Marathon 1 Redux

ravenshining · Jun 24th '18, 03:33

Interesting trick, Tacticus. I'll keep it in mind in case I find a place for it.

Today I spat out the remaining three MIDA doors, and fixed the transparency on the semi-transparent Grendels:

And I implemented them in the map, so now everything though Blaspheme Quarantine has MIDA tags on their secret doors. While I was at it, I fixed a texture on BGN, fixed some sound on NBM, and did some re-texturing and alignment to The Rose.

Then, seeing as there's no terminal editor or viewer that I'm aware of, I made a terminal testing map

1 - made a copy of the M1R merge folder outside of git
2 - deleted every file within
3 - deleted every directory under Resources
4 - created a map in level 00 with one octagonal room, seven terminals, and a repair switch
5 - symlinked that map into every level folder
6 - symlinked the M1R Resources/PICT folder into Resources
7 - symlinked every M1R term.txt file into the appropriate level folders

Now, whenever I want to test a change I make to a terminal, rather than having to merge the whole scenario and go find it within, I can merge the terminal test folder and quickly open the right terminal. Even better, I can put the test map in M1A1 and run it in a 640x480 window, so I can view it side-by-side my text editor without having to mess with M1R's preferences.

Then I went in and provided (mandatory minimum requirement) AI-specific logon/logoffs for every terminal included thus far. This includes two terminals that transition from a general message to a Leela message - for those, I've taken a page out of Pfhorrest's book and put LOGON tags at the transition, to change from U.E.S.C. Marathon to LEELA_870229.

EDIT - found the problem that was formerly this paragraph, a typo in a LOGOFF tag was dumping me out of a term prematurely.

Spoiler:

All that remains to do before I start pulling in the rest of the original scenario is finish the BoB physics. I might have time to do that today, in which case I'll be posting version 0.0.10 on Monday.

ravenshining · Jun 24th '18, 16:23

The new flavours of BoB!

Purple, black, and white carry pepper spray, .25 ACP, and nerfed fusion, respectively. Purple and white are slightly tougher than their yellow and red counterparts, while black is slightly weaker than blue, leaving the Blue "security" BoB to be the toughest of the lot. What about green, you ask? Green only punches, if green shot things that'd give away the assimilated BoBs too easily.

ravenshining · Jun 26th '18, 02:22

0.0.10-alpha is up!

GitHub: https://github.com/ravenshining/M1R/releases/tag/0.0.10-alpha
Simplici7y: http://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-1-redux

Release notes:
- New title music by HamsterAlliance
- Physics are 99% complete- all monsters have functional definitions and supporting sequences, but there are still some bugs - especially, humans need to be set to non-alien and rebalanced to work with rescue missions
- Rescue missions temporarily set to exploration because above
- Levels now play in canonical sequence, no skipping around like in 0.0.9a, but the blue term will still take you straight to Bigger Guns Nearby since that's so much more polished than everything else.
- Converted & added Blaspheme Quarantine & Bob-B-Q
- Miscellaneous improvements to Bigger Guns, Never Burn Money, Defend THIS!, The Rose
- All included terminals have appropriate AI attribution (LEELA-870229, TYCHO-005917, & DURANDAL-1707 instead of all U.E.S.C. Marathon all the time)
- Animated the fan texture
- More MIDA secret door textures
- Transparent textures from Marathon Zero
- Pulled in the remaining HD versions of Tim Vogel's UESC Marathon textures
- Rerendered 1st title screen
- Various text files have better formatting
- Lumped together everything in the "images" and "testing and proposed" folders into one "scratch" folder
- Rounded up a few stray files from the wrong places and threw them in "scratch"
- Images de-merged to minimise reliance on Basillisk II

ravenshining · Jun 29th '18, 10:46

blarg sick day update

making use of the new transparent textures, and playing with miniature switches on Arrival

ever so slightly widened hallway into the maze for better co-op. the widening halts at the elevator / stair fork, since beyond that point two players may diverge paths. Not sure whether two may pass each other without testing - it seems the player's radius may be shrunk in physics, but nevertheless a player still won't pass through lines less than 0.5 WU wide?

and what's this? a new friend! no physics for the little guy yet but sequences, yes!

also, the other day I had access to some unlimited internets, and took the opportunity to upload all the pfhor textures and Dr. Hardgrove's music for future utilisation.

