Descent 3 source code released

[Jeff250]

Available here: https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3

[Isaac]

That's awesome! How did you guys even get the source code? Is it reverse compiling?

[Jeff250]

It looks like it was released by Kevin Bentley. There is some commentary here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40048177

[vision]

Native Linux build when?!

Can't wait.

[Kevin Bentley]

Hello everyone!

Does anyone have the old list of 1.5 bugs? AFAIK, Jeff and I had addressed most, if not all of them in the rework we were doing in 2009ish (and some work again in 2016). But I can't find it. I thought there was a list on here somewhere.

[Jeff250]

I believe this is what you mean? https://descentbb.net/viewtopic.php?t=142

It looks like the formatting got messed up in one of the forum upgrades, but it looks much better here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101121231 ... .php?t=142

[Arne]

This version of that list has a few more entries http://www.suncho.com/buglist.html

[Hunter]

*brushes off account dust*

Holy balls. An actual source code release after all these years?

[TigerRaptor]

Descent 3 definitely needs an update.

[Krom]

Wonderful news!

It would be cool as hell to see some of the original D3 single player levels redone with full dynamic lighting and ray tracing. A lot of stuff has changed in 25 years!

It might not even be that big of a hurdle, just enough to get the directx renderer up to version 9 or later and then use RTX Remix to actually do the heavy lifting. Though implementing RTX natively also probably isn't *that* big of a hurdle because someone has done it with Descent (1) already: https://github.com/BredaUniversityGames/DXX-Raytracer

Also one bug/exploit that I discovered and reported back when we were testing for 1.5, but kept off the official bug lists because it was so easily exploitable (it is fixed in the publicly available 1.5 betas). It is probably already known at this point, but just to be safe I may as well share it here to make sure it gets squashed for good:
Using a custom table file you could set the "fusion" flag or whatever on basically any player weapon, allowing you to charge it up and deal additional damage per shot... Well, even in v1.4 that still worked in multiplayer from the client side. So for instance, if you took the mass driver, checked the fusion flag on it (removing zoom flag optional), you could charge up a mass driver shot in any public server and near full charge it would do over 150 damage if it connected even to an unmodified player. You could also charge up a ordinary homing or concussion missile and cause them to do several multiples worth of their normal damage if they hit. Or you could just click fire and they would be almost indistinguishable from an unmodified shot. (Obviously your rate of fire drops when charging, and overcharging will still damage/kill you, but in the hands of a skilled player it can make certain weapons absolutely devastating.)

I tested it a couple times on public servers with friends and we had a riot because it is just so broken. Also used it a couple times against obvious cheaters (flying outside the map, infinite homing missiles, etc) and it majorly annoyed them because I figured out which textures they were using to escape the shell and could one shot kill them with MD before they could reach their escape points. Plus I also had a pass-through textures of my own in that table so I could chase them even outside the level shell. Pretty sure I also had the beta team add a pass-through texture flag check server side after that too (basically any relatively simple table.gam or extra.gam cheats should be eliminated in the v1.5 betas).

[CDN_Merlin]

awesome

[d3jake]

Good news!

[TheWhat]

Neat-0
I loved that game.

[TigerRaptor]

Word about Descent 3 is catching on in the Linux community.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/d ... en-source/

[Top Gun]

Great news! I haven't really touched Descent in ages, and I feel awful for backing Overload and then not doing much of anything with it. I had so many good times in D3, and if some usable updated builds come out of this, then it's high time that I dusted off my ancient 3D Pro.