 feel on the mouse, although it's not quite perfect, but good enough to play. I'd like to try 0.10 sens, but how?

Too bad about the sounds effects, tho.

With those entries (4 stand out) your must be running D3D for video instead of OpenGL

Get rid of -lowmem unless your running less than a Pentium 166 Mhz CPU from 1995

Actually, '-lowmem' was just for testing the game with 8-bit sound as a possible fix. I don't use it now, as it didn't fix that issue.