I have received some criticism about going a separate path from D2X with D2X-XL, so I'd like to share a little background information on how this has come to happen to give a little insight to those who are interested in knowing more about this.

The Beginnings

Descent 2 is one of my all time favorite games, and I had never completely quit from playing it. As time went by, hardware and OS development made it impossible to play standard Descent 2 or the 3dfx version. As I wasn't willing to keep a legacy machine just for playing Descent 2, I started to look around for a port to a modern graphics API, and I found one: D2X. Sadly, MS Windows was the neglected step child of the D2X project, and the latest available version 0.2.6 suffered from a number of bugs severely hampering the usability of the program on Windows XP.

So me being a professional programmer thought I could fix the MS Windows specific bugs and be happy with D2X ever after. I managed to get a working MSVC project of D2X and started to cure the worst bugs. At that time, I joined the D2X developers news group and contacted Bradley Bell, the owner of icculus.org/D2X - home of the D2X project - to have my changes integrated into the official project and thus have the entire D2X user community profit from it.

Problems Arise

As I had been repeatedly forced to re-download the D2X source because of changes others had made, and had to re-integrate the changes I had made, I tried to get write access to the D2X source repository to be able to check in my changes there. This was denied to me. I had to 'prove' myself. Given my achievements so far I found this a somewhat unreasonable demand. I was asked to send in diffs of my changes and eventually have them integrated into the official D2X source. I had already noticed that apart from mostly cosmetic changes, the D2X project had come pretty much to a halt, so I knew I couldn't expect my stuff to be dealt with promptly as I delivered it.

Consequences

After I had to integrate my at that time already numerous changes into the official D2X source code for the third time, I have had enough. Given that I had fixed more bugs and issues in D2X in three months than had been fixed in the year and a half before, I had expected some more confidence and support.

As I said, the D2X project was pretty stagnant at that time, so I decided to keep my 'personal', windows-based version of D2X and aptly named it 'D2X-W32'.

Linux Port

As I feared the complications of a Linux port, and neither had a suitable machine nor some Linux easily available, I shunned from doing the port myself. Most of the changes I have made are not Windows specific, so I started to look around for some Linux using Descent 2 fan to support me with the port, or even better: Port it with my support. Unfortunately, the candidates either lacked time or qualification, or preferred to build their own D2X-Linux project on the 2 years old 0.2.6 release. I had thought porting a version with all bugs already fixed and a lot of nifty new features would serve the community better. Oh well.

But now comes the good news: I finally got around to download and install Suse Linux Open Source edition 10.0, and with some help managed to setup a D2X project on Linux. The Linux port has already successfully been finished, and kaelan with some help by simX from the Descent BB have created a Mac OS X port, that apart from a few remaining issues works very stable. How's that, huh? :D

Conclusion

If you look at how far D2X-XL has come, though a few people were very helpful, you will certainly agree that it's a pity I did not get the support by the D2X developer community I would have needed. Admitted, it's an old game - yet it's a classic, and if you look at the download count for the most recent Mac OS X version of D2X, you might be amazed how many people still play it.

Let me finish this with some fan art: