Descent / Descent II (DXX-Rebirth)

Games: Descent → (DOS, 1995) · Descent II → (DOS, 1996)

DXX-Rebirth: a Descent and Descent II port that continues the discontinued D1X and D2X, which in turn built on the original Descent source code and LDescent. It has one engine per game, D1X-Rebirth and D2X-Rebirth, which work independently, and it’s compatible with both full games, all of their expansions, and third-party levels, as well as with the pilot files, savegames, demos, and missions from the DOS versions. It renders with OpenGL, with optional transparency, colored lighting, texture filtering, and FSAA, at any resolution and aspect ratio your monitor supports, with VSync. It supports several joysticks at once alongside keyboard and mouse, MIDI, CD, or your own music files, and add-on packs that replace or expand the games’ content. Multiplayer runs over UDP, on a LAN or over the internet. It records smaller, less glitchy demos that stay compatible with the original games’, and it avoids the glitches that higher game speeds used to cause, such as overly fast homing missiles or excessive collision damage. The latest numbered releases on GitHub date from 2016 and 2018 (0.60 beta 2); to play without building it, the project points to the GitHub Actions builds for x86-64 Windows, macOS 14 on Apple silicon, and x86-64 Linux (AppImage). Four of its last 100 commits, from August and by a single contributor, state in their messages that they were made with help from OpenAI Codex.

You needThe data files from your own copy of Descent (descent.hog and descent.pig) or Descent II (descent2.ham, descent2.hog, descent2.s22, and its environments’ .pig files), for example from the GOG release; Descent II’s movies are optional. The free Descent shareware and Descent II demo data, PC or Mac, work too. Plus Windows, macOS, or Linux.

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Parallax Software

Year

1995

Author

dxx-rebirth

Stars

641

Last activity

2026-10-11 · 20 days ago

Language

C++

Descent / Descent II (DXX-Redux) · Descent / Descent II (DXX-Retro) See all →

Descent / Descent II (DXX-Redux) · Descent / Descent II (DXX-Retro) See all →