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Games Entertainment

Descent 3 Linux Client 71

Posted by Hemos from the coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you dept.
GehRehmee writes "This thread from the Descent Bulletin Board contains a comment from Jeff Slutter of Outrage Entertainment, enlightening the masses on an upcoming Glide/OpenGL Linux client for Descent 3. Not a lot of details, but good news for everyone getting tired of q3test. " Well, no sound, no joystick, minor bugs-but it sounds like it shgould be out soon.
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Descent 3 Linux Client More

Descent 3 Linux Client

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  • if your having problems with that setup you are doing something seriously wrong. I'm playing with a k6-233 and 8 meg voodoo2, and i'm getting framerates that are very acceptible.
  • sorry 'bout the nasty previous post...I was running a bit hot earlier today. in any case, yeah, the game does tax systems a bit too much for the graphics it provides. They still rock IMO, but you can't beat the Q3 engine. (yet) I can't get it past 960 by whatever it is on my old dodgy monitor, but I seldom notice frame rate problems on my celeron 300a (oc'd to 375) with a banshee of all things. Only happens on huge outdoor levels. You don't need a t3 to play online though...D3 taxes any connection quite a lot, apparently, but lots of players play on modems, some (such as myself) with pings in excess of 400. One of the highest ranked players is on a 200 ping. I think yr missing out on some great fun, but maybe you did make the right decision.
  • Compare the number of top players using sticks, keys, or mouse on any of the Descent ladders and I think you'll find that the stick is preferred hands down.

    Mouselook in D3, btw, doesn't count as a controller option -- mouselook has been universally condemned by the core Descent community since it eliminates the fundamental tactic of getting behind your opponent.
  • It's ok... I was asking for it... I was just frustrated about very high marks every site/magazine was giving to this game.
  • As I said, I downloaded this demo from loki.com and the text file that came with the game said it will use DGA but only if you run it as root.
  • I have the same problem. X11 is not the fastest graphics pipeline. DGA and GLX are good but DGA requires root access which is just plain wrong. I also have a problem with postage stamp sized windows for games. I have Quake1/QW/2/3test, Descent1X and some other games. Running in a window is crappy. I edited my XF86Config file to add low-res modes (320x200, etc) but even then you can't touch the mouse or you will pan the virtual desktop away from the game. There should be a simpler way to lock in full screen access for games, one that would change the desktop res to accomodate. I believe that the tools are out there to make this happen but they just need to be placed in the proper sequence. Things like GGI, fbcon, SDL and even Scitech Display Doctor (Remember that one?!) exist to provice Linux with good, simple, high-speed graphics rasterization. We just need to pull them together. GGI should probably be rolled into the Kernel as the high level interface to fbcon, SDL is good and will hopefully be the replacement for DirectDraw for X11. SDD has a unique position in that they marked an OpenGL implementation and entire game generation environment. They should make sure that everything is ported to Linux, but transferrable from Windows, and market heavily. Companies would have no problem with Linux support if their graphics toolkit just required a recompile to make it work.

    Maybe some company will come out with the DirectOS (Alex St. John) method. Since Linux is free it should be possible to create a bootable CD with just enough software to bootstrap the game and graphics libraries. You aren't going to need a full command line environment, all the X libraries--just the ones the game uses. You could run the game off the CD or boot off the CD and be sure that the libraries have been tested to work optimally with the game. With the ability to create a directory of symlinks from a CD you could even update the game libraries easily.

    Just my $0.02 US

  • DRI (Score:1)

    by RelliK ( 4466 )
    I keep hearing that XF4.0 "will" have DRI which will make things "much faster". Question is *when* will XF4.0 be released and *how much* faster will things run? I don't think it is a good idea to have games run on top of X in any shape or form. X is still a huge overhead. When you run a game you don't want to waste any resources, esp. for something huge that just sits in the background. Would it not be much better to implement DRI (or some equivalent) in kernel, so that you don't need to run X?
  • You too? :)

    My friend Rob and I got hooked on it our freshman year in college, right when the original DI playable demo came out. We'd stay up until all hours of the night to play that thing, and then struggle to get up in the morning to go to class.

    We've often referred to it as the most expensive computer game we've ever played. That game, single-handedly, has fueled more hardware upgrades than anything I've used in my life. Between faster processors, more memory, better audio and video subsystems, new controllers, and larger hard disks (storing all those extra levels)... aahhh. :)

    I don't know what's worse: the amount of money I've sunk into getting that game to be absolutely kick-ass, or the fact that I don't regret spending a penny of it! :)


  • Don't get me wrong, linux *needs* more mainstream games like this to be ported, but...

