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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Okay maybe not five minutes. Naturally I got waaaaaaay to involved and it wound up being NINE HOURS ON THIS WTF AM I DOING?

but hey it works. waaay more than it should. it does in M2 and M∞ anyway. shoooould mostly work in M1R but I didn't test it, might do funny things.
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ravenshining
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Continuing on with the quest to balance the monster population for the difficulty shift, I did Couch Fishing yesterday, and of course...

These rotated textures work great for making continuous lines around bends. I displayed that on the previous page on Defend THIS!, here's a new service corridor on Couch Fishing that allows you to return from the vats to the maze:
CouchFishing_0011.jpeg
Of course I neglected to make it possible to access before I pushed the merged map up, but... next weekend. Not entirely sure how I want to handle it anyway.

Here's a bit that connects the bottom of two vats with the maze. The liquid is moving fast and there are macerators so it's effectively one way just like the doors on the walkway above it, the window from the maze is purely for inspection. I'm not happy with how this looks, open to suggestions.
CouchFishing_0017.jpeg
At the very least I should put some different texture above and below the window, I don't like how it cuts in to the pattern like that. I'd lower the bottom sill, but then I'd have to lower the liquid, the ceiling of the passage, and the bottom of the vats... but it would look better. Hm. Or I could put a glass texture so it looks like glass is holding the liquid back, except that would involve some complicated polygons to make look right.
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HelviusRufus
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Some observations (aliquae animadversiones)

Complete G4 and the program crashes with
-------------------- Mon Sep 16 00:23:51 2019
Unhandled exception: std::bad_alloc (shell.cpp:381)

Try to scratch start Blaspheme Quarantine and it crashes with
-------------------- Mon Sep 16 00:27:30 2019
Unhandled exception: std::bad_alloc (shell.cpp:381)

Bob B Q scratch starts OK but you have to kill oodles o BoBs just to be able to move around.

Using 13 map downloaded Aug 19th from Github
I just play 'em; I don't know how they work.
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Flippant Sol
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After work tomorrow, I'm going to download the latest build of this and see if I can something I know I can fix. The game is running on the old M1A1 build, right?
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ravenshining
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Flippant Sol wrote:After work tomorrow, I'm going to download the latest build of this and see if I can something I know I can fix. The game is running on the old M1A1 build, right?
Hey, glad to have you back!

M1R hasn't required M1A1 since the very first 0.0.1 alpha. All it needs is Aleph One.

Download link for the 0.0.13-a release download from this past July (544 MiB once unzipped):
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/arc ... -alpha.zip

Download link for the latest merged map:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... 20Map.sceA

You also might want these two updated scripts:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... rlight.mml
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... xtures.mml

Current to-do list (warning, very long):
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/blo ... r/TODO.txt

And of course the whole project lives here:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R
HelviusRufus wrote:Unhandled exception: std::bad_alloc (shell.cpp:381)
That's most likely an out-of-memory error. Have you tried turning off plugins or reducing replacement texture resolution? I do plan on making the replacement textures a plugin rather than just on all the time. Myself, I frequently get sementation faults. They are sporadic and unpredictable, often repeating the same behaviour does not result in repeating the error, but turning off plugins and lowering texture resolution helps prevent them.

I can also tell from that error that you're apparently running Aleph One 1.2.1. I have a "new"(er) machine coming that runs Windows 7 and therefore should be able to run the 1.2.1, until then, as it has been always, I can only test on Aleph One 1.3.

Although, come to think of it, I do have a Windows XP partition on this computer. I suppose I could have put Aleph One on there... I just tend to forget that partition exists.

Also, I recently learned that the Redux soundfile may be corrupt, apparently it won't open in Shapefusion for people whose computers can run it. I never noticed this as I use Wail for sound file editing. A rebuild of the sound file may be in order, and the time may be opportune as Aaron has been putting together a sound remaster for Infinity and hopefully M1. Perhaps a non-corrupt sound file will cut down on these mysterious errors.
HelviusRufus wrote:Bob B Q scratch starts OK but you have to kill oodles o BoBs just to be able to move around.
Haha, yeah, especially now that they fight back a lot more of them survive. I haven't touched Bob-B-Q's geometry at all, only bob and texture replacement. As I continue to go through the scenario to balance monster distribution, I'll make a point to stop and do some monster path building on BBQ as well.

