DescentBB

psionik wrote:

Sirius wrote:D3 levels are harder to adapt well as they leave less to the imagination - and not to mention most of the popular ones kind of ... forgot to have a layout.

We selected the two d3 levels we will be using for their exceptional layouts. To me, The Manes is synonymous with descent 1. I would look into getting more older levels but honestly we want original material in our game, the ones we are using are just to pay repects and possibly rescue them from obscurity. I'm really going to try to get some content out this weekend, we are working hard right now on getting things together for the next set of screenshots and possibly a gameplay movie. And no, I am not going to post 127 screenshots this time.

Psionik,

did you take a look at my level spotlight (on http://www.descent2.de)? I have gathered a lot of exceptional Descent 2 (plus a few Descent 1, collection will be completed in the near future) there. Browsing them would save you a lot of filtering and sifting through the 1000s of Descent 1/2 levels available alone on PD.

Kilarin wrote:A negative attitude about CD can't HELP anything. However, it does contribute to discouraging the people who are working hard on this project and so could therefore hurt.

Everybody is entitled to have his own opinion. If the CD people are really determined, hard at work and have a vision, how should that discourage them? They will just shrug it off and keep going, because they know what they're up to. There will always be sceptics. Deal with it.

Diedel wrote:Everybody is entitled to have his own opinion.

You'll note I didn't tell anyone to shut up, I simply expressed my OWN opinion that being positive was a more USEFUL attitude in this situation.

Diedel wrote:There will always be sceptics. Deal with it.

Kilarin wrote:And in the meantime, I would urge the CD staff to not take Mobius so seriously. None of the rest of us do. It just draws more attention to him (and his opinions) to shout back at him.

So I think we agree here. But I AM glad to see that you feel there will always be skeptics who gripe about any project, and that the best way to deal with them is to either respond calmly, or just ignore them. Getting riled up about people who criticize a project is not really a very useful response.

Diedel wrote:Everybody is entitled to have his own opinion.

Everybody is also required to be respectful in the way they express their opinion. That includes both the skeptics and the CD staff. Consider this board policy.

EDIT: this has always been board policy. Now it's being enforced.

Why can't we all just get along? Is life so difficult we need to be arses to each other?

Btw, I just looked the Descent 1 and Descent 2 fusion strength up in the code/data: The Descent 1 fusion is exactly twice as powerful (60 damage per blob hit) as the Descent 2 fusion (30 damage per blob hit). That means one full Descent 1 fusion hit does 120 damage (the same for all difficulty levels). Whammo!

Diedel, check your PM box.
edit: Mobi, you too.

Lothar wrote:Everybody is also required to be respectful in the way they express their opinion. That includes both the skeptics and the CD staff. Consider this board policy.

EDIT: this has always been board policy. Now it's being enforced.

This insight is coming right on time.

Sniper wrote:

If this is CD's player ship, I have to say it looks awesome. Not a cute little airplane for the wife. This looks like a fighting machine - massive, brutal. It looks like what it's built for: Dishing out massive damage and surviving massive punishment. Compared to the Pyro, it looks like a pitbull vs. a shepherd dog. If this is CD's player ship, I love it!

Diedel,

If you haven't seen this already?
Have a look at that ship here!

Low Res Version


Hi Res Version!

The CD player ship reminds me of the top portion of a \"Mech\" from \"MechWarrior\".

I find the Hellion's cockpit too big - the entire ship has the size of a car. I would make the cockpit half the size to make the Hellion look really big, and increase its size compared to a human accordingly.

Just wait till you see the Hellfire. Lets just say you'll make a mess of yourself when you see it.

Well.... for space games I can see a ship being HUGE. But for a game like this, where you fly inside complex tunnel systems at about 55mph, I find it more believable to fly a ship that is about the size of a car. I have a hard time picturing every robot and door being 50-100+ feet tall. Remember how size looked really screwed up in D3? Same thing.

I have a hard time imagining a car carrying 4 laser guns, 2 plasma guns, a fusion cannon, two vulcan cannons, and 50+ missiles, plus a complete jet engine drive with fuel, energy supply, shield generator etc. etc.

Making the Hellion twice the size doesn't turn it into an imperial dreadnaught. It makes it about the size of a modern fighter plane (still small for all these guns - I bet they have to invent space warp bags for this ). Just look at a fighter canopy's size compared to the rest of the plane. The Hellion even looks like a small car on that picture.

And I wrote something about doubling the size above.

The problem of D3 is not the ships size, but it's speed. They had to make the levels more spacious to balance the significantly higher speed.

