: Been thinking about that dropped mechanic from the in-between build of M1.
: Would we have gotten to interact with the AIs (assuming they were planned
: for that build) even more directly? How could random cyberspace portals
: open up on the Marathon to begin with?
I imagine a "cyberspace portal" would be a kind of terminal. You don't physically walk into cyberspace, you log into it.
: Also--could this mechanic as described in the preview be implemented in Aleph
: One, or would the engine not be able to handle it?
You could probably accomplish a lot of it by having an almost-exact copy of the level geometry overlapping the real level geometry, and using teleport terminals as the entrance and exit. Without a complete copy and paste functionality in a level editor, though, that sounds like an enormous amount of work.
The only part that sounds difficult to implement is that when you die in cyberspace, you just pop back to where you were in real life. Possibly some complicated Lua could handle that: some flag is set when you use the cyberspace terminal (and unset when you terminal back out), and your current health (and inventory?) status is saved, then while that flag is set, if your health drops below some tiny fraction above nothing, you are relocated to the entrance terminal and your health is set back to the stored value (and the flag is unset).
