Available now at eternal.bungie.org is Eternal X v1.1 beta 5. It's basically just b4, plus:
- The Previous Aleph One AI script to let things continue working they way they used to despite the changes made in Aleph One's AI in its own 1.1 update.
- An updated version of President People's patch to the Eternal shapes, fixing 3rd-person view of the Marine sprites and a few other things. Hey, that's the only substantial "known problem" from the first beta, and now it's finally fixed!
- All of the terminal picts are redone. They don't perfectly match the terminal textures anymore, but stock Marathon didn't do that anyway. Updated textures including new terminals are in the works for a 1.2 release... someday. That part of it is already done, but not included here because it doesn't match the rest of the textures that aren't redone yet.
- The floating HUD now displays the level names in a Halo-like way as each level loads.
- Assorted bugfixes.
Other notable changes since the last "stable" release, 1.0.3, over seven years ago, in case people haven't played anything since then:
- Chapter 3 has been reorganized a bit, and one map replaced, for story reasons. (The main reason for there to be a 1.1 at all).
- There's a new floating HUD, with graphics of my design and scripting by Hopper. I think it's pretty awesome.
- The hires blood and explosions and stuff from Visciom's WEP are included now.
- Four tracks of new music from a new musician (Tommy T-Bone); featured mostly in Chapter 3, but more sparsely in other chapters as well.
- Updated interface (splash, main screen, loading, credits) and a theme to match which works on modern builds of Aleph One.
- Terminals now use the RIGHT tag for PICT sections and make use of the STATIC section for some interesting purposes.
- The textures are improved.
- The landscape textures are now taller, to accommodate the increased vertical viewing angle of Aleph One's new Shader renderer.
- Experimental implementation of mobile fusion turrets on the success branch of Chapter 5. Needs thorough testing to balance them just right.
- Lots of other misc little changes and fixes.
So I'm going to give it like a week (hahaha, I've said that before) for just one person (LT, I'm looking at you) to play through this and tell me it's not completely broken, and then I'm going to call this 1.1 final. Anything else can go into 1.2 instead.
If I don't actually call this 1.1 final within a week, someone please call me out on that.
So besides the redone textures, and the weapons if they ever get finished (Nick, CryoS, where are you guys?), on the docket for the next release is to change out the annoying PiD monsters from chapter 5 to something scarier. I'm thinking of keeping the Banshees, replacing the Headless with invisible Devlins, and just turning the Nightmares invisible, unless someone can think of a better third scary monster that already exists that I should use there. Or unless everyone thinks this is just a terrible idea.
Also, at some point I might learn the new toolchain and actually go through RyokoTK's and Crater Creator's reviews and fix all the little things they point out.
And remember, if any of you would like to help with that, the Eternal Maps merge folder is up on github now, so you can make small changes as you like and I'll roll them in to the next version of Eternal.
