Atque & Physics Editor

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doctorbenjiphd
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Hi,

Is there a version of Atque that is more, ahem, up to date? It doesn't work on my year-old MacBook OS 10.13.4 (though it did work fine on my older comp). Or rather, is there another application that has superseded Atque? I'm not sure how else to merge map files together to get the physics model and terminal scripts into a single map file.

While we're at it, how does one edit physics model nowadays? Before I would just use Anvil via SheepSaver, but, again, I'm on a newer computer and don't have any of those programs handy. If necessary, I can just re-download SheepSaver and format a new emulated OS9 and import copies of Anvil and such, but I would prefer not to have to dip into OS9 at all for the Aleph levels I'm designing.

Thanks!
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The Man
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AFAIK the version of Atque on SourceForge is the most recent. If it's malfunctioning, probably worth submitting a bug report, though I suspect more info is needed before I can say for certain. What message is it giving you?

ShapeFusion is the modern replacement for Anvil, though the build on SourceForge is not the most recent. You will have to compile it yourself, and some people have reported it actually being easier to do this under Linux in VirtualBox. I haven't tried this yet, but compiling it on Mac is... difficult, and I haven't yet carried out all the steps necessary for doing so. However, the old build on SourceForge usually works fine for physics editing, except when it just flat-out refuses to load physics files.

(Reportedly, a lot of plug-ins for Weland are also easier to compile in Linux, for whatever that's worth.)
“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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Wrkncacnter
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Yeah, basically if you want to do content creation for marathon, you should be using linux.
doctorbenjiphd
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The Man--thanks, but ShapesFusion doesn't seem to work with physics models. I'm mostly interested in tweaking the model and not so much the shapes file. I'll just try and boot from my old drive and use Atque and SheepShaver for Anvil there. It's too bad that some of the other tools are geared towards Linux only. A lot of us grew up on Marathon because it was a Mac exclusive. People like me are only interested in making Marathon content out of a sense of nostalgia, and it's unfortunate that the platform that Marathon was originally designed for isn't really compatible anymore. Oh well.
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The Man
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IDK what’s wrong on your end, then; I’m able to load most physics models in ShapeFusion without a problem. (Just for the hell of it, I attached a screenshot of an Eternal physics model I already had open.) There are a few physics models in my own scenario that SF won’t load for whatever reason, but Anvil seems to have problems with most of those physics models as well. Overall, SF loads most physics, sounds, and shapes files for me (the only sounds file I haven’t gotten it to load is Pfh’Joueur’s, which I’m guessing is because some of those sounds are very large).

I think part of the reason some of this stuff doesn’t work as well on Macs these days is because, for whatever reason, it’s a lot harder to get things to compile on Macs than it is to just load up Linux in VirtualBox and compile them for that. It shouldn’t be hard to find bootable images of Debian, Ubuntu, etc., that should work fine on Macs, though I haven’t played around with them much yet. The semester ends on Friday, and afterward, I expect I’ll spend some time doing exactly that.

The other problem is, of course, that the platform that all the original apps were developed for doesn’t really exist now. Modern Macs run on a different chip (Intel) and OS core (Unix) than the classic OS did; it’s really a completely different platform from a developer’s perspective, even if the end user’s experience isn’t that much different on the surface.

As for why there isn’t an up-to-date binary of ShapeFusion on SourceForge, though, you’ll have to ask the developers – I’m as mystified as anyone about that.
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“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
doctorbenjiphd
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I really appreciate how on top of these things you are, The Man. Cheers.

I think my problem with ShapesFusion is the same as with Atque. When I first opened both of them, I got a popup, something about the apps being out of date and to contact the developer. I peeked around a bit, and I think it's because I'm running on a 64-bit Intel processor and these apps were apparently optimized for 32-bit? Both programs will open, but whenever I select a file, say a physics model or shapes file in ShapesFusion, or a map to split in Atque, the programs crash.

The easiest way around would just be to use the physics model from other levels I've designed. But I need Atque to split the map in order to retrieve it! Besides, even if I could get it, I wouldn't have any way to merge the map files with terminal text and pictures back in. Sigh.

