D2X-XL rocks

So if you read the description over on the right, you'll know I've played Descent. What that doesn't tell you is that I own the Descent 1 and 2 Definitive Collection, which has D1, D2, D2:Vertigo, and Levels of the World, along with the official Descent Mission Builder.

That's nice, right? You totally care. Well, apathy aside, there's a reason I told you this information.

I installed D2X-XL the other day. It takes a bit of setup, as it's just the core engine for Descent 1 and 2 (which was open sourced a while back). You need to copy the Descent 1 and 2 files into the appropriate subdirectories for it to actually do anything worthwhile. Fortunately all of this is laid out in the readme.

D2X-XL combines Descent 1 and 2 into one game, allowing you to play the official single player missions from each, as well as any custom missions you may have for each, all from one program. Of course, there are tons of multiplayer options. Its aim is to add as much as possible to Descent while still maintaining backwards compatibility with the original games, meaning you can join multiplayer games created with the original games using D2X-XL. Any feature you're using that isn't supported in the original will be disabled, to prevent you from effectively gaining the upper hand just by running the game with a different engine.

It gives the graphics of both games a facelift via OpenGL, adding colored lighting, even where it's not specified (because it couldn't be specified) in original D1 and D2 levels. It figures it out from textures, so keyed doors, with those lights on the wall next to them that tell you what color key you need, will actually glow the proper color now.

It also adds some stuff not present in either D1 or D2, such as smoke trails, which like everything else in the game, are highly configurable. When you fire a missile, it leaves a smoke trail. These can be disabled if you'd rather be able to see the battle at hand. Or, you know, if you'd like to be able to move backwards and still be able to see forwards.

D2X-XL adds one thing that makes the game a LOT more playable: Higher mouse sensitivity. Turning the ship in vanilla D1 and D2 took for-fucking-ever. Not so in D2X-XL.

There are other solutions for playing Descent 1 on Windows XP and VistAIDS, such as running it under DOSBox, which I did for a while. It had weird graphical problems that could only be prevented by running the game windowed. Descent 2 had a Windows 95 version, and thus wasn't really affected too much. In the end, don't we all prefer a system architecture-native method of running any given program?

D2X-XL has support for playing custom music during the game, using the Ogg Vorbis format. It's only appropriate that one open source project make use of another, right? Plus, you know, Ogg Vorbis is awesome. It's all about having higher audio quality than MP3 with smaller file sizes.

The list of enhancements and new things is too long to go through here. The overall point is: D2X-XL is good. For Windows users, it offers a way to play both games within your OS without having to emulate another environment (i.e. DOSBox), and play them both at higher resolutions, with better graphics overall. For Mac OS X and Linux users, it enables you to play the games period, in addition to everything else it features. Can we get a round of applause for open source projects in general?

Accompanying D2X-XL is DLE-XP, an enhancement of the Descent Mission Builder to support all the extra level-building features and raised object limits that D2X-XL has.

The verdict: install, use, keep, and cherish.

Now if only there was an open source engine for Duke Nukem 3D. Holy shit never mind, a little googling eventually found me EDuke32. I guess that'll be a later post.