Video games - Descent

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	Video games - Descent

Descent is a 3D first-person shooter video game noted for popularizing the use of portal rendering technology and providing the player with six full degrees of freedom (often abbreviated "6DOF") to move and to look around. Descent spawned two direct sequels (Descent II and Descent 3). The Descent name was used in an unrelated arcade space sim called Descent: Freespace
, primarily due too copyright issues in certain regions. Descent was developed by Parallax Software and released in 1995. Although old by modern gaming standards, it is still cherished by a strong community of fans and new levels continue to be developed.

The trademark for Descent has been cancelled by Interplay in 2002. Source:

Rendering

The original Descent runs under DOS and is (with some tweaking) playable on 386-based PCs at 33 MHz. With the release of the Pentium, the performance requirements disappeared as 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, and a sequel entitled Descent Maximum followed. It's interesting to note that the Playstation version of Descent Maximum contained the same soundtrack as Descent II, but had a completely unique level set, never released on any other platform. Like the Macintosh version, the Playstation version also features a Redbook audio soundtrack, something the original DOS Descent lacks (the soundtrack came as a MIDI score).

Descent was released in 1994, one year after id Software's Doom
. As was typical with those releases, Descent uses a software renderer due to the fact that affordable 3D graphics accelerator cards (referred to as add-on videocards) were not mainstream as yet. While Doom uses sprites to render enemies, Descent features fully-3D-polygonal enemies. Quake
followed in the footsteps of Descent by displaying its enemies in 3D. Descent differs from Doom and subsequently Quake by using a portal system instead of BSP trees. In a portal scheme, each room is an enclosed chamber and the player moves from one chamber to another which were linked via narrow doors and tunnels. This method of rendering proved to be quite efficient for its time because the engine did not need to unnecessarily expend energy.

Perhaps the more significant improvement over Doom was that Descent used bitmap sprites only for powerups and not for opponents. With true 3D enemies, the game introduced a more frightening level of realism.

Graphics

The original Descent uses indexed 8-bit color in DOS's display mode 13h, using 320 × 200 resolution. The Macintosh and later PC versions allow higher resolutions, such as 640 x 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.

The engine for Descent and Descent II operates on the premise of interconnected cubes. Sides of cubes can be attached to other cubes, or display up to two texture maps. Cubes can be deformed so long as their sides remain planar. Walls can also be placed at the common sides of attached cubes to support effects like doors and see-through grating. Unlike in Doom, doors are flat, the level environments are static, and enemies are polygonal instead of sprite-based. However, power-ups and most weapon effects are sprite-based. Of special note is the lighting, which takes on many gradients due to dynamic lighting and looks more natural than that of Doom. Colored lighting is used for Descent 3. This engine was impressive for its time but eventually id Software released Quake, which is truly 3D and surpassed the Descent engine.

Descent 3 utilizes an indoor and outdoor engine in tandem, collectively called the Fusion Engine. Detailed for its time, the engine allows bump-mapping (a revolutionary and eye-catching feature at the time) dynamic colored lighting, relatively complex environments, and weather effects. Unlike contemporary first-person shooters such as Unreal or Quake, Descent 3 architecture does not rely on brushes. Rather it relies on basic vertex/face modeling. It is said the original levels are mostly developed in 3D Studio Max.

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Video games - Descent

Rendering

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