Completely overhauled “This Cave Is Not a Natural Formation”. I hadn’t originally planned to do this until much later, but the Bobs were being dumb, and the only way I could find to fix their behaviour was to completely replace part of the level. It cascaded from there, as I didn’t want to overuse 5D space (there’s still a little bit near a Jjaro power source, but there’s already precedent for those to use 5D space). The level still has the same basic layout; the architecture is just smoother now, and many of the passages are wider. Video here; I may add screenshots at some point as well.
Fixed several untextured areas that slipped through the cracks first time around on “Eat S’pht and Die” and “Unlucky Pfhor Some”. Also fixed a missing platform trigger in the same room of “Eat S’pht”.
Teleportation sounds for enemies and items now match the time periods the levels are set in. The first several times you hear enemies or items teleport in during the Marathon levels will probably be jarring.
Added a few more stereo sounds, notably for what Forge/Weland/Anvil/ShapeFusion call the “Heavy S’pht Platform”.
Added some contributions to the credits that we’d just plain forgotten about for preview 1. We apologise for the omissions.
Fixed the broken lamp spark sequence in several levels.
Various other minor bug fixes that I’ve already forgotten about.
Even more pretentious Latin translations of song lyrics (with questionable grammar) written on maps than before! See how many you can guess.
I’ve had reports that the default archive utility in versions of MacOS prior to MacOS 12 can’t read the zip algorithm I used for the version of the archive we originally uploaded. As a result, I’ve repacked it using the more common Deflate algorithm. I believe Pfhorrest has replaced the old version with the new one, but if not, The Unarchiver or Keka should work. If the version you have is 501 MiB (525,711,768 bytes, to be exact), then it should work with all versions of MacOS. I apologise for the inconvenience.
The website sidebar is also now updated to list both the current stable release and the latest development release (I suspect there’s probably a split between which release people going to the website will want), and the development page also now includes a rundown of some of 1.3’s most noteworthy new features.
Lastly, ares540 will be running this version of Eternal at Shots Fired Mini at 9:55 EDT today, March 13 (complete schedule here). I realise this is rather short notice given how dead the Pfhorums are, but you can catch the VOD if you aren’t able to see it live, too.
ETA: No longer page 69. RIP.
Edit 2: The run went really well – as in, I’m pretty sure it’s WR for any% on Kindergarten; ares PBed by like 7 minutes. His time was 58:37, I believe. You can catch the VOD on Twitch.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
Progress on 1.3 continues. One important piece of news is that Don-Martin Antell has rejoined the project! He’s one of the original designers of something like 40% of the levels in this game, and it’s wonderful to have him back on the team.
The most radical change currently underway is for “Where Giants Have Fallen”. We’ve long planned to remake this level, and I’m finally getting around to it. This is the current (still WIP) layout:
The Latin text (besides "Created by" in the upper-left corner) means (spoiler tagged in case someone wants to figure it out on their own):
Spoiler:
Upper-right corner:
Then, on a distant slope,
He observed one without hope
Flee back up the mountainside.
He thought he recognised him by his walk,
And by the way he fell,
And by the way he stood up
and vanished into air.
-Tony Banks, 1976
(Quote from Genesis' "One for the Vine")
Bottom-left corner:
Hey, old man, how can you stand to think that way?
Did you really think about it before you made the rules?
-Bruce Hornsby, 1986
(Quote from "The Way It Is")
Bottom-right corner:
The woman in black fled up the mountain,
and the gunslinger followed. -Stephen King (almost), 1982-2004
(Quote from both The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower with three words changed - the original was "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." The Latin I used for "gunslinger" literally translates as "slinger of guns", but close enough.)
Each of these has parallels to Eternal’s story.
This is mostly my work; CryoS did the central structure. I haven’t yet textured any of it because I don’t have the heights finalised yet, so you’ll have to wait on in-game screenshots; I’ll try to remember to post those in a week or so.
The final design won’t look exactly like this; for one thing, only the southern crossbeam spoke has its design fully implemented. It may be hard to tell, but the six crossbeams divide the level up in such a way that no more than 1/6 of it is visible at once. This has given the map a massive performance boost over its predecessor; even when looking at the level from the outside in; where the 1.2.x version gets some 30-35 fps on my system from the edges of the map, the new one gets 60-70 fps.
