Anyhow, I might not do level-by-level reviews of the whole scenario, but I’ll provide detailed thoughts on levels where I feel they’re relevant. (I don’t have too many thoughts on “Deja Vu” and “Septococcal”, apart from the odd Enforcer behaviour in the former and the motion glitch in the latter. I think the Enforcer behaviour might be fixable by putting monster & item impassable polygons in; they’re just marked as normal right now. No idea on the motion glitch; you can implement a teleporter as a band-aid fix, but it’d be better to fix it properly. I won’t attempt to implement either myself right now because IDK if you’re still working on those levels.)
“Unlucky Pfhor Some”: I attempted to vid this one, but I’m not good enough for it yet. If I keep practising, maybe I’ll get it; I don’t think it’s beyond my skill level once I familiarise myself more with its idiosyncrasies. Some scattered observations on how to improve it from my recent TC completion, though:
- After finishing this level on TC, the player will probably have more fusion ammo necessary than will ever be necessary to complete the scenario. I had some 590 fusion batteries after finishing it. (I’d actually gotten to over 600, but I used several in the final battle.) Not complaining – lack of ammo shouldn’t ever be a problem with a scenario such as Eternal, given its mechanic of collecting ammo from foes. I just found it amusing. To be fair, I actually went out and collected as much ammo as possible from dead Bobs because I am insane. (I probably wouldn’t collect that many if I were actually vidding – maybe 200.) It’s also kind of staggering how many dead Bobs that indicates, because surely the ones killed by Juggernauts would either have been fried or blown up. What.
It might be worth beefing up the VacBobs’ physics a bit; they have much higher vitality in Blood Tides of Lh’owon than they do in Infinity’s standard physics, so this wouldn’t be a departure from established canon. It looks like this level’s VacBobs only have 20, 25, and 30 vitality, which is inherited from the standard physics; compare with “Foe Hammer”, where they have vitalities of 80, 90, and 112. (I haven’t looked at all the Infinity levels, but I think they have similar physics even when you’re fighting them; I specifically looked at “Foe Hammer” because it’s a level where the Bobs are allied with the player.) I expect you’d still end up with a lot of dead Bobs by employing those settings, but probably not so comically many. There actually end up being so many Bob corpses and fusion batteries that it would probably slow down older computers, particularly when not playing on TC where the player can’t possibly pick up and use all those fusion batteries. Of course, this isn’t an issue on my three-year-old MacBook Pro, but I haven’t tested this level on my 10+-year-old Dell since the 3D textures were introduced. I expect it’d be far worse on the Dell. - Kill the fucking drones in the northwestern corner of the level, please. They’re not threatening, intimidating, or challenging; they’re just incomprehensibly fucking annoying. (I think the trope “Goddamned Bats” [warning: TV Tropes link] is made precisely to describe such enemy placement.) You can leave them regenerating at some rate, but the minimum count should be 0 for all of them. Or else just provide a way to permanently lower the door and trap them. It takes like five minutes to pass that part of the level purely because the player has to catch a lucky break to escape with shields intact. (Again, not a particularly serious threat – the player can almost always retreat to the beginning of the level to recharge if needed, since it’s rare for one of the hostiles in the outside battle to lock onto the player.) If there’s some method to bypass that particular annoyance, I haven’t yet figured it out, and it should be less esoteric if it exists. I should also note that I’m fine requiring players to deal with the drones during the first trip through that segment of the level, but there should be a way to avoid having to deal with them again afterwards.
- Speaking of drones, do the ones in the western segment of the level ever actually do anything? It’s entirely possible that, due to their physics, they don’t. It looks like their physics prohibit them from making ledge jumps of more than -5 WU. If my mathematics are correct, they’d have to make a jump of -6.8 WU to get off the ledge and engage in the central battle. Another thing that should probably be fixed in the physics, unless you just want to replace them with some other enemy. As it sits now they’re just adding extra sprites to an already sprite-intensive level.
- The segment at the very east of the level seems to be a trap. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but there should either be some way to get out, or there should be a Lua script to kill players should they chance to fall in there. Fill the area with goo, or make a teleporter, or just raise the floor elevation to 5.000. The temptation of collectable ammo in there may cause players to jump down, expecting to have some way out. (At least it caused me to do so, but I may be atypical as evidenced by the fact that I ended the level with 590 fusion batteries.)
- There should maybe also be a few more rechargers so the level doesn’t require so much backtracking. The southwestern and northeastern areas stick out for this. There is a recharger in the northwestern corner, but the player has to clear out most of the area before doing so. I get that the rationale for not including rechargers might have been that the outside battle could pose a threat, causing players to need to conserve shields somewhat… but really, it’s not much of a threat most of the time. It’s not so much a test of skill as it is a test of the RNG. Whether a Juggernaut locks onto the player and fires a bunch of missiles while the player crosses that region doesn’t have much to do with the player’s skill. On the whole, I tend to think that the less backtracking a level requires, the better. It’d probably shave around three boring minutes off of most TC films of this level if there were a couple more strategically placed rechargers. I’d put one at polygon 882 and another at polygon 291. I may come up with another good location for a few others at some point; I’ll let you know.
