DESCENT3(6)

💫 DESCENT3 💫

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for descent3, living in the Games Manual section of the man pages, and it's giving iconic 1999 space shooter energy. buckle up 🚀

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✨ NAME ✨

descent3 — a 3D space shooter game 🛸

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

descent3 [options]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically this page documents the descent3 command, briefly, and then we get into the good stuff 💖

Descent 3 is a space first-person shooter video game, developed by Outrage Entertainment and originally published in 1999. periodt.

here's the thing tho — the game data does not come with it. you have to install it independently using the game-data-packager program. and by default, the game will go looking for that data at /usr/share/games/descent3. no cap, that's the default path 🫶

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

🎀 Audio Options 🎀

• -nomusic — turns the music off. silence era, but only for the tunes.
• -nosound — turns off all the sound, music included. full mute, main character silence.

🌈 Display Options 🌈

• -aspect <value> — sets the screen aspect ratio, for non-standard displays like wide-screen TVs. for the girlies with the extra-wide setups ✨
• -height <height> — sets the screen resolution to the height you specify, if possible.
• -width <width> — sets the screen resolution to the width you specify, if possible.
• -NoRenderWindows — makes all windows fully transparent. use this one if your card doesn't correctly render partially-transparent windows. (note the caps, bestie — it's literally spelled -NoRenderWindows.)
• -vsync — turns on Vertical Sync. and heads up: this flag gets enabled in the registry, so it'll still be on the next time you run the game. it remembers 😭
• -windowed — runs the game in a window instead of fullscreen. cozy mode.

🎮 Input Options 🎮

• -deadzone <k> — sets the size of the deadzone for a joystick.
• -mlooksens <scale> — determines how much the player moves when the mouse is moved.
• -mousesens <scale> — adjusts the mouse sensitivity for when you're not using mouselook mode.

🔥 Performance Options 🔥

• -fastdemo — makes a demo play back at the highest speed your computer is capable of. zoomies.
• -forcelightmaps — forces lightmaps to be used, even when the Default Detail Level is set to Low in the launcher setup.
• -framecap <fps> — limits the framerate to the number of frames per second you specify.
• -himem — forces normal operations even when low memory conditions are detected.
• -lowmem — uses scaled-down textures and lower quality (8-bit) sounds to conserve memory.
• -superlowmem — uses the -lowmem settings and scales textures down even further, to conserve memory.
• -nolightmaps — disables lightmaps. this will improve performance on low-end video cards.
• -nomotionblur — disables motion blur on robots.
• -nosatomega — disables alpha saturation on the omega cannon effect.
• -nosparkles — disables powerup sparkles. 💀 (no sparkles?? tragic, but okay, performance is performance)

🌐 Multiplayer and Network Options: TODO 🌐

that's it. that's the whole section. TODO. we're waiting on it bestie 🙈

⭐ Other Options ⭐

• -logfile — generates a logfile named d3.log.
• -makemovie — makes the demo system save a screenshot of every frame during playback.
• -mission <name> — loads the mission file you specify at startup.
• -pilot <name> — specifies which pilot to use, skipping the pilot selection dialog when the game starts.
• -setdir <path> — specifies the working directory for Descent 3.
• -useexedir <path> — tells Descent 3 to use the directory where the executable is located as the working directory.

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🍓 FILES 🍓

• /usr/share/games/descent3/ — game data files.
• $XDG_DATA_HOME/Outrage Entertainment/Descent 3/ — which defaults to ~/.local/share/Outrage Entertainment/Descent 3/
  • configuration, savegames, demos & logfile
• $XDG_CACHE_HOME/Descent3/ — which defaults to ~/.cache/Descent3/
  • temporay files

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Descent 3 was written by Outrage Entertainment. the Descent community keeps the development going over at https://github.com/DescentDevelopers/Descent3 — the fandom never left, and honestly? we love that for them 🫶

this manual page was written by Sébastien Noel <sebastien@twolife.be>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

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and that's a wrap, bestie 💖 this page is from the Games Manual section, dated 2024-08-24, and it's a Debian-flavored DESCENT3(6) moment. go blow up some robots in space. slay 🚀✨