Marathon 1 Redux

Discuss and unveil current Marathon projects.

player light setting - If there are no light sources, at what distance should things appear black?

light="0" -- In the dark you shan't be able to see your fist in front of your face.
0
No votes
light="0.1" - you can see your weapons and walls/monsters you're right up against
6
50%
light="0.2" - current setting on 0.0.13-alpha, you can only see about 1 WU
1
8%
light="0.3" - current setting on git, you can see for about 2 WU.
1
8%
light="0.4" - you can see about 3 WU, most things are visible
1
8%
light="0.5" - original setting, you can see for about 4 WU, only very large areas are black
3
25%
 
Total votes: 12
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ravenshining
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Insane Arrival
I could have done it with one less trip through the ventilation shafts, and I regret not showing the shock staff vs. compiler, or the compiler's remains, but here you go. Insane IS conquerable.
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The Man
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Good stuff. You might want to revise the movie_export_video_quality value in your preferences file if you haven’t yet; it looks like you might have it set to the default. I just use:

Code: Select all

movie_export_video_quality="100"
but of course that results in a gigantic file. Of course, I also just delete them after they’re done uploading most of the time. But that video will definitely help me with strategy, I think.

Were you shifting between first-person and third-person view while playing or did you do that while encoding the video? I haven’t messed around with third-person view much. I also still haven’t messed around with mouselook much, but of course, I’ve been encoding videos on my desktop 99% of the time I’ve been doing Marathon-related stuff on it, so I’ve had little opportunity to do so yet. (The trackpad on my MacBook isn’t really suitable for games.)

I’ll probably get back to playing more of this soon, too. But of course, I’ve been pretty busy myself these past few days. I may respond to some of the discussion above tomorrow, at least.
“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

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ravenshining
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I actually encoded twice, once at 1080p, which gave the video but badly distorted sound, and again at 360p for the audio, and then muxed them with ffmpeg.

I switched perspective while recording, it doesn't seem to keep perspective, zoom, or crosshair setting you toggle while actually playing.

The key, gameplay wise, was fighting the first purple Pfhor in that first side chamber. If you try to fight them in the observation lounge, which has always been my go-to strategy, either the last one will block your path and you die (because it runs faster than on TC and is too tough to take down before you are surrounded), or you make it in, but all the Pfhor on the lower deck see you through the window and join the fight.
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The Man
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That makes sense. I wonder why the sound distorted in your encode. It usually doesn’t in mine. You’re running Linux, right? Might be something to report to TL. Have you tried altering both the sound and audio quality settings in your prefs file?

I still don’t have the energy to respond in depth to all of the discussion above – there was a lot of insightful stuff there. A couple of things, though:
  1. I understand wanting to alter the game in response to complaints from the Doom community to a certain extent, but at the same time… Marathon and Doom are two separate games, and at the end of the day, I think Redux should still feel like Marathon. I’m not saying that Doom players haven’t raised some valid criticisms with the original game – Bungie themselves have acknowledged that the first several levels in particular could be better, so it’s worth trying to improve the game’s faults where they exist.

    But at the same time, I got into Marathon with an obsessiveness Doom has never inspired for me. A large part of that is Marathon’s cerebral storyline and worldbuilding, but I like some of the gameplay’s quirks. I like the fact that the AI is so dumb you can inspire Troopers and Cyborgs to kill themselves by standing far enough below them. I like the floaty physics and the fact that you can use the flamethrower as a jetpack in low gravity. I like the fact that you can change direction in mid-air, even though that’s tremendously unrealistic.

    Obviously there aren’t commonplace calls to change all of these in the first place, but at the end of the day, I want Marathon to feel like Marathon. If that means other FPS communities still have some complaints because it doesn’t feel like their preferred game, I’m fine with that. I have some complaints with other FPS games from the same era, but if someone were making an overhaul of, say, Doom to address commonplace complaints with the original, I’d still want the finished product to play like Doom, even though it’s not what I’m used to.