I can probably load Atque onto a 32 bit machine when I'm all done and merge the maps in the end, so it should be ok....assuming this 3000+ polygon map doesn't crash when I start adding monsters and weapons in it...
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The Man
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Thanks, and glad to be of assistance. I don’t know if the 64-bit processor is the issue, though; I’m running a 64-bit Mac as well and haven’t had any of those issues.

I wonder if your being on OS 10.13 has anything to do with it, though. One reason I haven’t upgraded past Yosemite is because I’m afraid it will break compatibility with a lot of the older software I still use. There are some features on Mojave that sound really cool (Dark Mode in particular) but I’m reluctant to upgrade to new releases of operating systems until they’ve been out long enough to iron out some of the bugs. I’m still running Windows 7, if that’s any indication.

If worst comes to worst you can upload the individual components of your map and people can merge/split them as needed, though it might be easier to do that using the Discord. There is also an old app for the classic OS called the Marathon Map Splitter that might still be around somewhere and might be able to accomplish what you need, but you’ll at least need Atque to merge/split anything that exceeds the limitations of the original engine (e.g., more than 1,024 polygons) or employs features that aren’t present in Infinity (MML, Lua, etc.).

IIRC Treellama is the developer of Atque so you might also want to make a detailed bug report to him about the error messages you’ve gotten, the OS and hardware you’re running, etc. Though IDK if he’d prefer that here or via SourceForge or somewhere else.
“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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Wrkncacnter
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The only real reason things work best on Linux is because all of these programs were created a long time ago and aren't really maintained. Using Linux seems to be the easiest way to work around this.

However, if you care enough about it, you could maybe bring these various programs up to date so they can work well on mac/windows again.
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treellama
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All this stuff should still work with the Mac? Atque and ShapeFusion run fine for me in 10.14.1 on my 64-bit Mac. I just opened a physics model. Didn't try to merge or split anything.

I can build new versions of them, but haven't because nothing has changed and I didn't think it was necessary.
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The Man
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There's a lot of stuff that doesn't work in the old ShapeFusion binary on the SourceForge page. For instance, it doesn't seem to add new sound slots properly (they show up, but for whatever reason any sounds I add to them don't play in-game), and I can't get changes to sound behaviour ("cannot be restarted", etc.) to stick. Reportedly, both of these work in the more recent build, but getting wxWidgets to work is... complicated, so I can't confirm this.

Additionally it won't load the Pfh'Joueur sounds, as mentioned, plus several physics models in my own scenario (I think ShapeFusion and Anvil both dislike something PhysicsEditorOne did to the files), but I have no idea if either of these are fixed in more recent releases.

No idea what the cause of Dr Benji's issues is if it's not OS incompatibilities, though (and if it still works in Mojave, it's probably not the OS). Does it give you an error message when it crashes? Probably worth copying and pasting in here 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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Dugit
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Aeon's physics models no longer open up in Shapefusion, I think I posted about that some time ago but haven't found a solution - might the newest version of Shapefusion work?
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bernardo
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doctorbenjiphd wrote: Dec 4th '18, 22:48 Hi,

Is there a version of Atque that is more, ahem, up to date? It doesn't work on my year-old MacBook OS 10.13.4 (though it did work fine on my older comp). Or rather, is there another application that has superseded Atque? I'm not sure how else to merge map files together to get the physics model and terminal scripts into a single map file.

While we're at it, how does one edit physics model nowadays? Before I would just use Anvil via SheepSaver, but, again, I'm on a newer computer and don't have any of those programs handy. If necessary, I can just re-download SheepSaver and format a new emulated OS9 and import copies of Anvil and such, but I would prefer not to have to dip into OS9 at all for the Aleph levels I'm designing.

Thanks!
I also had the same problem with Atque. Atque does not merge the layers but splits them into separate files. I own an iMac Mac OS X High Sierra where I have Mac OS 9 installed under SheepShaver. I use Forge 1.0.4. to merge maps and to insert terminal files with the Hex program. After that I play the maps with Aleph One.
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