The downside is that this layout used a ton of polygons; it currently sits at 1,780, and I’ll need more to implement the crossbeam design I’ve settled on for all six spokes. As a result, I’m planning to redesign parts of the geometry. Currently, there are 72 hexagons per ring. I think I’ll probably revise the inner rings to use 36 hexagons each; this would cut some polygons. I can probably also implement the crossbeam design with fewer polygons by using split polygons more efficiently.
On the other hand, most of these polygons are pretty widely spread out; this level will hardly use up any map indices for polygon exclusion zones. This may also help when I add water areas, since I’ll need to use sound objects for those; because the polygons are fairly widely distributed across the map, they won’t use as many map indices as they normally would.
If players fall off the edge in “Where Giants Have Fallen”, I’m thinking I’ll either run a script to kill them or simply yeet them back to a random point in the sky in the previous level, with its state preserved as it was when the player left. (It’s possible to preserve level states after the player leaves a level – AOPID is a good example of this.) If they fall off the edge in one of the dream versions, they’ll simply get teleported to the terminal, as they would by simply going down the well.
Speaking of which, here’s another new feature I’m quite fond of: holographic terminals!
Thanks to Pfhorrest for helping make these. We have holographic pattern buffers as well, but I haven’t figured out many places to use them yet, so here’s one in a random location:
I really like how the scan lines turned out. (This also previews the old Forerunner terminal hologram; the current one qualifies as a spoiler, so I haven’t included it in the previews above).
If that landscape texture and architecture both look new, that’s because they both are. The landscape is Tacticus’ work, and he’s really outdone himself here. The architecture is a new segment CryoS and I built for “The Dead Live in the Catacombs” – CryoS made the original honeycomb design for an in-progress Where Monsters Are in Dreams level, and I yoinked it for a grid of operator nodes in a story-critical rewrite in that level. Here are some clearer previews of the results:
A bunch of Nightmares spawn in here, and it’s actually pretty scary! It’s really difficult to keep track of their movement because they’re small, stealthy enemies that are almost invisible from some angles, and they have a lot more options for movement than you do since they can fly into and through the nodes. I’m really pleased with how the segment turned out.
The AI formerly known as the Guardian/Praeses, who only appeared in a single terminal before deactivating, has been replaced with a new character named Pompeia Plotina. We gave her that name (1) because it’s a cool name (thanks in part to its alliteration and assonance), and (2) because it’s also the name of a Roman empress renowned for championing the philosophy of Epicureanism¹ and for “her virtue, dignity, and simplicity”; she is credited with improving education, aiding the poor, making taxation fairer, and making Roman society more tolerant.
Our Pompeia fills a role that had no name in 1.2.x and earlier versions; introducing her earlier in the chapter ties up some loose ends and makes for, IMO, a more coherent and engaging story. Hopefully, her presence will also help clarify a few aspects of the ending that might otherwise make little sense to players.
That’s not the only major story rewrite in progress. Yah-Nosh and I have continued revising Hathor’s characterisation in Chapter 1; players will probably have a harder time choosing a side in “Sakhmet Rising” as a result, and I think her characterisation and the story overall both come across as much more nuanced.
Also, we’ve given
Spoiler:
the W’rkncacnter
a terminal! Late in chapter five,
Spoiler:
it contacts the player to gloat about the impending destruction of the galaxy in that timeline and claims to be responsible for almost every negative occurrence throughout the game.
We deliberately leave it ambiguous how accurate this is. It also uses text in, currently, eight different languages besides English (some of which is bound to contain grammatical mistakes, since I’ve only properly studied three of said languages besides English). I’ve tried to stick to words that are cognates to English words as often as possible, so that the player won’t have too hard a time gleaning the context, but we don’t want the message to be perfectly coherent.
There are a few other new additions to levels. The opening of Chapter Five now looks roughly like this (please forgive the lower-res textures):
Which hopefully conveys that the Arx is a sphere more effectively.
