Descent 2 - D2X-XL - TTLG Forums

Shadowcat on 10/2/2006 at 11:12

I was reading about running on walls and ceilings earlier today, and got a hankering for a bit of Descent.

A poke around the web revealed (http://www.descent2.de/) descent2.de, home to the D2X-XL project (which is a port of the source code to various platforms, using OpenGL, and with numerous other improvements). It builds on the earlier D2X project, and reportedly fixes most if not all of the deficiencies that apparently existed in that one, so it sounds like it may be the best way to play the game on a current machine.

I figured some of you might be interested.

Installation of the original game is a bit of a pain, I found. It absolutely insisted on checking for DirectX 2, and it actually installed something and wanted me to reboot afterwards (*mutter*), so watch out for that.

I think that you MIGHT be able to bypass that nonsense by cancelling the standard installer immediately and instead manually running \WINSETUP\RESUME.EXE from your CD (which turned out to be the installer for the game proper). I say "might", because although running this allowed me to install the game without rebooting (which the regular setup.exe was insisting upon after its little DX2 routine), I was of course already some way through the default preliminaries at the time. Hopefully resume.exe doesn't actually check what you've done so far. (edit: unfortunately it does notice if you just run resume.exe. If you know a genuine workaround, please point it out...)

I found that enabling the redbook music caused some in-game stuttering, so I disabled it again, but everything else seemed to run nicely.

Chimpy Chompy on 10/2/2006 at 19:17

Nice one! I never finished Descent 2, this looks like a good opportunity to fix that.

io organic industrialism on 10/2/2006 at 20:24

yeah i caught wind of this about 6 months ago. i'm a lifelong descent fanatic (been playing descent 1 ever since the demo came out), but i was never able to get into descent 2 because i never had a computer it would run properly on. i have tried d2x about once a year for the past 5 years and have never gotten it to work properly with joystick, so when i heard about d2x-w32, i was pretty excited... however i have tried it a few times, and it always bluescreens my computer, which in windows 2000 = a reboot.. so.. looks like i am still stuck with d1x for now. i wish somebody would work on d1x still. it hasn't been improved upon since 1999. which seriously sucks because it has a pretty serious memory leak which requires a game restart after you've played it for a few hours :-\ well, version 1.43 does, which is one of the only ones that runs on windows NT based platforms

ZylonBane on 10/2/2006 at 20:44

So what's wrong with Descent 3?

Shadowcat on 10/2/2006 at 20:49

Not sure... I never properly got into the third one. I think the added complexity of D3 took away from the Instant Action feel of D1 & D2. That's what I was after this time, so I didn't even consider installing D3.

I do intend to play it properly some day (I only ever made it a few levels in before getting distracted) as I'm sure the game has a lot going for it, but it certainly changed the vibe a fair bit.

io organic industrialism on 10/2/2006 at 22:10

Quote Posted by Shadowcat

agreed 100% .. even though the gameplay mechanics are largely the same, the engine just has a totally different feel. i think that even d2 changed the gameplay mechanic too much by adding the afterburner. the most important part about descent for me was multiplayer deathmatch... and in d1 it takes skill to get away from your opponent. d2 it seems like the afterburners would make it too easy to get away from opponents, which takes away the fun, but also harder to catch people, which takes away the fun. granted, everyone has the possibility to have the same amount of afterburners, but they are used at different times, so it changes the gameplay balance from moment to moment in a game. in d1, the speed balance was always the same, and for me, that equality made it more fun

Renegen on 11/2/2006 at 00:26

Now if only they did the same thing for the 1st one, I hate the thief bot.

Shadowcat on 11/2/2006 at 03:17

Yeah, I had a real love/hate relationship with the Thief Bot. I could appreciated the challenge, but sometimes it was just too much and I'd wind up frustrated and annoyed.

I just reinstalled D3 to refresh my memory, and played through the first mission. I note that the briefing for mission 2 informs you about the Thief, so they introduce it pretty damned early in the third game.

It is a very slick production, though. I definitely want to give it a proper chance at some point. I do wish it didn't switch resolutions to display the map (my monitor makes me hate games that do that), but otherwise it's pretty funky.

Apparently D2X-XL will play D1 missions, but I don't know whether that means you can play the D1 campaign, or if you can just load stand-alone missions that were designed for D1. I haven't looked into it, aside from ascertaining that unpacking the D2X-XL files into a D1 installation and trying to run the new executable does not work :)

io organic industrialism on 11/2/2006 at 07:50

ohhh man. i hadn't tried d2x w32x since before the "xl" addition. i don't know what it stands for, but it is a HUGE improvement. i got it to run on my primary computer. and FINALLY i got joystick working to an acceptable level in descent 2.

it took me about an HOUR of configuration to get it to "feel" right, but i finally got it pretty damn close to descent 1. it took a ridiculous amount of tweaking. it appears there is a bug in d2x-xl.exe that when "linear joystick sensitivity scaling" is enabled, the Z-axis (twist axis) sensitivity slider doesn't have any actual affect on the joystick's sensitivity. which sucks because by default it was too sensitive for me. so i was racking my brain trying to figure out how i could overcome this bug. (because i tried playing without the linear scaling enabled, and the movement was all jerky like there was deadzones on or something)... and i figured that "overcalibrating" the Z axis might work. so i did a google search for "overcalibrate joystick".. and there is only ONE search result. so i click on it, and right at the top of the page, it says " I recently used a joystick utility for my Logitech Wingman Digital 3D joystick and found it to be pretty interesting and useful, but mostly for flying choppers in DC. It's a free download called DXTweak2 "

so i'm like !!! i USE a logitech wingman digital 3d. what are the chances that out of the ONE search result i got, it refers to the EXACT joystick i have!! so i downloaded the utility, set it to some ridiculously strange numbers just to make sure it actually had an effect on the controls in descent. sure enough, the Z axis didn't even work at all, so it definitely affected it. it took me about 30 minutes of tweaking the overcalibraiton numbers, but i finally got it set to something acceptable.

and now i am off to play d2.... for the first SERIOUS attempt ever. (i have played it before but not for very long)

maybe now i can go to one of the descent revivals they talk about on descent.net

thank you thank you shadowcat for mentioning this, and thank you whoever is still working on this program, you brilliant. especially since it plays d1 levels, i am able to play the lost levels in it!

it doesn't detect the descent 1 hog though ... so not sure if there is any way to play the original d1 levels.

Shadowcat on 11/2/2006 at 08:16

Ah, in fact it's dead easy as it turns out, and you don't even need the auto_hogfile command-line option.

1) Install D2 and patch to v1.2.

2) Copy DESCENT.HOG and DESCENT.PIG from D1 into the D2 game directory.

3) Install and run D2X-XL

4) Select the menu checkbox offering you the D1 levels.

5) Start new game :)

edit:
6) And read the FAQ. You probably need to use -nomovies, or the game will crash whenever you exit a mine :/

edit2: er, except it still crashed on my machine even with -nomovies. Ah well.

The crash screwed up the video display, but not the rest of the OS. I managed to avoid rebooting by running the game again (blind, but ALT-TABbing to my shell and re-executing the last command I gave it) which reinitialised the display routines and got everything back to normal. You can probably do the same thing by running any other full-screen application.

Alternatively, you might avoid the blindness factor if you try the game out in windowed mode to begin with. If a game doesn't have full-screen control, the chances of it messing up in this sort of way if it crashes are dramatically lessened. If it works fine, go back to full-screen. You should be able to use ALT+Enter to switch between the two screen modes.

edit3: (http://www.descent2.de/d2x-descent1.html)