fileball.whpress.com
April 1999

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Timeline

Counter Revolutionary

He's done it again... In response to Mark Levin's Coop-Only Level Bypass Demo, Jason has once again extended the scope of the marathon engine with a cool new tool. The enclosed map shows you how to set up a counter that can count events (number of players appearing, number of secret areas, you name it). The attached readme adds a few extremely innovative potential uses for the technique... if you're making a solo scenario, download this and process it. Use the technique... make Marathon better.

Stacked Walkways

A pretty neat demo of two walkways on top of each other. The technique uses scenery items to fake the look of the walkway, so you don't look like you're floating... it seems pretty clear that with a little bit of artistry, the proper scenery items could be created to make the upper walkway look nearly flawless. Also contains an intriguing extension of the author's untextured wall experiments.

A Breakfast Cafe in Vienna, Austria v1.0

A huge, sprawling level, with just about every possible environment. No matter what sort of battlefield you normally prefer, you should be able to find it here...

Level Detector

From the master of cool tricks comes a bizarre, but thought-provoking idea... a mechanism by which you can determine the difficulty level at which someone is playing. The included demo simply has different terminal messages for each difficulty level (kindergarten through total carnage), but you could, in theory, use the technique to decide where to send a player, depending on what level he's playing on. The possibilities are pretty far-ranging...

Not a Good Landing v1.1

A four level solo scenario. Mostly well-built, with nice architecture, and decent gameplay. Play would be better, I think, if it weren't quite so predictable.

3rd and 7

A large football field, surrounded by seats (?). Nicely laid out, if a little bare... but ammo is really sparse, probably for anything more than two people. Gets a little better once you find the entrance to the control booth, but it's still not enough for bigger games.

Apocalypse Ranch

A remake of the first outdoor area from Kill Your Television, with the addition of a pair of Juggs. Sort of weird... there's tons of SPNKR missiles here, but not one SPNKR. The physics model included, though, gives you missiles instead of grenades, and a whole boatload of 'em... so you should be okay. I suppose.

Descent into Death

A huge arena surrounded by rising hallways. With big groups, this might be fun, but smaller groups would have a hard time getting close enough to kill. There's a switch in the central pillar which I don't understand at all... all it seems to do is make the upper hallways vulnerable from below. Since only those in the upper hallways can flip the switch, it seems, well... pointless. (I suppose it also makes the area around the hill targetable from above... but there is much more freedom of movement down below, so it's more dangerous to those in the passageways.)

Test Arena

A simple concept, elaborately (and extremely well) executed. This is an arena for testing monsters. Standard monsters, custom monsters... doesn't matter. You get lots of ammo, and a safe island, and a setup that allows the release of exactly the number and kind of monster you'd like, when you want it. It's way more elaborate than you'd ever really need for this task, but hey-if you're going to do something, why not do it right? If you need a test map for your new monster, this would work quite nicely.

Drink Your Wine

A square arena, with a ledge around the outside and a raised square fortress in the center. Simple, but well-designed for flow. The hill (The central fort) is accessible from both the ledge (via a bridge) and the bottom (via a fast elevator). There are a few pillars to use as cover... but more than two people in the game, and staying on the hill is a non-trivial excercise.

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