(To think of people complaining mouselook would make Descent Quake-like ... the speedup in D3 does that just as much).

Yes, that afterburner really made levels open up. But they opened up in good ways like in AnotherBox and Bill The Cat.

Does the CD ship have an afterburner?

Like Diedel, I imagined the size of the Pyro to be pretty big. Tall enough that a 6' man could stand under it when it rested on it's wings. Doesn't look like that in D3, but that's the size I imagined it. What's the scale of the new ship(s)?

Uuuuh, in D3, the PEOPLE (yes in the main game you see people walking around on occasion), were almost larger than the ships in physical size. But you could fit like 3-5 in there.

What I base my size estimates off from for Pyro-like ships would be the Scorpion in Star Trek: Nemesis. That ship wasn't that big. Just barely big enough to fit two guys in it. But it looked really good. As far as we know, this ship is a single seater. Now also note, that a jet fighter is mostly a LOT larger because you need enormous wings to fly like they do. A ship like this, would be smallish, very efficient and wouldn't need any wings.

I wouldn't worry so much about weapons. I don't think an imperial star destroyer has as many weapons as a Pyro. Besides, almost every single FPS game allows you to fit 20 or so guns at least half the size of your body in your magic back pocket with extra ammo. No one seems to care or notice. Personally, I would just set the ships up so that you can pick your personal weapon layout before you enter the game rather than powerups like Freespace did. But that's just me. It would also make it a little more challenging.

What made D3 look bad, was all the cartoon-like models and the fact that characters that should have been tiny, were as large or larger than the ships.


BTW, the AB in Descent 2 seems faster and the game somehow still appears larger than D3. Mostly because it's darkness and sharp edges.

For me, what makes a game seem less cartoon-like, is ambiance, illusion, lighting, sharp edges, grunge, wear and tear. Things of that nature.

They're STILL working on this? Where's the in-game screenshots/trailers? It's been about 2-3 years since they announced themselves. N-Trap was a LOT quicker on the uptake for screens, information and videos.

Jeromie released a ton of screenshots months ago.

M,

get and install D2X-XL, start D2:CS Level 1, fly close to a hostage, and switch to external view (Alt+F12).

Pyros must have a super secret shrinking device to carry all their guns and then the hostages around.

I still say a big problem with D3 are the out of whack level dimensions making the Pyro look like a toy. One problem here is the increased Pyro speed. D3 Pyros are faster than D1/D2 Pyros. Another reason is that D3 contains structures looking like they were man-made, giving you an immediate estimate of the ships proportions, hence the ships look way too small.

I have recently created a D2X-XL level containing some structures like this (you can fly into a control tower to throw some switches there). Actually the Pyro looks too small here too, as you will immediately take the tower as being built for humans and measure the Pyro with it, but somehow the effect doesn't seem to be so bad.

Install my mission Boiling Point, warp to level 3 (enter 'freespace'), kill all robots ('spaniard', 'dodgethis') and fly to the big central area. Again, press Alt+F12 for an external ship view.

When I think about the proper Pyro size, I think of the small fighter vessels in movies like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica or Andromeda, to name a few. They have about fighter plane dimensions.

Btw, most fighter jets are as long as their wing span is, so the wings aren't the only criterion (F16 is certainly longer, not to speak of the ancient Starfighter). If I had to make the decision (\"if\" - I am only theoretizing) the CD ship would have about the dimensions of a tank and be pretty wide to make it look more hulking and threatening.

Into Cerberon's pyro is scaled to how it should be.

Well, to what some people think it should be.



The pyro is so huge!
You have to make the levels on a massive scale just for the pyros alone!

Imo the cockpit is out of proportion. It looks to big compared to the human in front of the ship. Consider at how fighter cockpits look compared to the entire plane. Maybe make the ship a little smaller (10%? 20%?)

But apart from that - not bad.

The real problem is the level building. A Descent level must not look like it's been built for humans on foot. It must look like it has been built by and for huge machines. Or if it does, then the Pyro must dwarf those structures, and you need space enough to maneuver. Imagine some office containers at a mine's construction site. The containers wouldn't be much bigger than the ship. You could however create enough space around to make it look well, and throw in a huge crane or so ... then you don't have that Pyro proportions problem. Switches might actually be small. You could either operate them wirelessly, or have a device extend from the ship and plug into them. That would make more sense than shooting *huge* levers.

If you remember Half-Life 1's intro sequence: Gordon is travelling through the huge underground facility by train. Everything looks huge. A tank-sized Pyro would not appear to be out of proportion there.

