Descent 3 Source Code (github.com)
Someone recently asked if the source code from Descent 3 will be released. I reached out to my old boss (Matt Toschlog) at Outrage Entertainment and he gave me the go ahead. I'm going to work on getting this running again and I'm looking for some co-maintainers.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/
There is, however, an outright continuation of the subgenre, in Overload.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
There were many 3D engines before Quake. You had a bunch of Micropose combat flight sims, a ton of 3d driving games, even Elite on the BBC micro.
Hell, I'd written some 3D graphics on the Atari ST before Quake.
Quake was the first 3D texture mapped, dynamically lit, first person shooter...maybe...depending on your definition. It was certainly one of the first to have that ran at frame rates around 30fps.
As others have said, Descent was also around the same time too.
If you don't have experience doing this yourself, watching such a player over the shoulder can be very nausea-inducing. I think to some extent this is innate, but I suspect for those who don't have a strongly pronounced response to begin with, playing such games (and doing those rapid turns yourself) desensitizes you over time. And I think that also transfers to VR to some extent; I've been playing first-person shooters with WASD+mouse for ~30 years now, and I had no nausea whatsoever the first time I tried VR.
Okay except that one time playing COMPOUND. By accident I moved the analog stick to the left while turning my head to the right, and the image moving the opposite of what I expected made me feel bad. I finished the level there, and then had to go rest for a couple of minutes and stop playing VR for the day.
tl;dr for some people it almost never happens, until it does.
No. It can actually get _worse_, as you get more sensitized to VR. The recommendation seems to be to _stop_ using VR if you get motion sick, rather than trying to power through it.
Could it be that you are both right? As in, you should stop right away when you start getting motion sick, but with time it will get better?
Something like: play 15 minutes everyday, stop as soon as you are sick, and after a while you will be able to play 30min, etc.
I have no idea, just asking for a friend :-).
You know, just to see that it has happened to someone :-)
Well here I am: I initially got queasy as soon as I moved, then I'd immediately stop and take a break, longer breaks in the beginning. Initially I got a strong sense of de-realization / depersonalization after getting out of the digital world (i.e. looking at your hands and your brain being confused if they're real) But that also went away very quickly. The nausea, and 'am I still in the matrix' feeling got better within days, and went away within weeks. Now I can stomach any crazy topsy-turvy locomotion in any game. But I still feel the sweat and excitement, when swinging off 1000 feet high cliffs in Jet Island, or diving hundreds of meters deep in Subnautica.
It's just amazing how immersive it can be. I think you can only get there by having it at home and really giving yourself the time to get into it.
It's also re-ignited my love for single player games, especially modded triple A titles like Dragon Quest XI, or Resident Evil 2 (Remake) for example.
And btw, I run all of this on (arch) linux, on a Valve Index kit, using both SteamVR and OpenXR through Envision (Monado). It's been a bit of tinkering but that's only made it more satisfying for me. Plus, there are great communities like the Linux VR Adventure group: https://lvra.gitlab.io/
There are still some sorts of games that will make me queasy (games that have a lot of uncontrollable-by-me jumping around (think "leaping ninja fighting games') for instance), but by and large, I've no trouble.
I also found Dramamine to be helpful during the intermediate period where I'd still otherwise get nauseous after a while. I find it continues to be helpful for things like those stupid "leaping ninja fighting games".
Nausea didn't get better and seemed to be present when my head was turning but the camera was moving either the opposite way or in the same direction but too fast.
I have some really good memories of spending hours inside of Obduction VR (highly recommended if you liked Myst / Riven / The Witness / etc), but the de-realization was so severe that I ended up abandoning that form of entertainment out of concern for my sanity.
I'm guessing it's easier to get used to the motion/display lag than the balance sence issues.
Maybe, but people who work on boats surely get used to it. So it seems like it is possible for some people to some extent :-).
The only experiences that made me nauseas were the ones that simulated movement of characters, where pressing a button would move the character and camera forwards. That was just too much of a disconnect. Movement by teleporting was not a problem.
