Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Det. Bullock on November 24, 2017, 12:01:12 pm
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For all the people like me who didn't get them when they were available all the Descent games are back on GOG.com.
https://www.gog.com/promo/20171121_black_friday_sale_descent_pack
The price is a bit higher and they decided to split 1 and 2 but at the moment the bundle is very convenient, I didn't want to spend any money for a while because of a new video card but I happily gave ten dollars to gog for the bundle before Interplay does what it does again.
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Sweet hell yes! Thank you for the headsup! I never got to play Descent 3 or Mercenary and my installations of the older ones never survived my younger years. Hopefully the Descents get to stay around this time. If not, well, no regrets either way now having a chance to experience what I missed with Descent 3.
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Sweet hell yes! Thank you for the headsup! I never got to play Descent 3 or Mercenary and my installations of the older ones never survived my younger years. Hopefully the Descents get to stay around this time. If not, well, no regrets either way now having a chance to experience what I missed with Descent 3.
I had the first Descent from PC gamer for years but I played it properly only this year after a number of false starts thanks to DXX-rebirth.
I don't know why I never went beyond the first levels before, perhaps because I tried to either play with a mouse, the numpad or the cheap joysticks I had over the years.
Playing that game with a full HOTAS is a joy, I could probably do the same using a CH Control Manager profile but being able to configure everything in game including deadzones was a boon.
I was planning to buy the other two on eBay so I could not pass this bundle up even if I promised myself to not spend too much for a while after ordering a new graphic card a couple of days ago.
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Pffft. I played that with keyboard only, and still used A & Z for forward and back (didn't have DOS mouse drivers, had never run across WASD yet). ...That might explain why I never made it past Rookie difficulty back then.. :rolleyes:
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Pffft. I played that with keyboard only, and still used A & Z for forward and back (didn't have DOS mouse drivers, had never run across WASD yet). ...That might explain why I never made it past Rookie difficulty back then.. :rolleyes:
I remember making to the first boss at rookie and never managing to beat itwith only the keyboard (I never felt comfortable with a mouse in this game).
Though probably it was because I already had a Pentium II by then and seeker missiles were impossible to avoid with such overpowered CPUs.
And considering that I managed to complete it only when I updated to the latest source port version which fixed that particular problem that might be why.
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Keyboard-only isn't necessarily a bad way to play. On one of my old (and now long-dead) laptops, I managed to work out a WADS-and-cursor-key-based configuration that covered all the bases for Descent 1 & 2. Basically the left hand had to deal with all lateral movement, pitch, and roll, while the right hand got responsibility for yaw and firing weapons (I forget if it was primary and secondary weapons or just primaries, with secondaries on the left). The basic premise was to consider what the right hand would be doing if this were a keyboard+mouse configuration and find a way to map as much of that mouse functionality as possible to the cursor keys or keys within easy reach of them.
I remember trichording while firing a weapon was either a huge feat of manual contortion or overwhelmed the keyboard input channels and gave you that lovely system speaker beep that most of us haven't heard since USB keyboards became the norm. In singleplayer, the slightly less sorcerous bichording was adequate for quick movement around a level, but yeah, you'd be at a disadvantage against a mid- or high-tier multiplayer opponent.
If I were to try to rebuild this control configuration, I'd probably shift the left hand onto FEDS, instead of WADS to make a little more of the keyboard accessible, so that I could more easily add in the extra keys needed for a D3 run as well. Alternatively or additionally, on a full-sized keyboard, the right hand could go on the numeric keypad, so that it could have access to more keys than just the four cursor keys plus right-control. That could allow for the movement functions to be more distributed between the hands, so that you're not stuck tying your left hand into knots. Some people need that hand to wank write after all.
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Yeah, I only ever bi-chorded. I mapped some slide functionality into the Insert, Delete for vertical, PgUp / PgDown for horizontal (might have been End and PgDn if I ever stopped to think about it) controls, so it wasn't quite impossible to pull off. Just really weird. Oh, and also mapped RCtrl to fire primaries, can hit that with right thumb, and leave spacebar as secondaries as the left thumb can hit that.
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Keyboard-only isn't necessarily a bad way to play.
Didn't say it was, it was actually the best way I had found to play it (the cheap joysticks I had were always a bit wonky with the game) and in retrospect it may have been the glitch with the seeker missiles that made the game too difficult for me since I was playing with a Pentium 2 333mhz on windows 98 in dos mode. And considering that even later attempts with the same or other control methods went the same way before the DXX-rebirth build that corrected it that was probably it.
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I still only use keyboard 😅
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I still only use keyboard 😅
High-five, fellow keyboard flier!
I actually try to use similar control schemes in FSO mods with glide and the Descent games so that I don't have to fight muscle memory when going evasive.
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Relevant:
Which is better (6 mins) - USB or PS/2 (the little 6-pin Mini-DIN circular port that is a smaller version of the 5-pin DIN keyboard ports from the early 90's)
What is N-Key rollover (4 mins)
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When I was in the market for a mech keyboard I wanted to get a PS/2 one but ended up getting a USB one.
Many USB keyboards have n-key rollover anyway nowadays.
USB boards that have it usually also have a default mode with 6 or so key rollover to ensure BIOS compatibility (n-key rollover via USB uses a drive trick and may not work with all operating systems).
Personally I'm a slow typist so I rarely use the N-key rollover, and USB has the added bonus of not risking to fry you motherboard by hot-swapping (which can be a thing with the old PS/2 port), also the 6-kro mode never gave me trouble while gaming.
Also note that a PS/2 plug doesn't mean inherent N-key rollover, my old keyboard was PS/2 but didn't have it.