Bungie Releases Marathon 2 Under GPL 155
"Today at 7 pm CST Bungie Software releases the Mac source code for their classic game "Marathon 2: Durandal" to the net. This game represented the pinnacle of first-person shooter technology in 1995, and was the most successful of the highly-acclaimed Marathon series."
"Programmers only need apply: the code is in MPW format (Macintosh Programmers Workshop, which can be freely downloaded at developer.apple.com), and because various components had to be removed before public release, devising some workarounds will be necessary before the code will compile. Nevertheless, for those with the skills to manipulate it, the code can form the basis of all kinds of 3D, first-person perspective games, and we look forward to seeing what is done with it."
"The code is being released under the terms of the GNU public license, and Bungie does not offer technical support with the code. More information can be found in the ReadMe that accompanies it. You can download sit version or a gzipped version "
Update: 01/18 04:25 by CN : Jason Pellerin of Bungie writes: "I'd like to see a linux port, and I can donate some server space and time to help it happen, please write me at m2linux@bungie.com if you want to get in on the fun."
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
Hope people can fix some bugs (Score:1)
The main theme is great (Score:1)
Remember Maelstrom, the Mac game? (Score:1)
It's Linux port is in every Linux distribution that I've checked.
Even old Mac games are going to make Linux better.
"real" 3D shooting. (Score:1)
Yes, it's an option. I'm going to stay out of the discussion on 2.5D vs. 3D, but Quake is a far more advanced engine. 3D acceleration and an extremely expandable design are the primary reasons, in addition to true 3D models vs sprites for other objects. And if you look at some of the projects that have sprung up to improve the Q1 source code, it's not as far away from Q2/Q3 as you might think.
Re:Windows version (Score:1)
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
BUT -
it was very frustrating that you could neither jump nor duck in this game. If you wanted to jump, you had to "grenade hop". Kind of lame for a character that's supposedly the ultimate killer cyborg.
Also, the only decent weapon for area coverage (grenade launcher), SUCKED as a combat weapon - it was attached as an over-under to the most inaccurate automatic rifle ever imagined. Plus, it did very little in the way of damage. Now, do an over-under with a flechette gun, and THEN you'd have a decent weapon.
(also would have been nice if grenades came in varieties; smokers, armor peircing, antipersonnel, etc.)
I also was a bit disappointed in Marathon Infinity, at the poor quality of the video. Other games were doing way better at that time. Marathon Infinity had almost no improvement over Marathon 2 in graphics. It was just some tweaks to the physics models and a new set of levels.
BTW -
Bungie does have a super-kick-ass new game in development called Halo, and from the movies and screen shots I've seen, it will totally blow everything else away.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:MAC didn't make the IIe (Score:1)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a . [nmsu.edu]
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
Get those dual sawed-off shotguns and find a Pfhor, or a Trooper... And you've got to love the single-handed Arnie reload action
And, for the record, the Marathon series has the best plot of any series (or single game) I've ever played. And Marathon 1 was the best...
I wonder if someone would be willing to put music into M2... One of the things I miss from M1 was the music...
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
I can see that you are a real quake-expert; quake has this 'real 3d' that you speaking of in the way of shooting.
As far as I remember (I have never seen marathon in action, so no marathon expert), the marathon engine used sprite-based avatars (enemies and the like), so no real 3d to speak of.
To make that statement into a question, which GPL engine makes for better graphical quality, GLQuake or this Marathon2 one?
Answers from somebody who is familiar with both (unlike us) are appreciated...
Re:This game ROCKS! err. SUCKS!!! (Score:1)
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
And this is what you define as 'real 3d shooting'. Interesting choice of words. Anyway, when you are running around with a rocket launcher kind of device in the real world, precision is not really that important (not getting your own hair on fire is I would imagine, is that in M2?).
This was 1995.
You said it was in the same time as quake I, so both engines that you are comparing were out.
There's more to 3d than whether you are using sprites, or what rendering engine, or how many FPS you are getting!
If 'real 3d shooting' is pixel-perfect aiming, God knows what you mean with more realistically (sp?) display, but I think all the properties you mention have a lot to do with 3d (although there is more of course, but not a lot more since we are discussing engines not game-graphics or whatever).
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
This is also a favorite past-time in team fortress, a quake I mod.
My windows freinds who were Quake heads who came and watched (and joined) us playing were blown away.