    Basically, what I’m saying is: keep in mind other communities’ opinions about the game, but don’t go so far in addressing them that the game doesn’t feel like a Marathon game anymore.
  2. Re: Craig’s remixes not having the same atmosphere as the originals, I strongly agree with this, as much as I love them. I’ve actually done mild remixes of all sixteen songs myself, but I never bothered posting them here because they’re not drastically different from the originals. Time to remedy that. I mostly added stereo panning and added some new instrument tracks that followed existing ones. You’re welcome to use them with credit if you like; I have them posted in FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or .m4a. I think the ones I’m fondest of are “Flippant”, “New Pacific (reprise)”, “Splash (Marathon)”, “Swirls”, and “What About Bob?”. Again, these aren’t radical reinterpretations, but they keep the same atmosphere as the originals and make, I think, better usage of the QT2.5 instruments. Which I used as the base because, to me, the QT2.5 instruments have always been key to the original game’s atmosphere.
I definitely agree with a lot of the other suggestions above. I’ll add more later, perhaps, if I feel up to it. For now I’m going to encode my latest gameplay video from my own scenario.
“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

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ravenshining
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No problem keeping it Marathon. I think the only other FPS I've ever enjoyed nearly as much as Marathon was System Shock... and to stretch the genre even further, Alien Isolation. Please don't even talk about Doom, I hate it so.

Maybe I could look into the music tomorrow. It's kinda been on the back burner since a) it works already, b) I like Craig's remixes, c) Craig has given me permission to use them, and d) there have been far more important things to worry about. But, I've downloaded a fair number of remixes, and I did take a music appreciation course at university last fall... I could sit down and take a serious listen. I think that would be a fairly relaxing thing to do that I would otherwise say "blarg I don't have time there is too much map/physics/shapes/code to do!" about.
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The Man
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I have a particularly strange idea that I came up with at 4:20 am last night (not, alas, under the influence of 420), but it still sounds reasonable at 11 am, so I’ll go ahead and post it.

Use more than one version per level.

The main reason I’m suggesting this is because most of these levels take a long time to complete, especially on higher difficulties. There’s something to be said for not hearing the same three-minute arrangement ten times in a thirty-minute level – players might get sick of it. I’m aware that these versions have different atmospheres and establish different moods, but that’s probably fine; it might even be a good thing. And I think I remember reading that A1 can be programmed to use more than one track on the same level, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.

I don’t know for certain how well it would work, nor do I understand how to write code to implement it yet, but it might be better than just designating one version of each track per level.

If needed, I can find a way to stitch multiple versions of each track together into one track, but I’d prefer having FLAC versions of each of them to work with if so.
“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

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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ravenshining
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The Man wrote:Use more than one version per level.
Flippant Sol wrote:Also, if you can make new music, why not use Lua to make it dynamic and segmented according to where the player is?
^this. I would love to do.
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HelviusRufus
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One o the wonderful things about blue Marathon is that you can use any .ogg files you want to simply by replacing the Tracks folder file with your own. One o the files I use is over 50 minutes long. This is only the blue marathons though, the brown, silver, and green, don't have the same system. Though, I must admit, I haven't substituted any .ogg files in M1R yet so I don't know if'n it still works that way. It seems that earlier some problems were being caused by a music file.

Another thing, as I've said before, if'n you don't like M1R, you don't have to play it, you can still play the regular blue Marathons; either the single fisted one or the two fisted one. This isn't like some games, the new does not replace the old, so per laborem ad astra.

It's like Eternal X: I've got three of those; each has its pluses and minuses.
I just play 'em; I don't know how they work.
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The Man
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I like the idea of changing the music based on the section of the level, but it’d have to be implemented in a way that didn’t have sudden cutoffs. Maybe it’s possible to crossfade tracks or else just only queue one up after the current one finishes. For me the ultimate case of mood-based VGM is the final battle theme for Final Fantasy VI, for my money the best VGM track that ever has been or probably ever will be composed. This is from a patched version of the SNES game and the video quality is awful, but the sound quality is decent enough to give an idea how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgcbShn9x8g

Of course, Uematsu composed “Dancing Mad” specifically with the intention of having each movement lead into the next. As a result, there are smooth transitions between each battle – but this requires it only to transition between movements at specific points in each piece, meaning that each time you move to a new tier of the final boss (apart from the final one, where the music fades out briefly), you may still get the old music for as long as ninety seconds or so. Ordinarily fine, since unless you’re speedrunning, you’ll probably spend at least three minutes on each segment. Note that the transitions seem to be timed unusually well in this video.

