Actually I did make some improvements to shapes and physics files. But that's small stuff. The major accomplishments are HUD work and the ball melee attack. As far as the HUD goes, I've got everything working properly except the shield/health monitor. Crater has been working on the script for that, which will hopefully be successful within a few days. The only major thing wrong with the hud currently is that it is only supported by a 1280x1024 resolution (1280x640 with HUD). I might have to write a seperate script for each resolution (man HUD masking would fix so much).
The Ball Melee attack is about as finished as it can get. It works well except for a couple things.
One, when you drop the ball (by using primary fire) it will go through the whacking animation before it drops. Not a big deal, but still unwanted.
Two, for some reason after you pick up the ball and drop it again, a ball will remain in your inventory. It is not the same ball though and you will not get time for having it. In fact it will not even let you select it, but when you cycle through your weapons it will be there for a split second before it automatically switches you to another weapon. Not a huge deal since usually you die before dropping the ball anyway and it doesn't really effect gameplay, but again, unwanted.
Three, the last problem with the ball is that the actual "whack" happens too early in the animation, but I have no idea how to fix this. Using key frames in the shapes file seemed like a solution, but they don't appear to work for 'Weapons In Hand' sequences. Yet another undesirable effect that doesn't really effect gameplay. I've added a movie of the Ball Whack in the movies section.
And now that you've read all this, I'll announce that the latest Alpha version has been released! Complete with new HUD (minus shields graphics and only one working resolution) and ball melee feature. I'll include the script that allows insta-death melee attacks to the back sometime in the future, and I'll try to get a more resolution-capable version uploaded soon.
(Sorry Windows users. I took down the Windows file because frankly I haven't been able to get the damn thing working on Windows yet! I'll try to grab a PC to fiddle with over the next few weeks and I'll upload another zip file for you guys. But if you think you have what it takes to get it working and you don't mind sit files, be my guest!)
A very productive week has come and gone in terms of Halathon. A good portion of the HUD is finished. I have decided to completely remove the Marathon style HUD and replace it with Halo's style which includes elements in 3 corners of the screen. Unfortunately I ran into a few setbacks (big surprise?) which will not allow me to make a transparent HUD. The biggest problem is that masks do not work for HUD elements, even though they work fine for the guns in gameworld. So for now the HUD will be placed outside of gameworld in the black areas on the top and bottom of the screen.
The only weapon I have not figured out how to display ammo for yet is the shotgun because I'm not sure how I will do reloading for it yet. Other than that, the Weapons HUD and Radar are pretty much finished. I will eventually get better quality images of the weapons in there.
On a more physics-based note, there have been some Halo features I've been wanting to implement and over the past few hours have been able to pull off! An awesome Lua scriptor whom I will refer to as Crater has been helping me script some cool things for both projects. Last night he managed to build a working script that kills people who are melee'd in the back instantly! And people said hit detection in Marathon could not be done :P
On top of that I was able to get a melee attack with the ball to work, no scripting involved. Over the next week or so I plan to grab the ball whacking animation from Halo and squeeze it into the shapes file to perfect the feature.
And now that the weekend is nearly over and I have put off everything else in my life just to create a completely unoriginal mod for a 10 year old game, I'm off to homework :(
Well it appears that the whole Trilogy release thing has given me a second wind for Halathon! I've been putting off school work and videogames, spending hours upon hours just to gain that extra inch in the project just like the good ol' days...err...nights. Yes, I should be in bed as I type, but I'm just that into it!
My endeavors over the past few days have nearly all been HUD-based. That's part of the reason I feel fresh about the project again. I got pretty tired of doing the weapons graphics and decided to clean up the HUD since it was a mess with Halo's weapons being used while Marathon's were being displayed.
Future plans will hopefully involve squishing the sounds into a real Marathon Sounds file, but that looks like a painful road. Most of the software and techniques for making custom sound files are ancient to say the least. I could probably use some help on this one folks, so if you know of a more modern solution for accomplishing this task please don't hesitate to drop me a line via email or AIM.
Nope, the site hasn't died. I'm just preoccupied with other things. Big things. *coughHalo2cough*. Yes it's true I've been neglecting this project but that doesn't mean I don't have some good news! Bungie has finally released their best game ever to the public, completely free of charge. The Marathon Trilogy set is available for download at halo.bungie.org
What does this mean for Halathon? Why ofcourse it means no more lame OS9 shapes patcher! This means anybody can download the complete Halathon shapes file and we won't get in any trouble for it! (not that Bungie would have cared anyway, but we try to be legit-ish). So you don't need OS9 classic or even a mac at all to play Halathon. The project is now open to anybody willing to download Marathon and Aleph One. Happy Halathonning!