Kicking off our look back at Windows sequels to DOS games with Descent 3! This game was pretty much everything the fans wanted out of a third Descent game and it really shows, keeping the same basic gameplay of the first couple games but greatly expanding on everything, adding in mission objectives, inventory items, multiple ships to fly, massive levels spanning both indoors and outdoors, and is one of the few PC games to have an actual decent ending!
...it's just too bad the thing's a nightmare to get working anymore. :P
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Additional Information and Corrections:
THE DESCENT GAMES ARE BACK ON GOG! No idea how D3 runs but here's a link to get it for $5 with the expansion! www.gog.com/ga...
Here's a couple links to the websites where you can find information on both Overload and Descent Underground: playoverload.com and descendentstud...
Here's the links for DXWnd and dgVoodoo2 respectively: sourceforge.ne... and dege.freeweb.hu...
One of the features I neglected to mention was the game's dynamic music system, which would play back different pieces of music based on various situations or progression through a level. Many of the levels even have their own very-brief death tune they play if you get destroyed!
Although it's possible to run the game at a widescreen resolution, it's not desirable because of how it's handled. Typically, when a game goes from standard aspect to wide aspect, there's two ways you can approach handling the field of view: Either increasing it along the horizontal axis, often called "Horizontal+", or you can decrease it along the vertical axis, often called "Vertical-". Virtually all modern games use Horizontal+ but before widescreen gaming was coming, anything was possible. Descent 3 uses Vertical- and as a result everything feels too big and too close when playing widescreen. :(
It may seem odd to set the framecap to 999, even if you're going to use vertical sync, but this is to prevent the game from dropping frames when it doesn't need to. If you set a lower framecap, regardless of if you're vsyncing or not, you're very liable to get significant delays and framerate drops on modern systems. On systems of the time, this is a non-issue.
An alternative to dgVoodoo2 is nGlide, which I also tested and found that it works ALMOST decently with D3, but with strange, regular hiccups in the framerate, thus why I recommend dgVoodoo2 for this game instead.
Some viewers may've also noticed the footage from Level 5 in this video seems to be missing something: The status of the five reactor cores isn't showing on-screen! I think this may be related to the 1.5 patch I was using and not because of how I was running this, though I'm not 100% certain.
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30 окт 2024