Thank you for continuing to plug away with testing and bug reports, Helvius!
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Flippant Sol
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From what I've gathered so far, Bigger Guns Nearby right now has three major problems
1: A visual information problem
As in film there needs to be an "establishing shot". Usually games do this by starting players in a big room so they can get a sense of the visual cues and they have an inclination to move forward. Bigger Guns spawns you any which way in this awkward teleporter room where you have to make your way through pitch black darkness to the terminal. The original Bigger Guns solved this by having a simple teleporter room where the player was facing towards the terminal and when spawned, you could see the shadow of light produced by the terminal screen that curves around the corridor. In our WIP state, the terminals don't have any graphics, so they can't produce light. A solution would be to re-aim all of the player spawns in the direction of the terminal and use static floor lighting to convey a sense of direction for the player. I will see if I can cook something up for this when I wake up tomorrow. I'll even smooth out the sound so its more realistic.
2: A spatial clutter problem
Now I'm not saying the original level didn't have some tight squeeze issues, it definitely did, but due to the excessive use of scenery, the player is blocked from moving freely. A similar effect to what the scenery offers could be replicated using a transparent and no-clip texture as railing that the player could move through freely, albeit at a reduced height. If there's a way of disabling scenery collision, we should look into that also.
3: There's too many enemies
I'll adjust this too when I wake up. Bigger Guns is meant to be both a starter level and a "test your might" level. I'd say if you want more enemies, have them spawn after the player drops down from the pattern buffer staircase, after the player has found said Bigger Guns and can make good use of it.

On another note, is Craig Hardgrove involved with M1R? Are we using his soundtrack as placeholder? Do we already have another musician doing new music? I could pitch in a track or two if wanted.
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HelviusRufus
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Just a short update:
I'm currently using the -LAA version.

BQ works on 13b2 and Treellama's special version
treellama wrote: Did you try my LAA build of 1.3b3? http://treellama.org/AlephOne-LAA.zip
but crashes on 121 and ordinary 13b3
I just play 'em; I don't know how they work.
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The Man
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Helvius, have you tried 1.3b2 as well? For some reason, it sometimes seems to load levels for me on Windows that 1.3b3 has problems with. I have no idea why, and isolating possible causes (or even more information about which levels 1.3b2 loads that 1.3b3 won’t) is on my list of things to do so that Hopper and/or TL can hopefully fix it for the final release, but I’ve got a number of other things I’m concerned with first, including the sound remastering project Raven mentioned above.

I’m glad this project is still going on, and maybe I’ll give it a closer look again now that it’s playable from start to finish. (Also, I’m still waiting on those retextured versions of “Not *This* Again…” so I can put together the Redux version of PYEO.) I’m not likely to play it on Insane anytime soon, though!
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ravenshining
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Flippant Sol wrote:Bigger Guns spawns you any which way in this awkward teleporter room where you have to make your way through pitch black darkness to the terminal.
Did you download the scripts I linked and replace the ones from the 0.0.13-a release with them? That should alleviate the pitch blackness considerably, although not totally.
Flippant Sol wrote:As in film there needs to be an "establishing shot"... The original Bigger Guns solved this by having a simple teleporter room where the player was facing towards the terminal and when spawned, you could see the shadow of light produced by the terminal screen that curves around the corridor.
A very good point! I never really noticed that about the original.

I should point out that in the original, you do not start in a position to see the light from the terminal, however, it is immediately around the bend. In M1A1 it's possible to start with the terminal light in view, but that's because it spawns players randomly about the corridor rather than on the jump pad.
Flippant Sol wrote:In our WIP state, the terminals don't have any graphics, so they can't produce light.
Something sounds very wrong there! Can you provide a screenshot of this? The terminals most certainly should have graphics!
Flippant Sol wrote:A solution would be to re-aim all of the player spawns in the direction of the terminal and use static floor lighting to convey a sense of direction for the player. I will see if I can cook something up for this when I wake up tomorrow. I'll even smooth out the sound so its more realistic.
Great suggestions! Here, I got things started in weland but I don't have time to fire up Vasara right now:

https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... earby.sceA

Flippant Sol wrote:due to the excessive use of scenery, the player is blocked from moving freely. A similar effect to what the scenery offers could be replicated using a transparent and no-clip texture as railing that the player could move through freely, albeit at a reduced height. If there's a way of disabling scenery collision, we should look into that also.
I'm well aware of this problem and have been searching for solutions. I don't like the idea of just walking through solid objects, I'd rather just nix the railings entirely.