General-RADIX · Jun 29th '18, 20:20

Oh hey, it's that beta creature! Are you planning on making those web-cannons(?) it's got functional?

ravenshining · Jun 29th '18, 21:05

Maybe if I or someone else gets around to creating attack sequences. Unlike the Marathon alpha I've never got the beta working (and no longer have a copy to try) so I don't know what it was like in action - all I've got is Hopper's extracted shapes. Otherwise I'll just have it skitter around harmlessly on the Pfhor ship, or use it in place of the Hound in case PerseusSpartacus doesn't finish it.

At the moment it's rather far down the priority list, and it'll be a little more work just to get a death animation and smooth out its movement, but I thought the artwork was too good (relatively speaking to other Marathon sprites) to pass up.

Speaking of beta stuff, I really liked the motion sensor, so I made a blend of it and the final as you can see in the screenshots. And, if you've been playtesting around BoBs, you'll hear them occasionally say "Good shot!" or "You killed BoB!" as in the M2 demo, where appropriate.

Also soundwise, in the latest version, if you've got enough BoBs around you may hear them cry "They're Everywhere!" in harmony thanks to having varying pitches and an M1 physics flag that makes them complain more often.

Pfhorrest · Jun 29th '18, 22:39

I don't think I've ever seen that monster before. It kinda reminds me of an Armageddon Beast, except it's not red. Is that from the beta with the 3D compass? I could never get that to run for more than a second before it'd crash into macsbug.

ravenshining · Jun 30th '18, 01:13

That's the one. Back when I actually had a physical system and the trilogy CDs, I couldn't even get the beta to launch.

I guess it does look vaugely like the Armageddon Beast... and vauge images are all we have of that. I thought some of the elements looked similar to a Hound's, as if the Hound is a larva and this is the adult.

General-RADIX · Jun 30th '18, 01:21

eisnerguy1 found a way to get the beta working. Dunno if this'll work for you, though.

ravenshining · Jun 30th '18, 08:39

Maybe, but now I'd need a copy of the beta, I've long since lost my discs.

Random fun - I was aligning the various AI logons so they don't jump about when transitioning like they do now, decided to make a couple distorted Tycho logos, then while going through the undo history rather fast, thought, hey, I should animate this:

: 5917.gif (97.27 KiB) Viewed 7207 times

I'm certainly open to suggestion as to which frames to keep, or other adjustments to make.

ravenshining · Jun 30th '18, 11:29

I've gone through the term files, and found room for five states of Tycho decay.

Spoiler:

This means new material needs to be written for four terminals.

Spoiler:

For the 2nd visit to the Arrival trash term, I haven't written anything, just changed the generic PICT

Spoiler:

For the 2nd visit to the secret Defend THIS! term, again I haven't written anything new yet, just increased the obfuscation for now:

Spoiler:

After that of course we don't hear from Tycho again until he is reanimated on Blaspheme Quarantine, unless someone feels compelled to write a new one.

General-RADIX · Jun 30th '18, 22:23

Hm...no specific text/dialogue in mind yet, but what about a term showing Tycho mid-dissection? It might look like a normal junk terminal at first before Tycho's thoughts (such as they are at this point) abruptly cut in.

ravenshining · Jul 1st '18, 07:07

Today's progress - bam:

That fortune is particularly apt for Marathon, no?

So, the whole (original) scenario, as far as: term logons, teleports, scenery, moonscapes, & music mml (MIDA tags still pending). Plus I opened a few windows on Neither High nor Low as it was kinda stuffy in there, but don't worry, there's oxygen. Also, don't let Durandal teleport you if he starts singing about shoving you out an airlock.

Now, it's not quite release-worthy yet, as I haven't put per-level physics. So there are MADDs on the scoutship and the compilers still fight you after you kill the controller. And I haven't pulled in my Pfhor starscape, so if you look outside the scoutship it's still very blurry. But that's enough for now, I require sleep.

ravenshining · Jul 2nd '18, 01:01

I got distracted today (I was supposed to be fixing motorcycles :-/ ) and did some more Redux art.

Rampant Tycho logo pre-Pfhor/Colony missions:

Spoiler:

Mirata chapter screen:

Spoiler:

Arrival chapter screen:

Before - 8-bit for 23 years

After - again with the dcci scaling after lots of manual blurring, sharpening, curving, etc., plus working it into the landscape backdrop with a freshly rendered Deimos.