It was worst the first few times, and I did not last long before I had to take a break, powering through was not possible. With experience it got better, the nausea/dizzyness was less intense and I could play longer sessions, but it never went away completely.
However, once I rented a plane to go over the Nazca lines, and it was in a tiny plane, that was capable of changing direction very easily.
That day I felt nausea. By this, I mean you can't ignore it, it is a strong sensation. So much, that the guides will advise to do the flight on an empty stomach. And it was overpowering, one girl in the plane did not watch anything because she was focused on a paper bag close to her mouth.
Not even fast turning karts or anything else has been able to reproduce that feeling.
In a small (3-4 seat) plane, I got a little nervous from the sudden changes in direction, but I didn't feel nauseated then either. I've been on one of those astronaut trainer 3-axis spinning chair contraptions a few times when I was younger and didn't feel any ill effects. I thought it was a fun experience.
I have gotten a weird variation on motion sickness a few times when I was on small boats. I'd be fine on the boat itself, but a day or two later, back on land, I'd feel like the surface of the Earth was bobbing up and down the way the boat had. It went away in a few hours or less, but it was hard to do anything productive while it lasted. I still didn't feel like I was going to vomit.
So much fun, though!
This. Everything or at least nearly everything is consistent and logical. The goal of the game is for you to piece out how all the element relates together.
Else, open the map, pick an unexplored planet and go there. There is no wrong way to go.
Figuring it out! Going from all loose ends to a decent picture of what's going on can be really satisfying.
It feels more like a roguelike or a survival game to me with it's anti-features like falling damage and time limited resources and inescapable holes to get trapped in. And then you die and have to start all over again from the beginning. The epitome of not respecting the player's time.
It's the only game I have ever refunded on Steam, and annoyingly I keep getting recommended it because it's "like" all the other games that I play even though it clearly is not. I feel like I am in bizarro world with the amount of people who rave about it.
That part is at least true - there are no other games like Outer Wilds.
It is absolutely an adventure game - aside from some arcade elements - you solve puzzles throughout entire game and you retain progress once you've solved them.
So maybe it's less frustrating if considered like "a Mario level that's supposed to be difficult"
The story is understated, poignant, and one of those "ultimately nothing happened but the real story is what happened along the way". For reasons like this I consider it similar to Disco Elysium, a totally different game on the surface
«I am the CEO of Orbital Design Studios, and am the designer behind the canceled "Descent IV" project in 2002. This game is a thing I thought I'd never see, aside from prototypes in my company's archives.
A very warm welcome back to Matt & Mike and all of the old crew of Parallax and Outrage Entertainment who have returned to create this long dreamed of and hoped for creation. Thank you for putting my regrets that D4 couldn't get made, to rest. Overload will stand for all time in its place.»
There was also another classic Descent contender, Forsaken, that got remastared in 2018 to run on Linux and macOS in addition to modern Windows platforms. The original game was actually used as a graphics benchmark for early 3d accelerators due to its lighting effects.
That said, looking forward to playing Descent 3 on a modern platform!
Glad D3 is in open source now, because the Steam version has broken multiplayer. I'd be glad to have a multiplayer session again one day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMduxHsXko
https://steamcommunity.com/app/448850/discussions/0/38095358...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/327880/Sublevel_Zero_Redu...
This game is such an underappreciated hidden gem.
I really enjoyed the story too, that was probably the first game I played through to the end, just to find out how the story ends.
I believe the team has long disbanded which is a shame, it is a very _decent_ product (ha!)
Not the same exact team head-for-head but pretty close. Matt Toschlog and Mike Kula were both game directors on the original (and founded Parallax Software). They were the game directors of Overload as well and they're the founders of Revival, the studio that made the game.
The game is very well made, and as far as I know they delivered everything they promised to their backers (it was on Kickstarter). I bought the game (on PC AND on XBox) and left positive review on Steam. Hopefully they're working on something else that's just as awesome!