It's definitely a question of proper level design. Just do not make things that should be operated by humans on foot big enough to operate them with a Pyro (i.e. don't make an office room so big you can enter it with a fighter plane), like in one of the D3 singleplayer levels, where you have to fly into that building. Proportion-wise, the D3 city level is a complete failure.

Actually I could imagine a ground pounder element for singleplayer, where you have to leave your ship to let's say operate some computer. But you don't have to: Tap into some connector - by wire or wireless - and operate everything from inside the ship.

Heck, if I was to build such a game (let's say as lead programmer/designer), I'd like to have everything in a way so that nothing is obtrusive or too apparent or exaggerated. Just everything blending perfectly together. So that people play and play and just think \"hm, not bad\". But when they stop playing and get up and live their lives, their thoughts will wander back to the game and they will start to think \"Heck, this was awesome .. it was just perfect!\"

Actually, I like the idea of the pyro being almost the size of a go-cart with wings. It was designed to fit into very tight spaces.
BUT, as everyone has pointed out, the picking up hostages thing is silly. But actually, I think it's pretty silly for just about ANY rational pyro size, so just ignore that part. D3 didn't use it much and CD doesn't have to use it at all.

As for the weapons. We just assume they are very miniaturized. Which works fine for energy weapons. It doesn't work well at all for missiles and vauss/gauss cannons. Alas.

Which is too bad, because a Pyro should be SMALL. It has to be for what it is supposed to do.

I think the pyros used a technology similar to star trek's transporter. When they picked something (or someone) up, they convert the physical matter into data, store the data on some sort of storage device, and then keep on going. When the thing is needed, it is reconstructed based on the data kept in storage. Apparantly, the reconstruction of living objects takes too much time for the emergency reconstructor to rebuild people when the ship fails, but it does have enough time and energy to reconstruct all of the weapons carried in storage, haphazardly spitting them out just as the ship is destroyed.

snoopy wrote:I think the pyros used a technology similar to star trek's transporter.

Interesting idea, if the ship was able to do this it should consume energy to change weapons. It would be more like the Star Trek food replicators and not the transporters though.

RC

Well, a counter arguement is that the ship doesn't nessarily have to be faster or slower, but its teh size of the level that really does it. (Like what Diedel was talking about.) There was one level... don't remember it now, but when I went into a HUUUUUUUUUUUGE room that it had it felt like I was flying in molasses, not getting anywhere as fast as I should've been.

considering the ships' size take into account, that the ptmc saw only a few ingeneers that could fly a ship and almost no pilot knowing the sophisticated specifications of the ships. Where the hack did they place the hostages? Well, these people knew their business. We are pilots, are we not?

d3jake wrote:There was one level... don't remember it now, but when I went into a HUUUUUUUUUUUGE room that it had it felt like I was flying in molasses, not getting anywhere as fast as I should've been.

Like that "fuel station" Monsterball level, with the four massive cylinders containing the goals? Simple textures don't help much for edge tracing, either.

Snoopy,

you are talking about Descent 35, right?

Sedwick,

actually the hostages were turned into food for the MD ...

I've read snoopy's idea several time over the years on the board from different players. It has always made the most sense to me. The hostages are kept in a buffer much like Scotty and his fellow engineer were on Next Generation when he crash landed on a Dyson's Sphere.

Consider that this \"world\" has warp cores and weaponry that eats more energy that we can barely manufacture now; never mind that this is all generated from a fusion reactor not much bigger than a dinning room table.

This is fiction. And with Sci-Fi, most anything goes.

It seems to me that the pyro in IC is a bit larger than necessary where scale is concerned but not so much that it matters. The human is the Quake in-game model, so yeah, the levels have to be conversely huge.

If scale is a concern, then you might want to look at D3 a bit more closely. There are several scale mis-matches there; one thing that has always bugged me about that game.

Duper wrote:This is fiction. And with Sci-Fi, most anything goes.

Core Decision


chapter 1.


They say we had to. The polar field on Earth was destabilizing for the first time in almost a million years, and with its potential demise would come devastation. Not small scale devastation, but world-wide apocalyptic devastation. The magnetic shield generated by Earth's molten iron core has a habit of weakening every 200,000 years or so and then inverting itself. This doesn't pose much threat to the creatures of nature itself but mankind had placed itself in a very compromising position. Reliance on machinery that itself relied on the field's orientation had placed humanity not on a crutch, but on a platform of dreams suspended over the black, bottomless chasm of extinction. It was coming up on 800,000 years since the last flip, and the field was weaker than ever recorded. We had to get off Earth.

