DescentBB

my preferred method of dealing with the thief is to hang around in an open location, and when it approches me, i afterburn towards it, when i am close enough i shoot a mega missile... if the thief tries to go through a door it will get hit, but if it turns a sharp corner it would miss, so careful selection of locations to do this is necessary

d2x-xl has a 'isometric' style radar which is good when it isnt too cluttered and you can spot the thief by its movement... the latest builds also have target indicators which show robots through walls, so hunting down the thief is much easier that way... not to mention it also has smoke effects, so in addition to looking for open doors, you can follow the smoke trail to hunt the thief down once you've damaged it enough

I find Thief bots hate the Omega

ohh dear it looks like i might have stumbled across some bugs in D3 ...

assigning the 'use inventory item' key to a joystick button , if you hold the button down it behaves like you let it go immediately, so you have to bind it to a key on the keyboard to use the energy shield converter properly

and also, when fighting the homunculus, if you lead it back to its starting room, it might suddenly go invisible or dissapear altogether, this happened twice to me before i avoided doing it again... the second time, i continued to be hit by melee attacks even though there seems to be nothing around me

I've had homoculus bug out on me a few times, especially in co-op

the guidebot in D3 definitely isnt as reliable as it was in D2 ... it kept getting stuck at walls, the further you let it get away from you, the more likely it is that it will not be able to get back to you

plus it has a stupid habit of getting right in the middle of your view so it gets shot by you

ive reached the spacecraft factory level, its the 'giant hangar' that i had remembered.... it really just feels like a simple level thats been scaled up , all the robots and turrets in it look miniscule... also, its really difficult compared to the level before and after it mainly because there are so many bots and turrets shooting at you at once and they dont drop alot of powerups, but also because of those fish bots which are hard to hit and cause alot of damage... the ship that goes in with you seems to be abit of a gimmick, i was thinking maybe the combat is easier if the bots shoot at the ship rather than you, but instead when i get into a fight with the bots i lose track of where the ship has gone, and the monotonous level design is quite disorienting as well
the level involves alot of mouse-aimed vauss cannon use ...and i've only just realized that the vauss cannon and sniper rifle shoots differently if you use the mouse to fire vs the joystick
if you are using the pyro ship , shooting the vauss with the mouse would only cause the left side to fire... the other 2 ships shoot two shots at once
holding down the joystick fire button zooms the sniper rifle, but does anyone know how to zoom in with the mouse?

D3 guidebot's even worse in user-made missions. Outrage apparently had some code for it to help it not get stuck or whatever, that they didn't let players use.

carmatic wrote:the level involves alot of mouse-aimed vauss cannon use ...and i've only just realized that the vauss cannon and sniper rifle shoots differently if you use the mouse to fire vs the joystick
if you are using the pyro ship , shooting the vauss with the mouse would only cause the left side to fire... the other 2 ships shoot two shots at once
holding down the joystick fire button zooms the sniper rifle, but does anyone know how to zoom in with the mouse?

Force vertical sync on for Descent 3 in your video drivers and the MD/Vauss should behave properly using mouse control (known bug with D3 mouse control and higher framerates).

Krom wrote:

carmatic wrote:the level involves alot of mouse-aimed vauss cannon use ...and i've only just realized that the vauss cannon and sniper rifle shoots differently if you use the mouse to fire vs the joystick
if you are using the pyro ship , shooting the vauss with the mouse would only cause the left side to fire... the other 2 ships shoot two shots at once
holding down the joystick fire button zooms the sniper rifle, but does anyone know how to zoom in with the mouse?

Force vertical sync on for Descent 3 in your video drivers and the MD/Vauss should behave properly using mouse control (known bug with D3 mouse control and higher framerates).

its a bug? i thought it was a feature , like so that the output of the vauss is limited to balance out the increased accuracy of the mouse... or it shoots in a different pattern to optimize it for the mouse, or something

Yep, it's a bug. It happens when the framerate exceeds the polling rate of the mouse. The most common solution is to restrict the framerate by using the -framecap xx command-line option or vsync.

Yeah its a bug, the other things it breaks are you can't charge Fusion and you can't zoom the MD while using the mouse at high framerates.

A little FYI, sometimes (like on my laptop) the framecap xx commandline doesn't do anything. What I do instead is turn on all the little hidden graphical features (bumpmapping!) and change my graphics device in the launcher to Direct3D -- which results in a low enough framerate that it works at least the vast majority of the time.

