Scandalous! Marathon's Story and Bungie Sightings report that Bungie may be offering up some new shirts at the MWNY Fanfest, for those of you who are there but not fortunate enough to score one of the coveted 49 limited edition Marathon's Story shirts (arrrgh... why not E3, Hamish, why not E3! ;).
The tireless folk over at Marathon Open Source and the codewarriors working on Aleph One have come up with a new batch of improvements. Dynamic fog levels and colors, Pfhortran scripting enhancements, improved preferences, and (gasp) even a few cheat codes. All in all, once Aleph One settles down, there's going to be all sorts of things for scenario designers to play with...
Pfhor passed along word of an interview up at the Action:UT site, with the Unpfhorgiven team which is endeavoring to bring Marathon to the Unreal Tournament engine. Some interesting information to be had, though the almost unforgiveable omission of the WSTE-M combat shotguns on the planned weapons list nearly stopped my heart...
Pfhor sends word that Team Unpfhorgiven, the group behind the Marathon: Resurrection project which is bringing Marathon into the Unreal Tournament engine, has a bunch of cool new stuff to show off:
In addition to The Mill and I Have Filmz, The Marathon Story Page has also changed, seemingly as a result of the Microsoft buyout of Bungie.
And while the source code to Aleph One may be safe under the GNU Public License, there is no telling what Microsoft may think of the uses to which the Marathon intellectual property has been put at the Story Page.
In case anyone had been wondering, the recent buyout of Bungie by Microsoft leaves MS owning the rights to the Marathon franchise, while Take Two gets the rights to Oni and Myth.
How does this affect the opening of the Marathon source code? Hopefully, not at all.
Derek Moeller, who maintains the FAQ for the Aleph One project had this to say:
And life goes on.
A new build of Aleph One at Marathon Open Source today, bringing the open source version of Marathon to v0.10.9 and fixing some bugs from v0.10.8. Perhaps more importantly, the Aleph One project now has a Hotline server to support it:
Aleph One, the open sourced version of Marathon, has reached another milestone with v0.10.8's release. Courtesy of codewarrior Loren Petrich, and the fine folk at Marathon Open Source, this new release boasts an interesting new feature:
Support for semitransparent liquid surfaces in OpenGL rendering. One can switch this on in the OpenGL-options dialog box.
Stop by and take a look at the screenshot--it looks pretty danged cool. Almost as good as the Tribes2 media we saw at E3... ;)