Descent: Underground | Hacker News Reader

Descent: Underground

kickstarter.com

61 pointsmoreati23 comments

It doesn't seem to me that any of these guys have anything to do with the original title besides getting the license. Not that necessarily means anything bad for the game, of course.

Trivia: The original Descent was written in assembly language, probably one of the last major PC games not to be written in a high-level language.

Even later still was Rollercoaster Tycoon; Both one and two were primarily in assembly, with a little bit of C to interact with windows [1]

[1] http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

Ha, I figured that there were probably some other crazy people after 1994 that I didn't know about. Thanks for the info!

Parallax eventually released the source for Descent 1 and 2, you know. It was C. (At least the majority of it?)

Edit: I can't access this domain from work, but perhaps somebody else can confirm this. http://descent2.com/ddn/sources/descent1/

Originally it built with some Borland product, and some folks put a lot of time and effort into porting it to MingW32.

Eventually, it gained SDL support, then OpenGL support... These days, you can apt-get install d1x-rebirth and d2x-rebirth. :)

Those links lead to 404s, but it looks like it's all on Github as well: https://github.com/drguildo/Descent

Indeed I was wrong that it's all assembler. There is lots of assembler but plenty of C too.

Thanks for checking! That repo appears to be the original source release, unaltered. IIRC there are some non-free bits in there that Parallax missed. (They discuss this in the interview in README.TXT.)

Anybody remember DEVIL, the 3rd party Descent Level Editor? :)

Descent was my first exposure to hacking. I'd hex edit save-game files and give myself 255 shield-value.. ;)

> Not that necessarily means anything bad for the game

They're selling ships.

There's not much more bad you can do for Descent.

  > Descent’s frenetic and pulse-pounding action were 
  > light-years ahead of its 1995 release date.

That's about 10^16 meters ahead of 1995.

What's this? Capture the asteroids? Multiple playable ships? Corporation logos?

This is not Descent. Descent is a dark, gloomy space shooter, that makes you feel miserable, disoriented, lonely and afraid of the damn robots with their not so bad AI.

And then you invite friends to play cooperatively to make it a little less horrifying.

That is Descent.

Descent 3 had multiple ships, logos, etc. CTF existed in Descent 2. ...And maybe D1? ... I can't remember! :)

I'd prefer a new Descent Freespace. The story line and gameplay in that game were fantastic.

Never played the game, never had the computing power as a kid.

Hmmm, I wonder what the completion rate for high cost games on Kickstarter is... (some googling later)... It's near 30% apparently...

http://gamerant.com/kickstarter-video-game-failure-rate/

The staff seems to have a hearty pedigree, the goals seem attainable, there are some smart statements about limitations. They might just pull it off. Might. I wouldn't bet on it. Why? Just feeling grumpy.

Wow - blast from the past, I loved descent 1 and 2. I thought this was going to be a new / digital version of the board game descent though.

Don't know which I would be more excited about.

My favorite PC game by far. I'm hoping this happens.

Also my favorite PC game by far, but I really hope it doesn't happen... It seems the devs are going for yet another 'monetized'/pay-to-win travesty à la Dungeon Keeper redux, sadly. Thanks but no thanks.

Where are you seeing that it's pay-to-win?

From the page: "All copies of Descent: Underground start with the WASP unlocked. Some pledge tiers unlock additional ships. All ships can be unlocked through game play."

As long as you can unlock ships without paying, it seems okay.

The page says the game will be $50. I wouldn't expect a full-price single-player game to require in-game purchases in order to beat the game.

I remember the bad VR helmets that were around during the first Descent, it's probably a good time to bring it back during a time of Oculus Rift.

Descent - made me fail half my exams one year in uni :)

Only video game to have made me feel ill - happy times!

there better be a cute little guide-bot who shoots flares at bad guys

When I search where I live :http://caniwearshorts.today/?location=Kad%C4%B1k%C3%B6y

UnicodeEncodeError at /

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 107: ordinal not in range(128)

Request Method: GET Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8002/?location=Kad%C4%B1k%C3%B6y Django Version: 1.7.6 Exception Type: UnicodeEncodeError Exception Value:

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 107: ordinal not in range(128)

Exception Location: /usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py in urlencode, line 1332 Python Executable: /opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/bin/python Python Version: 2.7.6 Python Path:

['/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/bin', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/lib/python2.7', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload', '/usr/lib/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/opt/apps/can-i-wear-shorts/env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages']

Server time: Cum, 20 Mar 2015 17:31:09 +0000

Wrong post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238237

Reply on news.ycombinator.com