Eternal (a Marathon scenario)

[Pfhorrest]

(Not sure whether to post this here or over at Your Art And Links instead. Mods feel free to move it if you choose.)

Some of you probably know the video game developer Bungie, who made Destiny and Halo. Well, half a decade before Halo they made another revolutionary (for its time) sci-fi first-person shooter game called Marathon, which is now open-source with a lot of fan-made graphical enhancements and free available to download and play on all major platforms.

Fans of Marathon have made a lot of mods (what we call "scenarios") for it too, including yours truly. Mine is called Eternal, and it's a single-player continuation of the original Marathon trilogy that's about twice as long as any of the original games. I completed an extremely rough first draft of it back in 2004, then with the help of a lot of other people made a more-finished pass in 2008, with the intention of finishing a few more stretch goals soon thereafter to call it finally "done", but instead spent the following seven years barely eking out a 1.1 version instead, which is also freely available to download and play on all major platforms.

As I was working on my Chronicles of Quelouva over the past year, another Marathon fan came out of the blue and completed the biggest missing piece of the project as plugin to my mod. With that inspiration, I've decided to carry on the creative momentum from working on the Chronicles and try to dedicate this next year to finally crossing Eternal off my to-do list forever.

Mostly I intend for that to involve finishing a texture upgrade that I was partway through a few years ago before life imploded on me again. I'm going to try to take it really slowly and finish that over the course of this year, and I might maybe share some of the progress on it here, if anyone cares to see it. I'm also trying to get some other fans to help with a few other little finishing touches while I work on that.

The current version is totally playable though, if anyone cares to check it out. I would recommend playing the original trilogy first though, since, you know, sequel and all that.

[Pfhorrest]

Probably nobody cares, but I have a couple of screenshots of the work in progress to share:





And this last one is my first attempt at bump mapping:

[Pfhorrest]

Bump maps are awesome:

[Pfhorrest]

(there's more screenshots at that link above, just posting my favorite of each batch here)

[Pfhorrest]

I've mostly given up on telling anyone about this on this forum since nobody seems to care, but I just really enjoyed this semi-action-shot, intending mostly to show some of the updated textures but a really nice shot of one of the new weapons too:

[Pfhorrest]

Hurray the first alpha of the new version of this I'm working on this year is out now.

[Pfhorrest]

Just another screenshot I thought was cool enough to share:

[Pfhorrest]

I'm kinda proud of this texture:

[Pfhorrest]

It's recently come to my attention that a large section of the fan community for Marathon think that this entire project is complete shit, but have only been saying so in places I wasn't aware existed, while the handful of people who have commented have been generally positive.

This is making me question whether I should even be bothering.

I would greatly appreciate if someone outsiders would take a look at the project and let me know their opinion.

[Chen]

It's recently come to my attention that a large section of the fan community for Marathon think that this entire project is complete shit, but have only been saying so in places I wasn't aware existed, while the handful of people who have commented have been generally positive.

This is making me question whether I should even be bothering.

I would greatly appreciate if someone outsiders would take a look at the project and let me know their opinion.

As an outsider I don't really even know how to judge this. You're working with a fairly old engine so it's clearly not going to hold up visually to any modern titles but I don't imagine that's the expectation. The textures look fine. As for story or anything since I have no familiarity with the original game or its sequels I can't really give any input on that. I think the issue is this is quite a niche game and quite old. An outsider will likely have no real knowledge of this game or what is expected from mods.

[SecondTalon]

Can't really say much that Chen hasn't said. I could download and play it, but I've not got the proper context.

That said - are you sure it's a large portion of the fanbase and not just ten assholes? I mean, looking at things like Reddit and /r/gaming, /r/truegaming /r/games and so on, you'd think no one and their cousin would ever touch another Call of Duty game ever again as they're all derivative garbage.

And yet, that series is like printing money. Each one sells more than the one before it because, generally speaking, people who like a thing have no reason to go online and find other people who also like a thing and then spend hours of their time talking about how much they like a thing... because all that wasted time could be spent playing a thing.

[cphite]

It's recently come to my attention that a large section of the fan community for Marathon think that this entire project is complete shit, but have only been saying so in places I wasn't aware existed, while the handful of people who have commented have been generally positive.

This is making me question whether I should even be bothering.

I would greatly appreciate if someone outsiders would take a look at the project and let me know their opinion.

Your textures look cool... it's an old engine and that shows, but so what? Not everything has to be shiny and new.

Ignore the haters. People love to bitch about games; if you judge only by forums, every game sucks and nobody plays anything ever. Yet, somehow they keep selling 'em to people...

It sounds like you enjoy working on this thing, so why not just work on it and have fun?

[ucim]

My first impression is "ch*irpin' awesomeful!" Now, I know nothing about Marathon, but I can easily see the Quelova worlds done this way. That it looks "rendered" compared to, say, an actual photograph of what the real thing might be, is of no concern in my mind. For one thing, you could always re-render the dataset, but in the context of a game or a story, if you're still looking at technical glitches, the underlying game or story is what needs work, not the imagery.

