September '08 Deathmatch Video

Youtube video link (streaming):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4oXt1NSRaA

High-quality video link (606 mb):

http://www.filesavr.com/mmaxtrailer260fpsmp3

(This video may need codecs to run properly, click here to download them)

Music:

Power of Seven - Marathon Infinity Theme

Psykosonik - Shock On The Wire

Deathmatch is team-based with three teams - the player on Blue, vs. Green, vs. Red. Levels featured in this video are "Duality", "House of Pain (M2 version)", "Everyone's Mortal But Me", and "Waterloo Waterpark (Max version)". Difficulty was set to "Total Carnage" for all the clips used. You may notice some Pfhor and VacBobs on the Duality map! Feel free to give them a special U.E.S.C. welcome.

Let me know what other classic Marathon levels you'd like to see in this game.

Building a Better Marine

Now that the player's weapons are complete in draft form, it's time to put together the character models - starting with the Marine.

Reference:

Upper torso:

And for good measure, more deathmatch screens from Duality!
(Old marine model, based off of MP2's BlackOps body, original helmet)

Helmets, SPNKRs, Duality

New pics fresh off the tarmac show off the final Marathon helmets (modeled and textured!) and the drafts of the SPNK-R Rocket Launcher and a new Deathmatch arena first featured in Marathon Infinity - Duality.

For reference - the original Marine sprite from M2/Moo with a SPNK-R:

Video: Waterloo Waterpark DM

This video contains a 5-minute deathmatch in the Waterloo Waterpark arena, Pfhor VS Humans VS You.



The song is the background is Psykosonik (Power of Seven)'s "Secret Life".

Preliminary Models

Most of the player-wieldable weapons have been lovingly modelled - at this stage with only the most base UV texturing.

.44 Magnum Mega Class



WSTE-M Combat Shotgun



Zeus-Class Fusion Pistol



MA-75B Assault Rifle / Grenade Launcher



The Alien Weapon (phallic, isn't it?)

Colors and whatnot are all temporary, of course. I'm running into a lot of issues with the MAX-FX engine resizing models after they're dropped into the game, so if you have any insight on this, drop me a line via the comment box.

Deathmatch at Waterloo Waterpark

This map shows up both in Scenario mode and Deathmatch modes, with the Deathmatch version taking place in the first few rooms and generally being more accessible (staircases added, etc.)








The orange-shirts are placeholders for the Pfhor, and Maddieman's excellent flamethrower (from Polar Payne) is a placeholder for the TOZT (although the particle effect used is original).

All other weapons are using original Max Payne 2 models as placeholders and will be updated later on.

New Bloodtypes Added

For the carnage lovers among us.

And for the Max Payne 2 modders:

There are normally two steps to the process of setting different bloodtypes to bodies, but in Marathon I've added a third.

Step 1: The particle effect (the "misting" that occurs when someone's shot).
Assuming you know how to use ParticleFX, put together your different blood effects and link them up properly in particles.txt. Next, in the character's skin file, there will be a series of bones listed, each with a "Material", usually set to "character". Set this to something else (in my case, it's character_pfhor) and then make a material of the same name in your materials.txt file. Finally, go to your particles.txt again and find the heading [bullethit_generic]. Add your material to the list here and link it up to your particle effect. Also, a tip here: for some reason, the shotgun uses the bullethit_lowdetail particle effect, so you may want to link your particles up there, too.

Step 2: The decals (blood that's thrown on the floors and walls)
In Max Payne, a projectile called a blood_bullet is generated along the same trajectory as your bullets when someone is killed. The trick here is getting the game to generate different blood_bullets for different people. Go to your character's skin file, locate the bone scripts again, and under "type", you will have either "TARGET_CHARACTER", "TARGET_BODYARMOR", or "TARGET_HELMET". The intended purpose of the type is to produce different effects (such as a metallic richochet) depending on what the character's wearing, but these also have different blood_bullet definitions. Under each of the projectiles you use (such as BulletBerettaSingle_Player.txt), there are three definitions that match these types - [CharacterHit], [BodyArmorHit], and [HelmetHit], with the latter two commented out. Take out the comment slashes and point these to a new type of blood_bullet. Copy the existing blood_bullet, rename it to this new name, and you can pretty much figure out from there how to set up your new decals. Keep in mind you'll have to define them in decals.txt just like everything else.

Step 3: The ragdoll decals
I've added blood decals to the ragdolls, which make delightful splatters whenever a corpse hits an object at a decent rate of speed. The way you change the decals here is to first change the ragdolls used in your character's skin file, then copy the existing ragdolls, rename them to your new names, and on "CollisionDecal", either point it directly to your blood decal or to a new one which throws down your blood decals as part of its script.

And there you have it - 3 different kinds of blood :)

HUD Updated

Max Payne's engine doesn't seem to support horizontal lifebars, so I've integrated new vertical lifebars based on the ones used in the first Marathon game.



Other HUD elements can also be seen more clearly in this picture than in the video. :)

Marathon//Max Preview Video

Preview video for a very early beta of this mod is up on Youtube:



Future videos will be cross-uploaded to higher-definition services, but here's a look at what the game looks like in action.

Rocket Deathmatch at the House of Pain

Welcome To The Revolution

***INCOMING MESSAGE FROM EYOCKEY***

I'll be using this blog to document the development process as I put together this Total Conversion. I might also talk about the workarounds and problems I encounter in the Max Payne modding process to help those of you also working on MAX-FX mods (if any).

Why Max Payne 2? Does anyone still play that?
I wanted to test-drive the MAX-FX engine for use in development on low-tech platforms, and I wanted to familiarize myself with a complete set of development tools and assemble a complete project for my portfolio. A "public release" wasn't even in the cards at first, but the Marathon community deserves to be thrown a bone every now and then, even if they are a needlessly cryptic bunch ;)

Max Payne 1 and 2 for PC are also available on Steam ($10 USD for Max Payne 2 $15 USD for the bundle at the time of this writing), and these versions will run modifications. Check out these releases at Steam's site. Good timing, I guess!

Marathon 2: Durandal is available on XBox Live via developer Freeverse (800 points at the time of this writing). Freeverse has done an amazing job, and I highly encourage all of you to support their efforts.

The original Marathon series by Bungie is available for free at http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org. Classic Mac users need only download those files, but PC and OSX users will need the AlephOne client at http://sourceforge.net/projects/marathon/ and can also play online.

I hope you all enjoy this mod as much as I enjoy making it.

***END OF MESSAGE***