This is way too pre-emptive for you to pay any attention to, but I'm pretty excited so I thought I'd post anyway

The excellent Roland Persson did a Descent port back I think in 2001 and didn't mess with it much the last couple years; its a very good job he did, but he never finished it up (little things like exitting the game, and better controls to make it playable perhaps..)

Not that I have much time, but I do have a little and an interest in descent, so heres to hoping.. I did manage a fresh rebuild and moved it up to PoPC 2003 ARM compliance (not too much work, the credit is all still his

I hope to add at least an exit option and maybe make some basic additions like tapping on screen with finger to fire and slightly better keymaps, etc.

Woowoo

jeff

Make it VGA

Lets not forget about QVGA owners. The original descent could run 320 x 200.

true: dont forget us...
make it in 2 versions

see you

Cool, takin me back to S3 Virge days and the first 3d hardware acceleration... if you can call it that, lol.

That's great news.

Glad to see you pushing on from Palm OS and joining us on the darkside

Mark.

People keep saying that, but .. I work on all platforms Palm OS pays the bills, but I like to keep my hand in things

jeff

Oh man! I loved the original Descent. If I could play it on my X30h that would be so sweet! *drool*

Better controls would be great! :-) configurable controls would be awesome.

i would like to use the stylus on the screen for pitch / directional control.

More great reviews!

   

I'm still debating what would be a good control scheme; Descent had 3 shot typesd if I recall right.. flares, shots, and missiles/bombs. Theres also direction (up/down/left/right) for rotation, and then forward/back. I think that covers most of it.

The current old port has the direction and forward/back and shot1, so it lacks shots 2-3; its also awkward.

I don't have a tonne of time, but I figure I can add at least better controls and make Quit work, and maybe make save/load work :P

So .. what to make the controls?

Options are .. look with d-pad, move with thumb on screen, fire with d-pad or thumb.

I've been bouncing this around:

5-way -- look around (up/down/left/right)
One of the hard buttons under d-pad -- fire flair
Screen -- top right to fire weapon 1
Screen -- bottom right to fire weapon 2
Screen -- top half to go forward (top right quarter, not including top right corner)
Screen -- bottom half to go backward (bottom right quarter, not including bottom right corner)

Something like that.

So holdf the device sideways, and play with both hands.. left hand for looking around, and right hand to go forward/back and fire.

*shrug*

jeff

sounds good.. any idea of an eta?

No idea but hopefulyl soon

jeff

This is for landscape mode:

1)dpad: strafe up/down/left/right
2)screen: free look (with right thumb)
3)shoulder buttons: fire primary/secondary
4)dpad button: forward

Less important functions can be mapped to keys (ie. backwards, change weapon etc.)

Tala

ps. I am currently looking into porting Descent 2 to the X50v, and that would be my setup.

I think d-pad button isn't really useful since its too easily pressed.

Shoulder buttons? Only Zodiac has shoulder buttons On the X50 series at least, theres the two little buttons on the side, but try holding the device sideways and using those for rapid fire.. don't think it'd work out.

jeff

How difficult would it be to write a bluetooth driver for the X50 and the zodiac, to use the zodiac as a 'dummy' remote control ?
Since there are bluetooth keyboards out there, the main work would be to write the driver for the Zodiac to act like a keyboard. It would be sweet to use the analog stick to control games on the Axim.

It might even allow for combined-screen games a la Nintendo DS.

What do the programmers think - doable or not ?
(I hope the zodiacgamer community does not find out that I suggest to degrade my beloved Zodiac to a simple joystick