Project Conflict

[RadBurn]

Project Conflict is inspired by a Marathon 1 scenario called Marauder Second Encounter and provides a deathmatch environment with hostile Marines wielding standard weapons.

Thanks to Pfhorums member Flowers for helping get this released.
Thanks to Pfhorums member W'rkncacnter for the bot script.

- Project Conflict
http://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-conflict

- W'rkncacnter's Bot Script
http://simplici7y.com/items/single-play ... e-you-lose

In case anyone cares to see what the original scenario was like here is a package demonstrating the deathmatch gameplay in Mars Needs Women. The complete scenario contains more content and can be found at the archives.

Marauder Second Encounter ( Marathon 1 )
- Mars Needs Women Demo
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sbpbtpje34uo5 ... r.zip?dl=0

[baudrillardboy]

This is pretty cool. I like to play very short games offline, and this is perfect for that. Easy enough for a quick diversion, and hard enough to keep things interesting. Nice job.

[JohannesG]

Any plans on putting this up on Simplici7y? http://simplici7y.com/

[RadBurn]

Yes, we intend to get this on simplici7y. We are currently tuning, testing, and clearing up some issues. MADDs from Marathon 1 will also make an appearance in the next release.

[RadBurn]

I encountered a bug trying to submit this to Simplici7y so I'll post the download here instead. Added MADDs and existing maps reworked to include them. Physics merged with maps for convenience.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qnr3oblf7hgut ... 2.zip?dl=0

[ravenshining]

That was fun. Nice to see my shotgun sequence idea in action ;-) And it's fun getting punched to death!

Had a weird issue in Vulcan where I kept getting stuck in a void, towards the large end of the big hall with the juggernaut.

Have you considered giving the enemies no flinch sequence, so like you they don't stop firing when fired upon? Maybe some duplicates with different health (as if they had picked up a 2x or 3x cannister). I think it'd be fun for the fist dudes to have 3x! I split the map to try that and check some things out in your physics, but for some reason Anvil won't open them.

[RadBurn]

Have you considered giving the enemies no flinch sequence, so like you they don't stop firing when fired upon? I think it'd be fun for the fist dudes to have 3x! I split the map to try that and check some things out in your physics, but for some reason Anvil won't open them.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f9y8c88kkbjhb ... h.zip?dl=0
Here is an unmerged physics model with no flinch animations. The fist marine has his health increased some and a strange bug with the MADDs has been fixed ( but not tested yet ).

I'll look into Vulcan later but no promises.

[baudrillardboy]

I don't know if you've looked into this yet, but in Delusions of Grandeur there are a couple polys that need to be marked monster and item impassable. In particular I noticed a lot of enemies spawning and getting stuck in the pattern buffer ledges near the middle of the map, as well as in the area under the staircase in the tower area.

[ravenshining]

That one wouldn't open either, until I opened it up in a hex editor side-by-side with a clean one and noticed a bunch of junk at the beginning and end of the file. Maybe that's a weird byproduct of copying it from my ext4 partition to an HFS image from within Basillisk II and then adding type and creator codes with Resourcer.

Yes, the flinchless Marines are much more challenging and closer to netplay than the flinching ones, and I like how the fist Marines can now take a rocket hit.

I'm noticing a bug where if a Marine gets up close to it's target (whether that's you or another Marine or a MADD) they will stop attacking. I don't know if that's with A1 or some particularity of the physics but I'm not sure why that happens.

I made some tweaks for my own fun
-Alien Weapon Marines have a short-range attack to mimic you holding down both triggers
-Fist Marines have increased Dark Visual Range and throw bouncy grenades
-Pistol, AR, Shotgun, and Alien Weapon Marines have reduced Dark Visual Range
-Fusion, SMG, and AR Marines use sniper ledges
-Pistol Marines stay with clear shot
-Fist, Fusion, and SMG Marines are not afraid of water or sewage (in case future maps incorporate them...)
-All Marines have drop ammo and have chatter and/or reloading sounds, with varied pitches.
-MADDs have electronic chatter

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f9y8c88kkbjhb ... h.zip?dl=0
Here is an unmerged physics model with no flinch animations. The fist marine has his health increased some and a strange bug with the MADDs has been fixed ( but not tested yet ).

I'll look into Vulcan later but no promises.

[RadBurn]

That one wouldn't open either, until I opened it up in a hex editor side-by-side with a clean one and noticed a bunch of junk at the beginning and end of the file. Maybe that's a weird byproduct of copying it from my ext4 partition to an HFS image from within Basillisk II and then adding type and creator codes with Resourcer.

The .zip attached below contains a .sit inside. Hopefully this solution works.

Yes, the flinchless Marines are much more challenging and closer to netplay than the flinching ones, and I like how the fist Marines can now take a rocket hit.

The Marines glitch when I play with flinchless. They glide on ice and stop attacking after entering their flinchless state. I even reverted to an older physics model to test out flinchless but no luck for me.

