Whew. Man, all hell broke loose tonight, as I said it would. I played about two hours of netplay Descent with a few of the cool kids over at Hard Light Productions, and wow, it was as much ridiculous fun as I thought it would be. I don't think I ever played an actual netplay game of Descent even ten or so years ago when the game was just released. I remember playing the single-player levels of Descent 2 at the elementary school where my dad worked, but never netplay.

Yes, that's right, Mac OS X netplay works in D2X-XL now. Woo! Diedel and I had a joint debugging session that finally broke through the final barrier to netplay on Mac OS X. Mac networking is still a little fragile: auto-downloading of missions corrupts the files, games in the tracker list blink on and off every few seconds, and I still don't know if hosting works on the Mac. But as long as you download the mission file in advance (usually available at the D2X-XL website), you can join the games on the tracker now and pulverize everybody with earthshaker missiles. :)

Funny anecdote:

Nick to simX in Shaker Castle: Look behind you!
simX: Eh?
level starts shaking
*** Nick has committed suicide.

Heh heh heh. Mmmm... Descent netplay.