This year has seen Bethesda Software's legal team settle a pair of high-profile disputes with Minecraft creator Mojang and original Fallout publisher Interplay, but now the company behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 is turning its litigious attention to one of its fans.

In a post on his blog last week, Norwegian Fallout fan Erling Loken Andersen recapped a back-and-forth dispute he's been having with Bethesda's legal team over a Fallout poster art fan site he set up. Andersen said it started in December when he received a takedown notice from Bethesda's lawyers claiming his collection of freely downloadable Fallout-inspired posters were infringing on the company's intellectual property rights. The publisher also insisted that Andersen hand over the domain for his site, fallout-posters.com.

Irregardless of whether Bethesda has a legitimate legal case here, this is an incredibly poor public relations move.

(I have published an important D2X-XL update, so I thought I'd share the corresponding post on my forum here, too.)

Recently I have had e-mail contact with Grant Hallman, one of the level authors from the G.E.L.D. team (Grant Hallman, Lars Christensen and Robert Pedersen) who had built a bunch of top notch single player missions back in the day, which has inspired me to play a bit Descent and explore their levels again. The one I am fondest of playing is Minotaur, which mostly consists of a just perfectly executed, huge three story labyrinth.

Well, I am always the one to find the most D2X-XL bugs, so it seems ... ... and it proved true again here. There was stuff like

• Areas behind walls that got removed during playing the level staying pitch black despite light sources being nearby
• Environmental sounds (e.g. water) being extremely loud
• Spawn markers being duplicated instead of relocated
• The guidebot not properly staying away
• The player ship changing its type back when being killed by robots after having changed it

Since there had been complaints about sound being too loud, I was glad I finally had a test case where this was reproducible. What confused me quite a bit during my tests was that the debug version of the program only ran the level at 4 fps or so. Unoptimized debug code or not: Given my hardware that was just too slow. When I looked into it I found a small design flaw in the sound processing's path finding I had made. I even remembered why I had coded it that way (both the obvious and the subtle reason causing it - I had just been too tired when implementing it). Changing two lines of code immediately raised the performance to over 80 fps.

Fixing the other issues listed above was of course desirable, but not crucial. Fixing the path finding certainly was, and particularly players with slower machines should feel the impact quite a bit, and maybe finally find D2X-XL to be playable on their machines, too (hint, hint, Wolfie! ). Another side effect was that sound handling and distance dependent decay now seems to work properly. The only backdraw is that some fixes also affect visibility and lightmap calculation, so all related data needs to and will be recomputed by D2X-XL. I will start to update the precomputed light, mesh and lightmap data hosted on my website soon though.

Something I also took care of was sound building up extremely if there were several sound sources in a segment (e.g. flowing water on four of its sides). D2X-XL will now scale the volume of the individual sound sources down to decrease the total volume to an acceptable value.

In the course of my tests I even created a new cheat marking a path from the current player position to some other segment in the level, which I aptly and in honor of the fabulous maze mission "Minotaur" I had mentioned above labelled "minotaur"; so if you type in "minotaur", a dialog asking you for the destination segment will pop up. On closing it, a path of energy boosts (which cannot be picked up and will disappear after a while) will lead you there.

The rather limited range of the Guidebot of 200 segments from its current position has also been extended to 1000 segments, meaning that you have better chances to have it find stuff for you in huge mines like Anthology.

So I hope that many users will find this upgrade particularly useful and enjoyable this time. Have fun.

We have heard a lot of variations and remixes of the music from Descent, and they are all fabulous... But this one really stands out, it captures the mood so well. It is a finely produced and generally well polished piece. Take a moment to listen and judge for yourself!

http://youtu.be/JwE5HV4tDn0

    "This is easily my biggest undertaking to date, in terms of project size, complexity, and length... Since 1994 I wanted to be part of the soundtracks of my favorite games (something which has not changed to this day). What HAS changed is my ability to do so, and create something that fans of the original tracks could appreciate -- and I could be sure I've created a solid tribute instead of a pile of garbage. It took many years for me to be confident enough in my abilities to satisfy all of the above, and I think the time has arrived.

    The tune herein lightly references the Briefing and Descent Title Themes (in the intro and outtro respectively) but is otherwise a heavy rearrangement of Callisto Tower Colony (Level 12). Level 21 has an extremely similar feel to Level 12, but it is certainly its own track, and I consistently referenced Level 12 while building this arrangement. I do not diverge much rhythmically in the supporting parts (aside from the actual rhythm section) and did not change melodic elements a great deal, but the arrangement and instrumentation should speak for itself."

Planet Descent will be upgrading from Blue Lasers to Vauss Cannon on Sunday, the ninth of October, 2011.

During this upgrade the site may at times be unavailable, as I will be using a cloaking device.

Guidebot is coming back to get you.

Update: Mission Completed. A few bots remain, I will be hunting these down and destroying them as time permits. See the 'To Do' list in this thread.

DescentiaPedia, The Descent Guides Project Forum, as well as all the static pages at Prepare For Descent will be moving to Planet Descent. There is no timeline for this move, but it will be soon. Watch this thread for further news.

Ultimately, the goal is to merge the sites. Tiny portal has a nice article system and all the pages from DescentiaPedia will become articles. Threads from The Descent Guides Forum may become articles or perhaps the will be merged with the Planet Descent forum.

This is something I have been considering for some time. However, the domain registration is up for renewal shortly so I have decided not to renew it at this time.