    D3 SUCKS. 1024x768x32 is JERKY on a P2-504, 256M RAM and a TNT2 Ultra at 175/183. It constantly crashes if you try to save during heavy firefights. You cannot finish more than 5-6 missions even on normal difficulty because you need to reload every 10 seconds (no kidding!). And I have played games, including D1 and D2 for more than 10 years...
    Great graphics, yes, and levels are cool, but it's all for nothing if programmers did a crappy job optimizing framerate - and they did. Great for showing off your PC but not more than that. It may be good for multiplayer, wouldn't know that, but for single-player it sucks. That's probably why Parallax split, as Volition's FreeSpace is simply FANTASTIC.
    So when I got too close to a hearth attack, I've put CD back in the box and put it on consignment. Games should be *fun*, not frustration...
  • Yes, indeed Glide is considerably faster that D3D or GL in Descent 3. Problem is not in frame rates (I didn't measure them anyway) but in the general jumpiness of the graphics. I do get about 24 fps in Q3 demo with all candy on and 32bit color, but the game still plays very smooth and I had no problem to frag.
  • More games to consider once I get X and my G200 cooperating. I liked Decent I (dos/shareware version), I just couldn't handle the baddy at the end (I think I ran out of ammo, can't remember, been almost two years).
  • I must say that Descent3 (i have played all 3) IMO (read: IMO), Descent3 is a far more interesting game than any of the other FPS games, simply because dogfights are a lot more interesting in 3 unrestricted dimensions. Now all I need is support for my MS Sidewinder PPRO (yes, MS hardware 'cept for the natural KB is actually quite good).

    Rock on Outrage!

  • Descent 3 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Funny, I just bought D3 about two weeks ago. I was a major fan of the original descent - spent hundreds of hours playing it in single and multiplayer mode. So when I heard that D3 was out, I bought a Diamond V770 Ultra just for the game, and bought D3.

    My impressions? Well, the textures are simply amazing compared to what could be done back in '94. It's nice running at 1024x768 with virtually no slowdown (except when there's a lot of aliens on screen). It's awesome that you can finally go outside the bases. Cool new weapons, especially the Black Shark. I love the realistic explosions.

    But single player mode, although much richer than the original game, is still boring IMO. Only multiplayer mode is satisfying.

  • I was hopeful when I saw the server rpms on the D3 cd that something more may come. Thanks guys, this will be way better than the Civ:CTP for Linux that I bought.
  • Descent has always been my favorite game, and
    Parallax (now Outrage/Volition) is a good company.

    I was happy when I saw that D3 came with a dedicated server for Linux, but a client ... wow!

    I must now go and send many letters of thanks and
    encouragement..
  • i'm a hardcore descent adict, so i'm still in windows (dont kill me here.. take it to the mines :P ) but now with d1x [warpcore.org] (the open source version of descent 1 ) AND d3 ported to linux, i'll have a much easier time switching.

    (btw.. d1 is the best, even tho outrage did a GREAT job on d3)
  • Go ahead, just keep your mouselook off...
    (Mouselook, aka "Insta-Turn", allows players to spin around instantly, defying physics. Many dedicated servers ban this option)
    Your mouse will still work under "flightsim" mode, although I've been told it takes alot of getting used to.
  • Okay about a year ago I got Windows completely off my computer. Only to find out that I was just another victim of CDPD (Conplusive Descent Playing Disorder). For weeks I had violent shakes, mood swings, and I developed a twitch. Fortunately, I have been able to surpress the rage of no Descent game play after I had such a bad shake that I drove my car into a light pole. Thankfully putting me in a coma for the rest of the withdrawal.

    But now that this news has come about I fear it's all going to happen all over again.

    I'll lose my job. Start failing classes. My wife will leave me. The dog will probably die from myself forgetting to feed it. The cops will start coming over again questioning why I'm screaming bloodly murder at the computer at 2am in the morning. Fools, they won't even know what I mean by dogfight. I'll need another trashcan for all the keyboards I'll be spinning through. I'll have to get new skin graphed on my fingers. And eyeball sprayers to keep me from blinking and missing one frame.

    I've even thought of ways to covert my car to be able to strife and have quad level 6 lasers. Lord knows I pray for the ability to pass out smart mines to tailgators.

    Curse you Descent! Curse this love/hate relationship! AAAAAAHHHAHAAAA, must frag, must frag!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Eros, apologizes in advance for all the bad grammar, spelling, and generally insane mumblings.
  • >btw don't you love the cheat codes of descent? gabbagabbahey, hilarious!

