Descent 3 has been made open source

Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: elmapulthis was like, my first PC game ever!
im not even kidding, it was not my first gaming system since i had an n64, but when i saw the graphics i was stunned.

anyway i never finished it =p

Yeah, this game came free with my Voodoo graphics card, and I loved it.

i paid like 6.50R$ (nowadays that is about 1.2 us dollars, but back then it was something like 3.25 us dollars)
it was dirty cheap compared to n64 games who were about 60~120 R$ (actually i think the only reason we were able to buy 2 for the price of one was because the games were already cheaper than the standard price and we made an deal to purchase 2 if we got an disccount)


the graphics were also more impressive than n64 games.


Last edited by elmapul on 16 April 2024 at 11:22 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestI'm not intentionally trying to be argumentative, just when I saw the headline "Descent 3 has been made open source" I was like OK a game like wesnoth or 0 A.D. That's not the case unfortunately.

No worries, although in terms of a commercial proprietary game later releasing both its source code and assets to the community, I would say Warzone 2100 is the most cogent example I can think of.

Is the original doom source code release not open source either? Weird standard to stand by. That's what most games that had their source code later released do—the code itself is open, but not the game assets.

Ah man, Descent 3 what a time. 1999 I preordered Freespace2. That was the start of my game modding. Between the Descent 1/2 level editors and Freespace 1/2. Then Descent 3 dropped. Descent developer tools were a revolution. For the first time being able to see inside the process of making games and being able to explore the files. It changed my life forever. A lot of the ideas behind Vegastrike were inspired by the Descent/Freespace series toolkits. And who could forget Loki Software? Linux native Descent 3 shipped with libSDL and the Loki Games update tools. Absolutely epic time.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: GuestNot really Decent, rebirth doesn't come with the game data. You have to buy it yourself, so does Descent2.de. It looks that this one is too.

So the exact same situation as with Doom or Heretic. The bespoke license used here is tricky, but the same was true for Doom and Heretic initally too, before id and Raven smartened up and adopted the GPL instead. Just a vistege of the code coming out so early on.

Quoting: GuestIt's not really open source, in my opinion, because while the engine is now open sourced, the game data is not. I think it's kind of disingenuous to call it an open source game when the game in entirely isn't open source. Just the game engine.

Well, it is certainly not free media; I could muddy the waters and say any software not created through the open source development model is not "open source" too, but at a certain point that is just arguing semantics.

I'm not intentionally trying to be argumentative, just when I saw the headline "Descent 3 has been made open source" I was like OK a game like wesnoth or 0 A.D. That's not the case unfortunately.

In this case, it really is arguing on semantics. It is open source, but it's not free. So I went with plain open source, rather than "free and open source". Hope that makes sense. I don't really see it as a productive argument to have though :P

The situation with the game data/assets is a bit complicated in this case. Parallax Software owns the copyright for the game, but Interplay owns the Descent trademark and have the right to publish and sell the game.

Presumably Interplay would be less than thrilled about the game data being made available free of charge. Re-releases and old titles seems to be their main source of revenue these days.

Info from here. I presume the non-payment issue was resolved given that all Descent titles are back on GOG.

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: GuestNot really Decent, rebirth doesn't come with the game data. You have to buy it yourself, so does Descent2.de. It looks that this one is too.

So the exact same situation as with Doom or Heretic. The bespoke license used here is tricky, but the same was true for Doom and Heretic initally too, before id and Raven smartened up and adopted the GPL instead. Just a vistege of the code coming out so early on.

Quoting: GuestIt's not really open source, in my opinion, because while the engine is now open sourced, the game data is not. I think it's kind of disingenuous to call it an open source game when the game in entirely isn't open source. Just the game engine.

Well, it is certainly not free media; I could muddy the waters and say any software not created through the open source development model is not "open source" too, but at a certain point that is just arguing semantics.

I'm not intentionally trying to be argumentative, just when I saw the headline "Descent 3 has been made open source" I was like OK a game like wesnoth or 0 A.D. That's not the case unfortunately.

In this case, it really is arguing on semantics. It is open source, but it's not free. So I went with plain open source, rather than "free and open source". Hope that makes sense. I don't really see it as a productive argument to have though :P

So I guess it's "LOSS" ("Libre Open Source Software", but without "Free")
But I don't think it's a total LOSS.

We should not suddenly change terminology to imply that an open source game must have free assets too. It's already tough enough to get developers to understand that they can release just the program source code to their games and still keep making money on the assets, so muddying the waters even more is just plain unnecessary.

Even without free assets, releasing this software as open source provides significant longevity and preservation, not to mention opening the door to expansion and derivative works. Frankly, for that reason the people that made the software open source deserve some copies to be bought.


Last edited by Samsai on 17 April 2024 at 5:45 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Gamall

Quoting: GuestDon't mean to be rude, but only Decent3? What about 2 and 1!?! I can't play them out of order!!!

They already have fantastic open-source ports.

https://www.descent2.de/
https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/

I think those are game engine remasters, while this one is the actual game. I could be mistaken though.

There's also Chocolate Descent at https://github.com/InsanityBringer/ChocolateDescent

Update 18/04/24 15:11: there seems to be an issue with the licensing at the moment. The MIT license was not meant to be up on it, as this was apparently the default GitHub put on it. That license has now been removed, and so there's now no license on it. Hopefully this will be sorted soon.