/vr/ - Retro Games

first post

Everything was superior to Doom.

>>5100010
Better on the technical and plot aspect, worse in every other aspect.
Marathon 2 and 3 get better in level design regard, but still not up to Doom level, and the enemies are still shit.

Doom is a better FPS overall, Marathon may be better in some aspects unrelated to gameplay.

>>5100020
Based.

>>5100010
Absolutely not.
And that comes from someone who absolutely adores Pathways into Darkness.

>>5100020
t. seething Ultima Underworld nerd

>>5100010
>its another shitposter cant get (You)s in Doom general
No one will care when you are gone

Well, the Marathon engine was undoubtedly better. It could perform 5D space and had working water and all that jazz. Of course it was later eclipsed as modders built on it but for the time it was better. As for gameplay, well, it's up to opinion. I personally like the slower paced combat, I just think it needed better maps. The fan-made scenario Tempus irae is probably my favorite FPS experience.

>>5100304
>and the enemies are still shit.
Doom may have some interesting enemies, such as the archviles or revenants, but being interesting doesn't necessarily make them fun to fight. At least Marathon didn't have chaingunners

>>5100463
>5D space
What?

>>5100637
Impossible space, whatever you want to call it. In Marathon it's referred to as 5D space. Vid related

>>5100010
The thing about Marathon is that the fundamentals of its concept and lore are a brainchild of Colin Brent, while the final iteration is a product of pretentious poseur wankery of Greg Kirkpatrick.
Pathways into Darkness is a unique and genuinely enjoyable game of fundamental importance to the genre, the ideas from which went on to form Halo 1 and, thus, an entire sub-genre of FPS games.
While Marathon is effectively hipsterDOOM with motherfucking ATROCIOUS combat gamedesign and muh philosophy (more like endless tangents obfuscating the fact that the actual point is suspiciously straightforward and honestly nothing special).

aleph one is mostly a POS

>>5100010
No, absolutely not. Pretty much everything is less satisfying & polished than Doom's.
However, the gameplay is still decent and the atmosphere in some levels is very well done.

>>5100010
>1990s
>mac games
>good

>>5100010

Marathon 2 was.

>>5101096
Based, and dare I say, redpilled. Only problem with M2 was how the fuck did Durandal survive? Makes no sense and wasn't even necessary for the story consider the plot of Infinity didn't need Durandal to survive in M2

Combat-wise I think I actually prefer Marathon.

The moment-to-moment gameplay tends to work better, and one reason for that has to do with how Marathon handles hitstun and reloading. In Doom hitstun is determined by RNG, meaning it works as you'd expect 90% of the time, but in Marathon every hit inflicted causea hitstun. With a rapid-fire weapon like the AR's primary, you can stunlock a single enemy with ease, which is essential to preventing Troopers from using their short-range hitscan burst on you.

However, all weapons need to be reloaded, so you can't stunlock something indefinitely. While you reload the enemy will try to attack you, creating these dynamic moments where you need to anticipate when you have to reload and back off before it's the enemy's "turn" to attack. It's like how enemies in a beat 'em up have a unblockable wake-up attack after being knocked down.

There's also a minor element of elemental resistances going on where mechanical enemies are weaker to energy bolts from the Fusion Pistol and organic enemies being weak to the Flamethrower, giving you something extra to consider when choosing weapons as the FP and flamethrower can deal extra damage but are more specialized in their role, making encounters with mixed enemy compositions a tricky affair.

I love how bullet-hellish the enemies can get with the projectiles too. I often find myself having to cross the streams of bullets like in a shmup.

I like savepoints since they prevent you from savescumming.

It's unfortunate that the level design in the main trilogy sucks a lot of ass, on top of wonky physics and shitty swimming parts, because the combat and enemies themselves work rather nicely. Marathon Phoenix really realizes that potential.

>>5101110
Because he's fucking unbreakable.

No seriously, it's not really explained at all other than him saying I'M FUCKING INVINCIBLE or just withholding information from you by even tricking you into believing he's dead. Maybe he somehow managed to influence the enslaved S'pht on the Pfhor battleship he was captured on.

>>5100672
Would love to know the technicalities of how this works if anyone knows

>>5101139
Well said. The combat of Marathon IMO is great, but it's not put to good use in the main trilogy bar a few excellent levels. You gotta play custom maps if you want Marathon combat to be fully realized, but even then there's a lot of lame content out there. Also I'd say Marathon is just a tad too easy. If you tweak the physics and make the Hunter/Fighter bolts a bit faster it's pretty much perfect on Total Carnage.