The midi Descent music (from 1 and 2) was to me the best game soundtrack in many years. Only when Portal appeared, it was removed from my top 1.
It is the only set of game related songs I enjoy using as ringtones =)
3D world. Adventure game mechanics, with problems and puzzles - but where progress opens up more puzzles, and where instead of developing the character skills, you develop the story. Slow paced.
There have been plenty of games to tap into that style, but not enough or frequently enough to warrant calling them part of a genre. Black Dahlia. The Witness. Talos Principle. In a way, even a visual story like All That Remains of Edith Finch can trace its root to Myst.
The 7th Guest was released months earlier. It’s the exact same genre and technically more ambitious. It uses FMV, but all the 3D worlds are pre-rendered.
I think it is should be obvious to most here why Myst was more generally successful. But outside of story and atmosphere (the former of which is porn plot in both) mechanically they’re the same game.
> The series caused a major shift in the adventure game genre. Unlike previous games, Myst attempted to keep players immersed in the world by removing all information not associated with the fictional world itself—no explanatory text, inventory, or score counters.
7th guest came out first. Too dark, while also being too campy to have the widespread lasting appeal of Myst, so no surprise why outside a niche one is mostly forgotten and the other always comes up even if only to hate for some. But they were basically the same game.
I don’t even know if 7th guest was first of its kind, probably not, but it sold bucket loads, partly because it was a pack in game for MPC kits and PCs in the early 90s.
Myst was the top selling game of all time until The Sims came along and dethroned it for quite some time. So you have a point about how some top selling games can become so iconic that there aren't any alternatives for a long time.
I think it's a great thing that Paradox eventually picked up the ball and made some competition for SimCity and The Sims, after EA strayed from the original designs, and enshitified them with all the expansion packs and online DRM bullshit.
Competition is great, and The Sims 4 and SimCity and the competing alternatives would be much better off and further along, if they only had viable competition all these years. EA should have released and documented and supported their internal content creation and programming tools for user created content, instead of putting all their effort into competing with fans and trying to squeeze the last penny out of it with expansion packs.
I've proposed and campaigned for EA to release the tools since before the release of The Sims 1 in 2000, and they did eventually give me the rights and pay me to develop and release some limited tools like The Sims Transmogrifier for The Sims 1, but they never followed through with releasing the internal tools like the Edith editor and SimAntics visual programming language, or the 3D Studio Max content creation tools, and they never officially supported or documented anything, the way Factorio and other games do such a wonderful job at.
This video shows Edith -- The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY
And this shows The Sims Transmogrifier and some other tools I developed with it, and user created content programmed by fans with the limited tools available (iffpencil2 etc) -- Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8
Decades later, it's now possible but difficult to develop and program user created content for The Sims 4 in Python, but it's terribly documented and practically unsupported. Here is the original proposal I wrote around the time we released The Sims 1 in March 2000, which outlined what we should do, but unfortunately they didn't take it nearly as far as I suggested, and never let me release the 3D Studio Max animation and object exporters, or the Edith editor and visual programming tools.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040329181128/http://www.donhop...
>A Proposal to Develop Third Party Content Authoring Tools for The Sims, by Don Hopkins, March 2000
>This is a proposal I wrote to Maxis after The Sims was released in March 2000, outlining some of my ideas for third party content authoring tools that I could develop. This led to The Sims Transmogrifier, but it touches on several other interesting tools and projects that Maxis never got around to.
>Problem Definition:
>There is a strong demand many from third parties who want to develop their own custom content for The Sims, including characters and objects.
>Proposed Solution:
>Update, clean up and document the content creation tools, so third parties can make their own characters and objects for The Sims.
>Port the tools to the latest version of 3D Studio Max.
>Make the tools self contained so they can be run stand-alone, by removing all dependencies on the Maxi...
So, I'd say there were plenty of myst-like clones mostly focused on the European market though and not necessarily very successful.
For Myst it was a high res 3d modelled world you could traverse, interspersed with video clips, all made possible by the new CD-ROM tech. It wasn’t actually that great a game. I loved it at the time but in retrospect there’s just not that much there. The most recent incarnation of a game like this is The Witness which is better in every way I can think of.
