Marathon: Infested *IMPORTANT UPDATE*

Discuss and unveil current Marathon projects.
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infestedsmith
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effigy wrote:Cool. I was hoping for something equivalent to the dim3 engine demo, or even the Halathon weapons test. That sounds even better, though. I hope it works out.
Rest assured, the final release, even without the long campaign I had hoped for, will have all 9 Marathon weapons, plus another secret one.
There will be bots to fight in offline multiplayer, and two types of survival modes to play on solo.

I'm not leaving anybody out, and this sure as heck ain't gonna be a tech demo or a weapons test. It'll be a fully complete game designed for offline and online play.
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infestedsmith wrote:Rest assured, the final release, even without the long campaign I had hoped for, will have all 9 Marathon weapons, plus another secret one.
There will be bots to fight in offline multiplayer, and two types of survival modes to play on solo.

I'm not leaving anybody out, and this sure as heck ain't gonna be a tech demo or a weapons test. It'll be a fully complete game designed for offline and online play.
So it will have a gameplay kinda like Unreal tournament?
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infestedsmith
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The gameplay will (hopefully) be just like Marathon, but the end result is a bit like UT, yeah . :)
Last edited by infestedsmith on Feb 18th '09, 20:41, edited 1 time in total.
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Can't wait to actually see this.
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No single player campaign?

Lost all interest.

You should release the plot and story via PDF.
In a format that tells the story by means of unraveling the story as it would be if I were playing through the game.
I wanna know the story. I'll never be able to play it. But I wanna read it at least.

No story, no interest.
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MoppyPuppy wrote:No single player campaign?

Lost all interest.

You should release the plot and story via PDF.
In a format that tells the story by means of unraveling the story as it would be if I were playing through the game.
I wanna know the story. I'll never be able to play it. But I wanna read it at least.

No story, no interest.
I'm pretty sure you just completely skipped the entire thread and only read the "no story" part. In Infested's defense, he admitted a singleplayer story was too much for him to tackle and he just flat out didn't want to do it. So instead of releasing something half-assed, and unenjoyable, he decided to do a very nice MP build.

You somehow assume that we care if you think there should be a story after the fact. It's rather pitiful.
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Alexander is making an awesome MP game with what will be a great survival mode. Considering he never really told us what the story was about we are not loosing some amazing story we've been waiting years for (since I don't know what it is, I don't how great it is Alex ;) ).

MoppyPuppy, you do understand all of the work involved in making a mod on your own? Let alone making it in a new engine? I think infestedsmith made the correct decision on this one and I for one can't wait to play the survival mode.

BTW, how's it going infestedsmith? Have you decided for sure what monsters will be in the survival mode?
Last edited by Winter_Wolf on Apr 17th '09, 23:00, edited 1 time in total.
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I wonder how the feel of the game will be once it's done. It looks nice.
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Sorry for ignoring this thread for so long. I've been caught up in other things, and I forgot all about it!

Progress is going very well. I encourage you to please check out the website: http://infested.coldfusiongames.com/
You can keep an eye on the latest updates, and see the new stuff I'm working on.

I also have a forum: http://www.coldfusiongames.com/forum/

And yes Winter Wolf, I have decided what the monsters will be. You can check out the forum thread I have on the subject.
Please note, I will be releasing all the monsters eventually, and minor updates, but for now, I think these will do well.


As for the story. I again apologize for not coming through with it, but it simply proved to daunting a task. I would be happy to release a PDF of the story, maybe including concepts of locations and all, that'd be a pretty cool thing to do. Thanks for the idea.
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i really like the models
keep up the good work
Its just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns and also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?
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**Copied and pasted from my weekly updates**

Okay! Boom! New lightmapped maps, with some monsters, cool lighting effects, and a great report!





Report:

* Imported all monsters into project.
* Basic rigging/animation/SFX for Pfhor Fighter
* Basic rigging/animation/SFX for Pfhor Trooper
* Basic rigging/animation/SFX for Cyborg
* Basic rigging for Juggernaut
* Basic AI for Cyborg/Fighter/Trooper/Drone
* New lightmaps/lighting FX for Thunderdome
* New lightmaps/lighting FX for Route 66
* Modeled/Textured Cyborg Grenade
* Created new projectiles for Fighter/Trooper/Cyborg
* New Normal/Specular maps for Sewage Set
* New Normal/Specular maps for Lava Set
* And more that I can't remember now...