Nature has a way of telling you when it's time for change. After the initial discovery that the field was weakening and indeed even beginning to flip, a universal group of minds was formed. This group contained millions of the world's greatest scientists, engineers, physicists, geologists, every intelligent mind from every branch of knowledge all brought together thru the Internet. The result of that group was the Geodrive. The Geodrive could perform gravity field manipulation, allowing a craft to create gravitational “spaces” around the ship that it would slip into, allowing for inertia-free movement thru any gravity field. The Geodrive was not completely a new idea, its gravity drive was contributed by area 51 and the group cannot lay claim to that part of the technology, however what they did come up with is indeed equal in brilliance to the stolen half. The Geodrive is powered by something they called a Geo-Alloy. The mechanics of this man made element remain hidden by the UGM to this day, suffice it to say that if its technology fell into the wrong hands it could change reality forever. Apparently it fused extreme heat and extreme cold into a crystal structure that, like quartz, gives off energy when compressed. However, unlike quartz, the geo-alloy's output is measured in degrees kelvin. A geological power plant. The Geodrive was a miracle of human thinking and industry - it could not only get us to our red brother Mars, it could theoretically get us as far as Venus.

When developing the scale for Descent IV, we in Orbital did a rather indepth study of scale and speed. I can't find the white paper at this exact moment, but we pretty much had all the numbers written out.

First, a \"cube\" in D1/2 is not the same size as a \"cube\" in D3. a Cube being defined by the size of the Pyro itself, FURTHER refined by the size of the cockpit as there is not Pyro-GX NATIVE model in D3.

Second, weapons, specifically missiles, are NOT to scale in any of the games. I think they were oversized to make them more visible to players, both for SP and MP. In our opinion, they are 4X oversized. This is based on size of the ship, quantity of missiles contained in the ship without an ammo rack, and , interestingly enough, the size ratio between the mega missile's warhead and the area of the GX (in the D2 movies) where it's fusion core is believed to be stored.

Third: We think the hostage scale is purely a gameplay issue. if they were to scale, they'd be hard to find and hard to pickup. To get the proper idea of human scale vs the Pyro-GX, you need to look at the cockpit and then corellate that with the fullscreen in-game cockpit images. It is large enough for 1 seat, no shelf behind the headrest, so we can assume the pilot's head is right within 6 inches of the back window. The front window appears to be about 1-1.2 meters away (yes, we did a cardboard mockup of the cockpit to get measurements...) at the bottom edge. So, you get a cockpit about 1.8-2 meters long, i.e., the size of the average human male. Concerning the top to bottom tickness of the cockpit in this scale, We assume that like in any modern fighter jet, the pilot is sitting about 50 degrees from vertical reclined. Oh, and no, we did not trust the D3 intro movie, as it has the pilot sitting straight up, which either has his legs unbent pointed right for the nost of the ship, think \"sitting on the floor\", which is a very uncomfortable position for a long period of sitting, or he has his legs folded or somehow right through the bottom of the ship! Anyway, it doesn't provides for a comfortable flight.

Whew..didn't mean that to turn into a wall of text. Sorry.

Next, speed. Wide open spaces in D1/2 ALWAYS made it seem like you were going incredibly slow. It's much like the sensation that astronauts feel when in space. Everything moves so slow, when in fact, it's going by incredibly fast. Did you know that a rock the size of your hand that is moving 1 degree off from parallel to your orbit at the SAME speed will STILL rip a hole in your hull the size of a pickup truck when it eventually impacts your ship?

Anyway, (breaking this up to avoid WallofTextofDoom) In D3 they sped up the GX by about 1.6x Why? Simple. Outside flying. To compensate, they made indoor spaces a bit larger than normal too, and made the flyable space small by placing piles and girders and crap everywhere. I SO hated getting my ship stuck on that junk. So essentially it's an illusion.

We believe that the main engines are never used in the game except as manuvering thrusters. Afterburners are in fact a device to overthrust the forward thrusting...uhh...thrusters. The main engines are powerful enough to get the GX into Orbit, and make intra-planetary travel possible in a few days rather than months or years.

So finally, our conclusion was the length of the GX matched that of an M1-A1 Abrams main battle tank, with the wingspan of course being about the same length. It's thruster speed without AB is about 100KPH, and 150KPH with AB. Anything that disagreed with this scale in any of the games was in error or was a change made in the name of improved gameplay.

Our approach to scale will be methodical as well but my explanation is much simpler. We will experiment with various things until it feels perfect, then move on.

Critics: Please enjoy this opportunity to quote, reinvent, and generally misinterpret my point in lengthy speculative posts thick with devout self faith.