>>5101154
>No seriously, it's not really explained at all other than him saying I'M FUCKING INVINCIBLE
I know, which is annoying. They don't give an explanation for his well being other than "Durandal is cooler than Tycho so he lived". It's a big Mary Sue-esque moment and rather annoying as it doesn't add to anything to the remaining levels of the game.
>Maybe he somehow managed to influence the enslaved S'pht on the Pfhor battleship he was captured on.
It's established in Infinity on the level 'Rise Robot Rise' that Tycho doesn't allow S'pht on his ship. So the question of 'How did Durandal survive?' is even less clear.

>>5101161
Maps are made of polygons, just like in Doom. However, unlike in Doom, multiple polygons are allowed to overlap as long as they don't share a common vertex.

>>5101161
It's called portal rendering. where things get drawn based on the adjacent sectors, so the geometry is streamed as you go along. This is not possible in Doom because all the data is precompiled and constantly accessed.

>>5100010
No.
>Macintosh
HAHAHAHA

>>5100020
Nobody remembers Ultima Underworld.

>>5101259
You could sort of replicate it in Doom with a teleporter line, and then replacing the teleport sprites with empty frames, and the sound with nothing. Sourceports generally let you do a silent teleport without having to fuck with the regular teleport.

It'll generally not be the smoothest or most subtle though, the effect works the best if the transition is a dark stairwell.

Is AlephOne still the best way to play it? It's been seven years since I even went near the franchise, so I'm sort of hoping it got better

>>5100958
Well, it's a source port of a game with a correspondingly POS engine, so

>>5101110
>>5101154
Because he is a fucking Mary Sue, that's why.

>>5100010
Not really, no. That being said, the engine is superior and the story is pretty damn good.

no, it's just not as fun and the level design is awful, typical 90s getting lost simulator

>>5101176
2.5D engines like in Marathon/Doom/Duke3d and such work on BSP trees and render flats, slopes and walls instead of polygons, which works much differently on fundamental level and allow such "bent space" transitions much easier than actual 3D engines. ALL of BSP engines allow it if you have a tool for editing a BSP tree.

>>5101259
In vanilla Doom, data is NOT precompiled and it is possible to do the very same trick in exactly same way, it's just that the feature was not included in the editing tools, as id Software made deliberate steps to avoid making their maps confusing, including specific guidelines to povide players with landmarks and points of reference so it was harder to get lost, unless you REALLY not paying attention

>>5101546
Silent teleport is a bit different thing. You cant shoot through it for one, and you cant see what's actually going on behind the teleport line so bodies/marks/enemies left behind would disappear, which is why mapers do them in (usually bent) corridors with no enemies or pickups around so you dont notice the transition.

This 5D geometry is still totally possible in Vanilla Doom though, via the very same kind of BSP fuckery.
It's just such feature was not included in the editing tools, and you had to know pretty well what are you doing to edit the generated BSP tree manually, which is why nobody done it until Linguica discovered it in 2015.

This can be done only in engines that render BSP directly, so it does not work in source ports that recompile BSP into actual 3D space (i.e. most of them). GZDoom allows you to do virtually same in actual 3D space via render portals.

Actually, Duke Nukem 3D uses exactly same thing to render multi-floor architecture, and has some 5D fuckery of its own in secret levels, but does not use it in regular levels for same reason Doom doesen't - to avoid making levels too confusing.

>>5101870
There is a game that can be described as "5D Space: The Videogame", called "Madspace".

https://store.steampowered.com/app/351810/MadSpace_To_Hell_and_Beyond/

It's not a very good game though.

And the worst thing about it, is that it makes you realize that the freedom this space fuckery gives to the mapper, actually takes away from level design, since you lose your ability to guess, while exploring. Every nook and cranny - you HAVE to stick your nose into it in order to completely ascertain, that no, this insignificant looking nook right here absolutely does NOT lead to a GIANT HALLWAY giving you access to another half of the level. You just start clearing out the level by always touching the wall with your left side, then after looping, touching some another wall with your left side, then again and again until you've cleared the level.

It's a cool looking gimmick, but it absolutely destroys whatever is fun in exploration when used mindlessly.

>>5101927
That having been said, I think, a cool idea for a megawad or some level jam could be that each level in the pack uses this trick exactly once, trying to get the most out of it and in some sense building the entire level around this moment, when it's finally used. So that in different levels it would get used in a radically different manner, you are not supposed to be able to guess, having not played the level yet.

>>5101870
>You cant shoot through it for one, and you cant see what's actually going on behind the teleport line so bodies/marks/enemies left behind would disappear, which is why mapers do them in (usually bent) corridors with no enemies or pickups around so you dont notice the transition.
Yeah, make a small and dark curving staircase, and put monster blocking lines on it so you don't have monsters wandering in and creating confusing situations.

The darkness and the shifting from each stair step would make it less immediately obvious that a transition was made.

>>5101560
Yeah. AO has actually started receiving updates a couple weeks ago. Maybe it'll lead to something?

>>5101870
>vanilla Doom
>posts source port

Really partitions my binary space.