Don't forget guys, weekly updates at http://infested.coldfusiongames.com/
Last edited by infestedsmith on May 26th '09, 13:39, edited 1 time in total.
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Looking good! [MUp]
Last edited by ukimalefu on May 26th '09, 14:56, edited 1 time in total.
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Will you fix the hands? It kind of bugs me that you can see the skin... The beautiful thing in Marathon is that you don't know what the Marine really looks like and what kind of ethnicity he is. Also, it looks weird without the gloves.
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Chiabos wrote:Will you fix the hands? It kind of bugs me that you can see the skin... The beautiful thing in Marathon is that you don't know what the Marine really looks like and what kind of ethnicity he is. Also, it looks weird without the gloves.
This has already been speculated about, but I don't think Infested's models ruin anything.
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Perhaps it could be optional, so if you choose The Marine/Security Guard/Cyborg you get glove'd hands, and if you choose a BoB, you get normalish hands?

By the way, were you planning some original enemies of you own design? Perhaps add an optional option that makes them avaliable in the survival mode?
Like Classic for normal Marathon enemies and Infested for the extra?

Anyhow, good to see this progressing.
Last edited by Yowza on May 26th '09, 18:09, edited 1 time in total.
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Definitely like the design of the Fusion Pistol.
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Many thanks for all the comments.



That looks like skin to me, not gloves. You can see the player's skin quite clearly in the player sprites, as well as in WiH sprites. Mullins also painted the player as light skinned.
Last edited by infestedsmith on May 26th '09, 21:10, edited 1 time in total.
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Infested Smith
I disagree with you on both your claims.

1) To me those are clearly gloves. A dark skinned person don't have the same hue on his/her palms as on the back of the hand and the rest of the body. It is usually a little fairer. Also, there are no visible nails (there isn't the slightest hint of a thumbnail on that thumb). On top of that I don't see why he wouldn't wear gloves when the suit itself cover most of his body except his mouth and chin - all BOBs in M2/M:I wear gloves.

2) Oh no, in some of the pictures the Marine is definitely dark skinned, but in the most of them the skin color and ethnicity is hard to decide, which I think is genius and makes the Tenth Mjolnir even more enigmatic.

Here are a few pictures by Mullins where the Marine is clearly a person of color:
http://marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins/marine2.lg.jpg
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pi...llins/img/6.jpg
And in this one he could be of any nationality/creed/race/ethnicity/whatever:
http://www.johnwallin.net/bilder/marathon.jpg

But this is your game so I guess you have the artistic freedom to interpret things the way you feel like. I'm just surprised that people thought that what I see as gloves can be seen as the actual skin of the Marine. I have never thought about it in that way before. Oh, and while we're talking about subjectivity; I, for some reason, always thought the Marine/Tenth Mjolnir was mixed: half Afro-American and half Caucasian-American (or half Latino)... I picture him to look like Gary Dourdan ( http://www.wildbluffmedia.com/wp-content/u...rdan_header.jpg ), but with short hair, battle scars and no beard.
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infestedsmith wrote:Many thanks for all the comments.
That looks like skin to me, not gloves. You can see the player's skin quite clearly in the player sprites, as well as in WiH sprites. Mullins also painted the player as light skinned.
That was my intention in posting that image.

@Chiabos: I agree, in the grand scheme of things it's so insignificant. I see it as the shading on the inside of the palm doesn't really clarify either way - in a sense it's like Marathon: Infinity, always ambiguous, leaving conclusions up to the player.
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Yeah, true, I guess you can interpret it in that way... It's just that to me it has always been 'obvious' that the Marine wear gloves, since the thumb lacks a thumbnail and the texture looks more like matte polished leather than skin. And in the hi-res weapon enhancement application the gloves turned grayish black (looking like rubbery black dish-washing gloves), and in Durandal XBLA you can clearly see that those are gloves... I'm just puzzled- no, bamboozled, that we have interpreted this graphical detail in such different ways. Nothing wrong with that though! Marathon is the closest thing to art we get when in comes to FPSs, so I'm totally cool with that!

Nonetheless, the Tenth Mjolnir's identity has never been uncovered, and I like it that way. May he be black, may he be white... maybe he's Asian or Hindu, maybe his Borg 'gray'... ...That is also a reason why I adamantly interpret it as gloves and not his skin color - I want each and everyone of us to have our own idea about what this killing machine looks like, hence why I think the light skinned hands in Infestedsmith's Marathon game ruins it for me... It does, it truly ruins it for me because it doesn't feel like Marathon to me, even though the rest of the graphics are amazing and I'm really impressed by the work and effort (blood, sweat and tears) Infestedsmith has invested in this project. But I guess that you can't make everyone happy.
Last edited by Tomfritz on May 27th '09, 04:28, edited 1 time in total.
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Such a fuss over color. The game strongly implies that the Marine is not fully human, and was not born on Earth, which makes trying to assign him a race a pointless exercise.
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infestedsmith
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Chiabos wrote:Infested Smith
I disagree with you on both your claims.

