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DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Your friend missed some critical marathon scenarios:

Marathon: RED
Made by Ian McConvil of MacHall fame, is probably one of the hardest out of the box Marathon total conversions out there, and surprisingly gorgeous to boot.

Marathon: EVIL
In production for Marathon Infinity before Marathon Infinity was released, it is more or less the definitive Marathon TC, illustrating how powerful the tools that were released with Inf could be (The lead designer for Evil was given the tools, Forge and Anvil in beta prior to their release)

I'll dig up some links to these when I get home.

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DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Ijuuin Enzan posted:

Here's Red. Here's the player-edited Red 1.1, optionally. Here are delicious icon sets for Evil, Red and Rubicon.

What's the dif between the original and the fan edit? Is that for Inf or the Aleph One conversion?

Edit: I played death match marathon 1 with my brother for the first time in years a few weeks ago. It was amazing, only shame is I need more friends so we can get up to 8 players.

DamnGlitch fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jun 24, 2011

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Anal Volcano posted:

So, um, I tried Marathon.

a) This poo poo is terrifying. Super loving claustrophobic, weird-rear end-lookin' enemies. Not a good mix for me.
b) The addition of the Pathways Into Darkness bit into the first level of the Marathon conversion for Aleph One was pretty silly. I hope there's nothin' else added like that in the game.
c) Mouse control feels horrible, like there's some crazy acceleration going on.
d) poo poo is really glitchy. I used the teleporter in the first level (which took me by surprise and gave me another near-heart attack), but it hosed up while going to level 2, and ended up in a tiny little window on my desktop that I couldn't do any input into. Had to Ctrl-Alt-Del out.

Definitely interesting, but gah. Any fixes for the mouse control or glitches?



A) The first level is intentionally claustraphobic. It is vastly less so in the rest of the game. The first level of Inf is similar because it is a call back to 'Arrival'.

B) That is pretty dorky yeah, but it's a fan conversion of a game windows people, or mac people, wouldn't be able to play today without emulation, and it takes literally 20 seconds to get out of.

C) Mouse control is horrible and should not be used. You will be vastly more successful if you use a combo of WASD for movement and arrows / keypad for looking. The game's return to center destroys mouse look, and it's too jerky to be accurate. Thems just the breaks. You can turn off return to center for single player but I think it's locked in for multi.

D) I have not had any problems with marathon in the main game unless it was a low memory issue, and that was when I was playing the originals on a Performa in 95. It's a remarkably stable engine, so maybe it was a fluke (admittably I have not played nearly as much on the PC as I have on the Mac, so YMMV)


Anal Volcano posted:

Really? I assumed with it being such a story-heavy (and text-heavy) game that it wouldn't work to well co-op. Hm.

The story is the text, but most people who end up playing co-op aren't playing for the first time. If you are turbo nerds like my friends and I are, you can read at the same time too.

There are some co-op only levels and a few carnage break levels in some of them (inf I think) which are basically "yeah we bet you're pissed off at each other why not blow up your buddy before moving on"

As amazing as the story is if you ignore it, it becomes another fast run and gun shooter.

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

ToxicFrog posted:

And to address the rest of the question: there's nothing else like that, the rest of M1A1 is an unaltered conversion of M1.

There are various nods to marathon mythology and community as secret levels but I believe they are all only accessed through the command-option start.

(IE, a version of the fake level 'it is a good day to die', a recreated version of the original Marathon beta level (the one built off of the PiD engine) with altered physics and enemies, a level containing a terminal that is just the marathon comic.)

Within the scope of the scenario though yes, there are no other changes that I can recall.


ToxicFrog posted:

I find that if I turn turn down the sensitivity (which is stupidly high by default) it's fine. The mouse stops being jerky and becomes nice and smooth. The recentering in multiplayer is annoying but I still prefer it to aiming with the keyboard.

I've personally never gotten it to the point with the mouse where I'm comfortable with it. The AI is pretty dumb so I never felt I need the mouse. But then again I grew up on this control scheme so it's pretty hard coded in at this point.


ToxicFrog posted:

And yes, Marathon is a fantastic co-op FPS. If someone hasn't played it before, it becomes a slow, chill run through the storyline, and everyone has, you can play it as a balls-out high-speed shooter.

Aside form a select few levels, you can really barge all the Marathon games like twin marauders of death. It's very fun. The only real hang ups are some of the puzzles (which in general M2 and Inf are better at, but M1 has 'colony ship for sale cheap,' though ironically that piee of poo poo might be tolerable with co-op, one working the switches the other checking to see if they can make it..) M1 might be a little cramped for some co-op, it wasn't designed with it in mind, but the other two were.