I just downloaded the demo [bungie.com], I'll install it tonight (see, you made me look :-)
I personally know three people who bought a power PC for the sole purpose of playing Marathon.
I know of people who buy Macs simply because they have the colour of fruit. I have never been impressed with the amount of thought people put into buying a Mac.
I didn't mean to turn this into a whole "bash doom and quake" thing,
It is amazing that it came to that at all, with your remark that "At the time, all my PC friends were playing doom2 (YAWN!) then quake came out. Still looked like crap next to M2". It's a crazy world I guess....
Re:This game ROCKS! err. SUCKS!!! (Score:1)
I just played the demo, so I can answer my own question right now. The engine of this game really really reminds me of doom, and it isn't the good old days either. If I realize that I just played GLQuake (also GPL'd recently) for about four hours this weekend while I also have quake2 & 3, and I couldn't stand this game long enough to find out how to look up or down, I know I have found out something about Mac-users once again (what's wrong with these people :-)
Don't get me wrong, there still might be a great game there, that's not just about graphics, but the great graphics is just what Mac-users where always whining about in news groups. Also, only the engine is GPL'd, not the entire game.
Of course I am also still happy that Bungie made it GPL. Sort of....
As for Pfhreakaz0id's concerns of lack of pixel perfect 'real 3d' shooting, I think that's easier to fix in GLQuake than Marathon's graphic engine.
Oh yeah, if that's not clear yet: Mac-users, as far as I am concerned all the sh*t you get from PC-users is well-deserved, stop boring us with your endless stories about your sucky system :-))
(Moderate away)
M2 kicks ass.... (Score:1)
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
Re:Maybe I've been living in a box all these years (Score:1)
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:1)
As a side note, I remember thinking that Marathon looked really good on a Mac Quadra machine. However, seeing some screenshots just now, it does seem kind of cheezy, all blobby and bright colored. Plus the 'viewer' seems to be tiny. Strange how Quake (I,II,III) can spoil you.
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Re:Marathon enhancements (Score:1)
The best thing about Marathon was the story -- The background plot and how it was revealed to you really kept the game interesting. (Has any Id game since Castle Wolfenstien ever had a plot?) If all of the game content has been GPLed, I would love to see Marthon's plot and terminal text ported to a modern Quake II/III engine.
For those who are interested: The Marathon Story site [smd.tcd.ie] has a ton of background information on the plot and various references in the game.
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Microphone hookup (Score:1)
I didn't have the hardware to take advantage of it at the time, but I always thought that was a cool feature. It'd sure beat typing for coordinating attacks!
Marathon is great! (Score:1)
Re:why only M2? Cross-platform (Score:1)
Incidentally, are Forge and Anvil (Bungie's editors) going to be open-sourced?
Re:Hope people can fix some bugs (Score:1)
Re: System Shock (Score:1)
Marathon was originally designed as the sequel to Pathways Into Darkness (released August 1993) and was first shown at MacWorld SF in January 1994. Marathon went through a number of rewrites during 1994 with it looking very similar to it's final incarnation by August and released in December 1994. I don't believe Bungie took much influence from System Shock.
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
I remember DOOM well. I've played it both solo and network play and it just doesn't add up to Marathon. From what I remember (correct me if I'm wrong) the DOOM scenario went like this:
Level 1 - Kill a whole bunch of bad guys.
Level 2 - Kill a whole bunch of bad guys.
Level 10 - Kill a whole bunch of bad guys.
Level 50 - Kill a whole bunch of bad guys.
That was it. The whole game. You just shot things. Your reward for clearing a whole level of bad guys was getting more bad guys to shoot. Mindless drivel.
Mac gamers knew about DOOM. We just prefered Marathon. The graphics were better. The movement and game flow was phenomenal. There was a story to solve. (What was the DOOM story anyhow?) And the network play was phenomenal. I think had Bungie released Marthon for the Mac and PC together, a lot more of you PC gamers would have raved about this game.
And in case you're wondering, I played DOOM before I played Marathon. You can accuse me of flamebait. I don't care. You say Mac gamers don't understand. You've got it half right. PC gamers didn't understand either. How could we? Our platforms were so far apart from each other that we couldn't help but flame each other.
Now things are different. Titles are being released cross-platform. Mac, PC, and Linux. And now the flames are where they belong; when we frag each other.