For Descent it was true 3D - was it the first? It predates quake. Maybe some people were captivated by the gameplay but for me it was “holy shit it’s 3d”. There’s a reason we have tons of FPSes and only a few Descent clones; the latter just aren’t that fun for most people.
Probably needed to develop a less-repetitive story-line to keep people engaged... The traps were so cheesy sometimes. =)
One fun feature was you could shut off your suit power to go into a stealth mode. This turned off all the HUD elements, and, amusingly enough, turned off most gameplay noises (the explosions and bullets whizzing by) because, in-universe, all those noises are generated by the suit computer, because space is silent!
Nowadays we have the modern version of Elite Dangerous, but its flight mechanics are too close to aeronautic flight mechanics to compare to Descent.
The graphics card was the Diamond Viper V770, if I recall correctly. Good times!
I wish the series had carried on, I really wanted to find out where the confusing plot threads of Freespace 2 went!
I loved the series too, though the name was only prefixed with “Descent” to avoid a trademark conflict with an existing bit of software already called FreeSpace. It’s completely unrelated to Descent story-wise (and I’d argue is almost completely unrelated gameplay wise too)
Of course, to make the game playable and fair there's a maximum speed you can achieve while not in hyperspace.
It is absolutely incredible to play like this, and very hard but rewarding. It can be essential for high level combat, and there's an entire community of hooners (sp?) that fly among narrow spaces between mountains doing incredible maneuvers. They use extra things like opening the cargo hatch or landing gear as aerobrakes (lower ship speed limit). Many "normal" pilots will enable and disable Flight Assist situationally, mostly to gain extra turning speed during FA OFF. It's worth searching youtube for some related videos.
Unfortunately for mouse/keyboard users like me there's a couple of things in the control scheme that conspire to make it harder to use than it could be. Still, the first time I landed my Cutter (a massive ship with brutal inertia) in a rotating station with FA OFF, I felt like the king of the world.
Note that you don't need FA OFF to do strafing in all directions. I do it all the time. However with FA ON, the ship will counter your strafes to correct the ship's motion into the forward/back axis. Strafes in FA OFF are more powerful and can let your ship move at top speed in any direction while facing any other direction, but you only really need that for tight flight maneuvers.
It was clearly a labor of love - way ahead of its time and would def hold up to this day in virtually every aspect
Man, I still can't believe I actually escaped that one the first time. That was the most amazing moment in the game for me.
After hours of searching google, I realize that I was actually thinking about Terminal Velocity. Great soundtrack, fun game (although I never finished it).
The composer of the soundtrack left a message here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6QkJtxu608
> @kylerichards4410 7 years ago Nu music, I wrote the music to this game almost 25 years ago. You just made my night. :) Cheers.
> @kylerichards4410 7 years ago Ha...it's really me. :) Yeah, those mod formats were pretty brutal on sound quality. 8bit and around 5khz samples, if memory serves. It's a little difficult to listen to the originals, so hearing your remix was fantastic. Again, great work. Really enjoyed it. :)
https://youtu.be/T2-IHgNYaKA
https://old.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/16xi20a/dua...
https://youtu.be/9U0KNVQmlcM
I miss this game...
> Never understood why this concept didn’t become a whole genre.
Spaceflight simulators have always been niche, unfortunately. Even more niche than flight simulators.
The pvp mode (Arena?) does offer loads of use for that aspect of it though. But, I could never get on with the combat style, it feels like you spend a lot of time turning your nose to try and get aligned with your target. That may be me failing at it though, but trying to maneuver away to turn around means the enemies are on my tail.
I had Descent 1 on PS1, and I remember the box claiming the enemies adapted to your play style. Now that I'm older and have studied machine learning and some other AI techniques, I've always wondered exactly what that meant. I'm sure my PS1 wasn't doing gradient descent (heh).
What tricks were behind the claim that the enemies learned and adapted to the player?