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

ToxicFrog posted:

^^ Fun fact: Jason Jones, the developer of Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap, also made All Roads Lead to Sol (the final level of M2), and considered his work on All Roads to be an atonement for what he'd done in creating Colony Ship.

"All roads" is a pretty awesome level. Though hard death Juggarnauts are almost as bad as the ticks. Almost.

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

More on marathon: Marthon 2 was made open source shortly before Bungie was bought out by Microsoft. It was seen as sort of a goodbye to the loyal mac bungie fans.

Aleph One is based on this code, which has made marathon available on pretty much every computer under the sun

About a decade later (IE real soon), bungie is going to be releasing Marathon Infinity's source. Among other things, this should allow Aleph One to play back Marathon Infinity movies (it currently can only reply marathon 2 movies without falling out of sync)

Always cool to see news of these old games in the modern times.

DamnGlitch fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jun 24, 2011

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

hippieman posted:

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.

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.)

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

ToxicFrog posted:

That's going to be pretty neat. For a while it couldn't even play back M2 movies, as I recall, which made watching the Vidmaster Challenge recordings kind of problematic.

Something that's always kind of bugged me about Aleph One, though - the Duke, Doom, and Descent source ports add all kinds of extra features, ranging from the fairly basic (like the ability to look up and down without distortion, which A1 still doesn't have after twelve years, or the addition of new game modes) to the fairly complex (like complete redesigns of the lighting model, and support for other games that used similar engines).

A1, however, has none of this - and considering the sneering dismissal such suggestions are met with in #alephone and similar places, it seems to be a cultural issue, not a technical one. But why is this?

Yeah, actually, M2 films just started being possible recently IIRC.

There were builds with a number of improvements over stock Marathon though. For instance, vastly larger spaces and item / enemy counts, music, massive sized textures, open GL rendering of the levels, fog. I believe 3D item rendering was put in at one point (though god knows if its in there now), crosshairs, a ground up implementation for internet play, rewritten voice chat.

I imagine some of the lack of changes has to do with... why in marathon? Like, lighting and 3d models and such. Sure, I guess it's neat, but most maps wont take advantage of that stuff. At a certain point, why add features that are obsolete to a 15 year old engine that has nothing that uses them that a 10 (12) year old engine like UT 99 can do vastly better?

I think at this point, improvements are made to try and make the Marathon experience better, not necessarily pack in other experiences just because they can. That's just my perspective though.

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

ToxicFrog posted:


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".


Yeah man, I'm not sure. Maybe you asked like a dick? I was pretty into A1 wayyyyy back in the day, getting nightly builds and on the open source mailing list, and everybody was really friendly. Aside from some random cock suckers I played with online once, everyone in the marathon community has been super nice to me.


hippieman posted:

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.


I sort of agree from a totally non-programmer perspective that it got a lot... uglier when they merged the SDK and Mac projects together. Pretty sure it had to do with the intel transition?

Either way, I've had very little problems, provided the scenario has been optimized for A1. These days I usually just drop A1 into the scenario folder, and not bother with trying to change what's what inside the app. A1 is small enough that it's not really a waste of space to have multiple versions of the app floating around.


DamnGlitch fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jun 24, 2011

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Anal Volcano posted:

Yeah. It also has this super annoying fade effect every time you go between options menus, from menus into the game, from the game back into menus...

And when I back out of the game into the menus, you have to alt-tab out and back in to get them to show up.

And, finally, I don't think this game has quick save. I guess the maps were built with checkpoints in them, but come on. Especially with as many bugs as I've seen in ~10 minutes of playing.

It has save points in game as part of the flow and strategy of the game. And again, I've not experienced the bugs I keep hearing people claim to have, across pretty much every computer I've ever owned.

Marathon also never had ingame menus, and while it's a feature I'd like to see, if you hang around a pattern buffer it's pretty negligible to work around.

Mouselook has always been in the game, BTW. It was just never very good.

DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Ijuuin Enzan posted:

...all these bugs, you should really be reporting them so that something can be done.

The bugs are pfhor. Punch or shoot them to kill them.

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DamnGlitch
Sep 2, 2004

Ijuuin Enzan posted:

For visual appeal, some juicy high-res icons for the Marathon trilogy.



oooh, that's hot.

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