The Descent engine's limitation to using segments with six sides and eight corners for constructing any level for it was one of the last big boundaries of mankind. Not right? Well, at least the part building Descent levels, anyway. I, like many Descent level authors, had suffered from the inability of Descent to handle a segment with less than six sides. There was just no way to make it work right with a segment that had one of it's sides compressed to forming a single edge, giving the segment a wedge shape to achieve just that level structure one had in mind.

I had always shied back from changing this because the implications of the required changes seemed complex, hard to overlook and prone to dragging a host of other changes after them. After a recent proposition to add support for triangular segment sides to DLE-XP and D2X-XL, I started to think about this feature again, and the more I thought about it, the more feasible it looked. It was very helpful that I had almost completely rewritten both D2X-XL and DLE-XP at this point.

There were additional requirements surfacing unexpectedly anyway - I wrote about it in the previous worklog entry - but actually these were more of a complete task of their own and ended in a very desirable feature of DLE-XP: Its new OpenGL based renderer. So what appeared like a problem, turned into a great benefit.

There's not left much more to say than that DLE-XP and D2X-XL now fully support segments with triangular edges down to tetrahedrons. Level authors, make something of it!

Here are screen shots of a small D2X-XL test level with various segment shapes: