Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Also if you want to play some Marathon multiplayer, if you grab the XBLA version and the 2 map packs, you basically get every single official Marathon mutliplayer map ever made.

Total Carnage contains levels from Marathon 1 and Infinity.
The Jjaro pack contains all the specific Jjaro texture set levels.

I did add a few things to the levels, some extra items and ammo (Marathon 1 was pretty weak with ammo drops) as well as ensuring every map in Marathon 1, 2 and Infinity has a Hill for King of the Hill and a Skull for Kill the man with the ball.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2011 19:30

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 05:01

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

ToxicFrog posted:

The same question applies to the other games I mentioned too, though. And the answer is usually "because it makes the game more fun, more accessible, or more aesthetically pleasing". For example, improved lighting can add a lot to the atmosphere without changing the map design (see Descent for an example), and improved controls make the game more fun to play in general. In the case of things like support for 3d models and high-res textures, there's no immediate payoff, but the community will often take advantage of such features - see the Marathon high resolution packs (which seem to have vanished from the sourceforge site for some reason), or the HRP for Duke3d.

There's still a lot of work that can be done in that area, though; my personal pet peeve is that you still can't look up or down more than 20� or so, and even that is nauseating, but that's far from the only thing that could be improved. But the devs seem completely dismissive of such changes.

The real problem is the death of OS 9 and Classic.

There are no good tools for Marathon that work on a Modern Mac. Without the tools to make new levels, there's less desire to push Aleph One to get better.

If you look at the last few mods (of course we called them Scenarios) of the 2000 to 2004 time era to come out, they all took high advantage of really wacky things in Aleph One.

Like Some crazy Room over Room to create reflective floors and catwalks (if you can dig up Murte Machine it uses an odd fork of Aleph One).

Same goes for some of the Fog and Animated texture enhancements. Without good tools the community died.

You can argue it's been brought back to life, but nothing I've seen compares to Marathon of the past.

Also Aleph One got really loving Linuxy. Programs for the Mac are supposed to be elegant and easy to use, not a cluster gently caress.

Edit:

DamnGlitch posted:

That's pretty slick. I've wanted a shot at the XBLA version but I don't own an xbox. Plus, I already have a pretty esoteric keyboard style, don't know if I'd like the game pad.

(shameful secret: I used to play marathon 2 when I was very young with a flight stick. Me and my friend would pretend we were piloting a giant robot, and the screen was looking through its eyes.)

We got Bungie's exact controller math from Halo for Marathon, and a bunch of different controller setups (including the old 007/TimeSplitters 1 style). So it's probably the easiest to play, if you've touched a console in the past 5 years.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2011 21:27

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

ToxicFrog posted:

Obviously not every upgrade makes sense in every game. Descent already had moving light sources and whatnot, so improving the way light is rendered made a significant visual improvement to the game. Because of Marathon's lighting model, however, it doesn't even make sense to discuss such things.

My question wasn't "why doesn't A1 have all of these improvements from other engines", it's "why are the A1 devs hostile to even the concept of improvement, regardless of what actual improvement is being discussed".

_{A contributing factor may be the way some parts of A1 are written in the most rear end-backwards way possible, making any change a pain in the rear end, though.}

"Unzip A1, unzip Marathon to same folder, play" is a clusterfuck?

Back in the day, you downloaded a Marathon Scenario, and if had to, it came with a special installer that would dress up the entire process, and generate everything.

You download Aleph One, you get a bunch of poo poo, double click the Icon, you get a very bad error message. Then you download M1A1. You put that folder into the same folder that Aleph One is in, still won't work.

It just got all ugly.

It's just now how the old community would of handled this.

We would of packed up M1A1 into a Application Bundle, made it a stand alone download, with a nice "Drag me to Applications" window. Keep it all tight and compact, and with a good custom icon. I've always hated the Aleph One icon.

Sorry about the "drat kids these days with their Marathons" but Aleph One took a bad turn along the way.

This was the stuff people were doing with Aleph One just weeks after Bungie released the source code:

and

That feature, Bridges and Balconies, was never finished in favor of of giving Marathon 2 different sort of scripting languages and just other things that have hurt it in my opinion.

