DescentBB

as you guys are implementing hi-res textures, hi-res models, textures and models from D3, game modes from D3 and making levels look like D3, why don't you just use D3 in the first place?

Floyd wrote:why don't you just use D3 in the first place?

G1!

sarcastic /ironic answer:

prolly they have crocheted-covered bog roll on their rear shelves and drive 60 on a road where 100 is allowed, wear hats and drive Mercedes', you get it?

They are just too slow :p

heheheh

It's all about gameplay and looks, and D3 plays like butt and looks like butt. The MD is the uber weapon, Napalm missiles are instant death, and the other weapons just don't cut it. The ships are out of scale compared to the levels to make up for the increased speed.

Too complicated?

Ok, easy answer:

D3 SUCKS BALLZ.

D2 players have style, something you don't even know about.

Now go away with your shameless plug.


PS: Poking fun is alright, but if this thread is turned into a flame fest by anyone here, I will delete it in no time.

Only thing D3 related, is what \"some people\" choose to use in D2X-XL.

If you even had a look at the hires textures that Dizzy is making. You would see no D3 crap in there that he has made.
Its all based on the \"original\" textures.

So now you can slap yourself for such a silly question.

Anyways.
You choose to play D3.

Diedel chooses to play D2X-XL, and I choose to play both!

But D2 is my all time favorite and nothing beats that!

Remember.. Its all about choice!

Diedel wrote:D2 players have style, something you don't even know about.

looks to me as if you were the one swinging the matches

Depends on how touchy you are.

You could have guessed from my final remark that I considered that humorous.

Do_Checkor wrote:sarcastic /ironic answer:

prolly they have crocheted-covered bog roll on their rear shelves and drive 60 on a road where 100 is allowed, wear hats and drive Mercedes', you get it?

They are just too slow :p

heheheh

The more and more I read this.....

Do you really think that?

Thats pretty closed minded.
Both games take alot of skillz to play.

I play both D2 and D3 all the time.

What makes you think that one who plays D2 is no good at D3?
We should game sometime for fun if you think that!
Then we'll see how slow I am.

To bad about our pings though!

please note:

Do_Checkor wrote:ironic answer:

Do_Checkor wrote:heheheh

I just got a VERY nice PM from the forum-moderator here and decided to NEVER post again here after this one. Bybye fellas and AUS: MOST D2 players complain about the too fast speed in D3 - that is all I was referring to - no offense - just kidding - and I never said "D2 players can't do good in D3"

Floyd wrote:as you guys are implementing hi-res textures, hi-res models, textures and models from D3, game modes from D3 and making levels look like D3, why don't you just use D3 in the first place?

Because unlike D3, D2 is source-released. The various companies and people that own D3 are holding onto it with several iron fists.

Do_Checkor wrote:I just got a VERY nice PM from the forum-moderator here and decided to NEVER post again here after this one. Bybye fellas and AUS: MOST D2 players complain about the too fast speed in D3 - that is all I was referring to - no offense - just kidding - and I never said "D2 players can't do good in D3"

Your post (like Floyd's) is pointless here and doesn't contribute any positive to D2X-XL (and be it in the form of constructive criticism). That's good reason to close or delete the thread. It's basically OT. My PM was a serious warning (based on personal experience with you) not to cross the boundary to trolling here. Yet I had no objections to leaving the thread open for further discussion. You got serious, yet polite replies, or replies in good fun.

Anyway, you have never posted here before, nor have you contributed anything to D2X-XL, so I doubt you'll be missed here.

Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

I know it was in fun.

I'm just questioning/ answering the response.

Actually it was serious, with a thin tarnish of fun.

Btw, recently I have read that D3 doesn't support more than a dozen custom hires textures or so (max. 128x128). D2X-XL allows an arbitrary number (512x512), and you can scale them with available memory. Tada.

Generally, D2 is way easier to expand simply due to the availability of the source code. D3 would be another story if the source was freely available (and if there weren't some people sitting on it for all eternity despite the fact they give nothing about the game anymore ).

There's a D2 style mod for D3 though (Pyromania if I recall it correctly), but I haven't tried it yet. Wonder how true it is to D2.

Nahhh..

Only prob I had was Floyd's post.

I'll admit, sure there are \"some\" D3 stuff in there.

Show me a \"look alike\" D3 lvl made for D2X-XL?
I think its the other way around.
Just because someone has some skillz to make D2 lvls look AWSOME for D2/ D2X-XL, doesn't make it a look alike D3 lvl.

