Series
Descent
3 games, 1995–1999.
Games
Interactive: timeline (needs JavaScript)
The series by yearMechanics
A marked cell changed from the game before. “Uses” means the game has the mechanic, with no variant recorded yet.
Every claim, by mechanic and game
| Concept | Descent 3
1999 |
|---|
| Boost meter | - Descent 3's released source gives the afterburner a 5-second tank (
AFTERBURN_TIME, 5000 in an E3 demo build): while it is held and time is left, the forward control is replaced by the afterburner control times 1.6, and times a punch factor of 1.8 while over 90% of the tank is left, the factor easing to 1 by 80%, and the tank drains by the frame time. Let go, the tank refills by the frame time, or twice that with the "Afterburner" item in the inventory, but only while energy is above 5, and energy drops by the same amount, so a full refill costs 5 energy (computed) whichever rate applies. Code
|
| Homing missile | - In Descent 3's released source a homing weapon with thrust left starts homing 0.1 s after it is created, unless it is guided. Without a target, it scans every object in a room the missile's room can see: robots, players, and buildings with AI, not its own shooter, not cloaked, and only enemies of the shooter, inside a cone where the dot product of the direction to it with the missile's facing exceeds the weapon's
homing_fov. In object order, a chaff chunk ends the scan (by a 1-in-4 roll in single player) and so does anything within 15 units (the distance between centers less both objects' sizes); otherwise the missile takes the object within 500 units most nearly straight ahead with a clear line to it. A target it has is kept while it stays inside the cone and either within 15 units, or within 500 units, in a visible room, with a clear line. Code - Descent 3's released source steers a homing weapon at the target's position plus a tenth of the target's velocity when the target moves under physics or walks. A weapon with rotational drag fires full
full_rotthrust left or right and up or down, by which side of the missile the aim point is on, with no roll; one without it turns straight toward the aim point by at most full_rotthrust × the frame time and has its velocity set along its new facing at full_thrust/drag. A weapon whose shooter is not a player has its turning scaled by difficulty: 0.20, 0.70, 1.00, 1.20, and 1.40 from Trainee to Insane. Code
|
| Inertia | - In Descent 3's released source, which includes the unreleased "1.5" patch, the player ship's thrust is the sum of a forward, an up, and a sideways push along the ship's own axes, each the control's value times
full_thrust, the whole scaled by the player's movement_scalar and by 1.3 outdoors; the physics then moves a thrusting object against a drag proportional to velocity, solved in closed form over the frame: v = (v₀ − F/d)·e^(−(d/m)·t) + F/d. Computed from that formula, drag acts while the ship thrusts too, and speed levels off at F/d, as in Doom, whose floor friction multiplies momentum by 0.90625 each tic thrust or not; Quake's ground acceleration instead stops at the wish speed. Code
|
| Six degrees of freedom | |
| Strafe-running | |