Also on the Mac, you can use a 360 controller to play Aleph One, but you cannot assign the Triggers to anything.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2011 22:12

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

0 rows returned posted:

I've wanted to play the Marathon trilogy for a long time and while I made it through marathon 1 via aleph one, it gave me the worst loving headache from playing the game. I don't know if its from the way it shears the y axis when you mouselook or what but it put me off playing the rest of the series.

Marathon in genreal runs with a really narrow field of view. Combine that with the maze like corridors of M1, and it can be very difficult to play in a modern era.

If you have even the slightest interest in the series, try the 2nd game on the Xbox. We put in a modern field of view option (but kept the original for purists). It makes it much easier to see. Combine with way better controls, better up/down looking (since ours is a true 3D engine) and ability to toggle controls and options (in game!).

Then if you are still not interested in the series, you've at-least played the best version of the game.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2011 15:32

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

BigEyeGuy posted:

Rise of The Trade was the first game to let you aim up and down
As mentioned here

Marathon was released on the same day, and also offered looking up and down.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2011 17:34

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Guillermus posted:

Marathon didnt have dog mode, Jesus mode and ridiculous rocket launchers

Fortunately Marathon had more than 90 degree angles on walls.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2011 21:13

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

100 years from now, the world will remember that Doom, Tetris and Mario are 3 games that are still played.

They are just the most pure, perfect versions of games. I also believe that all games are just a combination of Doom, Mario and Tetris, in some way or another.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2011 22:45

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Can someone point me in the right direction as to how to set up my Mac to play Brutal doom so it looks and sounds like the videos Dominic White posted?

# ¿ Aug 22, 2011 21:27

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Nothing I can do will let Skulltag or ZDoom work on my computer running OS X 10.6. The console just says this:

code:

8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	[0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]	Cannot find a game IWAD (doom.wad, doom2.wad, heretic.wad, etc.).
8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	[0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]	Did you install ZDoom properly? You can do either of the following:
8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	[0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]	1. Place one or more of these wads in the same directory as ZDoom.
8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	[0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]	2. Edit your zdoom-username.ini and add the directories of your iwads
8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	[0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]	to the list beneath [IWADSearch.Directories]
8/23/11 5:05:16 PM	com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[141]	([0x0-0x4f24f2].org.zdoom.ZDoom[13270]) Exited with exit code: 255

Skull Tag reports the same problem just swap the Zdoom references with Skulltag. I have the Doom2.wad in both the same folder as the executible, as well as in ~/Library/Application Support/ZDoom and /Library/Application Support/ZDoom

I'm out of ideas as to how to make this work.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2011 22:29

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

For the past several months I've been working to to create all new official versions of Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity with the Aleph One team and Bungie.

Tomorrow we are releasing the updated versions of the games with Aleph One 1.0.

Myself and Hamish (the guy who runs the Marathon Story Page) went through all of the M1A1 scenario and original Marathon to make M1A1 match Marathon. In all in all we probably made over 500 changes.

In addition we release Marathon 2 with the XBLA HD graphics, and officially blessed fan high resolution textures for Marathon 1 and Infinity.

We've also updated Aleph One to be a better first experience. It defaults to automatic full screen to match your current resolution. It uses a pretty standard WASD + Mouselook defaults. Also, you can download each game with one single link, no more frankensteining together a scenario and game engine.

If you've never played Marathon, or have not played it in a long time, this is probably the best Marathon experience to date.

You can grab it at http://marathon.sourceforge.net/

The press release goes out tomorrow morning, but share this with everyone you know.

Lastly, if there are things about the original Marathon's you cannot stand, this does not change them. The goal of this release is to create the most faithful, yet modernized version of the games to date. So it still has that same old floaty weird physics. But with a modern HUD and control setup.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2011 06:47

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Johnny Law posted:

Well that's a nice surprise! What got into you?

I've been thinking about getting Aleph One set up on my current gaming system so now is probably a good time. I've used it before to play partway through 1 & 2, but haven't touched Infinity yet.

Check out Marathon 1 again. There were a lot of things that were not correct in it. Some things minor like missing aliens. But some major problems like incorrect settings on monsters and weapons.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2011 07:52

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

ToxicFrog posted:

That is pretty sweet.

How do the XBLA HD graphics compare to the fan-made high-res textures?

In some ways I think they are better and in other ways not as good.

We were constrained for file size, so we had to cut some HD stuff down to less than awesome size. So 512X512 textures for walls. The fan stuff can go bigger.

