Descent

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Descent
Developer(s)	Parallax Software
Publisher(s)	Interplay Productions
Engine	Segment (Cube) based
Platform(s)	PC, (MS-DOS), Mac OS, Linux, PlayStation, Acorn Archimedes
Release date(s)	March 17, 1995
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player Multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: Teen (T) RSAC: V1: Damage to realistic objects
Media	CD-ROM, floppy disk
System requirements	Minimum (MS-DOS) IBM/Tandy or 100% compatible 386-33 or faster 4 MB RAM DOS 5.0 or later
Input methods	Keyboard, Mouse, Joystick, Controller

Descent is a 3D first-person shooter video game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Entertainment Corp. in 1995. The game features six degrees of freedom gameplay and garnered several expansion packs. It spawned two direct sequels: Descent II and Descent 3.

The trademark for Descent was allowed to lapse by Interplay in 2002 ^[1] and was re-registered in 2008.^[2]

Storyline

The game begins with a briefing between a bald anonymous executive (in later games named Dravis) of the Post Terran Mining Corporation (PTMC) and the player, a "Material Defender" (revealed as MD1032 in the briefings) hired on a mercenary basis to gather information about a computer virus infecting the robots used for off-world mining operations. The game progresses through the solar system, from the Moon to Pluto's moon Charon. After defeating the boss robot on Charon, the Material Defender is informed he cannot return to the PTMC's headquarters in lunar orbit, as there is a chance his ship may be infected with the same virus as the defeated robots.

Gameplay

Screenshot of Descent

Navigation

Although the keyboard interface for moving and rotating in full 3D space is easily learned, certain players^[who?] initially suffered from nausea and confusion since there is no fixed sense of up or down with the zero-gravity effects of space applied to the planet's mines as well. A main cause of inconvenience for casual players was getting lost in the mines (some of which were very large and complex). Memorizing the general mine layouts was an advantage.

The game also supported the use of two joysticks that could be configured freely, which made playing the game easier than using the keyboard.

Like DOOM, Descent provides a navigational wireframe map that will display any area of the mine visited or seen by the player. However, as the map was limited to revolving around the player's position at the moment the navigational map was brought up, determining direction of travel in areas further away from the player's position was challenging. The use of wire-frame models also meant that discerning between different areas of the map was difficult as the wire frame models of various parts of the mine nearer and further from the viewer were mixed together. This was overcome in Descent 3 with the use of opaque wall brushes and lighting closely matching that in-game, in addition to being able to move through the tunnels in map mode, similar to in-game.

Descent never achieved the popularity of more contemporary 3D shooter games due to the demands on the player to keep his or her sense of orientation in a fully 3D environment with a 6DOF flight model. Additionally, learning to "tri-chord" —increasing movement speed by simultaneously pressing the acceleration controls for several movement directions — took some time to master. Nonetheless, the challenge the flight model poses continues to attract certain sections of the gaming community to this day.

Multiplayer

Descent offers competitive multiplayer game play for up to 8 players over a LAN and is touted as being one of the first games to allow initiating sessions conveniently from a menu within the game as well as on-the-fly joining of multiplayer games, whereas in many similar games of the era such as Doom it is presumed that all players have to be queued prior to initiating the match.

With the advent of Internet IPX clients such as Kali^[3] and Kahn, Descent and Descent II were increasingly played over the Internet. Descent II was especially popular online due to its support for short packets and variable packet rate, which significantly improved quality of play over the slower Internet connections prevalent at the time.

An important element of the online gaming community was the Invitational Descent Ladder. The ladder facilitated one-on-one duels between some of the most skilled Descent players in the world.

Levels

In the original Descent, there are 27 levels corresponding to 27 different and unique mines, plus three secret levels.

The first three begin on the Moon, the fourth and fifth on Venus, and the sixth and seventh take place on Mercury. All further levels were released separately as shareware.

In the full version, the player goes on to mines on Mars, followed by mines on the moons of the gas giants Jupiter(Io, Europa, Ganymede), Saturn (Thetis), Uranus (Miranda, Oberon) Neptune (Triton, Nereid), the dwarf planet Pluto, with the final boss battle in the mines of Charon, one of Pluto's satellites.