EF
Damn straight... (Score:1)
Coincidentally, I was just in the process of making a Q3Arena map of one of the Marathon 2 levels (from memory, since I haven't played the game in 4 years
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
Re:My login name comes from M2, btw (Score:1)
Re:Marathon is great! (Score:1)
As a gamer I have to object to this. What you're forgetting is that it's not the graphics and engine and so forth that make the game, but rather the gameplay. Remember Half-Life? IIRC, the Half-Life engine is modded Quake I/II engine. So what made this one of the best selling and highest rated FPS's around? Good solid gameplay. In an age where many games are moving more and more towards internet play, (Q3A, UT, and so forth) it was refreshing to see an innovative and well done game which really stood out in the single player arena. Even though it was done using "hand-me-down" technology, the gameplay itself is what set this gem away from the rest. Just because a company is the first to come out with a technology, doesn't mean they'll make full use of it's potential. I'm not trying to knock on Quake or Unreal, but there are many many cases of people making a great game using dated technology, with fresh ideas or approaches that really appeal to gamers. Just my two cents...
----
Dave
Purity Of Essence
Re:Bungie Inspiration (Score:1)
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Dave
Purity Of Essence
Haven't you heard of Time City? (Score:1)
Aw, hustle on over to http://www.timecity.org/ [timecity.org] and check out the progress on Time City! Heck, Slashdot's own loveable Emmett Plant [slashdot.org] is in on this one, even.
(I have to confess that the gameplay seems a bit over-convoluted to me, with this "time dilation" business — but then, if you don't like something you can use the code to roll your own system, right? Open Source Software, you know?)
Story (Score:1)
And I'm not the only one. The Story Page [marathon.org] has spent the last three years or so disassembling the storyline, the secrets and mysteries and trying to figure out just what was happening while we were punching our way through hoards of Pfhor. (Literally punching in some cases.) Several hundred MBs (!) later we're now diving through the source looking for comments that may shed some light of an interpretation of garbled text we've been mulling over for two years. Marathon fans are dedicated, to say the least (in the least insulting way
And for those who think that Marathon is long past, just a Mac game from the Doom era that a handful of the obsessed are keeping alive, why don't you stop by the Story Page and grep for "Halo". Consider it backstory.
(This little bit of insight into the Marathon fanboy mind, such as it is, was brought to you the number 7 and the letter Durandal. Beginning mocking...now.)
Re:Marathon is great! (Score:1)
Because that's what this, and Quake 1, are. They're hand-me-downs. They don't fit the old owners, so they're passing it on to us. There's nothing wrong with hand-me-downs, I guess. It's a good, frugal way to put something to its fullest use.
But who wants a wardrobe of all hand-me-downs? All the decent games out there are proprietary. Sure, companies like Id makes it nicer for us by giving out SDKs to work *with* the software, but that's hardly Open Source. I'd really like to see some kickass graphics come out as Free Software... Even if it was only "A Quest for Herring".
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Damn straight... (OT) (Score:1)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Wher's the release? (Score:1)
Re:Windows rocks (Score:1)
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Re:Marathon is great! (Score:1)
Re:This is really cool! (Score:1)
Just another dat in the life of the best game company out there.
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game, but that you can't get a clear view of history through severely Mac-tinted glasses.
Please inform me (Score:1)
Re:Nice to see (Score:1)
Re:Nice to see (Score:1)
Here's the reason:
There were three games in this series:
Marathon
Marathon 2: Durandal
Marathon Infinity
Of those though, there were only two code-bases: M.2 and M.Inf shared the same code base, with only minor tweaks between them (mostly in the Mac-specific stuff, such as InputSprocket support and a few bug-fixes). You could actually play M.2 maps with M.Inf, and didn't have to tweak them at all.
So, what you're getting is still the "mature" code for the game.
Re:Bungie Inspiration (Score:1)
Bungie Inspiration (Score:1)
The full verion of Marathon had labelled some of the levels in honor of Beavis & Butthead. I guess at the time, it made it uber-cool but now it seems to make it a little dated.
Still a fun game though. It also featured (for the first time)a couple of my favorite little bits in the FPS genre:
1) The secondary firing key for multiple fire modes. I think Marathon was a first here.
2) The flamethrower. I haven't seen this used in any other FPS but I really don't play that much any more. I remember putting this weapon into Tbyte's "X-Xar" and it was a very fun/deadly weapon against the foot soldiers. Alas, it'll be a long while until that game is released now.
I noticed that Unreal has feature #1 but it won't be the first FPS I experienced this with.
