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Recently I've been messing around with the marathon total conversions, the tagsets seemed somewhat unbalanced and inaccurate, so after immense amounts of time playing marathon 2 I think I've got a pretty damn accurate conversion. One problem though, apparently these plugins (SitH, MaraMyth, ISOYG) were made before the days of unit inventories and I would like to have the marine be able to carry and switch between all of his weapons. The closest thing I have is the SitH marine, as it has a complete separate collection for each weapon. (marine w/ magnums, marine w/ fusion pistol, .etc) I would like to compile all of these separate collections into one massive collection so that I can create monster altering artifacts with appropriate animations.
I am running on a pc however, and do not have amber. I do have tahoe but i assume that would be useless in this case. If there is a way for me to do this or if someone would like to do it for me please let me know...

Nameless wrote:I am running on a pc however, and do not have amber. I do have tahoe but i assume that would be useless in this case. If there is a way for me to do this or if someone would like to do it for me please let me know...

You could get a friend with a Mac to assemble the bitmaps for you. Or use an OS 9 emulator like Basilisk II or SheepShaver. I think Mac OS 7.5 has been released and it runs Amber (?)

Be careful when combining lots of bitmaps into a single collection. You need to make sure all the images have the same Colour Table. I would think that the marine images have the same collections, but you never know. Also, it would be cool if you could add the hue change to the marines. That would allow multiplayer games roughly similar to Marathon net games.

Basilisk II is a 68k emulator. OS9 only runs on PPC chips, so Basilisk II won't run OS9.

I'm pretty sure Amber is a PPC app, but I'm not 100% sure on that one.

Keep in mind that with Mac emulation, you need to own both the OS and ROM for it to be legal.

Wow, Nameless - this sounds great! I think you might be able to garner additional help from all those Marathon fans in the community if you should ever need it (sounds like you have a firm handle on the situation however).


Correct me if I'm wrong, but in my experience you do not need to have a given unit's artifacts in the same collection. In fact, it is more likely to cause you problems as Lugas mentioned.

For Uber Ghol Riot, all the UGR Goodies are separate projectiles and come from many collections - some pre-existing and some I had to custom create. The Ghols can pick up and use all these various artifacts no problem. In fact, I use entirely separate collections for the status bar icons for each of these artifacts as well.

A given artifact can have a mons-limiting tag and any new/diff mons they become are not dependent upon the collection in which the artifacts are located.

It might save you a lot of extra work to just use the existing collections by testing/trying it without combining them first. It will probably be better because then each artifact will have its own color table and thus be more detailed visually. This is a big problem with combining too much into one collection, as Lugas pointed out.

Just my two cents, but I would be sure you really need/want to combine them all before doing so - it's likely to be better and easier not to.

I believe he is referring to the sprites for the unit, holding different weapons. Not the collections for the actual projectile.

Yeah, I'm talking about the sprites. For example, one of the marine collections has the marine wielding 2 magnums for all of the running animations but also has the other weapons included with attack animations only.

Thanks for the advice as I do still have to create the actual artifact/projectile collection. Assuming I get hold of a mac to run amber, the tags will be done shortly. If there is anyone interested in recreating Marathon 2/Infinity SP and net maps on myth or creating any original Marathon style maps, it would be much appreciated as I am not that talented with mapmaking.

I think Apple have released Mac OS 7.5, so if you can find that, plus a ROM, you can run Amber. I think somewhere on the Marathon Bungie site, there is a packaged version of the Marathon Trilogy for Basilisk II. You could download that and remove the Trilogy and download Amber in. The package also includes Mac OS 7.5.
If you can't get an internet connection to Basilisk II, my suggestion is to download the zip file, put it on a CD and then put it onto OS 7.5.

I've found it right here: http://forums.bungie.org/story/?read=38588

Also, you could also use a memory stick to transfer Amber, bitmaps and collections to and from OS 7.5.5 and Windows.