Anyway, I doubt you’d get transitions this smooth with Lua if you simply used unaltered versions of each remix, but it might be possible to make connecting segments between each track you used in a specific level that would sound good. I don’t know if it would play seamlessly – you’d probably have to use FLAC or Ogg to get that, because MP3 and M4A usually pad the beginning and end of each track with a few frames of silence, and I doubt A1’s music player is sophisticated enough to remove them. Of course, if the silence remains between tracks even with Ogg or FLAC, it’s a moot point.

(random aside: please don’t use MP3 unless you have to. It’s a lousy, lousy format. The later versions of the LAME encoder are better than they used to be, but if you have to use a lossy format, Ogg and M4A both usually give you better audio quality for the same file size, and they seem to be better at preserving dynamic range as well. I realise MP3 has been standard for decades now, but it kinda sucks because it’s an old format. Ogg is probably best due to being open source and preserving gapless transitions, but M4A is still better than MP3.)


ETA: speaking of dynamic range, if the scenario uses music files from multiple creators it’s best to make sure the levels are reasonably consistent between songs so that a loud song doesn’t end up blasting one’s eardrums out after a quiet one. I mastered my own remixes to DR13 (with an RMS of -19.8 dB), so they’re really quiet in comparison to most modern music. (Note that the version in my Dropbox might be DR12 with RMS of -17.6 dB instead, which is still really quiet. I actually spent a fair amount of time making them more dynamic than they originally were some twenty years when I burned them to CD, applying mild declipping and a phase rotation filter.) Some modern creators may not know enough about mastering to understand the problems with making the levels too high, or simply may not care (I think Craig’s remixes probably have good dynamic range, but I haven’t listened to most of the other remixers’ work often enough to be able to tell), so this may not be consistent from track to track.

…of course, if A1’s music player pays attention to ReplayGain info, this may not actually matter
“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

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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ravenshining
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HelviusRufus wrote:One o the wonderful things about blue Marathon is that you can use any .ogg files you want to simply by replacing the Tracks folder file with your own.
You can still do that with M1R. Just make sure the name is the same.
The Man wrote:Maybe it’s possible to crossfade tracks or else just only queue one up after the current one finishes.
I'm happy with however it might possibly work. If there's a way for a Lua script to trigger when the current track ends, that might be easiest - e.g. on The Rose, play Aliens Again (original), when the track ends check the state of the mission, if unfinished play Aliens Again again, if success play What About Bob? (CH's weirdly upbeat version), if failed play Aliens Again (CH's creepy piano version).
The Man wrote:please don’t use MP3 unless you have to.
I know mp3 is dated, and obviously if a track comes to me in lossless format I'll encode it with OGG. It happens that the tracks I have came to me in mp3 format, and there's no sense in re-encoding them. And yes I am painfully aware of dynamic range issues and know how to deal with them.
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Yeah, I wouldn’t ever suggest someone transcode MP3 to Ogg just because the latter is a better format – you actually lose quality in so doing. If you’re converting from a lossless source, though, MP3 isn’t ideal, at least from a quality standpoint. Unfortunately, it’s still by far the most widely supported.

(For instance, my car’s inbuilt music player doesn’t support Ogg, while my father’s doesn’t support M4A, but they both support MP3. Both are fairly recent models, and I don’t understand why they don’t support formats that have existed since 2000 [Ogg] and 2001/2003 [M4A] now. This is one reason I always keep lossless sources of music when I have them, even though I can’t really tell the difference between lossless and high-quality lossy encodes anymore. [The other is that I almost always remaster modern music due to the loudness war.])