-Vel
Addendum... (Score:1)
-Vel
Re:Marathon is great! (Score:1)
Re:Maybe I've been living in a box all these years (Score:1)
Other bugs... (Score:1)
You have to make your maps carefully, because with particular polygons the game gets confused, and the player can become trapped or see strange artifacts.
The game also tends to crash a lot with third-party maps.
Saved movies (how many 8 year old first-person shooters, or even recent ones can save multiplayer movies?) don't save correctly with third-party maps, sometimes even with the standard maps. The game thinks that the movement data is associated with the wrong map, so you end up watch a movie where all of the players are walking into walls. Usually saving the map on the computer that hosted the game helps keep this from happening. There is a utility that can reassociate the movie file with the correct map, but it doesn't work well.
The mouse on the PC version is WAAAY to sensitive, even when you turn it down in the Mouse Control Panel. Also, the keyboard on the PC version isn't accurate enough; it's only accurate to a certain number of pixels, so it's hard to have accurte aim.
More on TCP/IP: I've tried playing Marathon over the Internet using programs that will make AppleTalk run over IP, and the results were very bad. The game chugged along with every packet, even with decent ping times. I think probably the network code would need to be rewritten entirely for this to work. I would be _very_ excited if someone managed to do it, though!
There are probably a few other bugs I can't think of right now. Even so, I still think this is the best first-person shooter ever made. Fixing bugs like these would without a doubt make it the best.
Anvil and Forge Source Code Release? (Score:1)
Re:Mar II is a great game. (Score:1)
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Re:Why only second one? (Score:1)
Favorite M2 levels and more babbling about Thon. (Score:1)
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
Actually, the thing to realize here is that even the original Marathon totally blows away the DOOM series of games. I've played DOOM, and it sucks. Not only does Marathon look alot nicer and play alot nicer, the game also has a plot and makes you think.
Personally I think M2 was the worst of the 3 games. M1 and Moo (as we typed Marathon Infinity on the BBs and NGs) had much better storylines. If all you care about is "hack and slash" (to borrow a term from RPGs), then M2 is more your baby. The DOOM and Quake families are even more so.
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
Re:Maybe I've been living in a box all these years (Score:1)
Worst of all is that, while Bungie's reputation in the Mac community was similiar to the reputation Id enjoyed with PC gamers, Bungie had no name recognition in the already crowded PC game market.
With all those problems, M2 ended up being just another W3D/DOOM clone that was quickly dismissed.
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:1)
Actually, Wolfenstein 3D was the inspiration for Pathways Into Darkness, which I believe was Bungie's 1st FPS (either that or something called Minotaur).
While DOOM may have had some influence on Marathon, it wouldn't have been much, since DOOM was only a baby step over W3D; but Marathon was a huge leap over PID.
Re:Good news (Score:1)
Re: Two words... System Shock (Score:1)
Also, the maps in Marathon are less crude than the System Shock maps. Shock's maps are all based on square grids. There are tilted floors, but they're sort of preset tilts. You can have a 45-degree floor that tilts from one side to the other, or a shallower tilt that takes two or three squares, but that's it. And it's all very griddy. Marathon didn't have tilted floors, but there was no grid, and walls could be pretty arbitrary.
Both Shock and Marathon have a good engaging plot, though, although Shock, true to the Looking Glass style, is much less of an action game. Marathon is definitely a shooter.
I've played pretty much every FPS to come along, but until Half-Life arrived (and then Thief and Shock 2 8), nothing was as engaging as the Marathon series. I have high hopes for Halo, too... And the Marathon references have already been surfacing.
Josh
Re:This is really cool! (Score:1)
stobbit! no flame wars! (nt) (Score:1)
oh please (Score:1)
I'm a PC bigot and Doom was nothing compared to Marathon. I played Doom. I played Marathon II. When Marathon II came out I stopped playing Doom. I upgraded to Windows 95 for Marathon II.
So call me a doom trasher - when the subject of Marathon vs Doom comes along I say I doubt Doom inspired Marathon. Even if it did, Marathon was clearly the result of Bungee seeing where Doom was, and aiming very, very far ahead of id software.
Pathways Into Darkness was cool! (Score:1)
Besides a good story, there was plenty of gore, monsters bursting, and you had to manage a variety of ammunition. You got an AK-47 with regular rounds, sabot rounds, a grenade launcher, and all sorts of crystals.
Why not Marathon Infinity? (Score:1)
As someone who not only played but worked on maps and a map generator for the Marathon 2 engine, I'm wondering why they didn't release the Marathon Infinity code. (The Marathon series was a trilogy, with Marathon Infinity being the third and final chapter.) Infinity can load M2 map files, although there are some subtle differences in the engine and the texture sets were reworked. The main difference was the fact that Infinity allowed you to embed a physics model with each level in a map. (With Marathon 1 & 2, the phsyics model was stored in a separate file and was the same for all levels.) This allowed you to change the rules of the game from one level to the next, which was pretty cool.
P.S. For anybody who doesn't know, the best part about the Marathon series is it's story [marathon.org]. I've always found the id games to be a real bore because they were missing this key element. I guess Bungie spoiled me.
Re:Real 3D?!? (Score:1)
You are correct. To be precise, what happens is that the view plane moves vertically up or down, rather than rotating around the center of projection. IIRC, Duke Nukem 3D used a similar approach.
Re:Nice to see (Score:1)
I remember watching a friend play it briefly. At one point, he opened a door and saw this weird flying creature he'd never seen before. He yelped in surprise and terror. This was not a person who frequently yelped, or felt surprise and terror. Like Half-Life, and unlike Quake, Marathon demonstrates that what really makes a game succeed is good play, design, and plotting. Great graphics technology won't wrap your mind up in the world of the game the way that a good treatment of these other elements will.
Re:Marathon 2 rocked (Score:1)
Good start. (Score:1)
Hoping for more to come...
kwsNI
Re:This is really cool! (Score:1)
Re:Real 3D?!? (Score:1)
If you really want to get technical, none of this shit (d1,d2,q1,q2,q3,m1,m2,m*, etc) is 3-d since your looking at a flat 2-d screen. It's all an illusion. The illusion M2 present(ed) was/is as good as Quake1 and, as has already been stated, Marathon 2 was released a full year before Quake.
Um, how can you tell from a static screenshot whether or not a game is 'real3D'?
Re:Haven't you heard of Time City? - try glTron (Score:1)
ports keeping low bandwith needs (Score:1)
Maybe I've been living in a box all these years? (Score:1)
Looking at Bungie's site [bungie.com], I see Marathon2 was released for Win95 in late 1996. This explains why I've never heard of it. I was too busy playing Quake and Command & Conquer at that time.
Look at the progress that has been made... (Score:2)
Check out http://www.planetquake.com/qer/ - In a very short amount of time, two guys have done a good job of taking a lot of the technology from Quake2 and Quake3 and putting it into the Q1 engine. (Topaz has done a lot of work on colored lighting, and Phoenix has been implementing Q3-style "shaders" - Another guy has been looking into high-res textures, and released an amazing screenshot.) Topaz and Phoenix will be merging their code within the week, and hopefully soon they can be convinced to merge with Quakeforge, at least to some degree. (QF and QER have somewhat divergent goals...)
Re: Two words... System Shock (Score:2)
However, I did that System Shock 2 (great game, wish it had a better rendering engine, thou) has some references to Marathon, of particular interest is that the alien species that take over the ship are picked up from Tau Ceti IV, the original planet that the Marathon colony ship was heading to.
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:2)
No, but one of the many things you had to do in the solo game was do a thing called "gernade jumping", which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course).
Actually, grenade jumping was not required in any of the Marathon triologies (although later 3rd party levels did require it). You *could* use it to get to secrets but it wasn't required.Nice to see (Score:2)
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:2)
Actually, monstors in M and M2 were modeled as cylinders -- shooting over someone's shoulder would often hit. Shooting just outside of it would miss.
Loved those games much as anyone, but I have to set the record straight on that.
--G
Woohoo! (Score:2)
I remember when the original Marathon came out (Mac only, of course - Bungie, at that time, developed only for the Mac), and it was great - like a thinking man's Doom.
Bungie were always very relaxed toward third-party maps, hacks, etc. They even released their own in-house level editor with Marathon Infinity, and carried on that tradition with Myth II, as well. Truly one of my favorite game companies.
To check out more information than you could possibly want to know about the Marathon series, see here [marathon.org].
Actually, about 6 months (Score:2)
why only M2? Cross-platform (Score:2)
It's what I played before getting Unreal, so that was a *mighty* long time to be a Mac gamer. I was not impressed with Quake, and preferred the single-person missions of the Marathon series.
