Descent 3

What works

Everything tested: Cinematics, gameplay, installation

What does not

No sounds in Hardware mode,

Sound can cut out/become garbage after a time in Emulation mode.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer
Full playthrough

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Disabling Pulseaudio can extend time before emulation sound becomes garbled, but does not necessarily prevent it.

Descent 3 is rather close to working perfectly but is not quite there. While joystick control, movie playback, and other typically "finicky" features work great in Descent 3 under Wine, there are some configuration options which work better than others.

Renderer: Like many games in the late 90s, Descent 3 supported multiple renderers, in this case, Direct3D, OpenGL, and Glide.

The GOG.com version comes with Glide pre-configured and the "nGlide" wrapper, which translates the Glide API into Direct3D calls. This configuration works perfectly but may be rather slow.

You can try the OpenGL renderer but that has exhibited artifacts in many user configurations (namely, certain polygons appearing through walls).

Direct3D is a good option to try but may render textures entirely black (possibly as a result of S3 patented texture compression but this has not been confirmed). Direct3D _does_ work well however if you launch Descent 3 directly (launch main.exe) and give it the option "-nocompress". Note that main.exe will complain you cannot launch it directly -- it's meant to be called from the Descent 3 launch program. To get around this, call it with "-launched", e.g. "wine MAIN.EXE -nocompress -launched".