There is a texture in the Water collection, #61 - right after the red blocks and before the animated fans - that is transparent and works well as a railing texture. See the new area that on Blaspheme Quarantine for an example of it being used as a railing. At the moment, I'm thinking of creating thin, low platforms with this texture applied to the side, and setting that texture to be a switch with MML that controls the platform and is only activated by weapons. Then you could glide along them smoothly, and still be able to destroy them.

Flippant Sol wrote:3: There's too many enemies
I'll adjust this too when I wake up. Bigger Guns is meant to be both a starter level and a "test your might" level. I'd say if you want more enemies, have them spawn after the player drops down from the pattern buffer staircase, after the player has found said Bigger Guns and can make good use of it.
Nonononono- don't go deleting enemies! I've carefully arranged them to preserve the original balance! (Or at least I have from Arrival through Couch Fishing) Because of the difficulty shift, I had to add a few extra to keep the same numbers as the original has on Normal - one new monster for every three existing monsters. Although that means there are more enemies than before on Total Carnage, they are not promoted, so it should balance out.

I do like the idea of having them appear after you've crossed certain points, but I'd like to restrict teleportation to areas that have a view to space. If necessary lua can be used to spawn them in when no players are present, or windows can be added if the geometry is appropriate.
Flippant Sol wrote:On another note, is Craig Hardgrove involved with M1R? Are we using his soundtrack as placeholder? Do we already have another musician doing new music? I could pitch in a track or two if wanted.
I have written permission from Craig Hardgrove to use his music. Personally I find them to be superior in 90% of cases. There are a *lot* of remixes out there, and I do plan on some time sitting down and listening to them all carefully, making some decisions, then writing to the artists to seek their permission.
The Man wrote:I’m glad this project is still going on, and maybe I’ll give it a closer look again now that it’s playable from start to finish. (Also, I’m still waiting on those retextured versions of “Not *This* Again…” so I can put together the Redux version of PYEO.) I’m not likely to play it on Insane anytime soon, though!
Yeah, sorry, PYEO hasn't been a priority and classes are limiting my ability to spend time right now. At the moment I've been focused on fixing all the unwelcome discrepancies with M1. I'd love to see what else you might be able to contribute, and I look forward to your sound remasters!
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Flippant Sol
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The pitch blackness was due to the fact that Light Level 6 on Bigger Guns was set to 0, pitch black.
Aleph One 9_17_2019 5_42_13 PM.png
This is image was taken with the latest scripts in the script folder and the newest map
I changed Light Level 6 so when active, it was at 4% and 2% at inactive.
Aleph One 9_17_2019 5_44_05 PM.png
Ignore change in FOV. Also, I noticed that the game will crash when the Landscape Textures plugin is enabled.
In the map, I also fixed the lighting that the terminal room produces so its less obvious and more realistic.
I also used math to even out the scenery placement for the railings in those back sections of the map. Remember that the player needs a .500WU opening to pass through something.
While I may have disagreed with you over enemy placement, I think it has began to grow on me.
Here is my updated Bigger Guns, no music, no merge.
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ravenshining
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First, I approve of the way you moved the railing objects. I'm still going to regard using scenery as a temporary measure until we figure something else out, but for now it's less annoying than how it was, good work!

Regarding light settings... I suppose because the telporters are illuminated, it wouldn't make sense for the area to be pitch black. Your 4% light looks good. On the other hand, if there were no light sources... I've put up a poll on the matter.

The way you've repainted the light on floors, walls and ceilings is exactly what I attempted to do in an earlier revision. From a certain point of view, it does look more natural to have it extend to the walls like that, but it looks much worse in other ways.