1) To me those are clearly gloves. A dark skinned person don't have the same hue on his/her palms as on the back of the hand and the rest of the body. It is usually a little fairer. Also, there are no visible nails (there isn't the slightest hint of a thumbnail on that thumb). On top of that I don't see why he wouldn't wear gloves when the suit itself cover most of his body except his mouth and chin - all BOBs in M2/M:I wear gloves.

2) Oh no, in some of the pictures the Marine is definitely dark skinned, but in the most of them the skin color and ethnicity is hard to decide, which I think is genius and makes the Tenth Mjolnir even more enigmatic.

Here are a few pictures by Mullins where the Marine is clearly a person of color:
http://marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins/marine2.lg.jpg
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pi...llins/img/6.jpg
And in this one he could be of any nationality/creed/race/ethnicity/whatever:
http://www.johnwallin.net/bilder/marathon.jpg

But this is your game so I guess you have the artistic freedom to interpret things the way you feel like. I'm just surprised that people thought that what I see as gloves can be seen as the actual skin of the Marine. I have never thought about it in that way before. Oh, and while we're talking about subjectivity; I, for some reason, always thought the Marine/Tenth Mjolnir was mixed: half Afro-American and half Caucasian-American (or half Latino)... I picture him to look like Gary Dourdan ( http://www.wildbluffmedia.com/wp-content/u...rdan_header.jpg ), but with short hair, battle scars and no beard.
Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. If people have problems with it, I'll change it gloves. However, I must say, that looking at the other WiH sprites (shotgun) and the player sprites, it looks very much like the player is either Caucasian or Hispanic. You can't see the distinct lines for thumbnails, not at that resolution, but you can see the clear outlines of the thumbnail on some shotgun sprites. The enhancement mod has black gloves, and the Durandal game has obvious gloves, but as you say, those are both interpretations. Even though the skin of the marine is often painted fairly dark, the highlights in the skin are clearly (to me) pinkish, and brighter.

If you look at the BoB sprites, the same skin tone as in the WiH sprites is there too. For the security color table, the skin changes to a very obvious dark skin version.


Anyway, if it hurts people's ideas of what the marine looks like, I'll make the player wear gloves.
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infestedsmith wrote:Anyway, if it hurts people's ideas of what the marine looks like, I'll make the player wear gloves.
Only one person seems really bothered by it and someone will always disagree with your decisions. Personally, I think you should work on the more important things rather than redoing the WiH graphics for Infested.

On another note, those new screenshots look great! I really can't wait to play Infested!
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I agree with you, that's why I like that the Marine (according to me, Durandal XBLA, hi-res weap. package, and possible the Marathon Trilogy) wear gloves and that you can't see any skin - i.e. we don't know what he really looks like.

Infestedsmith
1) Well, that is kind of my point indirectly... I think that aspect, i.e. that the humans in Marathon, look like they could be of any human ethnicity, is genius. Here they use the same model for all humans in M2 (and M:I), and yet there is diversity to it just because it is open for our interpretation to compound the visual information (graphics). Sure, the graphics are old and a little blurry, but other games from that time clearly delivered us the good old All-White Cast (with the token black guy) transfered into sprites. Marathon on the other hand opens up the stereotypical framework and let us interpret, which I think is pretty rad!

2)No, I don't think you should change it unless you really want to change it; only change it if it is based on what YOU think, not on what I think. This game is your project and therefore it is you who decide what is 'right' and what is 'wrong'. You don't have any obligation to me or to anyone. Don't let my opinion/point of view/interpretation of things mess up your flow. You have your interpretation of Marathon (which I like... except the 'gloves/'hands') and I have mine. With that said: Keep up the good job Infestedsmith!
Last edited by Tomfritz on May 27th '09, 23:05, edited 1 time in total.
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Well, it wouldn't really big a big deal to make the textures look like gloves. But even then, I'd still have to deal with the Bob and Player models, which have exposed skin, and it's way harder to do this in 3D then in 2D, since in 2D, you only see from certain views, no lighting effects, ect. Still, it's just one texture for the hands, not a series of pre-rendered sprites. I might do something with it later if I can.

I don't suppose anyone would have any objections to a dark brown glove or black glove? I like black gloves, but I want to be sure to avoid the whole Mickey Mouse look, if you know what I mean. :)
Last edited by infestedsmith on May 28th '09, 04:12, edited 1 time in total.
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