Furthermore, we’ve made a lot of additions to a few other levels. Don-Martin is still replaying the game, but he’s also contributed some new segments to one of his levels, “Septococcal Pfhoryngitis”. A few secrets, some of which are Don-Martin’s and some of which are mine, now make it possible to exterminate the level of its Wasp infestation. These will also net the player an early AR and an early napalm cannon, but they require some difficult fights – be prepared! You’ll also have to take advantage of how
Spoiler:
an automatic exit polygon won’t teleport players out as long as they keep moving.
“Remedial Chaos Theory” has also gotten some revisions that show better evidence of Durandal is going haywire, what with the malfunctioning and constantly running doors and platforms now found throughout the level. One segment I’m particularly fond of has a view of a staircase to an inaccessible region that I’m now planning to duplicate in another level; I haven’t decided which yet.
There are numerous other changes as well. We’ll probably package a new preview within the next few weeks – my goal is to finish “Where Giants Have Fallen” first (and then distribute its changes to the dream levels based on it).
¹Epicureanism, contrary to its modern definition, taught moderation in short-term pleasures such as food, drink, and sex², since overindulgence in them could cause long-term suffering. Epicurus also championed a social contract based around laws that sought to minimise harm and maximise overall happiness, making his philosophy an early form of utilitarianism as well as an early example of what is today known as ethical hedonism.
²Our Pompeia’s attitude towards sex is hardly one of moderation, but then, in her society, negative consequences of sex such as infections and unwanted pregnancies last occurred so long ago that they’ve passed into myth.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
Preview 3 is now available at the Eternal website (or see our development page), some three months after preview 2. New features in this release just since preview 2 include:
Complete remakes of the levels “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”, “The World Is Hollow”, “The Land in the Sky”, “Floating in the Void”, and “Where Giants Have Fallen”, including a new “ghost battle” in the first four of these. (I’m reasonably sure this is the largest map I’ve ever had a hand in making [ETA: from scratch, anyway].)
Major expansions of the levels “The Dead Live in the Catacombs”, “Septococcal Pfhoryngitis”, “Core Done Blew”, and “S’pht’ia”
New Compiler sprites
A new landscape for the final chapter
A new overhaul of the Jjaro and Forerunner texture sets; the Forerunner colours no longer clash so much with one another
]New background music for the level “This Message Will Self-Destruct”
A substantial buff to the napalm cannon; it’s now actually pretty useful
Numerous new/remade sounds
New/revised plot beats, writing, and characterisation throughout, but especially in chapters one and five
New secrets throughout the game, including a secret credit terminal in the penultimate level
New terminal images
Even more pretentious uses of foreign languages, plus equally pretentious use of Early Modern English in the final chapter
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something big
There’s still quite a lot left, but the remakes of “Where Giants Have Fallen” and its predecessors were one of the biggest remaining hurdles. We might even be able to get a release candidate out this year.
Enjoy!
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
This is the first new update in almost five months. New features since Preview 3 include, but are probably not limited to:
A massively expanded soundtrack that now runs for more than four and half hours and includes work by eleven different arrangers
A reshuffled third chapter, including a (mostly) new level, “The Midpoint of Somewhere”
A complete remake of the Pfhor texture set
A new secret tracking system
Hundreds of gorgeous new terminal images
A new “quick save on level transition” feature
Numerous refinements and fixes to design, writing, and characterisation throughout the game
A complete refactor of the game’s scripting
To be clear, this is not the final release of Eternal 1.3, but unless some catastrophic bug escaped us in testing, it will be the final update this year. I plan to focus on finishing off Tempus Irae Redux (hopefully for an end-of-the-year release, but I’m known for being extremely optimistic with release dates, so take that with a boulder of salt) and then Where Monsters Are in Dreams, then hopefully return to Eternal with fresh eyes. I also plan for these to be the last major level revisions, but who knows how I’ll feel when I return to it.
Enjoy!
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
Preview 5 is out. The major changes mostly fall into two categories:
Fixes to several major bugs, including:
Occasional crashes in six different levels (“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”, “The World Is Hollow”, “The Land in the Sky”, “Floating in the Void”, “We Met Once in the Garden”, “Where Giants Have Fallen”)
The HUD not displaying the inventory correctly (or at all) in non-16:9 aspect ratios
Problems with the secret counter in network games
Problems with the map overlay in network games
Music. Over an hour of new music (parts of my new album See You Starside make appearances in altered forms), plus tweaks and refinements to several existing mixes. The soundtrack still isn't done, but it's now over six hours long and features the work of thirteen different arrangers and composers. I’d like to thank everyone who’s worked on the soundtrack; it’s not common for a game to have this much music that’s entertaining to listen to, but – as biased as I undoubtedly am – I think Eternal pulls it off.
