Descent 3

What works

Game launcher, main game, videos, config screens, tutorial level, first level.

What does not

I did not test the video settings as they have been flakey in the past.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Play beyond the first level. Joystick play was not tested. Mouse play was not extensively tested though it appeared to register the mouse when I tried configuring it.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Seems playable all the way through. The GOG version wraps the Glide API to D3D, so performance was a bit iffy on my admittedly aging laptop. See another individual's comment about OpenGL settings for better performance.

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".