DescentBB

Sirius

It's queued up behind another level I'm working on. Thankfully that one is nearing completion though (it'll have to be, I only have about 190 cubes of space left...).

Sirius

Yeah, it was level 16. I did another run to record it. Slightly messy but it worked...

Sirius

My guess is that the hostage rescue count increments until you reach an end-level score screen, whichever that happens to be. How full rescue is determined is another interesting question - it might just trigger if you have hostages on board and there are none left in the level, but I couldn't be su...

Sirius

No, it's not. I saw the same message from someone else on a zombie session of the website chat, and I have the same issue personally.

Sirius

I just managed to do it on the second attempt :-o Should have been recording though, I guess I can give that a shot later. The area he skipped is not as hard as it may look - the Seeker and Sidearms are probably the biggest threat that won't come to get you, and the Seeker can be dropped from long r...

Sirius

It's mostly optimization, memorization and good old-fashioned practice I think. It does look pretty cool when you do it well though.

Sirius

AF was actually intentionally harder since the original plan was for a co-op oriented set - when you have people working together some of the nastier traps aren't quite so nasty. That was why all the levels have multiple start doors. The briefing was the one concession to single-player, though we (m...

Sirius

I wonder if it's worth a video walkthrough - it opens up in stages, and many of them are pretty tough to deduce. If I recall correctly, the first stage is a room underneath the long tunnel you enter from. There's a control panel nearby that opens it I think? But it or a secret door inside it doesn't...

Sirius

Agreed on all the robot issues. They were often too small, and suffered a bit from Polytron limitations - that was why they were so simple. When working on Apocalyptic Factor a couple years later, we (actually on recollection it might have been just me for that one?) built far fewer custom robots - ...

Sirius

Yeah, wonder what the story behind that was. Most of the other screenshots make perfect sense.

Sirius

Yeah that was intentional, the smart missile version is kind of an equivalent to a Boarshead, and level 5 (or was it 4? I don't remember) felt way too early to introduce that.

Sirius

Plot differences... did they have briefings in the D2 demo? It's been 20 years since I played it so I can't really remember anymore, myself. I do, somehow, remember that they had D1-style exit sequences though, so it doesn't seem out of the question. Presumably they didn't want to put the movie file...

Sirius

The late-game Obsidian bosses shouldn't be a problem if you know what to do... and if you're trying for an insane no-death run, obviously you will.

Sirius

Yeah, level 24 was one of those big inspiration pieces... though I think I saw influences from it in enough other people's levels that I'm not sure I ever took the jump myself. Except for an early level that I lost at some point. (It was an early-98 level, not actually that good, so don't worry you ...

Sirius

I guess it depends whether anyone's published specs for the file format (DNet maybe?) or you feel like trying to reverse-engineer them. Either way I suspect some amount of coding would be necessary.

Sirius

What version of DLE? I attempted to reproduce this bug on 1.12.28/29 but the mines are showing up in game like you'd expect.

Sirius

Maybe too many to count, but Descent being the first PVP-capable game I played against real people, the most significant ones were what it takes to win in a competitive game. There are the raw skills - can you aim, can you dodge a homing missile - and being able to learn them well enough that you do...

Sirius

The Rebirth guys probably would appreciate the bug reports, too.

Sirius

Cold-starting 23 on Insane sounds horrible, to be honest.

Sirius

Keep robots in front of you if possible
Change directions often - they can lead but they can't mind-read
Keep away from the walls if you can to avoid missile splash
Try to "orbit" the robots, it tends to cause them to cluster which makes them easier to manage

Sirius

Yeah, there's a DOS version of HAXMEDIT that should do the job. It's not as pretty, but it's just as complete as far as I recall.

RbotEdit will tell you most properties of robots in a more user-friendly manner, and does work in 64-bit Windows. Last I checked, anyway.

Sirius

Probably similar to Krom's approach. There'd also be a fair similarity to Overload, at least in terms of the "feel" of the game and typical space afforded to you by the level design. Some specific contrasts to previous games, though: I would still be inclined to bring back the clear art di...

Sirius

Yeah, he would be, and after so much practice I suspect he's flying as well as anyone else would. WR speedruns are a matter of memorization and then luck - and, yes, execution, but if you're dedicated enough to sit through all the resets, you're dedicated enough to get that right anyway. Descent doe...

Sirius

Pigmy moved to Florida, it's quite possible this slipped his mind.

Sirius

That little dance tagging the drillers while going down to the red key was cool to watch.

Sirius

Yeah, I remember a few of those. Some of them would be pretty hard to get away with in the US - imagine taking shots at Canadians like that!

Sirius

I, uh... know there might be a history, but... would it kill us to be a little polite?

Sirius

Hmm. Scroll down to the "Meeting pilots, arranging games" section on this page - it probably explains the current scene better than I can alone :) http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php The actual Rangers site (comes with an auto-updating list of who's connected to the server and in wh...

Sirius

Are you aware of the Rangers' Mumble server? (You don't need to be a member to log on to it.) That's probably the best place to scrape together a few people to play - Big Rat gets his latest levels tested that way.

Sirius

"Also, since this is a cumulative update, it includes all previously released fixes and improvements from past cumulative updates, so in case you missed one, you’ll catch up with everything with KB3185614."

That'll be why; it's basically a bundle of all updates to that point.

Sirius

I wouldn't characterize it as excessively horizontal (the training level, maybe, but it's a training level) - but overuse of gray is definitely a problem.

My impression is that it's because they don't have the art for anything else done yet; it's just a demo issue.

Sirius

I believe placing it in the .hog file only works with D1X/D2X - which is why the older missions resorted to the .bat approach.

Sirius

Next up, no jacks at all? Wireless charging or bust!

Sirius

The official release isn't up to me alone, but I'll finish up my part once I get back home. One of the things I have to look at is performance - modifying some of those operations to run all the way up to 60,000 or whatever vertices could in theory be quite slow if not optimized. Then again, if it r...

Sirius

OK, think I fixed it (there were three separate issues that I ran into) - see if this works.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40598935/DLE.exe

Sirius

Hmmm. It's hard to say. I might have a chance to get it fixed within the next couple weeks; but it's hard to be sure whether I'll have enough time. It depends how much uncertainty you're willing to work with

And how long you expect the project to take anyway.

Sirius

Yeah, there's an accidentally-enforced vertex limit I haven't, uh, gotten around to fixing yet. Really need to do that, you're not the only one who wants that. Um... so... popular weapon distributions mainly apply to multiplayer levels, and... if you're flirting with the cube limit you probably have...

Sirius

That's because there are multiple maxima, so to speak. DLE, D2X-XL and D2 Rebirth all support several thousand cubes; the original version of D2 only supported 900.

Sirius

As far as I was able to deduce back when I tried to deal with this - if the boss appears behind a closed-off wall that later opens, the area it is confined to must be only one cube or it won't teleport anywhere else. I believe this is a side-effect of the algorithm Descent uses to figure out what th...

Sirius

Level editing was a definite for Overload, it was the modding tools and documentation that was a stretch goal.

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