Notice how I had the light stop just short of the walls, to avoid creating problems.
BiggerGunsNearby_0009.jpeg
Here's how you arranged it. The light is wrapping around a corner! Also, why on earth did you change the Leela terminal into a Tycho terminal? Please don't goof around like that!
BiggerGunsNearby_0011.jpeg
And here's where it really breaks down. This looks absolutely awful and is why I chose to go with it being more of a reflection than actual light being cast. Also if you're going to take the time to light walls, please don't leave them untextured, otherwise we'll just have to go back in and re-do the whole thing all over again.
BiggerGunsNearby_0013.jpeg
Here's the original. If you want to add enough polygons so it lights and shadows like this, go for it.
BiggerGunsNearby_0015.jpeg
Finally I noticed there's quirk of Vasara you may not be aware of: in an exploration mission, if you see or step over the required polygons while in Vasara, when you save the map those polygons will be changed to normal. So, when working on an exploration level, always compare the new save against the old to re-assign any exploration polygons.
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Flippant Sol
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I wasn't aware of the quirk in Vasara, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'll try to be more careful with textures going forward, making sure that scripted polygons function as intended.
The Tycho texture was used because on my machine, the terminal wall was black. Vasara pulls straight from whatever shapes file you're using, so I'm not sure what's going on here. Have you checked to see how graphics looks with HD textures on and off?
To be clear, you *are* using Normal brightness level on a decent IPS monitor, yes?
In hindsight, while my lighting was more "realistic", the lights reach too far and into polygons where they don't belong.
If there was a way of making gradient shadows without a million polygons on the ground, that's what I'd do, but if we want to reserve polygons, we are faced to either have trapezoids of light on the ground that are dull, or German Expressionist concoctions like what I made.
I think we can reach a compromise. What if we used the original window of light for the terminal room, but increased Light Level 6 again, maybe this time to 4% or 3%? I'll root back to your original patched build to avoid any of the Vasara errors.
That said, If you want me to go crazy with polygons to make some serious lightshows happen, I can't guarantee that scripted behaviors will be preserved for those specific polygons. Then again, I'm not sure if the terminal room has any activations other than pathfinding for the Pfhor fighters.
If you want the railings removed, I'm not against it.
Are there any other levels with lighting issues or object placement issues?
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ravenshining
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Flippant Sol wrote:The Tycho texture was used because on my machine, the terminal wall was black. Vasara pulls straight from whatever shapes file you're using, so I'm not sure what's going on here. Have you checked to see how graphics looks with HD textures on and off?
M1R as of 0.0.12 has been in what should be a playable state - minus the out-of-memory crashes of course - and you should not be seeing something as egregious as a blank terminal texture on a canonical level. So something is very very wrong if you're seeing black, that's why I asked you for a screenshot before. And what do you mean, turn off HD textures? There is no HD textures plugin or option yet, they're just always on. You can see the Leela terminal texture even in software mode, albiet not legibly.

You mentioned how in ancient times M1R required M1A1, you didn't go and unzip M1R into your M1A1 folder did you? Or worse try to run the new M1R map on the ancient M1R? They aren't remotely compatible.

It may be best to start fresh. First delete your M1R folder and find and delete your Redux Preferences. Then either:

• unzip 0.0.13-a into a fresh empty folder, make sure things are working right, then replace the specific updated files I linked above.

or

• download and unzip this larger but up-to-date development zip into a fresh empty folder:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/archive/master.zip
Flippant Sol wrote:To be clear, you *are* using Normal brightness level on a decent IPS monitor, yes?
My monitor is 12 years old and currently dying in more ways than one. It has terrible contrast, and overall is very dark. To compensate I have Aleph One set to Lightest across all scenarios.