Apparently Direct3D is good when you actually want low framerates . Typical Microsoft.

interesting, never knew that D3 had bumpmapping ... apparently its abit buggy tho, people are saying that objects seem to randomly go between bumpmapped and not

also, using direct3d makes the game run too slow for me

::edit:: just did some testing... it seems that if i run it with direct3d, somehow, turning on anisotropic filtering would cause abit of display corruption in the menus, like the text and the background would be offset by sections and it looks like tiling... but D3 actually runs faster with anisotropic filtering turned on

but it seems that vsync is forced on even tho i turned it off in the game and in the driver control panel

still, i like to use opengl because im using a patched exe which makes the colours 32-bit , but it only works in opengl , and the performance when rendering terrain is much better too

I've never had problems with bumpmapping on any PCs I've played D3 on except one reproducible problem in multiplayer that doesn't really matter.

There is one level I played in single where bumpmapping never works, but that's a level issue not a game one.

im also having a problem where the terrain rendering distance keeps getting reset to 40 for some reason


also, i've played around with the sound settings... my laptop has a Realtek sound chip, and i found a program called '3d sound back' to enable directsound3d in windows 7 ....
well, if i use directsound3d , sounds like shooting the flares and opening doors are missing.... basically half the sounds in the game are missing or greatly softened for some reason

also, if i turn on high quality sound, some sounds like the engine sounds and some continuous ambient noises get poppy and clicky... from what im reading, people with creative cards dont have this problem, and it seems to be a game issue

since nobody else is posting a new topic on the single player forums i thought i'd add another post here instead


im on D3 level 12 , PTMC Proving Grounds... i destroyed every single robot which came of the robot generators near the beginning of the level, and for the rest of the level, almost all the bots seemed to ignore me... most of them stay still at one spot, some of them are patrolling fixed paths... the jellyfish plasma shooting bots on 'level 3' open fire at me but keep moving along their path until they reach the room, and the bots in the room before the 'level 3' miniboss would open fire at each other after awhile...

is this a bug or something? on moon's descendarium it seems to be implied that there are bots to fight in the room behind the forcefields which i think was in 'level 2' , but when i entered it, the bots were passive... when i destroyed the generators, everything in the room caught fire and the tailbots moved in a line out of the room...

No this is normal. It's meant to be the humorous level I guess; the Proving Grounds is the robots' idea of a sport, so these are the robot versions of the dumb jocks (that's how I see it anyway, my thinking can be... unconventional. So I have no idea if this is the "canon" interpretation and in fact, it probably isn't. But I can't think of a better one). The guys waiting outside the doors to the arenas are waiting to go in for the same reason you go in -- they hope to be the champion in the ring! But you cheat and get the key to unlock the door before the match is scheduled to start.

The fun is meant to be in getting the robots to fight each other. If they can see you, most of the robots will fight you if you shoot them. If they can't see you... well... they usually assume that another robot shot them! I'm not good enough at this so I usually end up fighting them myself anyway -- but when I'm going for a speedrun, say, I just ignore them and they ignore me -- they even move out of my way. The Tubbs on level 3, and the turrets seem to be the only exceptions -- the manta rays seem to be the only bots that are actually more agressive to you than normal (maybe they wanted to be part of the fights but got stuck doing maintenance, so they take out their anger on the first acceptable target they see).

I think causing that mass robot exodus that leads to... exactly the same place they just left is the most hilarious part in the entire game. When I first saw it I had such a gigglefit that I think a Manta found me and killed me because I was helpless!

There's a fun endboss though.

There are other rooms, like one on Level 1 where you can activate generators, where you can fight robots with their "default" behaviours.

yeah the optional generators were quite a challenge, especially when it was spawning the fusion mechs... but the last one in the row was gyros and it was quite a nice relief

funny, the tubbs ignored me and just kept patrolling, and it was the patrolling plasma squid bots which opened fire on me and started behaving normally once they reached the end of their path... none of the robots moved out of my way, i could bump almost all the robots out of the way but the sixgun mechs seem to be the hardest to budge... also a few of the bots are agressive, like one of the sixgun mechs in the secret room

I wonder why this thread is still called "hello".
For that matter, I wonder why it's still in the cafe.

And then, I wonder why I can't have the accent on the "e" in "cafe". I'm used to spelling it the French way (cause this is Canada, eh?).

i've started a new thread about me finishing D3 , i seem to be the only one starting threads so i thought its better not to spam with new threads and post in here instead

but i do want to post on my new thread more often now