As for models.
WOW! A hole 1 model!11!1??
1) The Pyro model- Sure its from the failed \"D4\" project, converted to D3. BUT its really alot like the original pyro from the D2 intro movie. So I would say it fits perfect for D2X-XL. D3's pyro was nothing of the original D2 pyro. I don't see a D3 pyro in D2X-XL. So this model isn't really a \"D3\" model.

2) The D3 Mega Missile model- Yep.. that one is from D3. So what? Its only a temp model.

3) Model Textures- What, Where? The D3 Homer texture I did like 2 months ago? LMAO!
I think not! That was a test. You are sadly mistaken if you are not following the Afterburner Project that Dizzy is doing!
Best you read up on that one.

4) D3 Textures- Yep, once again. \"Some people\" choose to use them. How is that any different then the ones I see in the D3 remakes of D2 lvls? Uh huh.. thats what I thought.

Anyways. We are'nt the first to do remakes and won't be the last.
Enough said, and good day to you.

Yeah, Eagle's \"D4\" Pyro actually looks like the hires version of the D2 Pyro.

Diedel wrote:Yeah, Eagle's "D4" Pyro actually looks like the hires version of the D2 Pyro.

What he said!

Aus-RED-5 wrote:Only prob I had was Floyd's post.

you obviously took my serious question as an attack, which it wasn't intended as such. sorry if you misunderstood.

as for D3 looks: check Diedels level "Speed!", picture 4 on his homepage. and for the record: i have seen novacrons work, which is impressive.

I have two levels using exclusively D3 textures out of 40 of mine and 4000 or so total D2 levels. Yet both do not look like D3 levels.

I do not doubt that you can build cool looking D3 levels (although there are very few I consider good, and they're overplayed), but that's not the point. It's mostly about D3's gameplay. I don't like it, and I'm not alone with it.

I understand that you'd like to see the D2X-XL players play D3 to have some more participants, but there's few D2 players around anyway.

It uses D3 textures. Yes I know, and?

Floyd wrote:making levels look like D3

D2X-XL is D2X-XL no matter how you look at it.

The way I see it is, if some one was to port a D3 lvl to D2X-XL and use all its textures for that ported lvl.
Then I would called that a look alike lvl.

Flody wrote:and for the record: i have seen novacrons work, which is impressive.

Nova's project in which Dizzy has taken over is starting to go much further and deserves recognition too BTW.

So really the only thing you have to point out is textures from D3?

Oh and 1 mega missile.

D3 textures.... I care nothing about that. That is fair game IMO.

To me its fun factor
D3 is Floating around in a techno world, yaya, D2 is a Heavy Metal world Flying around pinning and plastering bots on the wall like a hunters trophy room, feeling that same reward as a well placed arrow. The gameplay simply isnt there in D3.D2 is far more aggresive feeling to me, I cant imagine a D2 player saying D3 is faster, maybe im wrong, dunno cant speak for them.But Ive had my fair share of both.
These are my reasons for contribution, the game is simply better and worth the effort, because its funner IMHO.Diedels D2X-XL and Novacrons textures turned me on and thats cool, But my vision is quite bit more aggressive than the Relived Project, which is why you wont find as much, pure to the original game texture finess, with AB textures,simply, Im trying to bring them as close to a bumped texture as I can. and in no way is what Im doing replicating \"as I see it\" an inferior game, as fun factor goes.

Noting the lil pot shots, laid out here, Id invite you contribute instead of making age/speed sarcastic/Ironic comments and then showing how fast you run away, which BTW was impressive as well

On that note
I totally agree, Novacrons work is impressive

Dizzy,

if you make bump maps, I will add bump map rendering to D2X-XL.

No matter how much I'd play D3, I couldn't get used to the sensitivity. Not to say D3 sucks, but it could be better.

The ships in D3 are faster. That requires the levels to be larger, and that makes the ships look completely out of proportions. Throwing the usual D3 level design in makes the ship look the size of flies. Though I believe you can design D3 levels differently, the D3 texture coloring makes it hard to create a dark, abandoned atmosphere in D3. Many levels look like candy bars. Above that the D3 weapons are totally unbalanced. If you play with good D3 players you will notice that the MD is the uber weapon, followed by the Napalm missile in close quarters (usually meaning instant death).

That's why I absolutely don't like D3. It doesn't look good, and it doesn't play good for me.

personally, I enjoy all 3. Although after playing D1 or D3, D2 is a bit tough. It's like running through water.