But we have more detail in things like the terminals. That said the fan stuff is made by extremely talented people, and that's why we and Bungie chose the content.

As for Marathon XBLA being in danger of being pulled, that was never the case. The game fits nicely in the middle of the pack for performance. I still get sales numbers from MS. Every day we sell between 50 and 100 copies.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2011 01:44

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Does anyone know what the first game to use WASD is? Like who is the first person to say "Hey this is a good control scheme for a shooter"?

# ¿ Dec 13, 2011 21:20

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

The Kins posted:

As far as rare insight goes, there's a goon called Hippieman who's a massive fanboy and worked on the Xbox Live Arcade port. I'm not sure if he hangs around this thread anymore, though. I hear if you say "W�rkncacnter" seven times into a mirror he emerges from the dying sun.

And as for Pathways, nope. The best you can do is use a Macintosh emulator loaded up with System 7 or compatible.

Oh hey months later, and I'll totally show up!

So shameless admission, I only just beat Infinity. I just never got around to beating it. It can be a pain in the rear end, go for punching whenever possible to conserve ammo, and try to find all the charge stations, they are tucked away.

Lastly learn how to quickly sidestep the bouncing grenades of the cyborgs in tight spaces and force them to explode on walls, or another enemy. Aleph One now ships with more standard FPS controls (you are welcome), but adjust the look speeds to match what kind of gamer you are. I'm old so I don't turn as fast in games.

As far as Pathways, there's now way right now to play it on a modern computer.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 20:18

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

TheMammoth posted:

If you had the PSX dual analog controller, you could use the controls much like any modern shooter.

I believe it also had split-screen multiplayer. I'm pretty sure I played that, but there may have been limitations compared to singleplayer (like in some games there was no music when playing split-screen).

What confuses me, though, is that I thought part of Nintendo's decision to use carts while everyone else went to CD was because they could hold more than a traditional disc at that time? So wasn't the music in N64 games supposed to be better? Why then are there at least a few examples, such as Q2, where the PS version actually has better sound? Sorry I definitely had that completely backwards.

My guess as to some of the reason why the PS was experimented with and pushed to its limits was Sony's relative openness to 3rd party developers compared to Nintendo, which pretty tightly controlled who could make games for the N64. Sony even released the Net Yaroze (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze), a console-based development kit allowing anyone to make their own PS game. So, you had way more titles, many of them admittedly pretty bad, but also some pretty spectacular in terms of what they wrung out of the system. Whereas with the N64, you pretty much had only Nintendo, Rare, and a few others doing so.

Quake 2 on the PSX was a staple with me and my friends. We would do a lot of 4 player deathmatch with the Multitap. This was all with the old PSX controllers before Analogue sticks.

The game ran amazing on the PSX hardware.

Now, Half Life 2 for the Playstaiton 2, that was a pile of poo poo.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 23:18

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

Zaphod42 posted:

You mean Half Life 1 for PS2?

Yeah it was. It was a weird bastard offshoot. It also included the only co-op Half-Life game (Decay). I can't remember if the dreamcast version was okay or not... Oh. I guess it was never released. I bet the PS2 version was a kludge job, maybe because the dreamcast version fell through.

Yes, yes I do. All the pervious HL2 discussion leaked into my post.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 23:26

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

gooby on rails posted:

The Xbox version was specifically tweaked to help with that, but if you're on the computer version I'm not sure what would have changed. Maybe the horrible mouse input code has been improved recently.

The jump from 2 to Infinity is also a drastic improvement IMO, but not so much through tech as through more realistic art direction that has always appealed to me more.

Original Marathon was designed to run at a 90 degree FOV. We emergency patched the Xbox game to add a 110 degree FOV option.

You can run Aleph One at native resolutions, and it'll actually adjust the view window. It won't change the FOV, but it'll make it less cramped (you will see more in widescreen than 4:3, just like the Xbox version).

It's widely believed that Motion sickness is caused by a narrow FOV. That and sometimes the weapon bob and camera bob effects can contribute.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 18:40

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

If you ever want to go back and play Marathon 1, grab the packaged up downloads here:

http://source.bungie.org/games/marathon.php

Don't get the M1A1 files. I reworked the entirety of M1A1 with Hamish the author the Marathon Story Page to make it behave correctly. There's a lot of mistakes in M1A1 that I fixed. From moister behavior, to completely incorrect values for the Hulks to weapon damage value problems. And yes, I put that god damned puzzle back in. Sue me. I also made sure all the secret areas can be reached.