    Make sure you remap the mine key before giving doing the codes, or you might end up with with a nasty surprise!

    I just played the D3 demo for the first time rescently. I have to say that the robots have gotten alot smarter...
  • Have you ever seen a mouse in a cockpit? Just a stick and buttons. Joystick and keyboard are the -only- way to play descent. Well.. maybe rudder peddles. :)
  • You do know that D1X has been ported, don't you? Check out the Descent Network, they should have a link. When/if the D2 source is released, it will probably be ported quite quickly as well.
  • Just how did you destroy all those bosses? The one in the mission right after your base was stormed (after that one you get a new ship) took me hours and literarly dozens of saves/loads (incl. loosing it all in that crash bug). Plus, the boss - being as big as it is - was still *faster* than me even if I use jets! Can't run, can't hide, (almost) can't destroy and at the same time several of those cop bots beat the crap out of you with their arms, as if the boss wasn't enough? Next mission after that was just too much for me and I sold the game. If you finished the game you must have some of those cyber implants from System Shock 2...
  • I can't wait. I'll be there in line at the store for this one for sure. To my mind descent is -the- game to have. 6 degrees of freedom rock! Small detour into Descent freespace that was no fun - where was the sliding damn it!? I'm delighted to finally have descent for linux. Head to head descent is the only thing that keeps the windows partition on my machine alive. Time to vote with my wallet.
  • True, I couldn't see much of the difference between 16 and 32 bit, both in looks but in speed as well... plus 32 bit setting is lost every time you reload (another bug) - which is every minute or so. I did have to switch down to 800x600 a few times... My point is, 1024 is industry standard right now and should be playable on a high end machine. What's the point of wasting your money on a TNT2 Ultra if there's no benefit... Oh well, I built me one of those dual celeron 550s last week - linux flies on it! - maybe NOW I should get the game again if I find it used somewhere for cheap...
    Btw, you use NT, can you install it on a logical partition? I tried and it won't :(
  • What difficulty settings did you have it at? I consider myself to be a pretty good descent pilot, but i had to drop the difficulty a bit just to keep playing. And are you talking about humunculous? Just go over/under him with afterburners.
  • I have a p2-400, voodoo3, 128mb of ram, and it runs fine. 1024x786 is still asking a lot, so 800x600 does fine for me. I get 40-50, sometimes 100fps framerates in indoor levels (lower res, tho). Granted, the features it offers are what bring it down at times. turn them down. And for outdoor levels, I suggest you turn down the rendering distance. Single player is fun as hell (and hard), and multiplayer, IMO, is a LOT better than any Quake game. Descent3 is one of the few games i have seen that has run wonderfully out of the box, and kept my attention until i finished it.

    My first /. post from inside linux (!)
  • I played at normal difficulty, is it ace? It sounds like hard but then I think there were 2 harder levels above it and 2 below so I took it as normal. Maybe I should've eaten that pill and called myself rookie just to get further in the game.
    Humunculous is the one... are you saying that if you're over/under him he can't hit you? Because you can't run from him, afterburners are still slower than he is (bigger mass = faster move ?!). What I eventually did is hide in those dark places left and right of where he emerges from, and sometimes - takes try&pray, save/load a dozen times, he won't follow so you have "only" cops to deal with, and after they're done you can try your luck on him. Unfortunately the game is buggy so once he just disappeared and I couldn't finish the level - guided missiles still went for him but God knows where he was. So only on the third try (first save bug, then dissapearance bug) I finished it... took me the whole evening. 4 direct hits with mega missiles and he still doesn't even slow down while advancing :( And that's only level 5 or so?
  • No, I didn't know. Thanks for the line. :)
  • There shouldn't be any problems with using G200 ... It is supported "out of the box".

    I am not sure what kind of problems you get there ..
  • 1) I thought freshmeat was for the announcement of game/app/utility releases/ports. Slashdot, as far as I understand it, is supposed to be for newsworthy things, not simple port announcements. Perhaps the original release of Descent 3 was newsworthy, but an announcement of an incomplete port to another OS is certainly not.

