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. :)