: The idea was nixed pretty early on. Which is to say, I always thought the
: sounds you provided for us were the ones we were going to use (and that's
: what we ended up doing.) I think most of the crazy talk about reinventing
: the game really took place before I showed up though. (Or more likely
: Wolfchild and I just ignored it and did our own thing. :P)
Well, I wasn't aware that the sounds I re-did were the one's used... somebody could have gotten in touch with me back then and asked me to do more work on them and I would have happily done so... as a matter of fact, I did do some more work on them after the fact and also passed them on to the Marathon Rampancy project. ( http://www.planetunreal.com/rampancy/index.html )
I guess this is just another example of how difficult it is sometimes to get projects moving in the right direction with the entire cast onboard. You really do need one individual with an iron hand to steward things along... I know some folks don't want to volunteer for projects that way... but there's nothing like meeting a deadline.
I really don't want to come accross as somebody that doesn't like M:R or that is not appreciative of the effort that has gone into M:R. There are some VERY talented folks who have worked very hard on this project. I really do think that a lot of that effort, to some degree, has now been wasted because most folks won't be able to play it on either Macs or PC's. I just heard recently from some folks that the latest OS X update is causing big problems with the unofficial Preview 3 version of UT for OS X.
Anyway, moving along.... unfortunately, we cannot lump MOD development for UT into the same category as Rubicon or Eternal... these are beasts of a completely different nature. Marathon development was halted looooong ago... tell me Forrest... if Bungie had kept developing the Marathon engine to the present day, would you not be using THAT engine instead of the older deprecated engine (you are to some degree, by using Aleph)? That is the scenario with the Unreal engine... it keeps evolving. Nonetheless, while the community for Marathon stayed in the Marathon fold (because there was nothing to replace it), the community for UT has moved on to the newer iterations of the Unreal engine based games.
I understand it is not a trivial matter to update M:R. I myself, for many personal reasons, (having a baby is the biggest), have decided not to update any of my UT99 maps for UT2K4, because they really do have to be rebuilt from scratch to a great degree. Sure, you can export and reimport them into UT2K4, scale them, etc. etc. But if you want it done right, you have to rebuild them.
The sounds, textures and music are all reusable... its all about the maps and the coding, and that ain't chicken feed.
Lastly... this one is for Steve. Graphics and Audio are two very different things. You would be amazed how much you can do to sound (no matter its age as long as it is a clean sample) with the right software and tools. I didn't spend as much time on them as I wanted to back then, but given a couple of weeks of straight work on them now, I could make any of the original Marathon sounds sound like they were recorded yesterday. (And you could have them in Dolby 5.1 if you want!) :-)