Marathon 1 makes heavy use of Glue and Super Glue polygons. A glue polygon will lock a monster down until an action wakes him up, such as a visual on the player or sound. A Super Glue polygon will just lock a monster in place. These don't exist in Marathon 2/Infinity, and thus the Aleph One engine can't do them. So I had to make extensive use of Monster Impassible polygons. And in a few cases, straight up new physics models (the S'pht who are captured and in stasis on the Pfhor ships). I'll have to go back and look, but I must of made over 2000 changes to M1A1 to make it work. I had to recreate each encounter inside Marathon 1. So if you fire up Marathon 1 now, on the first level you can look through the windows of the Marathon into a different part of the ship and activate the Pfhor who can see you. Also I made sure all the right compilers are at their computer terminals, and won't activate unless you shoot them. It totally gives Marathon 1 that creepy feeling when you are in map mode, and turn it off to have a S'pht right in front of you.

Also it comes with a new floating HUD so you don't feel as cramped as you used to with all the crap on the screen.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2013 18:10

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

0 rows returned posted:

Were you the one that removed the Pathways Into Darkness minilevel at the beginning of Arrival? I was a little sad to see it gone.

Yes, I also removed the weird Hulk level, and the Marathon Comic told in terminals from it. I also got the Aleph One engine updated to do the two different tones on Marathon startup instead of just one tone.

I also added several very tiny hard to see ledges to a few levels so you can grenade hop up to areas that the M1 engine would allow you to reach, but M2/Infinity would not.

Also Hulks die properly, and some monsters don't always do a hard death. I even fixed the Map annotations. I made it as authentic to Marathon 1 as humanly possible. Then I added a bunch of higher rez textures and a new floating hud and a more standard WASD/mouse config for default and target reticules, cause I'm a hypocrite like that.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2013 01:52

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

So speaking of old Mac games that don't work on OS X anymore, goon Haveblue and I did this.

haveblue (with some of my assistance) ported Pathways into Darkness to OS X.

You can grab it (Free!) on the Mac App Store here.

Bungie didn't want to GLP the source, so they granted me and Mark permission to port it over in a quasi licensing agreement. I wanted to post about this sooner, but Bungie is very tight lipped on things. This news is officially going out tomorrow morning, but I wanted to share this with goons right away.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2013 06:18

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

haveblue posted:

If a Windows port happens, it won't be done by me (not my specialty), so without a more liberal source release that's pretty unlikely. Right now the game is about 80% platform-agnostic gameplay code, 10% easily portable OpenGL/OpenAL invocation, and 10% OS X GUI.

If someone out there wants to port this to windows, I can most likely clear the paperwork to make this happen. But if you leave it up to me and haveblue, it'll be Mac only. Likewise if some brave (or stupid) soul wants to try to port this to iPhone, I can help push that through, but god help you.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2013 01:50

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 05:01

hippieman: May 8, 2004; Butcher of Song

poo poo, I somehow missed both of these replies.

The Kins posted:

I've put a call out to the Doom community to see if there's any interest there. Should I just PM you if I find someone with the skills and interest, or is there a proper e-mail address I should point them to?

Cat Mattress posted:

How about getting in touch with the people over at GOG.com? They could help you with the Windows port, and it'd be on a better place than the Apple app store.

I'm all for finding someone, but they need to understand this has to be a port of love and at the end of the day, they won't own a lick of code they wrote, and everything belongs to Bungie who can take it all away on a whim.

Haveblue did all the work completely out of love, there's no compensation, so I can't imagine GOG being that interested in a product they can't sell. Also, and this isn't meant to offend GOG, but it's not really a valued site for Bungie (Ok I'm kind a speaking for them, but in a UNOFFICIAL CAPACITY, SO DON'T TAKE THIS AS ANYTHING BUT MY OPINION ON THIS). Getting on the Mac App Store put them back on Apple's radar which has become important to them for future projects now that they are not tied to Microsoft.

So if anyone wants to help port this for the love of classic games, I'm willing to put in the effort to get this done.

Also, drat there's a lot of IP infringement in the original SiN textures.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 18:31

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