    2) Why would you want to play Descent 3 without a joystick?
  • oh oh oh! Mummy this game is too hard! Suck it up, matey! If it weren't difficult you'd be complaining that the AI sucks. If all you've been playing is quake, guess what: this ain't your average fps...the tactics are totally different, the movement is something you ain't used to. Crawl before you walk...play a few levels on the lower skill setting before slagging the game off.
  • Only on `too young to die' (did it for my wife's game). On `ultra violence', I have a tough time even in god mode, so no laughter here. I get him, but only after about 5 idkfa's (gotta clear out those mosters so I don't get pushed off the platform, that BGA chews the ammo).
  • I couldn't for the life of me understand why Descent wasn't as popular as DOOM (yes, D1 was competing against DOOM, not Quake! -- talk about technological superiority). It must have been the complexity of the controls. Getting good at Descent is hard and takes time, but that's part of the appeal. Can you tell I'm a flightsim fan?

    Anyway, I recently bought D3 but haven't played it as much as I'd like to because of the hassle of rebooting, so this is great news! (less great if it's not going to be a complete, fully supported port)

    It seems I'll be playing Quake 2, Quake 3 and Descent 3 in linux soon. To complete my collection I just need Falcon 4 and Shogo.

    Regarding Shogo: If you're like me, and think that in a certains sense, ID games have been going downhill since Wolf3D (you're not on edge as you peak through the doors with 20% health, you don't jump in your seat when you're shot in the back) then Shogo's out-of-vehicle parts may appeal to you.
    --

  • DISCLAIMER: this is not intended to be a flamebait. Just my experience, observations and opinion.

    I tried playing Q2 under Linux. Basically you have two options: run it under X, in which case it runs in a tiny window; or run it under svgalib, which is quite outdated. Neither way is good. Q2 is noticeably slower under Linux then under Windows.

    I also heard about the DGA mode in X. In fact I downloaded a demo of (forget what) from loki.com specifically to try DGA. Well, I must admit it actually works. But you have to run the game as root. Q2, on the other hand, doesn't support it.

    When a game is ported to Linux, what *exactly* is it ported to? X? If so, that is a rather bad idea. X is a bottleneck for games.

    I think graphics support should be a part of the kernel. Games should not require X to run. Only then can you get acceptable performance. I know lots of people object that, but
    1. You always have an option not to compile it.
    2. It is IMHO better then running games as root.

    Is kernel framebuffers / ggi supposed to do that?
  • No offense intended, but Tribes 2 sucks. I would much rather have something like Descent, which pretty much pioneered the first person flight-sim shooter market (where it still remains, by far, on top of the heap) than just another wannabe Mechwarrior rip-off.

  • Agreed. Keyboard is the only way to play descent.

    Here is the layout: (keeps your hands on the home row, ready to fly!)

    tab-automap e-nose down t-missle1 y-missle2 i-forward o-up

    s-turnL d-flare f-turnR j-slideL k-afterburn(d2) l-slideR

    c-nose up b-mine ,-backup .-down

    space-fire primary

    P.S. Sorry about the formatting, I'm no html wonder (shrug).

    P.S.S. Yes, I'm a lefty, but my right handed wife can play a pretty mean game of D with this layout. (Yes, I got a good one, she plays descent and enjoys it)!

  • 1) This is big news for a lot of people, and is one part of a continuing series of Linux-Game announcements, which quite literally could turn the personal computer industry upside down. I think that counts...
    This is essentially the public announcement that a Descent 3 Linux Client will become available. Freshmeat will be the more appropriate forum once the product is released, IMO.
    2) Joystick/Sound support is not the client yet. That doesn't mean it won't be.
  • This is great news. The Descent series has been driving my hardware upgrade budget for 4 years now ;). I now have yet another reason to dump windows.
  • D3 on Linux? Wow and a half.

    Now, I know this is SlashDot, the epitome of Linux users and Evilsoft hatred (I'm only one half of that... so far), so I'm betting there's very few other Windoze users on here who read all this , but I just gotta ask this:

    Are there any other Windoze users out there who are stalling their transition to Linux SOLELY because of the games they play?

    I mean, if Team17 makes a Linux version of Worms: Armageddon, that and D3 will be it for me. Give me a C++ compiler and I'll try to continue learning C++ on Linux...
    ---

  • I still play D1 from time to time and I use a simple joystick (right hand) and the keyboard (left hand). The joystick for turning and firing, and these keys:

    Tab: automap
    Caps: slide upward
    A: move forward
    LShift: slide left
    Z: move backward
    X: slide right
    LCtrl: slide downward
  • 1) Face it, Descent is a nerd-oriented game. And Linux is QUITE nerdworthy. Slashdot, last time I read the tagline, is News For Nerds. Thus, we hear about Descent 3 on Linux. 'Nuff said.