In videogames sometimes the AI skill is adaptive in very simple terms, e.g. reaction times or see/aiming range or chance of hit are increased or lowered to keep the game engaging.
Seems complex enough to meet the description on the box for the original Descent.
[1] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71...
[2] https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/86141b82295e71...
Arcade-style 6DoF games are so rare. And we have all the hardware now, just not the market to justify the effort. This D3 opensource could kick off a whole new round of games!
Level-editing in VR seems like it would be so much fun too.
With any 3d game it becomes a bit of a circle-strafe fight. With space and 6dof games, it becomes a flight simulator fight, which is an intense genre.
Additionally it removes some verticality from levels. IF EVERYTHING is accessible, it removes choices around taking the high ground / sneaking through the low ground.
I agree they are cool games, but they have some quirks that are not everyone's cup of tea.
The subgenre is called 6DOF, and it does have games. But I agree it's not as big as it could be, and that the magic hasn't really been recaptured. Game developers seem to frequently have this same thought. Descent was good! This should be more popular! Someone tries every couple years or so, but the result generally disappoints.
It is my opinion that 6DOF games are difficult to make good, especially to the standards and expectations of modern gamers. The combat and level design are much more technical (or perhaps just differently technical) than someone from a flat FPS perspective expects, and as a result, the game design seems to have a lot of opportunities for technical mistakes to be made. I think more generic FPS developers, who remembered liking Descent back when our standards were lower, don't realize how much we've learned since then and how very much there is TO learn about the genre.
I find that aggravating. Every few years, the Descent community gets excited about a big 6DOF attempt, and every few years we get disappointed by the result. Even more aggravating, they generally make design mistakes that I think show ignorance of the genre. How does this keep happening? You wouldn't think of making an RTS, or a MOBA, or even a flight combat sim, or really any other very technical genre of game, without the expertise of the veterans and elite players of the genre. And yet 6DOF developers seem to me to do just that. I can only conclude that the problem looks from the outside to he easier than it really is.
I don't mean to sound arrogant! What I mean is that, I think the answer to your question "Why isn't this more of a thing?" is that it's a much harder thing than it appears to be. I think Descent's success can be attributed to a lot of things: to lower standards 30 years ago, to lucky or prescient design decisions, to a brilliant team enjoying the unique freedom of the wild world of 90s software passion projects, and to a lot of community involvement over time. And I'm not sure that's the whole list. I do think it should be a bigger thing now - there is a delicious flavor here and no reason this generation shouldn't love it too. But it's also apparent that Descent caught lightning in a bottle, and even I couldn't tell you everything that went into making it happen once but not twice. I can point to reasons that I think attempts to repeat it have been less successful, reasons that make sense to me as an expert player in the genre, problems I think I or a couple dozen pilots like me could help anyone avoid. But I'm not sure that explains all of the difficulty. Every now and again, some veteran pilot will take the problem into their own hands and try to make the next big 6DOF, and those projects are rarely finished and rarely good. It doesn't seem that hard, from a software point of view, and they know the game! Or think they do. And yet they fail. So genre expertise can't be the only ingredient, even if I think it's a necessary and usually missing one.
The problem is clearly harder than it looks. I think I know what to do, or at least one piece of the puzzle, but better warriors have been slain on that battlefield, and I haven't actually made the attempt, so I don't actually know. But I can definitely say this much: Developer beware! Here there be dragons!
Overload's good though. :)
when you add the extra degrees of freedom in Descent-like games, relative to Quake-like games (or flight/space sims but in different ways), there are some emergent behaviors that change how the game fundamentally feels. What frequently happens when random devs take on a 6dof project because they enjoyed Descent back in the day is they'll make a game that feels like a shooter with vertical flight, and is missing some of the key things that make Descent feel good. I've heard some 6dof games described as "it feels like I'm flying a camera, not a ship" (lack of turning momentum), or "it feels sluggish when I try to move in multiple directions" (lack of vector independence / trichording), or "it's just spray-and-pray combat" (undersized ship hitboxes relative to projectile speed/size and level size.) There are a lot of things we've learned over 30 years of playing Descent and Descent-like games that don't always get taken seriously by devs of other 6dof projects. And even when they do take everything seriously, there are things none of us have figured out how to articulate but that can make a 6dof game feel bad.