I'm noticing a bug where if a Marine gets up close to it's target (whether that's you or another Marine or a MADD) they will stop attacking. I don't know if that's with A1 or some particularity of the physics but I'm not sure why that happens.

This looks like a problem with the Dx origin of attack for the Marines. I first noticed this with the MADDs but now I see it frequently. The .zip attached below contains a modified physics model that sets all Marines attack origins Dx to zero. This "in yo face" glitch appears fixed using this new physics model. However, I'm assuming that as long as the Dx stays within the radius of the Marine then the glitch should never occur.

I made some tweaks for my own fun

I'd love to see where someone else could take this project. Make it your own and have fun with it! I really dig the alien weapon idea btw.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dun87u922qcr1 ... 6.zip?dl=0

[ravenshining]

You know where this could be useful?

There is surprisingly good news planetside: nine military Mjolnir
Mark IV cyborgs were covertly living among the
colonists, and acting together they were able to
single-handedly turn back the latter stages of the Pfhor
assault. Casualties on the colony were nowhere near as high
as those we experienced here on the Marathon.

I've been working on a redacted thing that could involve the above events if people joined in. Granted, those would need M1 sprites, but then again...

'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one.)
Notably Unstable,
Durandal

[RadBurn]

Was there ever mention of an AI among the planetside colonists? I'm wondering about story delivery via terminals. Would there be a narrative like Blake or like Leela? How would you handle the nine cyborgs being a part of the story?

[Flowers]

Was there ever mention of an AI among the planetside colonists?

Not that I know of, although it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine they had an AI of some sort. Whether it was as smart or advanced as the three Marathon artificial intelligences, I can't say. You could make a scenario that instead takes place on Earth. Keep in mind we've been gone from Earth for roughly 300 years, so it's a possibility that military cyborgs have become commonplace and you could be fighting alongside them in defense of a Pfhor invasion. Although, I wouldn't know how to write a story around that, considering Earth is never actually invaded in the main story.

[ravenshining]

It could be the best AIs are down on the colony and who we meet on the Marathon are the leftovers. The colony was established seven years before the events of Marathon, surely at least one AI had been transferred down to the colony, perhaps three - there were six AIs on Mars.

On the other hand, whenever we hear communication with the colony, it's always with the "colony station," "spaceport," "colonists," or "cyborgs." If only one AI was down there, it may have been obliterated along with the spaceport.

Regardless of who or what is surviving on the colony, it'd be possible to recieve instructions from one of the shipboard AIs. Probably only Durandal could teleport you to the colony, and only after the S'pht teach him about teleportation techniques (because otherwise why would you use a shuttle?) but anyone could communicate with you - maybe even Tycho - and anyone could teleport you back if Durandal is kind enough to share the secrets of teleportation.

Oooh. If you're in contact with Tycho on the colony, that could be a great setup for the Tycho-aligned Infinity timelines. Somehow you piss off Durandal in the process of taking over the Pfhor ship, so he dumps you on the colony and in the hands of supposedly-inoperable Tycho instead of back on the Marathon with the more sane Leela. Then Tycho wins you over by helping you save the colony before whisking you off to help save the Pfhor...

I am now in contact with a number of colonists planetside, but
their reports on the situation below are conflicting and
obviously exaggerated. The primary medium-range radio antenna
has been disabled or destroyed, which makes communication
extremely difficult.

The only thing which seems clear is that the spaceport was
obliterated by low-yield nuclear weapons minutes after the
attack on the Marathon began. This I can verify through my
own optical instruments.

[General-RADIX]

Yannow, I actually have an AI character who acted as colony supervisor; she only survived the bombardments and evaded the Pfhor because her core was kept miles underground. Figured this was the best way to put an AI on Tau Ceti without disrupting canon too much.

Sorta going off ravenshining's idea for Tycho: if you wanted to write your own alternate timeline, you could have Tycho and Leela band together with the colony AI(s) and chase down Durandal (presumably after getting the colonists back to Earth 'n Mars first). Remember how Tycho's claim in M1 that he and Leela would tag-team Durandal never really went anywhere?

(Maybe, to avoid retreading M2, they actually intercept him near some unknown world en route to Lh'owon?)

[RadBurn]

Thanks to Pfhorums member Flowers for modifying Second Quest to work with this project.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c5bfujplw38qg ... t.zip?dl=0

[ravenshining]

I finally figured out the problem I was having opening the shapes file. The junk header and footer was the result of my passing it through MacBinary unecessarily, but there were plenty of other problems on a clean unzip.

First, Anvil gets screwy trying to read more than 256 bitmaps in a collection. The interface gets borked, some bitmaps aren't drawn, and even with 32 MB 64 MB allotted runs out of memory to do any writing. At 64 MB Anvil runs even more unstable than normal on my Basilisk II setup so I haven't tried pushing it higher.

Looking at the collection, I figure you don't need the blood, death, corpse, and MADD sequences all in there - the physics can reference the Marine for the former three and the latter can go in another - so I go in my favourite hex editor and delete them by hand, which means calculating and updating new hex offsets...

