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 | Eternal 1.2.1 “semi-official beta” *LINK* | |
| Posted By: Aaron Freed | Date: 3/23/20 6:34 p.m. |
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I’ve posted about this at the Pfhorums and on the Discord, but it occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who don’t read either of those. So for those of you who don’t know me, I’m one of the developers of Marathon Eternal, and because Pfhorrest is swamped with real-life issues right now, I’ve decided to package together a clean install of my current changes to the game for the in-progress 1.2.1 release, because it will likely be a month or so until there’s another “official” release. It would probably be ideal for as many people as possible to play this release before then, however, because that way, we’ll be aware of any potential issues and be able to fix them for the next official beta. So at the bottom of this post, you will find a link to what I will term a “semi-official beta” of Eternal 1.2.1 (the forum software mangles the link if I post it here, so I won’t). A large number of these changes will probably make it into the finished game, but I can’t promise that all of them will. I haven’t been keeping a detailed change log, because a lot of the changes are minor. The changes I can think of mostly fall into a few major categories: 1. Windows users should no longer experience out-of-memory errors, even at the maximum possible settings. This comes at the cost of all the textures being half their size (we are likely to package the oversized textures of 1.2.0 as an optional separate download for those who still want to use them), and all the media textures having to appear in every collection (so that we don’t have to load multiple collections per level – if Aleph One for Windows has to use one texture in a collection, it loads the *entire* collection). I think I omitted the HD render for one of the media textures, but I don’t think it was one we actually used. I’ll fix it in a future revision. 2. A precipitation plugin. Several levels (“A Friend in Need”, “Unpfhorseen”, “Pissing on the Corporation”, “My Kingdom Pfhor a Horse”, “Burning Down the Corporation”, “Second to Last of the Mohicans”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “Babylon X”, “The Near Side of Everywhere”) will feature some type of precipitation (purple rain, ashes, fallout, snow, glowing embers) that appears below landscape textures. This may slow down older computers; disable the plugin if the game slows down to unplayable speeds. Some precipitation also freezes in place while loading from saved games. We’re aware of the problem, but haven’t fully isolated why it happens yet. We’ll hopefully have a fix by the time the official release happens. Finally, this won’t work with solo Lua or netscripts. If you want to combine this with an existing Lua script, you should be able to add the line: Annotations.new(nil, "ETERNAL_PRECIPITATION_ON") Or the line: Annotations.new(nil, "PRECIPITATION_ON") Immediately after the line: function Triggers.init() I advise you to backup your scripts just to be sure you don’t break anything, though. (Either should work at the moment, but I think the latter is probably a better idea because I’m liable to incorporate the same type of plugin for other games, and it’d look weird to use “ETERNAL_PRECIPITATION_ON” for something that wasn’t Eternal.) 3. Completely remastered sounds. You’re welcome. The new versions should distort much less often than the old ones (at the cost of being quieter; adjust your system volume as needed) and have approximations of frequency information that were missing in the old ones (this does mean that certain sounds will *sound* higher-pitched than they used to, but this is the audio equivalent of an optical illusion, as the lower frequencies are still more or less intact). 4. Along with that, I’ve incorporated (also remastered) sounds from Pfh’Joueur and Rubicon. The Pfh’Joueur sounds roughly correspond with antiquity, and the Rubicon sounds roughly correspond with the 2881 (and later) settings. I would like to thank Chris Lund and D. Scott Brown for their permission to use Rubicon assets in various projects I’d been working on. I hope they don’t mind that I drew this “semi-official” release of Eternal into the mix as well (I also didn’t want to keep pestering them asking over and over for permission for things, particularly since this change hasn’t actually reached official status yet; I plan to formally ask for permission before 1.2.1 leaves beta status, though). It occurs to me that I should probably incorporate some Marathon 1 platform sounds as well; this will occur in a future release. 5. Various gameplay refinements. A number of intended changes to “Unwired” and “Core Done Blew” didn’t make it into 1.2.0 because I lost track of which versions were being used in the game. “Babylon X” wasn’t marked as a low-gravity level due to an oversight (the level is supposed to take place on a small moon); the new version enables some great grenade jumps (which is fine, given the level objective). The breathing and oxygen sounds now play on partial vacuum levels as a quality-of-life enhancement. Projectiles now show up on maps as another QOL enhancement. Various bug fixes: a bouncy wall fixed here, a misaligned texture fixed there, an abrupt sound transition fixed elsewhere, some inefficient polygon usage fixed still elsewhere. I don’t remember all the others; see for yourself! Should you find yourself stuck, we don’t have a current walkthrough, but Total Carnage gameplay from development releases of 1.2.1 can be found on my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoysJW6pXQ6nTrE2OJ1wsznWT_WWFeyeV (I haven’t finished films of all the levels yet, but the description of that playlist contains a link to a playlist that contains films of all the levels that contain combat from older versions; most of those have similar solutions to the current versions, though a few secrets may be missing). Obviously, gameplay spoilers abound. …oh, and to extract this, you will need Keka on the Mac, 7-zip on Windows, or g7zip on Linux. (I realise .7z is not as commonly used as other archive formats like .rar and .zip, but the file size is often around 30% smaller.) Drop a comment here or contact me on Discord at Aaron#6608 if you experience any problems; I’ll respond when time permits. Enjoy!
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