Objectives

Each level starts with the player in his ship materializing in a starting location within the mine. The player must then navigate through the mine while destroying enemy robots and picking up powerups if his resources run low. The player's spacecraft has a fixed energy capacity up to 200% and most weapons require regular pickups of energy powerups to be able to continue firing. Killing opponents often releases such powerups. There are also permanent recharging areas called "energy centers" which a player can visit any number of times to replenish his or her ship's energy up to 100%; the recharging areas are never exhausted. The player's ship also contains a limited supply of shield energy (normally referred to as "shields"), which is reduced when the player is hit. Unlike energy, shields can only be restored by acquiring the appropriate powerups, and can charge up to a maximum of 200%.

In singleplayer, if the player finished the previous mission with shields below 100%, the shields will be recharged to 100% at the beginning of the successive mission, and will retain the same shield power if it is above 100%.

The player has limited lives in a single player game (but unlimited lives in a multiplayer game.) When a player's ship is destroyed, it respawns at the mine's entrance. However, all the powerups (weapons, etc.) acquired thus far will be strewn about the area of death waiting to be reacquired. There is also a complementary points system. Players can score points by destroying enemy robots, picking up powerups, and detonating the reactor. The most points will be earned by rescuing the trapped PTMC workers in each mine and safely escaping with them after destroying the reactor. Bonus points are awarded when all trapped workers of that level are rescued.

In Descent, the goal of each level is to destroy the reactor. As an intermediate task to reach the reactor, the player must find a series of colored keys, usually in the order of blue, yellow, and red. (These three are the only key colors.) Each key will correspond with one or more doors of that color and allow the player to open those doors. Beyond the red door is the reactor/enemy boss robot, which itself will fire back at the player, and the area is also heavily defended by robots.

Severely damaging the reactor will set off a countdown timer and the player will have to find the route back to the exit tunnel before the countdown expires and the entire mine is vaporized in the reactor's meltdown. The game's introductory briefing states that determining the path to the exit tunnel before destroying the reactor would be wise, as the path is usually not straightforward.

If the player cannot escape, but has extra lives to spare, he can proceed to the next level and be forced to start with minimal weapons.

Development

The original Descent runs under DOS and is (with some tweaking) playable on 386-based PCs at 33 MHz. However, for good-quality rendering with full-screen view and better than minimal render depth, a 486 running at least 66 MHz is required. For maximum rendering quality, a faster Pentium CPU is required; with the release of the Pentium, the performance requirements were no longer an issue. Descent was ported to Apple's Power Macintosh in 1996 and both versions support multiplayer network play over a variety of protocols. A console port of Descent was created for the Sony PlayStation. Another console port for the Sega Saturn was also planned, but never released.

Rendering

Descent was released in February 1995, just over a year after id Software's Doom (December 1993). Like most games of its era, Descent uses a software renderer, because mainstream 3D graphics accelerator cards did not exist at the time. However, while most of its contemporaries—Doom included—use sprites to render enemies, Descent renders enemies in full 3D using polygon meshes, a technique employed by Quake the following year. (However, Descent does use sprites for power-ups and the hostages.) Unlike Doom and Quake, Descent does not use BSP trees for visibility culling (to speed up rendering), instead taking advantage of the game's use of collections of cubes to form rooms and tunnels. This system was very efficient, and made possible one of the first true 3D textured environments in a video game. On lower-end systems, detail levels could be reduced to cut out some of the smaller polygons on robots and render solid color blocks in place of textures on distant walls and across passageways in the distance.

The original Descent uses indexed 8-bit color in DOS's display mode 13h, using 320 × 200 resolution. Unlike its sequel, it uses only one 256-color set during gameplay, rather than a unique set for each group of levels; these colors tinge red during damage and purple during fusion charging. The Macintosh and later PC versions allow higher resolutions, such as 640 × 480. The default engine uses a software renderer in which the perspective transformation for texture mapping is only performed once every 32 pixels, causing textures to appear to pop or shift when viewed from certain angles. The software renderer also uses nearest-neighbor texture filtering, as opposed to bilinear filtering or trilinear filtering used by modern video cards. Nearest-neighbor texture filtering causes aliasing artifacts, such as blocky or swimming textures. These rendering compromises allowed the game to be played on most PCs contemporary with it, while better rendering techniques would have prevented it from being running on any but the most powerful gaming PCs in 1995.