Might be worth asking Craig and the others if they still have the FLAC sources. I’d like to have them myself.

I like the idea of changing the music based on the mission outcome, though I’d still probably use more than one version of each song before the mission success/failure because many of those levels take a long time before such a branch point is possible.

I might have more to say later, but I’m the one feeling lousy now. Rotten timing, too, since I’ve just started a new job. Hopefully I can suffer through it without having to call in sick.
“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

Last.fm · Marathon Chronicles · Marathon Eternal 1.2 · Where Monsters Are in Dreams · YouTube Vidmaster’s Challenge
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General-RADIX wrote:@Flippant Sol: Man, is the Doom community THAT harsh on Marathon? How high are their standards if they think the shotguns' sound effects are "anemic"?
The gold standard for shotguns is Doom 2, so, pretty high.
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I've always thought the doom2 super shotgun sounded like someone dropping a bag of flour more than a gun.
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Doom sucks and no true Marathonner should heed the worthleaa opinion of a Doom fan.
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ravenshining
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I'm back.

Re-reading the documentation I found earlier - and actually saving it to my hard disk this time! - I found the mission flags, set them to 0x0043 (Extermination, M2 Exploration, and M1 Rescue), merged, and yes, Aleph One indeed displays the proper terminal messages. Sorry about all the fuss, everyone. I'll, uh, go close my PR now...

The ideas raised about keeping track of things with Lua instead of missions may still be useful - for example, if the mission fails because the player killed off the BoBs, we could swap out the Failure message for a pissed-off Leela message. It also might refine the branching storyline, if we check on the total casualty count instead of the current casualty count, which looks like it persists across levels?

It's nice to see the M1 Exploration mission type is supported, which will be useful later on. And, I shall have to remember to set environment flags 0x0410 (M1 weapons pickup, respect glue polygons) on every level.

Random thought I had a few days ago: On the first few levels, the slow staff is really not fun. Maybe instead of having it that slow, you don't know how to actually zap people with it yet, and so you basically wield it like a quarterstaff with a flashlight on top, giving you a bit more reach than your fist.

This reminds me, Pfhor are generally thinner and lighter than humans and are superbly adapted for low gravity environments. Maybe the melee attack does more damage in Battleroid hands? If I have a separate, more powerful melee attack for the player, I could go back to not needing discreet keypresses on the second trigger and have it still be balanced. I changed that way because if the ammo and firing rate are the same, there's little reason to ever use the melee attack as it does less damage.

With fewer melee shots per charge, maybe Lua could be used to provide the flashlight functionality as long as the weapon is in hand. Currently, I have it set to just have a long flash decay, and I'm not sure that works with co-op - does a player's muzzle flash affect everyone's view in the area, or does it only light the area up from one player's perspective? If not, maybe that could be done with Lua, too.

Another question about co-op: Do I need to have eight player objects in different spots? Obviously this works best most of the time, but on a level like Arrival where I'm starting you in the escape pod, can I have them all on the same spot, or only have one player object, without problems?
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-I'd say go for the heavier staff attack, it makes sense that the pfhor cant swing as hard as the player. Allowing it to impart more knockback would be good for keeping melee enemies at bay.

-Fellow players cant see each other's attack flashes, as they operate on the light intensity/distance scaling for the player camera.

-I think you should be able to have as many players spawn from as few points as you want, if you don't mind having people overlap. Two or three spawns are plenty for most cases.
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I haven't had much time to put into Redux - classes resume in 3 weeks and I still need to fix my vehicle - but sometimes when I'm eating I'll put on Narcogen and Blackstar's old playthough of M1A1 for ideas, as well as to see how less-skilled players handle things.

