About D2X-XL
D2X-XL is a modification of the original Descent 1 and 2 source code allowing to play these two great games on modern hardware. With D2X-XL 2, the renderer has been rebuilt from scratch for Vulkan and DirectX 12, all textures have been reworked, and lighting, effects, sound, robot behaviour and multiplayer have been overhauled.
D2X-XL allows you to play both Descent 1 and Descent 2 with a single program, using the appropriate game elements for each of the titles. All enhancements have been carefully crafted to make Descent look and sound like a modern game while still preserving the gameplay of the originals.
Due to its many enhancements, D2X-XL offers a greatly enhanced single player experience as well as improved and expanded multiplayer capabilities.
D2X-XL offers enhancements in every area of the game. Here is a short, incomplete list of what you can expect from D2X-XL:
Engine
- Rebuilt from scratch: renders with Vulkan or DirectX 12 instead of OpenGL
- Everything is prepared ahead and cached, so nothing hitches in the middle of a game
- Much faster: the entire mine is one mesh, all robots of one type go out in a single draw
- Planned: VR headset support
More: Engine
Lighting
- Every pixel of walls, robots and ships is lit by the lights that actually reach it
- Light portals: light falls through opening doors and vanishing walls
- Lightmaps baked on the graphics card, with soft shadows, bounced and ambient light
- Hardware raytracing where the graphics card supports it
- Subtle, soft shadows of ships and robots; volumetric halos around lamps
More: Lighting
Renderer
- All textures of Descent 1 and 2 reworked and upscaled, with normal, height, ambient occlusion and specular maps
- Displacement mapping: grooves, plates and rock sink into the wall or stand out of it
- Hardware tessellation for rock, water and lava
More: Renderer
Effects
- Explosions with shock waves, heat waves and shrapnel
- Fog, water and lava with drifting wisps and flowing streaks; fog is lit
- Reworked smoke trails, lightning, glow and energy shields; a new spawn effect
- Skies with clouds and changing weather
- Reworked cartoon style with outlines that look hand drawn
Sound
- 3D sound: you can hear where a robot is before you see it
- Sound travels through the mine; doors and walls muffle it
- Reverb, computed automatically from the size of the room you are in
More: Sound and Music
Music
- Supports high resolution music in ogg and flac formats
- Replace the original game music with high resolution versions of its songs
- Let D2X-XL play your own songs via playlists
More: Sound and Music
Robots and Weapons
- Robots have to see or hear you, they talk to each other, and the alarm calms down again
- They no longer clump together, dodge shots and may take cover
- New difficulty level: Braindead
- Homing missiles go for the target closest to your crosshair that you can actually see
- More aggressive Mega Missiles
- Robots have joints where their limbs move
- Slow motion and bullet time
More: Robots and Weapons
HUD and Menus
- New target indicators with health bar and lock ring, only for robots you can see
- Weapon and inventory icons show their state
- Zoom scope
- Radar dish
- Two menu styles of its own; rebuilt screen resolution menu
More: Cockpit and HUD Menus
Multiplayer
- Public matches over the game tracker, without entering addresses or ports
- Private and LAN matches; players from the host's network and the internet can mix
- Faster, more compact network code; missing missions are downloaded from the host
- Up to 16 players per match
- Game modes: Enhanced CTF, Entropy, Monsterball, Darkness
- Special competition mode
More: Multiplayer Game Modes
Levels and Modding
- Hub levels keep their state; triggers, doors and the reactor work reliably
- DLE: 64 bit, segment splitter, tools for rounding structures and adding surface detail, ambient light per segment, levels with up to 65500 segments, export for Overload
- Mods can assign their textures with a simple text file
More: Level Features DLE Modding