Some people were working on a port of the Infinity maps to Unreal, but I think they lost interest/steam somewhere along the way.
Best part of Marathon: custom physics models. For M1 I made "Pope's Super Fist" which gave the Pistols faster shooting and exploding bullets (x1.25 damage so it wasn't some super cheat) and the Super Fist: it threw a Phor shot down the hall and lit up as it went, so you could see down dark hallways AND trigger remote switches.
Then in M2 and Mi you got physics models embedded in the Maps, so each level could be in a different atmosphere like space or Zero-G.
It was ahead of its time in terms of playability, and so what if it was sprites instead of polys??
Heck I played through MI last year, just because!
Pope
How about discussing the code!? (Score:2)
First and foremost, this application was written with MPW. That means that it will require significant rework to get it to compile under CodeWarrior. Second, the code is 8 years old. That means it's written to versions of the Mac APIs that are long gone. I didn't look closely, but I didn't see any PPC support, support for UPPs, or many of the other tweaks Apple has forced on developers over the past 4 or 5 revs to the universal headers.
Finally, even if you used the precise version of MPW used to build the program originally, it still wouldn't build because several chunks of code are missing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not faulting Bungie in any way. I think this is a great contribution on their part. But it's still going to be a while before someone steps up and gets this thing to build under a modern development environment on the current version of the O/S.
Anyone gotten started on it yet? ;)
An explanation for PC owners (Score:2)
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:2)
Shrug. I've played both. I think that both are good games, but it's very obvious that DOOM spawned Marathon (i.e. Bungie wouldn't have written Marathon had they not seen DOOM). So it's peculiar to see Maccies trashing DOOM so much; it ends up looking like sour grapes. But we Linux types are used to that
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:2)
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game.
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:2)
I'm not saying that the 3d engine in OpenGL isn't more advanced! This was 1995. If you were asking "did Marathon2 more realistically (sp?) display the environment of it's game than QuakeI did?" then I'd say "hell yes." There's more to 3d than whether you are using sprites, or what rendering engine, or how many FPS you are getting!
Re:Hope people can fix some bugs (Score:2)
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:2)
Re:An explanation for PC owners (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but it's you that doesn't understand. I am not a Mac head. I don't even use the Mac anymore, I just had one at work then. But marathon rocked. As I mentioned in another post. I person know three Quake-I fanatics who came to one of our Marathon2 sessions and bought a powerPC for the sole purpose of playing Marathon2. That's how good it was.
Re:This game ROCKS! (Score:2)
I just got really tired of "Oh, you don't have a PC? You don't play Quake? You must really suck as a gamer" If I'd spent 1/4 of the time playing Quake most of those guys did, I'd kick their ass!
Re:Real 3D?!? (Score:2)
My login name comes from M2, btw (Score:2)
also, there were lots of custom mods using "Pfh" stuff. Phfreakaz0id was my Marathon playing name.
Anyone remember Disco Inferno? A mod of a classic multi-player map with lots of lava as I recall. The "disco" one just added a flashing strobe in the shape of a mirror ball
Mac only source (Score:2)
"This is the Mac source. The sole known archive of the Windows 9x source was placed in a l
ead box and shipped to one of our island laboratories for safekeeping. Unbeknownst to us, the boat c
arrying the box made an unscheduled run up the coast of Madagascar, where the ship's captain hoped to
catch the end of the annual Miss Middle Of Nowhere pageant. The ship was approximately six miles f
rom shore when it was torpedoed by a one-man sub purchased from the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog by a
punter with more money than brains. Divers are still combing the sea floor looking for the box conta
ining the Windows code, and if we ever find it I'm sure we'll let you know. Windows hackers with lot
s of spare time may still be able to do interesting things with this code."
Anyone else find that funny?:)
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Re:This is really cool! (Score:2)
IMO Marathon 2 ranks up with Ultima, Star Control II, and System Shock 1/2, as one of the all time greats, as far as player immersiveness is concerned. The only game I feel clearly surpasses this one in quality and immersiveness is Half-Life (wow). Marathon 2 was also the first that I can recall that had something besides 'player 1 go kill player 2' style deathmatch.
It was the first game that I could recall that had a full scale alien invasion where everyone else wasn't dead and you actually had NPC's alive and fighting at your side. The lack of a sense of being 100% alone was a relieving break from the standard fare.
I'm gonna have a GREAT time playing this game and hitting those Durandal terminals and watching those NPC's go at it again
By the way I could smell a GPL move coming from Bungee. I am not at all surprised by this news. Way to go!
