marathon

Our friends at Freeverse released a content pack (available 6/18/08) coming to the Xbox Live Arcade port of Marathon: Durandal. Includes netmaps, the jjaro textures from Marathon Infinity, and two new achievements!

... well, not really THAT personal. However, Ducain at HIH did go into an awful lot of detail in his questioning of yours truly and Louis Wu at HBO, and the resulting fountain of verbiage is now duly formatted and posted for the benefit of those wit intestinal fortitude to spare and time to waste.

Twelve years in the making, the full version of Eternal, a 'near full conversion' for the open source version of the Marathon 2 engine, Aleph One, has been released:

Picking up from the end of the Marathon trilogy, you find yourself suddenly ninety-four years in the future, in the year 2905. You are on the S'pht moon K'lia, hanging in orbit over a desolate and ruined Earth.

Aleph One is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Eternal comes in two editions; a Full edition (227Mb) and a "Lite" edition, more suitable for older computers.

To open PrintMusic files, get the free FinaleNotepad program. Versions are available for Windows and Mac OS X. It opens PrintMusic files, as well as imports and exports MIDI.

To download the free program, the Finale website will require you to register a free account with them. Be sure to check the opt-in marketing settings at the bottom of the form if you don't want them to email you or give your contact information to their partners.

After the last tutorial on how to download sheet music files there were some requests on how to upload files to the site for other readers to see.

If you've transcribed some music from Halo or any other Bungie or Wideload game and would like to share it with the community here through Rampancy's sheet music section, first you need to have an account, confirm that account, and be logged in. All of those steps are covered in the tutorial on How To Download Sheet Music Files. After you've followed those steps, come back here.

 Click here for the complete text.

Every so often readers have some trouble obtaining access to the sheet music files on Rampancy.net. Below is a short tutorial to help you out.

The short answer is that these files are freely available to anyone. All I ask in return is that you register an account first. Registration is free. I don't give out your email address to anyone, and the site will not mail you anything unless you ask.

 Click here for the complete text.

Mark "Have Blue" Levin of Freeverse has written up a Gamasutra postmortem of their port of Marathon 2: Durandal to the Xbox 360.

What's revealed is that the Xbox version isn't so much a port as it was almost a complete from-the-ground-up rewrite:

Going beyond a port. Without an emulator, huge chunks of the game had to be discarded. The original rendering code of the game was very well suited to its original platform, but was entirely unusable on the Xbox 360. MacOS’s proprietary graphics API, QuickDraw, was used extensively throughout; some of its features, such as drawing 2D lines, were absent from the 360 entirely. Screen-space arithmetic was done using fixed-point integer math, a crucial optimization a decade ago but a source of needless complexity today.

Texture mapping was done using blocks of PowerPC and 68K assembler -- no one on the team was able to directly read them. The entire renderer had to be rewritten in DirectX. As a result, the 360 version of Marathon 2 outputs a native 720p image at 60 frames per second, rather than the 480p30 of the original. And unlike most other classic ports, it uses texture filtering, true 32-bit rendering, and every pixel of a widescreen display.

The "HD" mode of the graphics, which in other games commonly refers to a post-processing filter, is a completely new set of images. All of the nearly three thousand sprites in the game were redrawn in true 32-bit color, allowing us to put our own spin on the look of the game.

Wow. That's an awful lot of love heaped on a decade-old game; but Marathon deserves it. Check out the entire postmortem for the story of what went right, and what went wrong, bringing Marathon to the Xbox 360.

http://www.physorg.com/news109430733.html

Real photographs show Sol to be a "no trih xeem" zone.

-- Steve's hoping this isn't just the sleep deprivation talking.

Retronauts continues its contributions to 1Up's ongoing Halo 3 coverage by taking a look back at Marathon 2. In case you've been under a rock since July, Freeverse has ported the game to XBLA as Marathon:Durandal.

Thanks to chewpathingy in the HBO forum.

1Up's Halo 3 coverage continues; this time, the Retronauts Blog is traveling further back in time to the colony ship Marathon. There's also an indication from Bruce "Hippieman" Morrison from Freeverse in the comments to that entry to the effect that if there's enough interest, that Marathon Infinity and even the original Marathon can also be brought to Xbox Live, just like Marathon: Durandal has been.

HBO is announcing the winners of their latest Seven on Seven contest. This last competition was to put the Master Chief into an older Bungie game. The seven winners get free downloads of Freeverse's Marathon:Durandal from Xbox Live Arcade.

Ma1agate tipped us off that IGN has started offering a walkthrough for Marathon: Durandal. It's got a section on basics to familiarize players of more modern games with the Marathon series and its unique quirks (no jumping, no reloading) as well as a section on gameplay tips and a level-by-level walkthrough.

Freeverse's XBLA port of Bungie's FPS classic Marathon 2: Durandal recently got an auto-update; you may have noticed the last time you played the game. Freeverse's web page has a news post up about the update. The highlights are:

• Survival mode in demo
• More sensitivity controls
• FOV setting (for people with motion sickness problems)

For a more complete list of changes, see Freeverse's site. Thanks haveblue for the heads-up on Freeverse's post.