Less noteworthy but still worth mentioning: A few levels have new secrets, and we changed the Jjaro slime to look less like the toxic M1 Pfhor sludge.
One caveat: I’m not sure if you’ll be able to resume your saved game from preview 4. If you need help with this, I may be able to provide it, but I won’t remember to check here very often; Discord is probably an easier way to get hold of me. (That said, if you’re going for 100% secrets, you might want to start over anyway, since one of the levels with new secrets is fairly early.)
Enjoy!
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
Preview 6 has been released; see our website, development page, and Simplici7y page. It is the first update in over a year and includes several major new features:
A new in-game menu system for toggling several optional features, many of which are new. See page 2 of the game manual for instructions on using this; massive thanks to Solra Bizna for coding it.
A script that makes the overhead map more legible by disabling irrelevant layers (new in this release; giant thanks to Irons for adapting his script from the excellent scenario Istoria to work with other scenarios)
An RPG-style monster health display (new in this release; major thanks to aperturegrillz for coding most of this)
Shared item pickups in cooperative play (new in this release)
Disabled friendly fire between players in cooperative play (new in this release)
Quick save on level transition (new in 1.3)
A secret counter that displays the number of secrets on a given level, the number across all levels you have played in your current save (including multiple visits to the same level), and how many of each you have collected (new in 1.3)
Major updates to the soundtrack:
The entire soundtrack now uses Opus (which is objectively the best lossy codec by every major performance metric)
An optional FLAC version is usable in-game for those who want even higher sound quality
Seventeen of Craig Hardgrove’s pieces have been remastered or remixed from newly unearthed, higher-quality sources that he has released on his website; Eternal now has five versions of “Swirls (piano)”, and “Splash (Marathon)” has effectively been doubled in length to match the structure of the original composition.
Aside: see also my 2024 remasters of Craig’s source release, which have more dynamic range; some of them also differ from the versions used in this release of Eternal. My Marathon soundtrack page (and Craig’s, for that matter) may also be of interest.
Every level now has unique music; the soundtrack now runs for more than seven hours
The extended level music for “Deja Vu All Over Again” now mashes up “Landing” with stems from Chris Christodoulou’s stunning Risk of Rain 2 tracks “The Rain Formerly Known as Purple” and “A Glacier Eventually Farts” (those who’ve heard the former probably already know exactly why I made this mashup). An immense thanks to Chris for granting permission to use his stems (and for releasing them to begin with).
“We Met Once in the Garden” now has three different variants of its level music and incorporates dynamic music scripting inspired by games like FTL: Faster Than Light and Cadence of Hyrule, which each have multiple, widely different versions of their (superb) soundtracks that they switch between based on in-game events.
New Drone and Juggernaut sprites for chapter four. Huge thanks to General-RADIX for these.
More consistent physics between levels. Yuge thanks to Irons for help with this as well; he added a bunch of new features to his invaluable physics utility Charlemagne specifically to help with Eternal and Tempus Irae Redux development.
Major areas have been either added to or made explorable in at least six levels:
“Deja Vu All Over Again”
“Roots and Radicals”
“Core Done Blew”
“A Friend in Need”
“Rāna explōde corpus spīrāmentī (Frog Blast the Vent Core)”
“Teneō affectum malum dē hōc (I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This)”
Eternal no longer supports releases of Aleph One prior to 1.7 due to its heavy use of features added in that version (Opus support, dynamic music scripting, new transfer modes, etc.). We apologize to people unable to run recent Aleph One releases (but also, please get a new computer).
This isn’t the final release of 1.3; there will be further revisions and addenda to music, writing, and levels. Whether it is the final preview before a release candidate remains to be seen. In either case, I will be focusing my efforts in the immediate future on Tempus Irae Redux (which is very near release) and Where Monsters Are in Dreams (which isn’t), so a release candidate probably won’t appear until late 2024 at the earliest.
Enjoy!
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.” —Frank Wilhoit
