: From what I now remember on alt.games.marathon the main problem was the devs'
: attitude - a really huge divide started between programmers like Loren
: Petrich and the devs and the scenario designers like Borzz. The designers
: wanted features like better monster AI/pathfinding and a lifting of the
: limitation polygon counts, among other features. While I know that the
: latter was done, not much was done about the former. And people took up
: the (quite adversarial) attitude of "Well, if you want us to add
: feature X, why don't you download the source and do it yourself?"
The split that I remember was really much more along the lines of what I was arguing. Some people were just calling for "make Marathon cleaner" - remove the limitations (poly count, viewing distance), link it to new technologies (OpenGL, TCP/IP), and allow recoding of the arbitrary parts (by implementing them in MML instead). There was a good bunch of people back then saying "just give us TCP/IP and OpenGL, implement everything in MML, remove the limits, make it stable, port it everywhere, and call it done." I was one of them.
Then there's the camp of folks who added stuff like the follow-cam (I remember that was a big controversy... "wtf are you wasting time on that for? TCP/IP still isn't working!!!"), and B&B, and other features beyond the scope of the original Marathon. There were some folk who, as you were saying, called for an improvement to the AI, and that was its own controversy, which centered on whether it was worth doing something that would break the behavior of everything made before it, so that things made after might be cooler.
Basically what it all comes down to is "Aleph should do what Marathon did, but better, so we can continue to enjoy Marathon in even greater glory!" versus "Aleph should do what Marathon did, and more, so we can make fancy new stuff with our new toys!" Honestly, I think it would be best for both sides to fork the project: keep one branch as just pure Marathon goodness, without the extra crap, but polished up for the 21st century; and let the other branch grow off into its own engine, no longer Marathon, no longer concerned with backwards compatability, just to be a nifty new engine project for people making scenarios to use.
: Has someone here or a b.org actually asked someone at Bungie for this? It
: seems odd that they didn't do this back when the Marathon source was
: released.
The code for Forge and Anvil is in the same place the code to M2Win95 is - sleeping with the fishes.