No matter what you do, somebody is going to not like it. Ignore them. In most cases, you'll find that those people have never actually done anything along those lines.

I'm not sure what stage of completion this is in - is it playable right now? Are these concept drawings? (The relevant context is "how much have you done WRT how much still needs to be done?")

Jose

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. To answer Jose’s question it has been fully playable for well over a decade, this year’s project is just putting the finishing touches on it all. Some of the haters talking about how awful it is (all behind my back in a place I didn’t know existed so nobody trying to attack me directly) are some of the other more prominent creators in the community, which is why it stings so. They’ve politely given me criticism before and sometimes I agree even if changing it would be too much work this late in the game, but I didn’t know until now that they thought it was really that awful.

[SecondTalon]

Without knowing their issues with it, I can't really say if it's valid. Like, I'm starting to get in to the RPGMaker scene and there's so many terrible games that aren't terrible for mechanical reasons or even art reasons, just that the story is full of horrible cliche trope garbage shit.

But I'm doing what I can to say simply "Story's not for me" and moving on to what I can critique.

So.. is it that sort of thing?

Also, fuck'em if they can't tell you to your face too. You're awesome.

[Pfhorrest]

Interestingly story is the one aspect universally praised for it, to the point that there are stickied forum threads to remind people it isn’t actually canon. It’s mostly the maps that people hate, which aren’t my work so I don’t take that personally; and now apparently my new textures too, which is what’s really got me down as that is what I am currently spending so much time refining.

[SecondTalon]

They’re complaining about textures?

Man, fuck them.

[Pfhorrest]

I discovered a single numerical configuration value that has been set wrong in Eternal for over a decade, changing which radically improves the quality of lighting across the entire scenario, and now even the people who thought it sucked think it looks pretty awesome.

[SecondTalon]

I stand by my "fuck them" assessment. All the same, congratulations. You should feel like that guy who fixed Colonial Marines

[techblogger911]

Good work! I don't always like new and shiny textures

[Pfhorrest]

Thank you

got past the alpha stage and released Beta 1 last night

[Pfhorrest]

beta 2 is due tomorrow night, and I took this screenshot tonight to remind myself of the bug in the landscape texture you see there, but despite that bug I thought the screenshot was worth sharing:

[SecondTalon]

I'm not seeing the bug. Is it the dark patch being too gridlike? That's all I can figure.

Still, that looks like a fun classic deathmatch arena - things are open enough that a sniper can sit in a spot and control vast stretches of territories but there's also enough cover that someone could easily make it through and, while the sniper's looking at one spot, hit them. It's varied enough to be interesting, has a goal (Climb higher!) that's self evident, there's lots of places to hide but no place that's secure - hiding from one direction still leaves you vulnerable to three more (without even counting height).

I mean, I'd run around in it and blow things up.

[Pfhorrest]

The bug was that halfway between the motion sensor in the middle and the weapon display on the right was a seam in the landscape (“skybox”) texture wherein it didn’t wrap correctly.

And this level is meant to be part of the single player campaign (there are no multiplayer maps in my mod, though there are in the original Marathon series), but I’m glad you think it would make for a good one and agree with your assessment of it for that purpose.

[Pfhorrest]

I'm very happy to report that over the past couple of months, development on Eternal has really taken off, as a couple of fans have chipped in a ton of time and effort to really polish a bunch of things up way beyond my expectations for what I thought I would get done this year.

One of them also has a YouTube channel that is mostly gameplay videos from the Marathon series, and he has a playlist of every level in Eternal (in various stages of this year's development) that I thought I should share with you all, here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 7fvitdSKDH

Though I think my current favorite of his videos are two currently-unlisted ones showing the addition of a script to add weather effects to a couple of levels, something unprecedented in the original Marathon trilogy and so really cool (to me) to see in a Marathon scenario, even if it's nothing special by the standards of modern titles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsBilYx4Ibg

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeiBXmXqlNY

I missed my end-of-year deadline due to serious illness that wiped December off the calendar for me, but so many other people are so enthusiastically helping out now that I've decided that my own prior commitments to other things that preclude me from working on Eternal myself any more shouldn't force them all to stop or to abandon their still-incomplete plans to make it even more awesome (including multiplayer maps, because they've been testing the solo campaign in cooperative play and finding it so much fun that they want to be able to fight each other too).

So while they've carried on without me, rolling out three unofficial betas across December, I've decided to call those official, release one more myself this week with the last of the work I had planned to complete by the end of last year, and then let them all finish off their incomplete additions to roll into one more final feature-frozen beta 10, after which they're all going to playtest it and fix any bugs they find themselves until it gets to a state that we can call final.

It's kind of a dream come true, seeing a project of mine become so beloved that it carries on in the arms of the fans-cum-codevelopers achieving heights I never even aimed for even while I'm completely incapacitated.

Oh and BTW, development builds are all publicly available if anyone here wants to check them out:

http://eternal.bungie.org/development.php