Yes, all elements in the HUD have been accounted for...except the shotgun. Still trying to think of a way to make it work well. Might have it use 2 or 4 round magazines instead of 1.
I was reading a forum a week or so ago and someone noted that the fuel rod gun experience was somewhat deminished. The reason it was so weak (and not anywhere near the massive blasts you remember receiving from hunters) was because in Halathon there is no overheating. It would be way too powerful. So in order to remedy this I sort of borrowed the idea behind Halo 2's FRG. You will have a very limited supply of ammo (7 rounds to be exact), but the shots will be devestating. The explosion effect for it is still not done yet so don't let the blast radius confuse you...it is big. Other small fixes and tweaks have been made as well.
One other thing. I finally got to borrow a friend's Windows machine and mess around with Halathon on it. There were a ton of script discrepencies between the two platforms, but I managed to flatten all of them out. The Windows version of Halathon has been tested and proven to run correctly on atleast two Windows machines thus far :P This means it is up for download alongside its mac counterpart and should even work between the two in multiplayer games. Remember, if you're playing a map besides the halo weapons test map that you include the Halathon Lua script upon gathering a multiplayer game. This will ensure all the features work properly for everybody.
Nothing real major but a few noteworthy updates. I put up the Windows version again so people can test it out. I've gotten reports that it's been working for people, just email me with any problems and I'll look into them.
One other thing. Lua should work in single player on the weapons test map only. The script is still included seperately if you want to use it in a netgame.
Also, HUD weapons are not done yet so don't worry if they don't all show up.
Explains why we don't have certain features like beatdown for all weapons and why it cannot be with the current Aleph One limitations. Keep reading for more.
Issue #1: I cannot completely look up or down. This sucks because there is a guy right below me and if it were Halo I would be able to look down and pwnzn0r them.
Response: The physics file can be adjusted to allow for complete 90 degree up/down looking but it does not look "right". Marathon does not have a true 3d engine. It just gives the illusion of 3d by distorting imagery, and when you look completely up or down at something things look goofy. Hence we keep viewing angles similar to Marathon's (they are actually increased slightly for Halathon).
Issue #2: Why can't I do beatdown for other guns like the pistol, plasma rifle, etc.? Why do I have to switch to "Beatdown" before I use it?
Response: Marathon allows for an alt-fire trigger that would be (mostly) perfect for this kind of thing, but it unfortunately only allows for one weapon fire sequence. A sequence is a series of frames that play in succession in response to an action (an animation, basically). Marathon cleverly disguised this limitation with things like having a secondary trigger for grenades on the assault rifle, an overloading fusion pistol, dual-wielding pistols and shotguns, and an alien flamethrower that fires at different angles when fired. All of these things use the same firing animation, they just create different projectiles or projectiles in different locations when alt-fire is used. So while we could make other weapons have an alt-fire that behaved like beatdown, you would see the primary firing animation (ie, the gun firing) while it happens. That does not work good at all, so we included beatdown only for the assault rifle since it is the weapon you spawn with, and it can most easily take place of the "fists" that Marathon used.
Interestingly enough, the fists in Marathon and the assault rifle beatdown in Halathon behave the same way as beatdown for anything in Halo; if you run at someone and hit them with beatdown you do more damage to them than you would do standing still.
Issue #3: Where is the Sniper Rifle (or if you prefer, the Snaaaaaaper Raaaaafffle)? Why can't I zoom in with the pistol?
Response: There actually is a zoom feature that was added in Aleph One. Unfortunately the feature is not easily accessible with most key-configs and the zoom key cannot be reconfigured. Press the F7 key to activate weapon zoom. This "Sniper Mode" feature as it is called has a fixed zoom rate (looks about 5X) and currently works for all weapons. We could have added a Sniper Rifle (even though the zoom feature is not obvious to many), but another problem limits sniping. Press F8 to turn on your target reticle, then zoom in and look at a distant object on a large map. No matter how slightly and slowly you move the mouse or press the turn key, you cannot cover some angles. There was a discussion about viewing angle "precision" on the marathon-devel mailing list sometime ago, but it does not look like this will be changed, at least not for a long time.
Issue #4: I am a big fan of the power weapons (Needlers). How dare you exclude them from Halathon?
Response: The Needlers, or "power weapons" as leet people call them, cannot be accurately done in Halathon for a couple of reasons. Those reasons being, a projectile homing feature of Aleph One is currently broken, and there is no way to change the image of the needler weapon after it fires (ie, there is no way to remove a needle from the weapon graphic after every shot). Rather than bastardize them we opted to give the weapon slot to something we could do better.
Issue #5: Where is the jump button? How am I supposed to avoid rockets? And while we're at it, where the shizzles is the crouch button?
Response: Marathon has never had a jump or crouch feature. Jumping should be possible with some clever trickery and engine changes that do not yet exist, but crouching would surely require support for many new sequences that Marathon was just not intended for (although games that have come after Marathon and made extensive engine modifications have managed to do both). As for dodging rockets, that is possible with some good old-fashion dancing.
Issue #6: Why don't plasma weapons overheat?
Response: Again, this is something Marathon never supported and something that no Aleph One additions can do. If Aleph One had a Lua trigger like "weapon_fired" we could probably make overheating for plasma weapons work. At least, overheating would work without a special heat meter or an overheat animation because those would require other features to be added. In the meantime we've gone ahead and taken care of the other special features with plasma weapons (charged shot shield drain, plasma shots doing more damage to shields than to health) and made a few tweaks to slightly weaken plasma weapons in Halathon to compensate for their lack of overheating. The plasma pistol cannot be fired super-fast, and the plasma rifle fires slightly slower than the real thing.
Issue #7: I'm on a multicore G6 4Ghz Mac with 2 kabillion bytes of RAM and a Geforce Infinity+1. Why is the framerate only 30 FPS?
Response: From Loren Petrich, an A1 dev who added many graphics-related features in the past: "The game state has an update rate that is intended to be every 1/30 second". So rendering a scene more than once per update would just seem to waste processing power. In other words, it is the way the game was built.
If any readers find any errors, workarounds, or ways that we can incorporate these features given the current limitations we have to work with, feel free to post in the comments.
Work continues. Tycho has changed some HUD things and Crater Creator and his friend Solra have been working on the scripting side of things. Some fun new stuff. Shields/Health are implemented complete with recharging shields, recharge delay, overshield gradual decrease, and overcharged plasma pistol shot shield takedowns. I added a whopping 3 lines to this script to have bullet damage do double damage to flesh hits. Plasma weapons do triple damage to shields. I or someone else will change things to make each weapon mimic Halo damage values more exactly in the future. CC hopes to get something else working that would be very cool.
The audio side of things has also not been neglected. Tycho put sounds in a sounds file, so no more full volume effects being played when someone fires a weapon across the map. The aforementioned shield stuff also has sound improvements (different sounds for when the player is hit if their shields are up or down).
On the code side of things, Treellama has been kind enough to provide a build of A1 with some minor improvements and a faster updating radar. Now if only we could get him to make a few other alterations, like fixing the precaching bug or adding another Lua trigger.
Tycho decided to change this premise to a Total Conversion. That means we have a lot of more work to do before it can be considered complete.