Topic: The Enemy Within -- 15th Anniversary Edition (release thread!)

[Kaiaatzl]

It's finally here!  Again!  15 and a half years after the first time!

The Enemy Within was always one of my absolute favourite mission packs for this game.  And not just mine, to this day it's the only fan-made mission for Descent to have its own TVTropes page.   It's a project I wished I could have been more involved in than I ultimately was -- but back then I just didn't have the skills to contribute much of anything valuable.
Well, a lot can change in 15 years.  Including The Enemy Within   This was a hell of a lot of fun to revisit and add all the things my ambitious mind had wanted to create back in 2008, plus a few more besides.  I hope I've made this the definitive version.



What it is:
A 26+6 level mission with absolutely stellar level design work by Darkflamewolf, Darkhorse, Sirius, Pumo, Wishmaster, and Maki (Kyouryuu), custom robots and art by Darkhorse and Sirius, and some additional content by me.  Featuring a story of espionage and betrayal deep within some mind-bending and mind-blowing mines.  The original pitch was bite-sized levels built around a central theme, but what actually got made for it was a whole lot more than that.

What's been added:

An original industrial rock soundtrack featuring a mix of real instruments, real synthesizers, and the occasional VST plugin, and which, in the style of games like Devil May Cry and Sonic Adventure 2, mixes instrumental tracks with a few vocal songs that are sprinkled in to highlight especially cool moments.
New sound effects for all robots (except thief) and actual voices for all the warship pilots, featuring myself, Pumo, and Regolith247 on V/O.
A storyline that's been adjusted just enough to keep even returning pilots guessing.
Full exit sequences for almost every level, made by Parabolicus to slot in perfectly with each map's theme and aesthetic.  Unfortunately these will only work on recent versions of D2X-Rebirth, as no other version of Descent 2 supports them.
Two separate versions, optimized for D2X-Rebirth and D2X-XL (a D2X-Rebirth custom install is the recommended experience).
A few minor tweaks to gameplay.



What's been taken out:

The mission no longer supports DOS Descent 2 at all.  Exit tunnels push the segment counts for many of the levels above the vanilla limit and several of the maps never really worked properly in the original Descent 2 anyway.
The midi tracks have been removed 'cause I couldn't figure out a way to keep them in without having that interfere with the new content.

Here it is on DXMA
https://sectorgame.com/dxma/mission/?m=2128
Or I should say, here's where the link to the link to it is on DXMA.  The files were, unsurprisingly, too large to fit, so the download there simply contains a link to the real one.
If you wanna skip that whole runaround, here's the actual files on Google Drive as well
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nUnt4LRRig-w_2x6K3pfLWmfM69YuEDb/view?usp=drive_link



Here's a few example music tracks as well.  But you'll have to play the mission for the really good stuff

Turbine (level 10)
Selkie (level 18)
To Ruin (level 9)

[Dosgamer]

This is amazing. Grateful for all your work on this. Many thanks. if I’m using rebirth ask what folders do I put the Google Drive files in? Just want to make sure I’m doing it correctly.

[Kaiaatzl]

The folder structure is already set up in there so you should just be able to extract ewithin-rebirth.zip to the game's main directory.  It's all in the txt too.

I wasn't able to find a way to stop the new sound fx from overriding the default ones so you may want to use a separate installation of Rebirth.