- This level seems to have been a case where the mapmaker ran out of polygons; some areas of the level have much simpler geometry than surrounding areas, and there are areas with skeletons of polygons that aren’t filled in. The new release would be a good time to take advantage of Weland raising the polygon limit. I’m looking at the northeastern corner of the central area in particular, which looks like it was initially intended to be a lot more complicated. I’ll abstain from attempting to alter the geometry myself for now, unless you think I should. There are a lot of items whose placement I’d have to reinstate should I actually delete polygon 417, though I might be able to get away with just deleting polygon 599 and possibly polygon 803, in which case I’d only need to reinstate one Bob.
- There should be a pattern buffer near the start of the level – maybe on the other side of Leela’s terminal. I tend to hold by the gameplay philosophy that players should be able to save both at the beginning of a level and near the end, with only a handful of exceptions. (I’ll admit that I’ve violated this philosophy myself in several levels in Chronicles, and I actually intend to fix it in a couple of levels soon, but there are a couple of others where I’m going to wait for feedback from playtesters.) There was a point when I’d find the absence of pattern buffers challenging, but on the whole, these days I can’t always spend 30 minutes playing a level at once (my lengthy vid films notwithstanding). I’m fortunate enough to have multiple computers, so I can just pause when I need to, but not everyone has that luxury.
- The final battle isn’t quite as challenging as I expected, but that’s fine. I only died once, I think, and that was my own stupidity in thinking I had more room than I did to blow up Mothers of All Hunters.
- I’m currently playing with the miner’s lamp at 0.375, but if it gets changed to 0, this level’s lighting will need to be overhauled significantly; it’s a very dark level. The outside region is almost all 0% light, rarely higher than 15%. Oddly, many (though not all) of the indoor regions are more brightly lit; I guess the reasoning is that there’s artificial lighting there, but the outside is just night. Still, even at night, there’s usually some light from the moon and such. I’ll also note that the rationale for the lighting of the floors of polygons 509 and 510 confounds me. I assume there was one, but you have 0% lighting for the very bottom of the level, then it jumps to 10%, then 15%, then 20% for the rest of the steps, but then back to 15% for most of the rest of that balcony. I’m fine with changing the lighting to reflect the updated miner’s lamp settings, but I must admit the lighting in this level is already quite striking. (This is a major reason I’ve decided to use level-by-level changes to the miner’s lamp in Chronicles; I liked some of the levels fine the way they were. But I can certainly understand wanting to use one setting for the whole scenario.)
- Overall, I really like this level, despite the annoyances listed above. The central battle and the final battle both make it a really, really fun level. Once at least the issue with the drones is fixed, I’ll probably give vidding it another go.
…scattered other thoughts about random levels:
- I went in with Vasara and it does look like putting transparent textures over windows to space might lessen the oddity of having fog nestled up against space textures. It’s ultimately up to you whether this affects your approach to “Dysmentria”, but I do think it looks pretty cool with purple fog.
- “Sakhmet Rising”. I haven’t properly played this one on TC yet, but I have a couple of architectural observations. I get why you have the polygons for the towers (polygons 734, 735, 736…). I even kind of get why you have the polygons behind them (752, 753, 783…). There is, however, a slight danger of a player doing something stupid or exceptionally unlucky and getting trapped. I don’t know how it would happen, but I feel it’s better to prepare for all eventualities rather than say “no player would possibly…”. So… I’d either make those polygons teleporters, or else just make lines 2208, 2170, 2339… solid, and then place some texture on them to make it impossible to walk into the inescapable area. Or, really, both, since sometimes Marathon ignores solid walls when a player has a high enough external velocity.
Alternately, you can just raise the height of those areas so that the player can escape them should it become necessary; it’s not as though any of them are ever visible to the player during normal gameplay. It looks like the lowest point at any of those walls is 4.5, so… 4.25? Something like that.
Also, polygon 750 is untextured.
What’s the purpose of polygons 755-763, though? I’m stumped; they seem utterly identical to all the surrounding polygons. Is it a remnant of some geometry that was planned for an earlier version of the level, but ultimately abandoned? The automap doesn’t display all the sides of polygon 12 (I assume this is due to landscape texturing that we can’t see); was polygon 758 intended to counteract that? But that doesn’t explain the others. - Also in “Sakhmet Rising”: “strong suite” → “strong suit”.
- “Unlucky Pfhor Some”: “to become like a god outside of it's control” → “to become like a god outside of its control”. I should probably go through all the terminals outside of the game and look for things like that. And, for that matter, see if I can’t condense some of the wordiness without removing either meaning or style, if that’s OK with you. Eternal has a great story, but a lot of the terminals do get really long-winded.