Re:What we need now is a Linux port (update) (Score:2)
:pserver:anonymous@beetle.bungie.com:/home/m2li
login: anonymous
password: pfhor
module: m2linux
...for your source-tree grabbing needs. To submit patches, talk about plans and ideas, etc, please write me at m2linux@bungie.com.
This is really cool! (Score:3)
The fact that they didn't pre-announce when they thought of it is the best part of this news. They went ahead and did the work of removing the proprietary stuff, bundled it up and set an exact time and location for the release. THEN they told everyone.
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Re:Why not Marathon Infinity? (Score:3)
-BH
This game ROCKS! (Score:3)
It was a great series. GREAT solo play. A really good sci-fi story. You had to pay attention to the plot, get clues, not just blow stuff up.
At the time, all my PC friends were playing doom2 (YAWN!) then quake came out. Still looked like crap next to M2 and m2 had real 3d (you know, you had to aim up and down, not just point in the general vicinity).
Anyway, this is good game. These are the folks who did Myth, etc.
Marathon enhancements (Score:4)
A Brief History of Marathon for the PC/Linux ppl (Score:5)
The storyline of Marathon is nothing new: one of the moons of Mars has been converted to a human colony ship and shot off to a new planet for colonization. Midroute, the ship is hijacked by an alien race called the "Pfhor" (pronounced 'four'), who begin to slaughter the humans. To make matters worse, one of the 3 AI, Durandal, apparently communicated with the alien ship, and has decided to do whatever possible to escape his computer prison.
You are the ships only hope as a security guard (your true identity is still a mystery through the remaining games).
At that time, the engine featured 8 player multiplay over Appletalk (not networkable :-/), a pseudo 3-D enviornoment: the maps were made of polygons in the x-y plane, with the ability to overlap polygons to achieve 4-D effects, but was limited in that no wall between polygons could have more than one opening), monsters and items were rendered as spirits, and various lighting effects. Liquids were only simulated, and floors and ceilings of each poly had to be horizontal and walls had to be vertical. Sure, that's a lot of limitations, but on basically 68030's, the game ran rock solid. Additionally, the ggame when beyond just shooting, providing a detailed story through terminals that you interacted with.
Marathon 2 did a lot of revamping of the engine, allowing larger and more colorful textures, liquids, transparent textures, and more lighting effects, but not much else. The plot of M2 took off where M1 ended: you've saved the colony ship, but have been abducted by the rogue AI Durandal, who is looking to save his butt before the universe collapses in 1x10^13 someodd years (paranoid, aint' he?). To do so, you visit the Pfhor homework as well as the homeworld of a race they have enslaved, the S'pht, looking for a device that might be able to transport planets across universes. As your survival is controlled by Durdanal, you have but little choice to follow him.
Marathon Infinity (the last of the trio) didn't do much to change the game engine, and mostly extended the story line and play to sort of wrap up the series... while the game play in Infinity is pretty good and the cleanest of the 3, the story at that point was a bit weak. IMO.
By this time, however Quake for the PC was out, Quake 2 was in the works, and MacSoft was working on getting Quake ported to the mac; the Marathon series had fulfilled its goals to fill in that FPS game that the mac players did not have. While people have begged Bungie to make a 4th Marathon sequel, they will probably not, as work with Myth and Halo continues. Oddly enough, people will be watching Halo carefully - the story in Marathon actually includes elements from a Wolvenstein clone that Bungie created called Pathways Into Darkness, and the players expect to see a drop or two of Marathon references in Halo and Oni.
One of the key things that made Marathon much better over Quake for me was the intelligence of the monsters: supposedly, the game adjusted the AI of the monsters as you continued depending on how well you played, and while it's hard to reproduce such events, I truely believe that is the case. Only recently has the AI of other games improved over Marathon's (that being Half Life), going above the basic 'charge the player'. The aliens in Marathon would seem to be able to cut around to your back if there was a way and get you trapped between two sets of them. They also seemed to know how to lurk well. Alot of this depended on the mapmaker's ability as well, but in general, the game was tough.
What we need now is a Linux port (Score:5)
My C skills are not the best, but I can contribute space for a cvs server, time to manage it, and time to manage patch submissions, builds and testing. And a mailing list and bugzilla db, if those are needed.
If you want to get in on the fun, please email me at m2linux@bungie.com.