DescentBB

Sirius

The D1/D2 robots were supposed to be stock, but I didn't actually make the split version myself so I can't be 100% sure what it did. That is more or less also the answer to the cold-start question: it wasn't really intended to be split (even though the layout facilitates it) so I didn't test it that...

Sirius

That is probably intended behavior, though I don't know if the original builds of Descent 2 had the same brightness bug with flash missiles that shows up in D2X.

Sirius

I don't recall the story behind Lost Levels - apparently I did do some beta testing but I don't remember what it was I was testing. I do vaguely remember seeing The Prison Compound pre-release - it may also have been co-op. Anthology I ran through multiple times on Ace and Insane (didn't worry much ...

Sirius

If you know it well enough it might be possible - though I haven't tried. The traps at least are always in the same position, which might make it possible to develop countermeasures.

Sirius

AlexanderBorisov wrote:BTW "Make it even harder" seems like a good joke. Its first levels seem harder on Ace than most of Obsidian and TEW on Insane.

Gets worse... later on there are Canaries with something akin to Frag Missiles, and they're used in things like door traps. Blech.

Sirius

I don't think Obsidian is intended for cold-start, ... Correct. I recall trying some of the later levels cold-start during development, found they were kind of brutal, and my reaction was "oh well, you're not going to be starting from scratch anyway". It was play-tested, but we generally ...

Sirius

Rebirth (because of some hardcoded OpenGL attribute) renders the explosion behind the robot and at most angles makes it look like something exploded behind the robot and then the robot just vanished. DOS renders the explosion in front of the bot so it looks like the bot is actually the thing explod...

Sirius

No, for two reasons - the XL level file format is structurally different and DOS D2 won't understand it, and even if it did they both have too many segments and it'd just spit out an error message and quit.

Rebirth might be OK with the segment count, but it won't be OK with the format.

Sirius

Vertigo robots have Parallax-built polymodels, which were designed fairly expertly and don't have rendering issues.

I don't know that much about BP XL, but Anthology, no. The OOF format came from D3, and isn't supported by any other version of D2.

Sirius

Looks pretty good so far. Some of it I've played to death in the name of testing, which tends to bias one's views, but taking a step back I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Sirius

Oh, yeah that's the demo, which doesn't have any briefings. But briefings are planned, and a lot of the work on that falls to me. It's also essentially the same situation as AF, where we have a bunch of levels already made and the story has to work with them - as opposed to the approach where you bu...

Sirius

Those were the "last four" I mentioned. They're probably OK but I don't remember as well.
Bahagad is older than Rebirth, though the Win95 version is a possibility - I don't know how DFW did things back then

Sirius

The only situation where different hard drive capacities is a problem is if you have a RAID array, but if it's a self-built PC, you would generally know if you do since they don't get set up accidentally

Sirius

Regarding aesthetics - a lot of that is personal preference, and things that are "dated" can still be enjoyable, e.g. a lot of 80s music does actually have good fundamentals under all those synths and gated reverb :) It's accurate to say that the way I designed levels for Obsidian is not t...

Sirius

People who are interested in that grey zone - topics that could go in either place - typically visit both forums, for the exact same reason. It does kind of suggest that we have redundant forums and could do with some mergers, but... those changes take a while to happen.

Sirius

LOL! Some of that I'm not particularly proud of in retrospect, but I've never had anyone call anything out, so maybe I'm just too self-conscious about it :) Plutonian Shores is reminding me an awful lot of AF in terms of narrative design, except that "now what is this level for?" is a much...

Sirius

It comes down to who did the work and how. Most of the big ones from the DOS D2 era are OK because they knew about the whole BSP thing and tried to get it right. The only reason later missions are more risky is because the authors may have only tested in Rebirth or XL, and not have seen any issues e...

Sirius

You'd have to convert them to .ogg - should be possible provided you have something like DTX to export them with.

Sirius

There is a substantial jump in difficulty from that to level 2, as well. You have some weapons by then, but the traps can be brutal and difficult to solve cleanly (kind of like Lost Levels, in fact...). People have played through AF on single-player and enjoyed it; but it is a hard mission, so it ma...

Sirius

Yeah, there's a lot to go into with that. :) First, the question from earlier about problematic robots: it doesn't render the affected missions unplayable - it's just that the robots look bad because you can see some parts through each other. Enemy Within is not affected by this issue because the ro...

Sirius

It probably means the texture wasn't flagged as transparent. If it works outside of DOSBox that most likely means Rebirth etc ignore the transparent flag and just look at the color index for transparent pixels, but the flag is there and is supposed to be set. (I know about this because I previously ...

