New Project (+Screenshots)

[oogaBooga]

I've been working on a project recently, codenamed the Mjolnir Project. The idea is to make the most accurate, comprehensive, and fun Marathon conversion to date.

Features:
All health/damage/movement speed/projectile speed/etc have been faithfully converted to myth. There are a few minor descrepencies, in order to balance it for myth, but nothing so drastic as the blender-speed devlins or the wimpy juggernauts that plagued the SitH tagset.

Tons and tons and tons of corrections to sprites - such as the fixing of incorrectly used sprites (fireball puffs being used for grenade explosions, SPHT majors firing the wrong projectile images and having no contrail, etc etc). There have been hundreds and hundreds of fixes - aesthetic, audio, balance.. you name it.

I have taken the liberty of completely re-making the marine collections. The torsos and legs had to be pasted together, and the marines in SitH had some ugly visual problems (such as legs being outlined in thick green pixels, and the torsos seeming to "jump" all over the place due to hasty image placement).

Not only did I re-do all of the marines, but I added a few more. Weapons can be found on the corpses of dead enemies - through a random % chance of them dropping a weapon on death.

-Maser marine: The Maser from rubicon can pin units in place and strip away their health

-Railgun Marine: The railgun from EVIL can pass through units and do substantial damage.

-Disintegrator Marine: The disintegrator alien weapon from rubicon fires static-like bolts that do substantial damage and have the tendency to push units around.

-Carpet Mortar Marine: The carpet mortar from Rubicon fires two volleys of low-yield grenades in clusters, making it ideal for taking out groups of fighters.

-Shockstaff Marine: The pfhor shockstaff from evil allows the marine to significantly upgrade his melee abilities, as well as shoot shockstaff energy bolts at distances.

-Tactical Nuke Marine: The tactical nuke gun from evil is rare. Very, very rare. It comes with limited ammo (one clip of 5) and disappears once used up. Massive damage, massive radius. Surprisingly ineffective on the tank-like Juggernauts, however.

Mjolnir also features many new enemies/allies, taken from various popular marathon scenarios.

AR Bobs - The assault rifle bobs from Rubicon are fairly accurate burst-fire machinegunners with the ability to launch a grenade with full mana (think of them as Troopers, but on your side).

Maser Bobs - These are bobs that carry masers. Their backpack contains nearly unlimited ammo, however the maser is always more deadly in the hands of a marine. Just dont blow them up to get the maser - it's liable to be destroyed along with them.

Cleanroom Bobs - harmless scientists in cleanroom suits. Try not to kill them.

Thinkers - From rubicon. floating big-headed chair-bound Pfhor that have dual-barreled machineguns built into their floating vehicle, as well as dual-barreled bouncing grenade launchers (major variants shoot seeking grenades).

Cydrones - From evil. Think of them as floating, slightly weaker cyborgs that fire a burst of four energy bolts, and explode upon death.

Rubicon Enforcers - These enforcers carry the alien DIsintegrator rifles, which can seek targets in the hands of an experienced Enforcer, but sadly the marines who pick them up are still trying to figure that part out. They have a wicked up-close shock melee.

Rubicon Drones - a sleeker, faster-firing upgrade to the drones we all know and love (hate).

Rubicon Juggernauts - Lots more health. Fires a withering barrage of bullets, and each one does splash damage. Their grenades are also not to be trifled with - it takes a skilled marine to dodge a Major Rubicon Juggernaut's 4-grenade salvo.

Sigma Fighters, Sigma Hunters, and Sigma Troopers - they are slightly beefier, faster, nastier versions of the standard marathon versions. They are from a project that never got finished, which I was involved in, called Portal of Sigma.

Chamberlain - An assasin target for netgames. Mostly useless Pfhor Diplomat - but like the Deceiver, he has a withering energy drain attack at close range. 1v1 he can be deadly, but a couple of Pfhor Fighters can bring him down.


Screenshots

http://hl.udogs.net/files/Uploads/%20Us ... reenshots/

These are some screenshots of three of the multiplayer maps that are going to be released alongside the Tagset. The 4 "funky camera build" screenshots are dark upon viewing, but if you open it in an image editing program such as photoshop, they look correct. Im not sure why this happens - it has something to do with the PNG format.

The project is very far along, and we hope to have 4 or 5 multiplayer maps each with numerous meshes, ranging from classic army-style setup to a respawning "deathmatch" variant where you get one marine each, and weapons are scattered about the map for you to pick up. We also hope to have a solo map or two by release.

Special thanks to LegacyTyphoon, Forrest of Bungie.org, Ozone, Steel Axe, Melekor, and anybody else i'm a dick for forgetting to mention.

The current build of Mjolnir can be found in LegacyTyphoon's uploads folder (not mine) - the exact title is 'Mjolnir Project 1.4.zip'.

[Melekor]

I would recommend anyone who is interested to try out this plugin, it really is quite fun, especially in combination with plugins to increase the number of enemies.

These are some screenshots of three of the multiplayer maps that are going to be released alongside the Tagset. The 4 "funky camera build" screenshots are dark upon viewing, but if you open it in an image editing program such as photoshop, they look correct. Im not sure why this happens - it has something to do with the PNG format.

This is because some apps (including photoshop) include gamma information in the png file when they save. You can delete the gamma tag with a tool like tweakpng or if you're using photoshop you can get the superpng plugin which allows saving images directly without any metadata.

[vinylrake]

I didn't find any closeups of the newly rendered units in the handful of screenshots I looked at, but those are sure some nice looking maps towards the bottom of the list!

[oogaBooga]

Ah, right. I should have been more specific - these are just screens of the maps so far. I'll have some battle screenshots soon. And there wasnt any need to render because they're all bitmaps stored in Marathon Shapes files

made it really easy to put into oak - they were already all indexed to the same color table!

[Zeph]

wow ooga this is looking quite good!

I know you're probably the most knowledgable marathon person of all the community and I really trust your expertise


Let me know when it's playable

[oogaBooga]

Its playable now as a tagset, but the maps need a lot of testing before I can comfortably release it.

Any volunteers ?

[vinylrake]

if you are looking for strict map testing (passability, water levels, stuck spots, etc) i'd be happy to help and volunteer to be slaughtered in some ffa games - but i am a marathon newbie so can't really provide any meaningful feedback about how close (or far away) the units / guns / attacks are to marathon itself.

[killerking]

I'd also like to help you with betatesting.