Now I've got a file Anvil can read properly! Yes! I can write bitmap data, and do so with Anvil memory allocation back down to 32MB! And... it can't edit the sequences, because there are too many low-level shapes and this has, with the MADD stuff truncated, 599.

I'm guessing the limit is 512 (01ff) because the Marine has 354 (0160), so maybe only two weapons need be deleted or 87 32 frames need be referenced multiple times by high-level shapes, but I'm calling it a day for now. I don't want to update 599 frame references by hand on top of the 512 bitmap references that still need fixing...

Well, you've taken the shapes format well past it's Infinity specs into Aleph One and ShapesFusion-only territory. Alas, I can't get ShapesFusion to compile. But hey, now I have a very intimate knowledge of the M2 shapes file format!

[RadBurn]

At 64 MB Anvil runs even more unstable than normal on my Basilisk II setup so I haven't tried pushing it higher.

I gave up on Anvil in Basilisk II for anything besides physics models and referencing stuff. It is only because of ShapeFusion that I put my time and energy into this project.

Looking at the collection, I figure you don't need the blood, death, corpse, and MADD sequences all in there

I don't have a lot of experience with the engine and only did what I felt comfortable doing. I was under the impression that each collection should be self contained and not reliant on any other collection ( for the most part ). Some of the death and corpse bitmaps needed altering to go along with the different helmet these Marines had. As for the blood I did consider using the Marine blood but remembered something I read long ago about collections not loading into memory without cause. Since this project is intended to be played single player then the Marine collection wouldn't have a need to load into memory. Instead of testing this or asking the community or whatever I just did the work.

I don't want to update 599 frame references by hand on top of the 512 bitmap references that still need fixing...

Still need fixing? I follow what you're trying to do but my question is why?

Well, you've taken the shapes format well past it's Infinity specs into Aleph One and ShapesFusion-only territory.

Damn right I did. If I did this right the first time I'd have even more frames and animations but I rushed it.

[ravenshining]

Looking at the collection, I figure you don't need the blood, death, corpse, and MADD sequences all in there

I don't have a lot of experience with the engine and only did what I felt comfortable doing. I was under the impression that each collection should be self contained and not reliant on any other collection ( for the most part ). Some of the death and corpse bitmaps needed altering to go along with the different helmet these Marines had. As for the blood I did consider using the Marine blood but remembered something I read long ago about collections not loading into memory without cause. Since this project is intended to be played single player then the Marine collection wouldn't have a need to load into memory.

I am probably wrong about the death and corpses. I'm looking at monster_definitions.h, and unless someone who knows code can correct me, they have to be in the same collection because that is set in a separate section from the sequence IDs.

The blood spot effect, on the other hand, even with M2 limitations can be separate because there's an unused blood spot sprite in Explosion Effects. Also, the Marine gets loaded in single player now because chase cam. I don't think that limitation applies under Aleph One, because nowadays we can make maps with multiple texture collections, someone familiar with the source correct me if I am wrong.

Still need fixing? I follow what you're trying to do but my question is why?

One, because I'm having fun. Two, if I were to use this in a scenario, I would need to be able to edit them, and even if I could get ShapesFusion to compile I remember not liking its interface and would prefer to use Hackvil and Anvil for everthing they can do.

Anyway, I hope you're not taking my post as a negative review, it's more of a journal of my learning about the source.

[RadBurn]

if I were to use this in a scenario, I would need to be able to edit them, and even if I could get ShapesFusion to compile I remember not liking its interface and would prefer to use Hackvil and Anvil for everthing they can do.

If you need the graphics I can export the collection as bitmaps and upload them for you to edit to use in your own thing. Wait a minute.... Here you go :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4xlqyrh7mk9z ... t.zip?dl=0

As for getting these into PICT format or whatever for Anvil I'm unsure. The Macintosh Repository has some possible conversion solutions on the Basilisk II end once the bitmaps were transferred over :
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/app ... /?c=7&p=16

[ravenshining]

Oh, no, thank you, I was able to get as far as getting Anvil to handle the 256 bitmaps I cared about. It's the sequence data that needs to be fixed because of how I changed the hex data, the same frames all point to different bitmaps now and the sequences would have to have their arrays changed to point to the shifted frames if I cut down the frames.

Getting sequences right is a tedious task, and I admire your tenacity to stick it through all 670 frames to make this project!

[RadBurn]

Red Spectrum remapped to work with this project
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xy5t4o7t8tfe ... m.zip?dl=0

[Flowers]

Red Spectrum remapped to work with this project
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xy5t4o7t8tfe ... m.zip?dl=0

Any plans on getting this on Simplici7y now that there's more content out?

[RadBurn]

Revel map pack from screamingfool has been converted
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u02a7ao4gsrnu ... l.zip?dl=0

Any plans on getting this on Simplici7y now that there's more content out?

I'll try and get everything packaged together and uploaded there. Last time I tried I was locked out from being able to create an upload due to some bug.

[RadBurn]

Windbreaker's Sovereignty map pack added
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e9oqtbcbjcqnu ... y.zip?dl=0