So, no, but my standard of comparison is actual M1, M2, and Infinity, using the same settings as I do for M1R.
Flippant Sol wrote:If there was a way of making gradient shadows without a million polygons on the ground, that's what I'd do, but if we want to reserve polygons, we are faced to either have trapezoids of light on the ground that are dull, or German Expressionist concoctions like what I made.
You don't need a million polygons and gradient shadows, things would just need to be split up so the beam extends smoothly towards the wall, and then in places like on top of those boxes the wall would need to be split so there's a shadow cast on the lower half. And I don't think the trapezoids were dull, the stark contrast between them and the surrounding blackness gives a nice atmosphere.
Flippant Sol wrote:I think we can reach a compromise. What if we used the original window of light for the terminal room, but increased Light Level 6 again, maybe this time to 4% or 3%? I'll root back to your original patched build to avoid any of the Vasara errors.
In the long term, I've considered running some scripts to shunt all the old lights to slots 21+ and adding in the standard levels into 1-20, and I don't think the blackness is so important it can't wait.
Flippant Sol wrote:That said, If you want me to go crazy with polygons to make some serious lightshows happen, I can't guarantee that scripted behaviours will be preserved for those specific polygons.
If you know what you're doing and have the latest build of Weland it shouldn't be a problem ;-) Just look at what polygon types are there already. There isn't any polygon-specific lua running on Bigger Guns. Arrival, Cool Fusion, Unpfhorgiven, and Pfhoraphobia all have some lua going but I think err hope uh, tried to tie that to things like scenery objects and annotations... for the most part.
Flippant Sol wrote:Are there any other levels with lighting issues?
I didn't think Bigger Guns had any lighting issues until you brought it up, really. I suppose "Texture alignment
& Lighting" is the to-do list there, but what that's really saying is "this level is basically done but texture alignment and lighting can always be improved because Aleph One sucks at making those things easy to do well."

I think the only other level I've used lots of railing objects is Cool Fusion.
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thedoctor45
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Have you thought about adding Bridges & Balconies to M1R? I think it would be a nice feature to have if used properly and sparingly.
Crater Creator made a neat lua script called "Better Bridges" for use with Halathon a while ago which hasn't found much use in other scenarios yet (which I don't really understand tbh) so maybe this would be a good opportunity to change that.

http://simplici7y.com/items/better-bridges-5

If you need 3D bridge models for your scenario I'd be glad to help out btw.
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treellama
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thedoctor45 wrote:(which I don't really understand tbh)
Because it’s an awful hack that doesn’t work well?
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ravenshining
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The lack of monster interaction is what has kept me from considering it seriously, and I expect others. The breaking of chase cam is unfortunate, but not that big of a problem.

However, I think I've just now figured out a way to get monsters to at least attack and approach players on bridges.
Spoiler:
First, dedicate a monster slot for an invisible, ephemeral, harmless dummy with the same class as the player. Next, when the player steps onto the bridge and is taken to bridgeland, a dummy is spawned at the player's real-world coordinates. As the player moves across the bridge, the dummy is manually re-positioned; finally, the dummy is removed when the player returns the real world.

Monsters would see the dummy as a valid target to acquire, and may attempt to attack it and to approach it from below once they did so, hitting the player. Because there's currently no way to find out who a monster is chasing, there would be a delay for monsters currently locked onto the player as they lose their lock and consider new targets, but that's better than not attacking at all. If the monster happens to be attacking the player at the moment they cross the threshold though, it could be ordered to attack the dummy to eliminate that delay without any apparent change in target.
Although non-flying monsters would still be unable to walk on the bridge itself, that would greatly expand its utility...

So, yes, I'd love to implement BB&B. If possible, there are a number of locations that could use "inverted" bridges, areas that are normally raised but players are able to pass under. And, if not B&B, some faux bridges - polygons that are raised in idle but lowered in postidle, creating the illusion of a bridge while retaining the ability of monsters to walk over them - would be nice to have in a number of areas.

I've looked through the scenario and catalogued a number of candidate locations. If you'd like to create some models for any of these, Doctor, that would be awesome! However, it might be best to hold off on anything that isn't in the "faux bridges" section until I can write the lua to get monsters working so we know it's possible.

