OH! WELL IN THAT CASE I BEAT THE ENTIRE GAME ON INSANE WITHOUT SAVING OR DYING! AND I THOUGHT IT WAS TOO EASY LOL

I'm amused that this thread is still alive. I really enjoyed reading the post by "Entropy."

The reason for this is that originally the homers (and many other things) were FPS dependent. So there are almost as many "original" homer settings as there are Descent players, because everyone played at different FPS.

I'm not sure how XL does it, but I know Rebirth has set the homers based on difficulty...each difficulty has the homers set to fly like they did at a certain FPS in the original.

Now play Doom2 on Nightmare, and Unreal on Unreal. A lot of older games had difficulty levels that were a joke to play. I don't think they were ever meant to be playable, just a novelty feature. For instance, both unreal and doom spam so many monsters, that even if you had the skill, you'd still run out of ammo. Descent completely takes the fun out of the game since the balance is so out of whack. I can't really consider a difficulty level that unbalances the game and cheats to be fun, but hey whatever rocks your boat. Just keep in mind S&M isn't for everybody.

That's just plain bad and lazy programming. The 3dfx version doesn't have this problem, maybe they should figure out how they fixed it. Because if you can't dodge the homing missles, and if you dodge them and they do a 180 and come back, that's just unplayable garbage. And why would the higher difficulty levels need to fly at higher "fps"? The original game didn't do that, so neither should Rebirth.

Well here's the deal:

In the original game many of the weapons were based on FPS (frames per second) which changes depending on how good of a computer you had. The better the computer, the better the FPS and so the harder the homers were to dodge.

Both the original game and the 3dfx version changed the difficulty of the homers depending on your particular computer's capability. So on your particular computer, you might experience the original, and the 3dfx version the same as each other...but it's something totally different than someone else may experience.

Rebirth has removed the variance in difficulty...it no longer depends on FPS. The different difficulty levels have the homers fly the same way that they used to at certain FPS settings. This way everyone gets a uniform game experience.

As an example...the homers now fly almost exactly like they did on the original game when I played it...simply because my FPS at the time were similar to what Rebirth has set the homers to fly like.

E.G. I used to play the game at 36 FPS on Rookie (FPS on the original changed with difficulty because on higher difficulties more projectiles were in the air at one time, and so FPS would drop). Rebirth has the homers on Rookie fly like they used to at 30 FPS (I don't know that...it's just for the example.) Therefore when I play the game they fly almost exactly like they used to.

Also I can still dodge homers on insane...granted they're very hard, but I still can. (And I'm not THAT good of a pilot.)

http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/frm/index.php/topic,805.msg8597.html#msg8597 Here's a thread explaining the way the homers work a little bit.

There was also a poll and the majority of the people said that the way the homers work now (0.57.1) is very close to the original.