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Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty Chapter 3 Stage 1
Posted By: Aaron FreedDate: 10/1/20 12:58 p.m.

In Response To: Eternal X Tour of Duty Chapter 3 Stage 1 (Lion O Cyborg)

A few scattered notes:

* S’pht of the same colour all share the same physics on a given level; each colour represents a specific clan. There are, however, two different shades of what you refer to as “blue”. The less saturated blue S’pht are hostile on the first three levels of Chapter Three (they become friendly once the Pfhor invade), and the more saturated blues are friendly throughout the game. I can’t remember which clan Raven associated the less saturated blues with, but the saturated blue are the S’pht’Kr. If memory serves, they also show up as blue dots on your map.

* All Ticks are hostile to basically everything around them. They’re very fickle, though, so it’s almost random as to whether they attack. Their attack is pretty dangerous, though.

* “She Is the Dark One” originally had another view of the Citadel of Antiquity in the northwestern corner, until we realised that this made no logical sense, given how far underground the player was, hence the segment of “Bob’s Big Date” I replaced it with.

We had a lot of fun revising that map. I’m not really sure how many of the additions wound up being my work and how many of them were Raven’s. I suspect slightly more of them were mine, but when a map gets passed back and forth between people that much, it’s almost a moot point, since people often end up piggybacking off each other’s ideas to some extent. I have absolutely no idea who built a few of the segments in the map now.

* Split doors get messed up in VML/Vasara if a player saves them in a different position than they’re supposed to start the level. That door would’ve been correctly aligned when the map was saved, but because it starts the map closed, it would end up misaligned if a person saved the map with the door open. This is one of the most annoying things about texturing in Aleph One.

* The annotations including our names and dates (e.g., “Aaron 2018.10.04”) are really just notes to ourselves about when a map was last revised, and aren’t of any interest to people outside the development team. That said, we weren’t very good about updating them regularly, so they’re not really even of much interest to us.

* Although “Omega” was at one point planned to be the name of what would have been the final release, it was dropped from the title during development, as it became clear that Eternal was unlikely to wrap up its development anytime soon – there’s never actually been a release entitled “Eternal X Omega”.

* I wouldn’t put too much thought into what real-world materials a texture resembles – these textures have been through so many revisions that there’s a decent chance the mapmaker’s original choice looked like something completely different.

Furthermore, when assigning textures in Eternal (and in most Marathon scenarios, for that matter), I mostly pay attention to what looks good aesthetically, rather than what would make the most logical sense to us. Lh’owon is an alien world terraformed by a technologically advanced race, so our primitive human technology isn’t really very relevant.

The one exception to this is Tempus Irae’s Earth textures – since they mostly represent 16th-century Earth technology, texture assignments actually should make some logical sense. (Though it’s a game first and foremost, and if there’s a disparity between what’s most realistic and what results in the best gameplay, I suspect I choose the latter nine times out of ten – and it’s not as though Tempus is a consistently realistic scenario, anyway.)

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Replies:

Eternal X Tour of Duty Chapter 3 Stage 1Lion O Cyborg 10/1/20 8:51 a.m.
     Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty Chapter 3 Stage 1Aaron Freed 10/1/20 12:58 p.m.
           Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty Chapter 3 Stage 1Lion O Cyborg 10/1/20 3:19 p.m.

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