I'd especially love to see some ornate alien looking bridges over the lower slime pits on Two Times Two Equals, and some industrial looking bridges over the lava on a number of levels such as Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!. Neither of those are bridges that necessarily need to be walked under, they are either too short or could have support structures underneath that prevent things from passing, and this could be implemented without serious hackery.
Spoiler:
Faux bridges:
Two Times Two Equals... - lower causeways, northern causeways & ledges
Fire! x5 - first lava room
Habe Quiddam - flamethrower room
Welcome to the Revoution - pillar room
Bigger Guns - western walkways
Ain't Got Time - beginning jumps
Smells like Napalm - ledges in entry room to eastern tunnels
Neither High nor Low - north-central ledge

Proper bridges:
Arrival - ledge in hangar bay
G4 Sunbathing - Raiseable bridge to antenna room
Habe Quiddam- Bridge intersection room

Inverted bridges:
No Artificial Colours - room with the view to space
Welcome to the Revolution - canyon, charger room
Shake Before Using: that one loooong bridge, and the lava room
Try Again - Southeast room, opening room, canyon, bridge room
Defend THIS! - Bridge room
Ain't Got Time - egg rooms
Two Times Two Equals - opening rooms
Cool Fusion - numerous areas
Habe Quiddam - Eastern rooms
Couch Fishing - large vats
Never Burn Money - Deprivation chamber ledges
Bigger Guns - final room
Fire! x5 - raiseable bridge room, single pillar room
Roots and Radicals - core approaches
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ravenshining
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I wanted to have Bigger Guns in a clean state before pushing out the weekly merge. After eliminating the superflous lighting from and retexturing Flippant Sol's update, I went in and added a few more boxes to the start area, and applied varying textures to the boxes throughout the room. Having everything not look so samey really helps both visual appeal and navigability, I think.
BiggerGunsNearby_0001.jpeg
That big brown box is where the second (non-canonical) teleporter used to be, the large green box and smaller brown boxes are in what was negative space in M1 and open space in M1R ≤ 0.0.13-a. Vantage point from on top of boxes.

The Rose has had its population adjusted, and it really needed it on account of the BoB's tendency to fight back now. More monsters have been set to teleport, so the larger battle on TC+ is more segmented. Minor cosmetic issues also addressed, and that first door has been returned to being a single door.

Boring teatise on doors and moster paths under the
Spoiler:
Before, I had split the door into three segments, with impassable polygons on either side of the centre segment. The segments were set to activate each other, and the hope was that the BoBs would stay to one side or the other. Unfortunately, BoBs decided to traverse the door lengthwise and it would get stuck in odd positions with parts up and parts down, and it was difficult to even open the door once that happened.
doorbefore.png
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Then I realised I can still guide the BoBs to one side or the other without splitting the door, just by having the points along it. Unfortunately this doesn't stop them from attempting to cross lengthwise, but it does prevent the door itself from getting jammed or broken on BoBs like it was.
doorafter.png
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Of course to get the BoBs to cross to one side while leaving a path in the centre open, I had to widen the door to 1.5 WU. In retrospect, I could have just made it that wide without adding any lines or points or polygons, and BoBs would single-file through the door leaving room for the player on either side. While that might not help increase the BoB throughput, at least it would enable to player to squeeze through without punching anyone.
Weekly merge:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... 20Map.sceA
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ravenshining
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So someone - with a weird username which I'm not sure he wants repeated here - popped up on the Discord and posted an amazing AI-upscaled Mutant sprite:
image0.jpg
He said he'd like to do that for more sprites, but had difficulty dealing with the blue background and said he'd need a source of PNG's with the blue removed.

Of course I pounced on the opportunity. But before generating transparent PNGs, I wanted to make some adjustments to he Marine and Juggernaut collections. First, I finally brought in the M1-style legs, which I'd held off on because I wanted to keep the much-better-drawn M2-style death sequence, which has the wrong boots. So I did some quick & dirty colour adjustment to make the dying boots look more like M1 boots:
death.gif
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Next I wasn't satisfied with the butt-glow I added to the jugg, and I thought the colour-changing eyes were a bit much. So, I replaced the glow with a ring, sort of like how the Freeverse jugg has, and instead of changing colour the jugg's eyes just get brighter:
Tryagain_0000.jpg
With that done, I set about exporting everything that doesn't already have an HD sprite or 3D model. Then, after learning how to run for loops in bash, I concocted a single command to blacken and make transparent the blue background for all 3,700 files. It took eight minutes to process and here's the result:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1F7kfJ ... M3qhyi6vrm

Next, Aaron decided to start working on merging Not This Again, Not This Again X, Sorry Don't Make it So, and Pfhor Your Eyes Only. We figured out where to translate PYEO, and while he's working on NTA I had to get PYEO back to playable status. While I was at it, I finally swapped those yellow enforcers for blues, updated some textures to use the extended set, and added in a few rechargers that appear on SDMIS. This included the 1x charger in the elevator room, and I must say it looked terrible at first, so I made some adjustments to the 1x charger texture:
PfhorYourEyesOnly_0001.jpg
pfhor52.jpeg
Finally, the railing sprites have been reverted back to how they were in 0.0.13-a, but with Tacticus's HD replacement.