Title screen idea.

Spoiler:

HelviusRufus · Jul 2nd '18, 02:55

Re the title screen idea.
It really doesn't fit in with the ominous chords at the beginning.
There's no mystery or foreboding; out there...waiting....
The first Marathon starts reminiscent of the original Alien's in outer space no one can hear you scream idea.
There's something happenin here, what it is ain't exactly clear, there's a bug with a staff over there....

Another ominous idea in the first Marathon is the chortling but when you look, there's nothing there (sometimes). You hear them, you know they're there, just around the corner or maybe... behind you... quick! look...

ravenshining · Jul 2nd '18, 03:31

Good points. I suppose also, M1's story has very little to do with the star itself. Anyway, it was just an idea, I still prefer the current screen (purple flare/starfield).

Re hearing voices with nothing there: I have reinstated the voices in the pillar ;-)

ravenshining · Jul 2nd '18, 22:38

All M1 & ∞ Jjaro netmaps have been added to the project. This was easy because:

-M1 netmaps have no scenery items
-M1 netmaps use few landscapes
-monsters aren't really important
-M∞ Jjaro maps are mostly compatible with M1R (as long as shotguns are not required to toggle switches)

I also threw in a retextured Thick & Chunky as it's one of my favourites, and a modified Beyond Thunderdome since I've been using it for testing already.

For now they're in a separate map file, because the solo / coop is going to take up 100 levels due to the branching storyline. If A1 can handle more than 100 levels, I'm not sure how, because you'd get resource ID conflicts between chapter screens and terminal images.

ravenshining · Jul 4th '18, 19:20

I've finally discovered the Marathon discord chat, thanks to a link someone posted on the Story Forum. Naturally, I searched for anything to do with Redux, and... not exactly the most encouraging things came up. On the one hand, it's good none of that was posted here, because no one had anything constructive. On the other hand, it's helpful to hear the general opinion and there are a few things I can glean from that.

There was one exchange that did seem worth addressing- there were those who said it is inappropriate for me to be posting alphas on Simplici7y, and I have in fact been on the fence as to whether or not to keep doing so.

On the one hand, given the slow pace of other people uploading things there I don't want my periodic updates to dominate, I don't want to tax the server with my 160MB files that get re-uploaded every few weeks, and the only feedback I've gotten from Simplici7y was someone saying I shouldn't post until the project is done.

On the other hand, dozens of people are downloading every release - with a peak of 154 downloads of 0.0.7-alpha - and since it's basically just me working on this project, I feel a need to keep showing progress in the hopes of attracting some assistance. There's also the hope that someone will download it, play it, and offer constructive feedback, and while that rarely happens, it's certainly needed.

(edit: I realise many of those hits may be robots, I don't expect there are that many active players of Marathon much less people interested in Redux. but, I don't know how many of those are real people, either. If the rate of robot downloads were constant, and 0 real people downloaded 0.0.9, then that 154 would be 11 people, which is more believable, and the real peak is 0.0.5 at 28 people, which is quite a lot)

If I had people regularly contributing, or who were volunteering to take over some of the tasks I know I'm not going to be good at, then I probably would keep things on GitHub until I had something more polished for Simplici7y. As things are, I'm quite worried this project may lose momentum next month when classes resume.

Jul 4th '18, 19:29

There's no robots.txt on Simplici7y so a lot of those downloads could just be web spiders.

Wrkncacnter · Jul 5th '18, 17:40

Yeah, that probably explains some of it. I mean there's no way there's 1000 legitimate downloads of BallsHUD.

HelviusRufus · Jul 5th '18, 22:50

ravenshining wrote:There was one exchange that did seem worth addressing- there were those who said it is inappropriate for me to be posting alphas on Simplici7y, and I have in fact been on the fence as to whether or not to keep doing so.

I go to Simplici7y to get the downloads because, frankly, on github I don't know how.
On Simplici7ty you just click the button and there it is.
On github it's confusing unless you already are familiar with the site.

ravenshining wrote:...discord chat...

There may be a clue there.

ravenshining · Jul 7th '18, 06:20

Yes, HelviusRufus, I almost forgot, that's the other reason why I keep uploading to Simplici7y- it's so much simpler for those who aren't familiar with GitHub to download from. I'll definitely keep uploading major updates that have significant improvements, but I might not put every single release as I've been doing.