>>5102084
>posts source port
learn to fucking read you mong
The BSP trick works in ORIGINAL only (well, in Chocolate as well, but only because its goal is to be a perfect recreation of original)

>>5102127
That gif is from a source port with fucking 16:9 aspect ratio. Either post a GIF/Webm from DOSBox or gtfo.

>>5102134
>DOSBox

The Marathon games were developed for MacOS, originally. Marathon 2 was ported to Windows 95 back in the day. Bit none of the Marathon games were ever ported to DOS.

In many ways Marathon was more advanced than Doom, and a lot of it had to do with how mature MacOS was in comparison to DOS back in 1994. MacOS could network multiplayer games much easier than DOS and there were features like voice chat in game, which could be easily implemented through the MacOS operating system. Bungie started as a Macintosh exclusive developer.

The Marathon game can be downloaded for free from here:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/games/marathon.html

Which do run under modern source ports.

>>5103340
Reading comprehension check: FAILED.

>>5102134
check out this colossal faggot who cant google

>>5100010
neither were superior to Chex Quest

>>5101870
>has some 5D fuckery of its own in secret levels, but does not use it in regular levels for same reason Doom doesen't - to avoid making levels too confusing.

Marathon didn't use impossible geometry in the campaign levels, did it? I thought it was just a showy gimmick for one of the net maps.

Marathon controls so fucking awkwardly, even for its time.

>>5101546
>You could sort of replicate it in Doom with a teleporter line, and then replacing the teleport sprites with empty frames, and the sound with nothing.

believe Hexen did this in a couple maps.

>>5101259
>>5101546
I seem to recall a Hexen level that did a looparound trick that teleported you invisibly in the middle of a hallway to the other side, like Pac-Man, so it seemed like one long contiguous hall.

>>5100010
Last time I played Marathon I got so fucking lost. Every maze escape tactic I tried failed me so I gave up. I was kinda annoyed as I was only a couple levels in.

>>5105265
>Marathon didn't use impossible geometry in the campaign levels, did it?
Marathon used A LOT of 5D space. You just probably didn't notice it because it mostly only uses 5D space to create multiple floors over top one another. Take the map "The Hard Stuff Rules" from M2. It'd be utterly impossible to create a 7 floored tower like such without 5D space.

>>5105832
Right, but I mean overlapping rooms that appear on the same floor in-game. The stuff that would be impossible in the real world.

>>5105478

Usually it's because you missed a door in the dark. Walk along the walls slowly while pounding the spacebar. You'll find it.

>>5101026
there were a lot of cool mac exclusive games back then, obviously not true anymore. people only laugh at this era in gaming because they have no idea about it and think its the same as today

>>5106616
escape velocity is probably my favorite series from that time, alongside marathon. hopefully theres a game before long that captures the essence of EV

>>5100010
>apple
>superior

yeah right

>>5101560
>>5102041
I still haven't got around to playing Marathon since last I checked at least 5 years ago the Aleph One version still isn't as good as the Marathon 2: Durandal release on XBLA because it's still lacking 60fps.

From what I played of Durandal, Marathon's arsenal and gunplay was just as good as Doom's. But with that 30fps lock, I'd much rather be playing Doom.

>>5107363
M2 on XBLA was remade from scratch, hence the 60 FPS.

>>5106618
Endless-Sky is basically EV. It's even more moddable.

>>5101870
Doom uses pre-compiled BSPs to render "flats" "slopes" and "walls" (which are all polygons, just not arbitrary polygons, they have restrictions).
Duke Nukem 3d uses a graph of sectors connected via portals. You might be able create this kind of overlapping geometry by manually editing Dooms BSPs, but it's not really how BSPs are supposed to work.

>>5101161
The build engine uses a graph of convex sectors that are connected by portals. By it's very nature, you can have graphs of any shape, cyclic, etc, and there are basically no restrictions on the shapes of sectors, aside from that they are convex (which allows you to draw all of a sector's walls in any order, without overdraw). This means that sectors can overlap one another, can look bigger inside than outside, etc.

>>5107382
> tfw grew up on the escape velocity games
> loaded up endless sky
> got a good ship within a few hours
> blew a bunch of shit up and got bored

i hate that i have zero attention span now

It was better in the sense that it correctly predicted the direction the FPS genre would go.

>>5107382
>>5107565
its not your attention span, endless sky is a piece of shit which is why i didnt mention it. go emulate os9 and play EV, EVO and nova. there's tons of classics you can download for free, ambrosia games just need a second hand serial in os9 which you can google.

i'll make it easy for you:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/old/ (get the free trials)
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html

>>5107640
I've played ev and nova so many times now. Maybe I'll play more than an hour of override some day

>>5107565
>>5107382
there's also interviews with matt burch (the guy who made the EV games), i enjoyed them a lot although the interviewer seems autistic, he wrote a book called the secret history of mac gaming which is on TPB (exclusive interviews with 90's mac game devs, worth a read for the marathon stuff alone which also happens to be the best written part)

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/74212819
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/74210102
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/74209825
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/74210840

>>5107645
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/23392456/The_Secret_History_of_Mac_Gaming_.epub

>>5100672
Countless Portal maps do this today :-)

>>5107363
You basically can't have 60 FPS in Marathon without rebuilding it completely, as the guy below has already said. Here's what one of the devs on the port had to say about it.

