We haven’t posted anything in a while, but rest assured this project absolutely is not dead. In fact, there’s probably been more development for this project in the past couple of weeks than there had been in the several months preceding it. A few screenshots of work-in-progress levels (monster placement, textures, architecture, and level names all subject to further change):
“Thou Shalt Not Be Pfhorgiven”, mainly by CryoS; a level originally for created the abandoned
Rubicon expansion
Marathon Syndicate (more on which shortly). I went through and cleared out a lot of extraneous polygons so I could place ambient sound objects, along with various other subtle revisions. It had more than 2,450 polygons when I started and somehow still ran without crashing. (That is definitely the largest polygon count I have ever seen in a functional map.) I got it down to 2,304. CryoS has revised the geometry a bit further; his current revision has fewer than that, but he may add more to it.
This level is in the process of being remastered, and what you see above is running in
Rubicon. The
WMAiD version will have different textures. Not drastically different – we’re using the Nebulon set, which is heavily inspired by the Pfhor sets in
Rubicon. So basically, imagine these screenshots in mostly pink and purple instead.
Syndicate was one of those ambitious mods that died due to people's lack of time to contribute to it - which I'm fully aware could happen to
WMAiD as well, but our large backlog of unfinished maps like this one gives us more of a cushion. CryoS has another
Syndicate level that may end up showing up in
Chronicles, since it probably wouldn't fit in
WMAiD. I think one of the other mapmakers may have used their contributions for other projects. No idea what happened to the others.
“Thrudnesday”: architecture and shading by Drictelt; textures, monster placement, and sounds by me. (Monster placement is nowhere near finished.) This is one of the most C Lund-like levels I’ve come across that wasn’t actually made by C Lund, so I chose to give it the UESG textures, which are the
Chimera textures from
Rubicon with a few modifications. I’m fairly sure I won’t keep this monster placement, which may not even fit the story, depending upon where we slot this level in. This is on the lower end of the polygon count by
WMAiD standards with
only 970 polygons, though I may add some more later on in development. Credit to Drictelt for some spectacular shading on this level.
This map was, to my understanding, intended for an abandoned project variously entitled
Marathon Shadow and
Marathon Afterlife, more on which later. We have most of the assets from
Afterlife, and they will see the light of day in some form at some point; however, the primary creator has asked that we retexture them all before showing them to the public, and we’re honouring that request. Since I’m not actually sure what texture sets to use for most of them, that’s a project that will have to wait, which is part of the reason I’ve chosen these two maps to showcase.
(Also, no disrespect to Drictelt, but there’s probably no way we’re keeping this level title. If nothing else, I suspect we’ll want something you can easily pronounce.)
You’ll hopefully see a bigger update with a couple of actual videos within the next couple of weeks. I’ll also see about us releasing a playable demo, hopefully at some point this year (before the full game is done, hopefully, next year).