D2X-XL is a modification of the original Descent 1 and 2 source code allowing to play these two great games on modern hardware. With D2X-XL, you can revive these two games and either make them look (almost) like the original, or activate a whole slew of enhancements that have been added to D2X-XL and give it a vastly improved appearance.

D2X-XL allows you to play both Descent 1 and Descent 2 with a single program, using appropriate game elements and behaviour for each of the titles. Despite its enhancements, D2X-XL is 100% true to the original games, allowing you to turn off all extras and play Descent 1 and 2 just the way they looked back in the day when they were new.

Due to its many enhancements, D2X-XL offers a greatly enhanced single player experience as well as improved and expanded multiplayer capabilities.

D2X-XL offers enhancements in every area of the game. Here is a short, incomplete list of what you can expect from D2X-XL:

Visual Improvements

  • High resolution textures, models, sound
  • Colored, lightmap based illumination and per-pixel lighting
  • New effects: Smoke, lightning, glow, volumetric glare, improved explosions
  • New gun effects: Light and smoke trails, tracers, lightning bolts, bullet cases
  • New ship effects: Dynamic shield effects, thruster flames

Stereoscopic Rendering

  • Oculus Rift support
  • Supports 3D TVs
  • Anaglyph rendering

Multiplayer Improvements

  • UDP/IP networking making matches directly over the internet possible
  • Match making via built-in game tracker
  • Up to 16 players per match
  • New game modes: Real CTF, Entropy, Monsterball, Darkness
  • Automatic download of missing multiplayer levels
  • Special competition mode

Physics Enhancements

  • Improved collision detection and physics
  • framerate independent weapon behavior
  • Flexible weapon physics
  • Slow motion and bullet time

What's New

D2X-XL 2 is a complete overhaul. Here is a quick overview:

  • Engine: Vulkan 1.3 and SDL2, floating point math throughout, multithreading, shader caching, crash reports.
  • Rendering: level geometry and robots drawn in batches, portal based visibility, displacement mapping, hardware tessellation, improved cartoon renderer.
  • Lighting: GPU lightmap bake with indirect light, full per pixel dynamic lighting, light falling through open doors, object shadows, hardware raytracing.
  • Textures and models: every texture upscaled, with normal, height and specular maps; hand made relief masks; reworked robot models.
  • Effects: reworked explosions, smoke trails, lightning, shields and coronas; new spawn effect; improved fog, water, lava and skies.
  • Audio: OpenAL with automatic reverb; sound travels through the mine and is damped by doors, walls and fog.
  • Gameplay: robots have to see or hear you, and they talk to each other; new difficulty level Braindead; improved collisions; reworked homing weapons.
  • Multiplayer: public matches via the game tracker without entering addresses or ports; LAN and internet players can mix; faster network protocol.
  • Interface: new menu style and wallpapers, screen resolution menu, new target and lock indicators, new HUD icons.
  • DLE level editor: 64 bit build with a modern renderer, new geometry tools, up to 65500 segments per level.

D2X-XL adds a plethora of new features to Descent 1 and Descent 2. Find a pretty complete list here.