I think it'd be possible to build a great game in the genre, but you'd need a bunch of key things to come together, and then you'd also need great marketing to get the thing in front of millions of eyeballs to make enough sales to keep the community going.
Awful comment to write in a Descent 3 nostalgia thread tho, I admit.
I just remember growing up on Descent and Forsaken and immediately discarded them once I discovered FPS in the early 2000s.
Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding what descent is about?
probably some nostalgia there but great memories
Total long shot, but I thought I'd ask.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwar_(video_game)
Oh my God, so many memories.
T2 would be cool too. But nothing tops T1. That said, there's no reason to wait for the source to be leaked to play. http://playt1.com/ has everything you need. The community maintains both the game client and have written multiple custom master servers.
Fun fact, the editor was called DALLAS, which from what I remember stood for "Don't ask Luke for Levels And Scripts". Luke was the only designer who could make things work with the original language.
Personally, I'd love to rewrite it to use wasm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40051289
Here's what I'm doing for Micropolis (open source SimCity), where the rubber hits the road. There are a bunch of comments in the code describing the approach and constraints. (Obviously analyzed and written with the help of ChatGPT!)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/Microp...
Implementing a JavaScript scripting SDK is the first step towards integrating browser-based visual programming languages like Snap! and Blockly, which make it easy to program extensions, like Sandspiel Studio!
Snap!:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/
Blockly:
https://developers.google.com/blockly
Sandspiel Studio:
https://studio.sandspiel.club/
I've written lots more about Sandspiel Studio on Twitter and Hacker News:
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1777401152260247673
>I bet you could make Sandspiel Studio compile those Blockley-based visual programs into WebAssembly or GPU shader code! But actually it might be too fast since the fun is watching the flowers grow. I taught your flower blooming code to grow potatoes too!
https://studio.sandspiel.club/post/7718
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561910
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36003900
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044329
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044498
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39601709
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38016554
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700318
Simpler times!
What a ton of work building a game is.
It's cool that this was done, thanks!
That's right. Good times!
`git log <file>` gives you the entire history of commits that touches that particular file.
edit: i suppose you mean the ability to keep track of what is being done in other unmerged branches perhaps?
https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-enemys-gate-is-down-real...
https://kangaroopunch.com/view/ShowSoftware?id=1
I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.
The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.
Thanks again for doing this btw!
I am not familiar with the.. um.. I guess you could call it the landscape of the freespace community but this was a top search result.
https://www.hard-light.net/
and here is a github project that looks correct.
https://github.com/scp-fs2open/fs2open.github.com
And now, for free, an opinion. I enjoyed descent, but did not like freespace, I am sure there is fun subtlety to the game, but I bounced off it hard, combat in open space ended up being just these really boring circle battles. Much funner combat when you have tight claustrophobic corridors to deal with.
They're just different games. I love them both for what they are. It's a shame that Interplay tried to use the Descent name to sell more copies, because even if there was some minor inspirations in development, Freespace definitely stands solidly on its own two feet without the tie.
Awesome.
Today kids just have 1 gazillion games on their phone. There is no more connection to the system beneath. No work or effort needed. Just download and play the next best thing.
I think this generation is missing out.
I still wonder how we managed to do that just by reading books or manuals and sharing info with friends.
Our PC “only” had 4mb of RAM which was the minimum for Doom, but exiting Windows into DOS after boot left a lot of cruft in memory.
The first time I tried starting the computer and bypassing autoexec.bat (which I learned from reading on a BBS) I was scared it was going to be permanent. Luckily it wasn’t.
Nodding though, oh man that got me into developing things like you wouldn't believe.