I like D3 best, then D2 and then finally D1.

I adpated very well to D3 after playing 6+ years of D2 online.

Now, I can't play D2 worth much compared to how good I was in the hey day.

I personally don't care for the way Descent 3 looks, in general. Some of my levels, like Elysium, try to get the dark, gritty corridor theme going - but it isn't the same. If I could point to a single thing, it would probably be the lighting. It is horribly oversaturated and overbright in every official Descent 3 level. Rarely do you have any dark corners to hide in.

Granted, these are the choices Outrage made and we are hardly compelled to follow them.

But another reason making stuff for Descent 2 is valid is that it's far less work. In the amount of time it takes to make one fully fleshed-out Descent 3 single-player map, you could have made a whole campaign for Descent 2. And I guarantee you - it would be just as fun.

Of course, that time depends on the designer. I personally think it is crazy, for example, to build a highly-detailed mine out of 4,000 cubes. It just seems to me that if you really want that kind of detail, you ought to consider a different game. Cubes, and the splitting thereof, are a really, really roundabout way to achieve detail. Either that, or you figure out how to implement some rudimentary static mesh / \"stationary 3D prop\" support.

I mean, if Diedel is thinking about putting Monsterball into Descent 2, making a \"stationary 3D prop\" class may be neither a stretch, nor a bad idea.

Kyoryuu, I think the attractive thing about cube-based level design is that it's intuitive. Something like MaxED (boolean-based level geometry) for Descent would be really neat.

Kyo,

LOR was a fun project. I just wanted to see how far I can stretch things.

It would be possible to implement static objects. Problem would rather be having people to actually build such objects, than to support them in D2X-XL.

As for me, the reason I don't play Descent 3 is that it doesn't run natively in Mac OS X, so I have to launch the Classic Mac OS 9 emulation environment in Mac OS X in order to run Descent 3. Intel-Mac users are left totally out of the D3 party, because Classic emulation doesn't run whatsoever on Intel-Macs. Not to mention the fact that the ****ing 1.5 patch was never released for Mac users, so that renders our 1.4 version netplay-incompatible with other D3 users who have upgraded to 1.5.

Descent 3 also hijacks my screen without letting me play in windowed mode (so I can't respond to instant messages etc.), and it (*grr*) doesn't let me host because of supposed level mismatching, even though I can join D3 netgames fine. Oh, yeah, and it requires a CD in the drive.

Finally, the source code is not open so enhancements and bug fixes cannot be made to the game at all. We're stuck with what we have with D3. With D2X-XL, Diedel has done a great job at making fixes and enhancements that make playing Descent more enjoyable.

simX wrote:Oh, yeah, and it requires a CD in the drive.

If you make a .dmg file with the title "Descent3" and load it up, Descent 3 will work. You can also rename one of you hard drives Descent3 but that may increase loading times.

Kyouryuu wrote:I personally don't care for the way Descent 3 looks, in general. Some of my levels, like Elysium, try to get the dark, gritty corridor theme going - but it isn't the same. If I could point to a single thing, it would probably be the lighting. It is horribly oversaturated and overbright in every official Descent 3 level. Rarely do you have any dark corners to hide in.

That's partly because the gamma is by default set to 1.5. I set it to 1.0 long ago and you'd be surprised at how dark the game really is. You'll need your headlight (the floodlight, not the spotlight) on more often than not to get around.

Diedel wrote:The ships in D3 are faster. That requires the levels to be larger, and that makes the ships look completely out of proportions. Throwing the usual D3 level design in makes the ship look the size of flies.

I totally agree. It's something I noticed almost immediately. All ships are about the size of a large dog for most of the levels, and in some, small enough to be carried like a model plane in a human's arms. The trouble with Descent 3's levels is almost all of them are human work environments, so the RC Pyro effect is made.

I had asked Suncho if Core Decision will have the RC ship feel and he said that if a corridor is 50m wide then the ship will be scaled appropriately. Maybe they stuck to that, maybe they didn't. Going by Screenshot 7 it appears that they are trying to. Just picture a human in the cockpit and then getting out and wandering around. Any level I build for the game will be around a 6 foot tall block representing a human and with his ship always in mind. I'll be sure to torment players with areas they can't get to because they can't get out of the ship.

Halo is a good example of how to build a level with humans in mind but scaled for ships. Just make the Banshee 3x bigger and bingo, there's a good scale.

