: Work together, collaborate! jeeezz!
Easier said than done my friend.
I got involved in the M:R project when it was first started. I was big into UT at that time and having created content for it already ( http://osx.beyondunreal.com/eko ), and being an audio guy, knew I could help in some fashion. I proceded to convert every single M1, M2, and M3 sound/loop etc. I had all of these already converted and prepared in UT .umx format, and was working on preparing the music tracks when my involvement with the project came to a grinding halt.
My vision was to do an updated, cleaned up version of Marathon. To that end, I had remastered all of the original sounds in 16 bit audio, cleaned them up, enhanced them, etc. etc. etc. Well, that was not what I was told the direction of the project would be. They wanted new sounds, that had a similarity and feel with the original, but would be original sounds. Well, for me, that was the end of my involvement. It was not what I wanted to put my time into, nor what I wanted my contribution to be. Sound is very important to me, and its contibution to the feel and immersion of a game is invaluable. Using new sounds, for me, would mean that I was no longer working on recreating Marathon.
So, you see, just because folks have common desires and goals, does not mean that they want to take the same roads to get there. I want an updated 3D version of Marathon as much as the next guy... but as far as I'm concerned, M:R is a project whose final playable platform is dead and extinct. The UT community is for all intensive purposes, extinct. I've been associated with it from day one, in every single one of its knooks and crannies... so I know... believe me. Even the UT2K4 community is not what the UT community was, however, at least, because of its more modern platform, the M:R project has a greater chance to endure there... I would even say be completed, because there is a far greater pool of content creators to draw from as opposed to UT.
In todays modern gaming world, 5 years is an eternity. No modern project can sustain itself for that long of a period. I would say that if a MOD project is not finished within 3 years of a game being released, you can come pretty close to writing its obituary. This is not the "real artist ship" argument... it's the "you must ship while folks can still play (or still want to play) the damn game" argument.