I feel terrible for not releasing any media and so I am trimming down a movie I took awhile ago and will post it here in a few minutes.

Cool info Halcyon. I don't suppose there is any chance of resurrecting that project? The powers that be aren't going to suddenly start co-operating I suppose.

psionik wrote:The Geodrive was a miracle of human thinking and industry - it could not only get us to our red brother Mars, it could theoretically get us as far as Venus.

Thanks for the story bite! I'm convinced this is going to be a GREAT game!

One point, not actually important, but you would get complaints later so I thought I'd point it out. At closest approach, Venus comes closer to earth than Mars does. And at furthest distance, Mars is a LOT further away from us than Venus.

Kilarin wrote:Cool info Halcyon. I don't suppose there is any chance of resurrecting that project? The powers that be aren't going to suddenly start co-operating I suppose.

Not likely, not as we originally wanted at least. Perhaps someday I'll have time to get it back together and strip out the extra junk we'd added to the game in order to make it marketable, then release it as a free download via torrent.

EDIT: That sounded as if I had a finished game over here. I don't. I meant to strip out those uneeded parts from the design document and redevelop the game. Also, most of our game assets for D4 are old now by today's technology. For example we had "big" textures of 512x512. Tiny now...

Wonderful into Psionik. Nice premise and it's written well.

Great info Valin. I didn't know the GX was that slow. It certainly felt faster in D2 though. But that could be environment but even so, I've flown around in some pretty big rooms with AB and I still felt faster.

I would like to see some actual stats on the GX from D2 itself. Anyone know how to get the stats in such a way that I can compare weapon and ship table files from D2 with D3 weapon and ship table files? With D3:U, I'm planning to re-balance the weapons to act more like D2 weapons.

Yes, weapons were always unbalanced to an extent in all three games but they were less balanced in D3.

But I think you guys are looking at it from a different standpoint than I am. No game is going to be physics perfect. Otherwise, it wouldn't be nearly as fun. But I do like balance, and for a game to \"feel\" real. D2 in comparison was dark, murky, and sharp. More like Quake games (which have always remained the same pretty much in gameplay and ambiance.) And yes, I know about the hostages in D2. I've been playing since 95 in single player. Though it wasn't until 98-99 that I started playing on-line.

I'm looking at this game as separate from D1-D2. Not as part of it. Thus, the ships really don't need to look or feel like Descent ships. I just want the flight capabilities. My feelings on ship design, is that it should be sort of like a Commanche helicopter, if you removed the rotors and the long tail. Maybe compact fold-in missile bays instead of wings. On a ship like this, you wouldn't need wings for much. In D3, they mostly just look cool. I just like a smaller, more compact look. I also like a semi-flat base like the Phoenix has. You can really sneak around if you know how to fly it just right. I like to slide against walls and hide at times. I've used this to my advantage a lot of times. But I like the Pyro best as the Phoenix is a bit too fast with weak shielding.


But, this isn't my game. CD will do what they do best and I'll still play it through as long as it has vehicles and has a feel like D3 has. (not necessarily the same feel but something like it).

I think you misunderstood me. The speed of the GX is not because it is the GX. It is because it was D1/2. The problem of scale comes with the need to measure speed by the length of the ship itself, refined even further by defining speed in the term of \"cockpit lengths per second\".

Why are numbers not sufficient? Simple. If I took a GX, and put it in a long tunnel , made of standard sized cubes in D2, then flew down the tunnel at a set speed and timed it. Then setup the same experiment in D3, except lacking a standard cube size, it must be guessed by making a cube scaled to the size of the GL first, then building the hall with that. When this is done, you will find the GL is MUCH faster. That's not to say that the GL was meant to be, it means that the GL was meant to SEEM just as fast because almost NEVER in D3 does it use a \"standard\" size cube. They are almost always double the size. Again, this was done to keep speed seeming to be somewhat even when transitioning between inside and outside flight. Had Outrage not done so, Flying outside would have been a chore at best, and a pain at worst.

Thus, D3 was distorted for the sake of gameplay and is not a reliable source of scales.

Again, the ONLY reliable base of scale in all of Descent is the cockpit of the GX, which is almost exactly 2 metres from back edge to front edge. There is nothing else anywhere in the game that comes close to being realistic as far as scale to base any measurements on.

How did you measure the canopy of the GX exactly? I think I know what your talking about but I'm not sure what you refer to exactly with cubes. I thought cubes were only used in D1/D2 and not at all in D3?

I've never really constructed a full on level before. I've designed a few rooms but I mostly model/texture/rig/animate, and fiddle with the table files.