Updated shapes:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... hapes.shpA

EDIT six hours later I realise I forgot to push those edited textures to git. they're up now, the link to the updated shapes should be the same.
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ravenshining
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Alas, last weekend's efforts were for naught as someone I attempted to rope in flaked out on me, but this weekend I did a quick revision of Smells Like Napalm:

• Monster population adjusted
• Opening room sports a jump pad
• BoBs fighting wasps out of view
• Infinite randomly-located tiny wasps instead of minor wasps
• Pfhor and S'pht teleport in the drydock
• Infinite S'pht, but only at the drydock and pattern buffers
• S'pht have actual patrol routes that vary depending on how much you've completed
• The Hole touched up for better texture alignment

And, most importantly, I've revised the means of escape from the secret. Previous iterations had the elevator descend upon you activating Durandal's terminal. Now, that doesn't happen. Instead,
Spoiler:
the elevator is set to be controlled by aliens, and after reading Durandal's terminal all S'pht on the level will follow you down, activating the elevator on the way. Unfortunately there is some luck involved as monsters might get in each other's way, but I didn't run into that problem in my tests. On the bright side, because there are infinite S'pht, if you kill of the first bunch to come after you without making it out, more will come later.
It isn't guaranteed to work, but it will usually let you out after a while, and it will require you to actually do something rather than just having Durandal do it for you.

Merged map:
https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... 20Map.sceA
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HelviusRufus
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I keep forgetting to mention that I really like the sounds on the vacuum level G4. It's very vacuumy.
The only thing I'd change (and only if'n it were very very easy) would be that when I shoot a grenade and it explodes away from me, that it should explode silently. But, even then, when you're grenading you're not really concentrating on whether they're making noise or not.
I just play 'em; I don't know how they work.
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ravenshining
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That would be a neat effect - to increase attenuation, so near explosions produce a small sound and far ones are silent. Unfortunately, I don't think that's possible as you propose. If, as Aaron has requested of A1, that lua could specify the volume at which a sounds is played, totally, but as it is, it cannot. I miiiiiight be able to write a script that modifies [/i]pitch based on distance, which could render a sound effectively inaudible, but I'm not sure how well it would work. I may look into that if I remember when I have time.

Unfortunately I have very little time at the moment with university and things being so bad at home that "shots fired" is no longer a metaphor. If someone else who is lua-proficient were interested in joining the project though, that could be something one could play around with.
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treellama
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I don't think giving Lua the ability to play sounds quieter would help, since it's not playing the explosion noise.

You could replace the projectile in flight with a silent one after a certain distance.
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ravenshining
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What I was thinking was making all projectiles on a vacuum level silent, and then using Lua to handle the noise. That's a neat idea about replacing the projectile, though.

Personally I'm happy with the way I have it set up now. While it might be more realistic to have no sound, it's more fun to at least have some muffled sound.
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ravenshining
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A tiny little update after so long, but an important one: I've addressed monster balance and corridor width on Bob-B-Q. I say, I have had a LOT of fun playtesting this, fighting the Pfhor alongside the Security Detachment.

It is possible to fail to save enough humans on Normal, and you'll have to apply yourself to save enough people on Total Carnage. Surviving on Insane requires intimate knowledge of the level and a good bit of luck. Corridors are wide enough where necessary to avoid getting stopped by most BoB jams.

I've also rearranged a few fights to create some climactic standoffs for you to walk in on, with a whole mess of Pfhor on one side and security personell on the other. Some you walk into the middle of, some more towards the Pfhor side, one right behind the humans.

https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/raw ... 20Map.sceA
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HelviusRufus
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I've only been able to go through it thrice so far, but I was only blocked a couple o times and each time a shot down the corridor or a slap up side head opened things up.
I like the way things are going.
I just play 'em; I don't know how they work.
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