After having at Yuge!'s internals, I figured out how to do greater-than-99-level-maps without image buggery. Thank God for Kate's ability to do a search-and-replace across all files in a directory, that really simplified updating all the terminals to use the new image indexes.

Now, I didn't want people control-shift-new-game-ing into the final screen, so I put a placeholder level in level 100 (level index 99) and named it, "invalid level index" to warn people away from choosing it. Fascinatingly, it fails to show up on the level selection dialog!

See, in Yuge!, you can select level 100, which will display the end credits before loading:

Atque and Weland had no trouble finding my "invalid level index:"

But Aleph One takes the level at it's word!

I imagine this is sort of a bug, that the engine is reading a command from a level title, but hey it works better than I intended! Now, I'm running a build from 2017 that has better error handling than the so-called "stable" version so it would be interesting to see whether this map name will crash stable.

Wrkncacnter · Jul 7th '18, 07:50

JUICE has a way of intentionally hiding maps from the level select screen. I didn't use it in Yuge, because who gives a shit. No idea why it's just happening to work for you.

ravenshining · Jul 8th '18, 07:52

In response to the previous poll, I've increased some monsters burst count to make TC more accurate - in the process, learning about ternary operators in order to understand how Aleph Once scales that aspect of difficulty!

With these changes settled on, I went and wrote physics models for the entire scenario, now that I have the whole scenario in the repo - implementing the gradual proficiency increases for the shock staff and SMG, and setting appropriate compiler and REDACTED behaviours for the endgame.

I uh, also rewrote most of my git history. The repo was like 1GB despite only having only ~150MB of actual data. No one has forked it, so hopefully I'm not messing anyone up, and cloning should be easier. It's still 750 MB, I may try nuking my history again right before the next release and see if that helps.

Lots of testing, some textures, some music, lots of tweaking, and the original progression should be playable EXCEPT I still can't get Rescue missions working properly >:-o No matter what I do, how I tweak the map, physics, terminal files, I can't get the FAILURE message to display if you kill all the BoBs!

Adding to the confusion is that Aleph One's source code seems to refer to #UNFINISHED, #SUCCESS, and #FAILURE tags, while Atque's source lists #UNFINISHED, #FINISHED, and #FAILED.

ravenshining · Jul 8th '18, 10:41

Here's the prahblum - in Aleph One's code.

In order for a terminal to display it's #FAILED state, this test must be passed in computer_interface.cpp:

Code: Select all

if (static_world->mission_flags&(_mission_rescue|_mission_rescue_m1) &&
			dynamic_world->current_civilian_causalties>dynamic_world->current_civilian_count/2)
		{
			completion_state= _level_failed;
		}

However, current_civilian_casualties and current_civilian_count are calculated as follows in monsters.cpp:

Code: Select all

if ((static_world->mission_flags & _mission_rescue_m1) &&
	    monster_index!=NONE && 
	    (definition->_class&_class_human_civilian_m1)) 
	{
		dynamic_world->current_civilian_count+= 1;
	}

and

Code: Select all

					if ((static_world->mission_flags & _mission_rescue_m1) && (definition->_class & _class_human_civilian_m1))
					{
						dynamic_world->current_civilian_causalties += 1;
					}

A1 is only looking for M1 civilians, on maps with the M1 rescue mission. It doesn't do this math if you have M2 civilians or the M2 rescue mission. So, to experiment, I changed the above code to read:

Code: Select all

if ((static_world->mission_flags & (_mission_rescue_m1|_mission_rescue)) &&
	    monster_index!=NONE && 
	    (definition->_class&(_class_human_civilian_m1|_class_human_civilian))) 
	{
		dynamic_world->current_civilian_count+= 1;
	}

and

Code: Select all

					if ((static_world->mission_flags & (_mission_rescue_m1|_mission_rescue)) && (definition->_class & (_class_human_civilian_m1|_class_human_civilian)))
					{
						dynamic_world->current_civilian_causalties += 1;
					}

Compiling... and victory! With the above changes, the Rose now operates as intended.

Of course, it's been absolutely forever since A1 has had an official release, so the chances of this being fixed for my project are slim to none. So, in lieu of that solution, I would need a way to set _class_human_civilian_m1 on my BoBs in Physics and _mission_rescue_m1 on my rescue Maps (amongst other M1 flags I need to set).

The Pfhorums

Marathon Community

Marathon 1 Redux

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