Descent 3 (Descent3)

Game: Descent 3 → (Windows, 1999)

Descent3: the community edition of the Descent 3 engine, released as open source under the GPL-3.0 on April 16, 2024. It includes the 1.5 patch that Kevin Bentley and Jeff Slutter wrote, which never shipped, brought to a stable state by the Descent community. Version 1.5.0 (August 16, 2024), the first release, is the work of 28 contributors over four months: it fills in what the patch was missing, prioritizes compatibility with current CPUs and the developer experience, and keeps features mostly identical to the released code. It runs on 64-bit Linux, Windows, and macOS using SDL2, on AMD64 and ARM64 processors; 32-bit support was dropped. It also ships HogMaker, a utility that builds platform-specific HOG files with the level scripts. There are official builds for Windows x64, Linux x64, and macOS (Intel and Apple silicon). The project is still active: the last commit is from October 23. The repository includes the level scripts and demo data files (the demohog folder) and does not contain the game’s assets.

You needThe data files from your own copy of Descent 3, copied as described in the USAGE.md that ships with the executable; the project includes no game assets. Plus 64-bit Windows, Linux, or macOS (x86-64 or ARM64).

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

Outrage Entertainment

Year

1999

Author

DescentDevelopers

Stars

3k

Last activity

2026-10-23 · 8 days ago

Latest version

v1.5.0 · 2024-08-16

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C++

Descent 3 (Piccu Engine) See all →