Sirius

I was more thinking of building on Luke Schneider's work with that comment. Mandrill was the first to extend it with animated robots, but quite a few other missions followed that up, and there might have been a total conversion at some point? Or at least an attempt. Interestingly, almost all animate...

Sirius

Luke Schneider for technical innovation (first custom polymodels in a major mission due to Polytron); Kruel for artistry and storytelling in level design (especially Konflict at Karon). While some of that was refined significantly by later authors, pioneering work counts for a lot in my book. :) Of ...

Sirius

I have a hard time agreeing with the suggestion that level 5/6 lasers are overpowered, though, when they're actually weaker than D1 level 4 lasers. I've seen the numbers: D2 level 6 lasers deal 12.5 damage per bolt, while D1 level 4 lasers deal 13. (They were nerfed in D2 to make room for 5 and 6, n...

Sirius

D1 stuff - you have probably all the essentials? There are a few odds and ends that might warrant playing though - all of these appear to be early-career missions and have some rough edges - but may still be fun. Invertaus: http://enspiar.com/dmdb/viewMission.php?id=106 Sirius System - a little oddb...

Sirius

OK, yeah, the HAMs will be a problem. Rebirth will load up any replacement descent2.ham files in the mission; D2 DOS will not do this. You'd have to replace descent2.ham in the base game directory for it to work. I don't remember what plutdemo.ham has in it - if it's a so-called "V-HAM" (V...

Sirius

I'm not really sure how to vote on this one. I've played almost all of them in co-op over the last couple years in various (Rangers) Co-op Saturday events - with the notable exception of Ironstar and Ironblade due to reported issues that appear to make them non-viable in co-op - and can say I enjoye...

Sirius

As I commented on the chat thing, it would require opening up a new category, but this is the kind of thing that might be worth submitting if you're working on it (http://www.speedrun.com/descent2). Spooty is the moderator there and it looks a little lonely, so... yeah. You would need to record a vi...

Sirius

especially since I should be writing my master's thesis (and I've been procrastinating horribly) LOL... that sounds exactly like me in 2008. I think I was working on Anthology on the side, and... you know... While I did finish said thesis (barely), I don't really recommend the approach I took to an...

Sirius

It is possible she already has, and hasn't published the results, or that she knows through other means (e.g. genealogical records). I'm not even sure it isn't public knowledge - I suspect the point is more how much bearing it should have on anything. e.g. I have some Maori ancestry (native people o...

Sirius

Yeah, August seems to be usually the best weather month in the PNW.

Sirius

Bugs me a little bit too that 16:9 is so popular - though more so for laptops, since with their screen size it really does feel cramped. On a larger format screen, or for gaming, it's not such a big deal. But 16:10 or 3:2 displays seem to top out at around 85 Hz.

Sirius

I have a feeling DLE is doing this because the bitmap palette isn't an exact match, so it's not sure exactly what color is supposed to be transparent, so it assumes all the colors are not supposed to be transparent. Does Paint.NET allow you to copy the palette from an existing bitmap (exported from ...

Sirius

Pumo Mines is the only active D2X-XL mission project that I'm aware of. I vaguely recall ideas being floated for another one or two, but they ultimately didn't go anywhere. It's possible something cool could have been done with D2X-XL; the issue with reviving it now is that Overload is just around t...

Sirius

They were more thematically varied than later levels, mostly because they didn't have a clear theme to stick to. (For that reason, it's either the easiest or the hardest system to mimic the style of, depending how meticulous you want to be.) Some interesting ideas, but they didn't have a monopoly on...

Sirius

I was supposed to reply to this when I had time and then forgot :oops: It's a tradeoff. .dem files are easier to produce, and work better for slow connections because they're relatively small and very small when compressed. They also have better picture quality on slower (below 5-10 Mbps) connection...

Sirius

No multiplayer yet in Overload - that's coming later - but it's developing pretty well so far.

Sirius

About L12, with wise use of invuln and cloaks energy center can be reached with ease (invuln behind the guide bot helps to reach it 9 of 10 times). Otherwise seems next to impossible. ...oh. LOL. :lol: I forgot that was there... getting to the energy center without it is incredibly painful, as I su...

Sirius

Took a couple shots at level 12 earlier but will need more time with it - the weapons you start with are weaker and you can't really pin down the legions of merc-flinging robots that easily. I believe it can be done still, since I at least got to the energy center and that's the worst stretch as far...

Sirius

Actually, yes, it reverts the homing missile code to behave like the original D1/D2 code but locked at... I think it was either 25 or 30 FPS. That makes the D1 homing missiles easier to dodge, and the D2 homing missiles... either no different or maybe actually harder, because there was something wei...

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