Quake 1, 2 had a huge community around coding or map making. Tribes 2 was absolutely all about mods. Command and Conquer with it's rules.ini or StarCraft with its gui scripting stored in map files I spent so many hours messing with. It was all about making something crazy to show off when you went back to school or later to a lan party to wow everyone.
I think old computers have a certain amount of simplicity that I think make the user less passive when using them. I also think that older games tend to be both less addictive and leave more to imagination.
Of course that won't be sustainable forever eventually he'll be influenced by his peers to play whatever they're currently playing but I'm hoping that having been exposed to older computers will be beneficial.
When I was young, my parents bought me a copy of X-Wing (CD-ROM) for our Win95, Pentium 100 machine. My parents were not computer savvy, and being only 13 myself, I didn't know much about computers. My dad couldn't get it to work, and so the box sat on the shelf for months, maybe even a year. (Time's warped when you're a young kid. =P ) I'd leaf through the manual and gaze longingly at the box art, and look through the little technical leaflets that were included. The latter of which may have been written in hieroglyphs. I set it aside, played the Descent demo over and over that came with out PC, and surfed AOL.
I kept learning more about the computer in the meantime.
One day I was performing my old ritual, when I noticed one of the paper leaflets in the box. Rather than being hieroglyphs, I knew now what it was saying. X-Wing needed DOS EMS (Expanded memory), and this paper was telling me I needed to edit CONFIG.SYS on Windows 95 machines to get this to work. My parents had forbid me from touching anything in the "WINDOWS" folder (there be dragons, according to them) and after having wiped a lot of my mom's files on our earlier Tandy, they didn't want me messing with things I didn't understand that they couldn't fix.
But I was confidant. I edited the file, and hoped for the best. The computer restarted, and just as I'd done countless times before to no avail, tried to start up the game.
Listening to the Star Wars theme play MIDI over the speakers, I jumped up, ecstatic. It was late at night, and my parents were watching TV in the living room. I ran downstairs. "I GOT X-WING WORKING!!!!!!"
It was a feeling of accomplishment, that to this day I look back on and say "that's when it started". I think I knew it then, to some tiny degree, that this was going to be my path.
I'm 40 now. I'm a solutions architect at AWS. My computers were all built by me. And my X-Wing box sits on my shelf still.
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I've talked with my niece, and with some other kids over the years about their gaming, experience with PCs, and the like. There's not much to figure out. I don't blame them; I don't shake my fist at these kids. After all, I recall the frustrations too. Building PCs that wouldn't start for no reason (well, this still happens), the unreliability of early home routers. Many early games that just wouldn't start on your PC but run just fine on your buddies. I remember LAN parties with my colleagues with a combined technical know-how in the room of several CCNAs, MCSEs, etc, and we still can't get our Unreal Tournament server to be seen by everyone's PC. Don't get me started on copy protection woes.
But there was a joy in finally getting it working, and through the stress, we learned a lot about how it all worked. The current internet and computer environment doesn't have that in that you need to know how it works in order to enjoy it. I wouldn't reverse the state of affairs; things are much more mature and stable now. And it's not as simple as saying "well go off and do these projects". We can motivate some to do so as a stretch, but nothing was motivating the same way as sheer necessity like we had it.
So I see it as just something to observe and note and appreciate for how we had it then, both maddeningly frustrating yet glorious in how genuine and unrefined it all was. Hopefully later generations will find their own versions of what we experienced.
I'm glad to have lived through it. It kick-started a love of computing and a lifelong career.
This is how thousands, if not millions of people will have their first foray into coding, and it's a much, MUCH larger amount of people that get in touch with the deeper levels of tech than "our" generation had.
Don't underestimate "this generation"; don't generalise them either by trying to state they only spend mindless time on their phone.
[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-pro...
[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/scriptap...
Back then I played the trailer over and over and over, waiting for the release... That line is carved deep and immediately pops up every time I think of Descent 3:
> Now, after years of waiting, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Just as fitting today as it was back then :D
EDIT: ha, an internets uploaded it. What a trailer that was...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IHFazkfmBE4
For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40009248
Very cool — thank you!