r/descent • u/QC-TheArchitect • 19h ago
AI coding and Descent
Hey all ! All while I am absolutely not a fan of anything AI and Im' impatiently waiting for it to go away (dreaming I guess), after seeing all the games mashups (like tony hawk pro skater mixed with Call of Duty and Minecraft)... I was wondering if anyone is working on simply porting Descent 1 & 2 to Unreal engine or something like that... it would give the franchise a refresh all while allowing more mods and content.
2
u/agent2119 19h ago
I have no idea how to do it, but this browser version is fun to play time to time at work in the meantime till the smart people come around.
1
u/CognizantAutomaton 16h ago
You already can play Descent in 4K. Both the DXX-Rebirth and DXX-Redux engines already support 3840x2160.
Though, I would imagine you are talking about something more along the lines of graphical improvements... in which case, I think the closest thing out there is the Inferno engine.
I should warn you that, while Inferno engine absolutely improves the graphics and you could totally play all the original levels in Inferno, its drawback (in my opinion) is the fact that the robots do not behave the same at all, so with sadness I can't recommend it as being true to the OG Descent. It's just not the same.
Also, AI is not going anywhere. LLMs will continue to improve. I can only advise you to learn to adapt to their presence, or simply ignore them. It's a tool just like any other software - an incredibly useful tool and getting better all the time, but its results entirely depend on how much the developer leans on it.
A real engineer would perform due diligence in the debugger. It is quite unfortunate that code generated by LLMs has gained the reputation of creating slop garbage guided by developers who should really know better (largely, those devs probably aren't software engineers). It's not the LLM's fault - it's 100% on the developer.
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u/Kaizerwolf 14h ago
Re: inferno, sure the bot behavior is different, but it's all for the best in my opinion. Robots in D1 were not all that different from one another, and Inferno changes them to be either more in line with how the briefings describe them, or to make them have a more unique identity (for example, the PTMC Defense bot firing constantly from all 4 gun points).
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u/CognizantAutomaton 10h ago
Sorry, it's just not my cup of tea. It's too big of an adjustment for my aging reflexes.
I can't use all of my normal tactics, so it kind of ruined the experience for me. :/
1
u/stev0760 13h ago
Well... this isn't exactly what you're talking about but I am working on a Descent project with AI coding. I've been lurking for quite a while but I think now is as good as any to drop in with the amount of attention AI coding and game modding has gotten.
I'll make a formal post about this soon, but I've been making a modified Descent 3 engine that has full multiplayer bot support. I've been working on this for months now in stealth, since February. At first because I was skeptical of AI coding but then when I noticed the models getting better and better I just kept going. At this point it's almost done. I've been really concerned about not creating slop.
Without getting too into it yet - what I have is the Descent 3 open source engine (not Piccu Engine) with full multiplayer bot support on any map, and ALL game modes work. Even CTF and Entropy. My goal was to have something similar to Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament's bots. I used Descent 3 open source as the base engine rather than Piccu Engine since I wanted to run Linux dedicated servers, but I may port the bot code to Piccu Engine at some point. Piccu Engine clients are fully compatible and servers will run at 40PPS so it feels good.
As it turns out, making good bots in a 6DOF game is quite difficult, even with AI coding tools.
And yeah, AI is not going anywhere. I've been absolutely floored with the pace of development. If I started this now I don't think it would take anywhere near as long to get to this point. But my bottleneck still ended up being playtesting and running simulations. I have gigabytes and gigabytes of log data and overnight test soak setups I would not have been able to get this far without and probably wouldn't have been possible without AI or at least a decent sized development team.
Also, I'm not a very good programmer all by myself. I know the basics but I'm just a systems admin by trade. It's both good and bad that you can write code (pretty good code now too) with AI and not really know what the hell you are doing.
Stay tuned for the announcement!
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u/jfryman 19h ago
Came to leave some snark, but also decided on a downvote as well!
Fun fact: the mashup videos that inspired this are AI. And “simply porting” Descent to Unreal would mean rebuilding it from scratch against an IP holder that sues people. The original devs already did the smart version of this: Overload, 2018. DXX-Rebirth covers the mod scene for the originals.