The engine for Descent is a portal rendering engine, operating on the premise of interconnected cube-shaped sectors. Sides of cubes can be attached to other cubes, or display up to two texture maps. Cubes can be deformed so long as they remain convex. To create effects like doors and see-through grating, walls could be placed at the connected sides of two cubes. Descent introduced an elaborate static lighting scheme as well as simple dynamic lighting, where the environment could be lit with flares—another advancement compared to Doom. (Descent II later added more dynamic lighting effects, including the ability to shoot out light fixtures.)

Third-party development

The source code to the original Descent (minus the audio code, which was replaced with that of the Allegro library) was released in 1997. The source code to Descent II was subsequently released in 1999.^[4]

Numerous open source projects based on these source releases have appeared on the Internet. The most popular early project was D1X, which added many new features such as the ability to change resolution, customizable primary and secondary weapon priority, and many other features that were previously only available in Descent II.

Following the release of the Descent II source code, the D1X project sparked another project called D2X, which went on to enhance the gameplay and compatibility of Descent II. D1X and D2X also made it possible to play the games on different platforms like Linux. However, eventually, work on the D1X and D2X projects became stagnant. The latest version, D1X 1.43, added support for OpenGL and Direct3D graphics as well as TCP/IP multiplayer, and runs under Windows XP with few problems. There are source code projects for Descent that are still active like DXX-Rebirth.

Descent has also been unofficially ported to the Linux operating system,^[5] Xbox^[6], Nintendo DS ^[7], Playstation Portable ^[8], Pocket PC^[9] and AmigaOS 4.0.^[10]

Expansions

Descent Mission Builder (1995)

A commercial Descent level editor, created by Interplay Productions. Users can create their own single-player and multi-player levels with the program and then play them.

Descent: Levels of the World (1995)

A popular add-on for Descent, containing all of the entries from a level design competition held by Interplay in 1995. A viewer is included, allowing the player to see a preview of each map, as well as selecting ones that received a "Top 10" award or an honorable mention.

Descent: Anniversary Edition (1996)

A bundle released on the one-year anniversary of the original game's debut, the Anniversary Edition featured Descent, the Levels Of The World add-on, and several additional levels created by Parallax.

Descent on PlayStation

A version of Descent was also produced for the PlayStation. It features the same levels as the PC version of Descent, but adds a remixed soundtrack, prerendered cinematics, and colored lighting effects.

Related titles

In 1997, Interplay released Descent to Undermountain, an RPG that used a modified version of the Descent graphics engine, but that was otherwise unrelated.

Perhaps the most well-known "Descent clone" was Forsaken, which was released in 1998 for PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. Forsaken had similar graphics to Descent, and almost identical gameplay.

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War was released by Volition, Inc. in 1998. It shared the Descent name, but otherwise had no connection to the series; it was given the "Descent" prefix to avoid trademark issues^[11] (in Europe, it was released as Conflict: FreeSpace – The Great War). FreeSpace was a space simulator, and while it was still technically a 3D shooter, it for the most part did not retain Descent's trademark six degrees of freedom. Some early drafts of the FreeSpace story had the pilot searching for Descent's "Material Defender"^{[citation needed]}, but the story of the finished game was unrelated.

Around that time, Volition also began work on Descent 4, but development was canceled in 2000, owing mostly to disappointing sales of Descent 3.^{[citation needed]} Descent 4 may have been originally planned as a prequel to Descent, and reportedly served as a basis for the first-person shooter Red Faction. Similarities include a reference to a "humans first" strike in Descent's opening briefing, and plot points such as nanotechnology, an evil faceless corporation, and the virus they are attempting to harness. Mike Kulas (president of Volition) stated in an interview that the Red Faction and Descent universes are strictly separate, however he did admit that code intended for Descent 4 had been used in Red Faction.^[12]

See also

• Descent II, the sequel to this game
• Descent 3, the sequel to Descent II
• Terracide
• Forsaken
• Straferunning (known as trichording to Descent players)
• Interplay Entertainment
• Parallax Software

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Descent (video game)

• Official Descent page at Interplay
• Descent at MobyGames
• Descent series at MobyGames
• Descent source code