    2) Strange, I've played the Descent series on my mouse and a bunch of keys only I can identify, and I can do pretty good. I picked up a joystick to try D3 with it, and I couldn't get the hang of it at all...
    ---

  • No, you're not the only one. Unfortunately, as I spend 90% of my time playing games, win98 is my primary OS. I'm considering moving at least to NT.
    Second problem is that new hardware takes long time to get supported, and I'm HW junkie. I actually bought AccelX commercial X-server to help me with that, but e.g. SB Live support is still flaky.
    Both KDE and Gnome beat win98 GUI, but even then Netscape is easier to use in Windows - and looks better, although AccelX does much better job of rendering fonts than XFree. UNIX version of netscape is worse because of crappy motif dialog boxes. I deal with motif at work as well, and I don't like it at all.
  • It's strafe, you momo. Strife was just a bad game based on the Doom engine :-)
  • Ahem... I play - rather, finish - like 40-50 games A YEAR. Played D1 and D2, Forsaken and just about any kind of game except sports (even that sometimes), and I have no problem shooting from upside down or whatever. I usually play with joystick but had to switch to mouse for this one - joystick is so slow that you get killed before you see the enemy. The game should be hard on hard setting. Period. On average it should be exactly that - average, for a player like me. I'm not too good, but at least average. But it's not just that the game is hard - it's buggy and graphics is jumpy. Look at Heavy Gear 2 or Quake 3 - those games have great graphics and it's still smooth. D3 is not. Unreal from last year was playable at 800x600 if you had V2 and fast enough machine (that was industry standard then, 800x600, not a P2-450). Even PC Gamer admits that D3 cannot be played on full setting on anything that now exists (and still gives it 93%!). You're partially right, though. I might be getting old for this. Oh well, RPG genre is back and doesn't require 0.1 microsecond ping between brain, eyes and hands...
  • DRI should let GL accelerated games run as fast as they do in windows, under X. That assumes that agp is supported by linux by that time.

    Get a DreamCast if you want NO overhead. For computers, you expect a little overhead. With computers, you expect more than just games to be run. People who design the process assume you wan't to return to normal work afterwards.

    X is not that big a resource to have running in the background. All the work that it will be doing is opening a window. What makes X seams like a pig is that most of your apps use X's resources, for things like pixmaps. Just open a little X session with "xinit -e gamename" to get a minimal X session.
  • I run X normally with 15bpp. I then have a game mode, that is 16bpp. This lets me go fullscreen without worrying about the mouse panning. And as I said above, games can go fullscreen without all of this fuss automatilcy like q3test, to bad none of them do.
  • Descent is still a very cool game. Sure the graphics are a bit outdated but it's not in any way an ugly game. Put a modern 3D-engine on Descent 1/2 and you have a winner. Descent 3 has a modern 3D-engine - but the game itself sucks really bad. The cool atmosphere of D1/2 is gone, Descent 3 is seriously boring. I played the demo for 15 mins and then deleted it. It's a decent looking game with outrageous hardware requirements (K6-2@400 + Voodoo3 = slow) and absolutety no future.
  • Re: Full screen
    If you want to play 3D games, you probably want a 3D card. I believe 3dfx cards have a Mesa extension to go fullscreen. My G200 doesn't, but Q2 just positions the window at 0,0 and reduces the resolution. As for being root to use DGA... that's not right. Either you have X horribly misconfigured or it needs root for something else.

    Re: Games in X
    I live in X with many xterms, so it doesn't bother me any. If you don't, then you're right about GGI. I believe there is already a 3D API in GGI with support for 3dfx cards. At this point, I don't think that 3D is part of the framebuffer interface, but I could be wrong...
  • Well, modern games should be using OpenGL. When the opengl drivers get DRI support, then they all should run much faster. This even goes for 2d games.

    Ohh yea, you can shrink the size of X, so you can get fullscreen. Quake should do that itself, but it doesn't for some reason. Q3 does automaticly go fullscreen however. It is the games fault.
  • "no atmosphere"? Did you mistake this
    for one of those primarily single-player games?
    Get a PXO account and try that ...

    A K62-400 isn't that outrageous, it's rather inexpensive, even if you include a middlish Voodoo3. Besides, Descent III requires no where near that unless you're expecting 1024X768+ .. D3 is my favorite game and runs fairly well on my K6-166 and Voodoo 1, it only gets *slow* when I'm the server for an 8 player game (my cable modem can handle it, my CPU can't), but that's ok since I usually limit it to 5 or 6. What is with you people who call anything less than 60FPS slow? I know motion is far more fluid and realistic at those speeds, but that doesn't make 20FPS unplayable or "slow" .. sheesh, you people and your "upgrade every 18 months" syndrome. I played D1 on a 386 DX40!

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