DCrazy wrote:Something like MaxED (boolean-based level geometry) for Descent would be really neat.

Can you explain that a little closer?

simX wrote:Oh, yeah, and it requires a CD in the drive.

descent3.com wrote:D3 NOCD Version 1.4

You were saying?

d3jake wrote:

simX wrote:Oh, yeah, and it requires a CD in the drive.

descent3.com wrote:D3 NOCD Version 1.4

You were saying?

descent3.com wrote:PC PATCHES ... D3 NOCD Version 1.4 (in case you haven't gotten it, emphasis on PC)

You were saying...?

No need to be snarky about it, especially when you don't look at the details. Shadowfury mentioned (unsnarkily) a better workaround that I wasn't sure worked -- some games don't allow disk images to work in place of the CD.

In any case, the CD was one minor problem out of many others, so it's kind of beside the point. (Thanks anyway, shadowfury.)

LMAO - d3jake got pwned!

Yes.. please READ before posting, because he did say that he is a Mac user.

Diedel wrote:Kyo,

LOR was a fun project. I just wanted to see how far I can stretch things.

Sure, and that's all well and fine. I'm just pointing out that it's just not a very practical way to habitually build.

Diedel wrote:It would be possible to implement static objects. Problem would rather be having people to actually build such objects, than to support them in D2X-XL.

Depending on what kind of poly count you can manage, it probably wouldn't be too hard to create a basic set of props. The first Unreal Tournament had some very basic prop support in the form of small foliage, pipes, and so forth. It wasn't much, but it was more than you could do with BSP. Or rather, trust doing with Unreal's perpetually flawed BSP algorithm.

It seems like you'd like to get more detail out of the D2 engine. It would be super easy to make a static light fixture and plop it wherever you wanted it, likely moreso than splitting and scaling cube faces to achieve a similar effect. When you start using static props, the sky texture becomes the limit. It's the direction most engines seem to take to add detail. Obviously, Unreal does static meshes from Maya or 3DSMax. Half-Life 2 has func_details that are made from BSP (in essence, cubes), and prop_static for Lightwave objects. Core Decision is apparently using the generic OBJ format, which freeware Blender supports.

I think DCrazy is talking about BSP or CSG... I'm not sure. For that matter, I'm not sure I understand how Descent actually handles its corridors! I don't think it's BSP.

d3jake wrote:You were saying?

Okay, Dravis, I'll sit down.

Max Payne level gemotery is specified using boolean geometry. Imagine a XOR bitmask, but in 3D space using boxes and other primitives. Not quite BSP (though the geometry is converted to BSP format when compiled) and not exactly CSG (you're not only creating solids, but also negatives).

Think of it this way: To create a room in MaxED, You create a box of negative geometry in the void. The normals of all the walls point inwards. If you add a box of positive geometry inside the room, it appears as you would expect box to appear, with the normals pointing outwards. But you can then intersect another negative box with your existing box to create a cutout. And so-on.

You can then union and intersect these pieces of geometry to combine rooms, etc. So to create two rooms connected by a hallway, I might create three negative boxes, then select them all and click Union. Bingo, one unified \"room\" of negative geometry.

The awesome thing about this approach is that you don't have to worry about creating convex geometry. Concave geometry and even concave faces are perfectly valid, and will be dealt with when then compiler turns your level into a BSP for the game engine to work with. The thought process is much the same as working with D1/D2 cubes, but is far more powerful.

Kyouryuu wrote:

Diedel wrote:Kyo,

LOR was a fun project. I just wanted to see how far I can stretch things.

Sure, and that's all well and fine. I'm just pointing out that it's just not a very practical way to habitually build.

Actually I think it's at least as practical as spending weeks (or maybe rather months) on building a good D3 level.

BTW, I guess I could've assumed that you were talking about Mac, but you said it so generally that I couldn't make that kinda of jump.

simX wrote:Shadowfury mentioned (unsnarkily) a better workaround that I wasn't sure worked -- some games don't allow disk images to work in place of the CD.

You're welcome. Also, D3 only looks for a volume with the name "Descent3", regardless of the data contained therein. It will, however, search therein for things like movies, so a larger drive may take longer to load. But yes, most games only allow CD images, and the latest game that allows those without seeing it as a CD/DVD-R is C&C Generals.

N.B. the disc image has to be loaded up BEFORE classic is started. If you loaded it afterwards, Classic needs to be restarted.