>>5108242
Or... decouple rendering from game physics and interpolate entity-movement post factum, like most Doom ports do.

>>5108362
I'm going to be completely honest, I have no idea what the fuck you just said and whether it made sense or not. Either way, 60 FPS isn't going to bring anyone to Marathon. Anyone who likes Marathon is already playing Marathon. Making Aleph One 60 FPS isn't going to change anyones mind on the game.

>>5101546
>Nobody remembers Ultima Underworld.
Lol

>>5108369
They said they couldnt have more FPS because of game's physics and rendering depend on each other, so changing rendering fucks up physics which results in bugs.
Doom originally was the same way, but Doom source ports did a few workarounds to separate rendering from physics so you could play at any FPS you want, while game physics still worked at 35fps (Doom's dick rate)

Bungie could do the exact same thing for Marathon, but they decided to go the lazy way - just change the FPS without separating it, which resulted in bugs, and they had to rewrite the whole physics up to 60FPS because they thought they absolutely had to since they didn't read their TCR properly.

>>5108369
Dev's did a stupid thing many console dev's do (ticks tied to frames)
There's a non-stupid way of doing this (ticks tied to timer, frames indipendent) and it can be done,
but nobody's arsed to do it at this point.
And so Marathon is fated to be forever gimped.

>>5108380
>Bungie could do the exact same thing for Marathon
Bungie doesn't interact with anyone in the Marathon community. The people who wanted to make the port of Durandal to Xbox 360 had to beg Bungie to allow them to do it, and Aleph One is in no way affiliated with Bungie. Anything Marathon related has been created by fans with varying degrees of technical proficiency. Point being, Aleph One isn't made by employed professionals. It's just a community project. Maybe one day someone will change everything to allow 60 FPS, but the community doesn't really care about 60 FPS so I doubt this will ever happen.

>>5108389
>Anything Marathon related has been created by fans with varying degrees of technical proficiency
But the same is true for Doom ports. They are made by enthusiasts, and the code is open for most of them, so there's nothing to stop whoever wants to improve Marathon port from looking up how Doom ports did the same thing.

>>5108395
True. However the Doom community is like 100 times bigger than the Marathon community. It's unfair to assume that Marathon can ever become what Doom is. I can name 3 devs who actually worked/work on Aleph One. I suspect in 2-4 years the Marathon community will be completely dead.

>>5108402
I don't even like Marathon but that thought still makes me sad, because of people who do.
Y'all deserve an advanced sourceport.

>>5104536
sex quest total conversion when

>>5100437
is this really going to be a thing. ultima vs. doom? please dont do this faggots!

>>5100672
Sorry but this is just standard portal technique. You step on a portal and it renders different area.
Game's still 2d/3d hybrid and talking about "5d" when discussing about 3d engines is stupid as everything what you see on screen is working in 3 dimensions at most which are then projected to 2d surface (framebuffer).

>>5101546
>Nobody remembers Ultima Underworld.
Pepperidge Farms remembers.

>>5100010
>imagine thinking this thought

>>5101139
nothing in marathon is hitscan

>>5112256
True, but projectiles such as AR or pistol bullets travel fairly quickly. "Hitscan" projectiles in Marathon have a speed of 1024, for reference, Overloaded fusion bolts have a speed of around 300. Those 'hitscan' bullets are traveling pretty damn fast.

>>5112296
yeah but it's noticeable on maps like G4 Sun bathing, also fuck the enforcers in Marathon 1 on Total Carnage they fucking rape your health

>>5112302
>also fuck the enforcers in Marathon 1 on Total Carnage they fucking rape your health
That's not even the hardest enemy in M1. That title would go to the rampant Security Drones. Holy fuck those guys

>>5112331
oh the green ones that shoot grenades, yeah fuck them, also just beat my TC run of Marathon 2

>>5112384
Are you going for a TC run of Infinity? Infinity is much harder on TC than either M1 or M2, especially the last third of Infinity.

>>5108369
>Making Aleph One 60 FPS isn't going to change anyones mind on the game.
I was vaguely thinking of playing it some time, but now I know it's locked to 30fps, fuck that, I have better things to do.

>>5112395
I don't like the level design that much in infinity, but I play the multiplayer almost everyday

>>5100010
Not for influence or for online play, but it had superior AI, level design, weapon balance, engine, and storyline.