One point that repeatedly comes up is them being confused about how much ammo they have and what ammo is for what. Since they're using the XBLA HUD, they don't see that they've just, for a frequent example, picked up AR ammo when they have no AR. So, there's another point in favour of scripting an inventory panel - while it may be obvious to veteran players that yellow = pistol and red = AR, this is apparently not the case for casual players.
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Thanks to one sleepless night and finding a copy of Pfhorte, I've gone through and:
• restored glue, glue trigger, and superglue polygons for monster activation fidelity
• All levels now have Glue, M1 weapons, and M1 activation flags set
• some also have Ouch is Lava and/or Terminals Stop Time where appropriate
• Every level except Arrival has eight starting positions
• Generally restored Ouch and Must Be Explored polygons, with some artistic license
• Shallowed the lava in many places
• Exploration missions set to M1 exploration (you only have to look at the polygons, not traverse them)
• Rescue missions now behave properly
• Lots of other little things I'm forgetting
• Merged. https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R
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I noticed while playtesting some enemies not activating properly. I checked in Weland, and saw these monsters set to deaf and blind. Meanwhile in Pfhorte, there appears to be no deaf or blind setting. So, it seems M1A1 relied on blindness, deafness, and triggers to activate monsters in a crude way of emulating M1 behaviour, triggers that I've gone and removed while converting to glue. That means I need to either:

A.) go through and locate every blind and/or deaf monster, and unblind/undeafen them
B.) go through and locate every blind and/or deaf monster, and add in triggers and superglue / zone borders
C.) revert all my latest changes and go back to blind/deaf monsters and monster triggers M1A1 style

I'd rather not do C - and most certainly will not on any level containing BoBs as BoBs are restricted from zone borders - but it will be awfully tedious clicking on every monster to see whether they are blind and/or deaf. It sure would be nice if there were a way to automate unblinding/undeafening, or some way to automatically or visually locate such monsters.

It appears that as of the latest GitHub "Unphforgiven" is unbeatable due to infinite spawning monsters and the mission set to Extermination. Also, I apparently did not set Ouch consistently or add in goo sounds on Pfhor slime. Fixes scheduled to be completed next update cycle concurrently with additional pending tasks concurrently.
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Assuming solution A is actually a good solution, create a weland plugin to loop through monsters and set their flags. It would be pretty easy (maybe 20 lines of code or something, mostly copy + paste from some other plugin).
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Well, in the meantime I started going though and looking for them in Weland, a tedious process especially since you have to wait a second or two after clicking each monster before it loads its data. Then I got distracted and did this:
TheRose_0002.jpg
Those windows are zone borders, so the fight below doesn't ordinarily affect the hallway above, and it's dark so you can't ordinarily see through them anyway, but there are fun things you can do, tempting things that make winning the mission harder. I also may have finally solved the BoB jam in the hallway with the switch pillar.

Then I started adding appropriate goo sounds to the Pfhor ship levels, and got distracted again:
PfhorYourEyesOnly_0000.jpg
Getting that balcony to look right was fun :-) For the moment I've locked the secret door to get up there as it's unfinished. I also added another external vista elsewhere that ties in with my landscape, but I may move it later.

I was about to get a whole lot more distracted when I saw the time, focused, added appropriate goo and pfhor ship sounds across all Pfhor levels, reset Unpfhorgiven back to just Exploration, and uploaded a merge to GitHub.
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I added a plugin to my collection of weland plugins to bulk modify the monster flags for all monsters on a level.

I probably needed to recompile them all anyway with the new version of Weland.
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ravenshining
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Wow, that's awesome, Wrk! Thank you, you just saved me a ton of work!

And yeah, I had to recompile most of your plugins for them to work. Also had to edit the makefiles, because apparently it was spitting out executables named "Plugins" instead of moving the dll file to the Plugins folder. I tried adding a /, but that just resulted in complaints, so I cut the line and moved them myself.
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Wrkncacnter
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Weird. Oh well, glad you got them working somehow. I still don't understand why my compiled versions don't work for other people.
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Brought this up on the story forum:

Image

The colour scheme of those "orderlies" isn't seen anywhere else, so I did this:
civillianpfhor.png
civillianpfhor.png (7.1 KiB) Viewed 9662 times
I think it would make a good noncombatant for the Pfhor scoutship.

Sorry about the lack of updates in forever. My free time has run out for the summer, expect further updates to be more sporadic until December.
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