DescentBB

Since no one is really maintaining D1X anymore, I decided to call this 1.44. After reading all related postings to the developer site, I decided to breech the hallowed ground and give a mouselook feel to D1. I think noobs could pick it up this game much faster using this kind of a mode. I also expanded the range of framerate, as it does not effect gameplay, only looks better, unless someone can prove otherwise. My joystick (the great Thrustmaster X-Fighter) gave up the ghost many years ago, and thus inspired this version. I also couldn't stand picking up the mouse continuously in addition to the fact that the regular mouse movement was not stable (a big move of the mouse could be a smaller move on the screen than a small move of the mouse). Does this make joystick versions obsolete??? You tell me (THC still handed my ass to me ). Try it out. The only known bug is that it hangs on exit from the game (but Joysticks may not actually work either, as I cannot test...I did rework the keyboard to behave properly). It can be downloaded via anonymous FTP at 68.39.244.226 (d1x144_olgmw.zip).

If the new mode of play gets more positive votes, I will post the "Mouselook" fix to the D2x developer site. If it gets more negative votes, the author asks that you destroy your downloaded copy...

PS: Use an FTP client or just Dos Prompt...Internet Explorer can't connect (does anyone know why?)

Um... that would be because IE is dumb. Among other reasons.

Does unlimited framerate affect homing missile turn rate? I know it's not supposed to, but I'm not convinced D1x actually fixed that properly.

Nonetheless, I'll have to give this a look considering my USB joystick doesn't work in D1x anyway. And I'm not getting a serial port joystick, so...

Mouselook?

In D1?

no. no no no.

I would intend to agree with Ferno, just out of principle. As an alternative, would there be any way of updating D1X to work with USB sticks? I noticed that my newer Cyborg stick performs strangely at best in-game, and my new PC doesn't have a gameport; my beloved 3DPro is relegated to my family PC at home, unless I happen to find a new sound card with a gameport. (Do newer sound cards even have those anymore? And if not, why not?) I will thank you a lot for even attempting to work on D1X; nothing's been really done with it in a while, and with Diedel's flurry of D2X improvements, it's starting to look like the bastard child of the two. If you have any coding experience at all, I think that devoting even a little time to looking over and tweaking other parts of the code would be warmly welcomed by the community.

Doesn't D1X work with SDL? If it would, it would suppor t USB sticks.

The mouse movement problem could stem from two roots: Either the mouse is sampled once per frame, slowing it down significantly at high frame rates (that was the case with D2X before I fixed that), or the turn speed is limited capping the mouse movement internally.

You'd think, Diedel, but the exact same joystick that works perfectly in D2x works very poorly in D1x. So there IS a difference somewhere.

Then the problem probably isn't *USB* joystick handling, it generally is joystick handling.

I have worked over the control handling routines in D2X time and again until it worked the way it does now, refining my understanding of how D2X employs them at every pass.

The most important measure however was to limit control sampling rate to 30 Hz. I can but wonder why Parallax never managed to cap control sampling rate; from some comments in the code I assume they tried to.

Top Gun, What config you running? My Cyborg runs great in D1x. I use d1x143_oglmw.exe with a "-joypolled" tag in the shortcut properties. Here's my ini data.:

-pps 6
-joypolled
-shortpackets
-noredundancy
;-playermessages
-cockpit 2
-gl_mipmap
-notitles
-gl_reticle 0
-maxfps 65
-font600
-1024x768
-joypolled
;-gl_intensity4_ok 0
;-gl_texminfilt GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST

btw, sound cards don't use serial ports anymore because... well.. serial isn't used anymore. USB pretty much took over about 2 years ago. Although, there are lots of older simpler PCI sound cards still out there that probably do. What Cyborg stick do you have? You might want to try uninstalling the software if it is installed. I found that it causes a lot more trouble than it's worth.

Yes, it is the turnspeed cap that makes the mouse unwieldly. That is what causes the large fast mouse move -> small move on screen vs a large slow mouse move moving a large distance on the screen, as well as the inability to return easily to where you were pointing prior (you have to pick up the mouse alot making it totally useless). The cap is what I removed to make the mouse behave properly. I then put framerate related mods on the move increment calculation for mouse and keyboard to balance the movement speed regardless of framerate all the way up to 500 fps (D2X is totally hosed at high framerate for other reasons - ie, the weapons fire out of control speed and the ship bounces up and down widly - looking at other elements of the code, it wasn't designed to go above 150fps...why is D1X fine???). As for fixing the mouse in D2X, I disagree it is fixed. It exhibited the same behavior (it is the exact same code in kconfig.c, so what else would I expect - yes, I grabbed the latest code). Let me tell you, the game looks infinitely better at 200 fps than at 80 fps...the weird ghosting is gone completely (I don't see much reason to run above 200 fps...as it is in line with what the old d1voodoo and d2voodoo could do, but what the heck...I just wanted to see how fast it could go...I stopped at 500 because calculations get complicated after that)

Interesting. Downloading now...

PS: Use an FTP client or just Dos Prompt...Internet Explorer can't connect (does anyone know why?)

Doesn't IE use passive FTP transfer by default?

edit: Oh, and I hope that all those against mouselook were equally outraged about the SpaceOrb.

I can't tell the difference in anything above around 60. Past that rendering looks fairly smooth.

I don't think most other people can either.

I'm using a Cyborg Evo stick. I'll have to try out your command line and see if it makes any difference. I'm almost positive that I don't have any of the software installed, but I'll try ditching it if I do. It's still a shame about the serial ports, though; I'd love to keep using that 3DPro.

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz cards still have a serial port. Don't they have "Serial to USB" adapters though?

Also, in regards to FPS issues. Nobody should be playing D2 at 200fps. It just isn't necessary. Neither descents were meant to be played with FPS speeds that high. That is why a cap was necessary because modern machines can push the game to insane framerates. 80fps is the max anyone should ever need. If you can't play with anything between 45-80fps in D1 and 60-80fps in D2 then you shouldn't be playing Descent at all

D3 is the only one of the series where 200+ fps would be prefered.

Well, on monitors 60 hz is about the highest you can go where flicker remains reasonably evident. Because that's a pretty drastic change, and frame-to-frame motion in video games isn't that great, you generally don't notice much stutter at that point.

Once you reach about 80 hz/fps - where even that relatively pronounced flicker is undetectable - well, the game can't appear anything but smooth, or at least if you can tell what's going on.

Thus that makes me wonder, why would D3 need that high a framerate? I'm guessing it has something to do with the game itself, much like the impetus for not pushing D2 past 150?

I am thinking the "ghosting" I was seeing is due to the Flat Panel monitor after talking to some other people. However, it is smooth (or at least the roughness is undetectable) after about 120 FPS...I will change the cap to 150 fps, as I saw other impetus in the original code to limit gameplay to 150 fps max.

I have heard that you can forget about the MD in D3 with less than 150 fps. It gets too slow. Another case of crappy programming by the Descent ppl - frame rate dependant stuff. Awgh. It's really not hard to get rid of that.

That's definitely incorrect, Diedel; I don't think I've ever had 150 FPS, but I'm decent with the MD at the very least, and pretty good when my game is on. I think the only weapon with real frame-dependency issues was the Omega, and possibly the Vauss, to some extent at least.

I tried to download D1X 1.44 yesterday
using my ftp program (ftp explorer)but
was not able to connect.
Is your ftp server still up?