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Bungie Releases Marathon 2 Under GPL
"Today at 7 pm CST Bungie Software releases the Mac source code for their classic game "Marathon 2: Durandal" to the net. This game represented the pinnacle of first-person shooter technology in 1995, and was the most successful of the highly-acclaimed Marathon series."
"Programmers only need apply: the code is in MPW format (Macintosh Programmers Workshop, which can be freely downloaded at developer.apple.com), and because various components had to be removed before public release, devising some workarounds will be necessary before the code will compile. Nevertheless, for those with the skills to manipulate it, the code can form the basis of all kinds of 3D, first-person perspective games, and we look forward to seeing what is done with it."
"The code is being released under the terms of the GNU public license, and Bungie does not offer technical support with the code. More information can be found in the ReadMe that accompanies it. You can download sit version or a gzipped version "
Update: 01/18 04:25 by CN : Jason Pellerin of Bungie writes: "I'd like to see a linux port, and I can donate some server space and time to help it happen, please write me at m2linux@bungie.com if you want to get in on the fun."
In agreement with your comments:
Check out http://www.planetquake.com/qer/ - In a very short amount of time, two guys have done a good job of taking a lot of the technology from Quake2 and Quake3 and putting it into the Q1 engine. (Topaz has done a lot of work on colored lighting, and Phoenix has been implementing Q3-style "shaders" - Another guy has been looking into high-res textures, and released an amazing screenshot.) Topaz and Phoenix will be merging their code within the week, and hopefully soon they can be convinced to merge with Quakeforge, at least to some degree. (QF and QER have somewhat divergent goals...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
However, I did that System Shock 2 (great game, wish it had a better rendering engine, thou) has some references to Marathon, of particular interest is that the alien species that take over the ship are picked up from Tau Ceti IV, the original planet that the Marathon colony ship was heading to.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
No, but one of the many things you had to do in the solo game was do a thing called "gernade jumping", which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course).
Actually, grenade jumping was not required in any of the Marathon triologies (although later 3rd party levels did require it). You *could* use it to get to secrets but it wasn't required."Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Interesting. I've never played it, but a friend with a Mac has been raving about it for years. It can only be a good thing, particularly releasing it under GPL rather than "XYZ Corp's open source license of the week". I wonder why they only released the second one, though?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Look, I've played Quake, and if you pointed somewhat close to the guy, you hit him. In Marathon, shooting at someone on a ledge was very difficult. You could be putting shots that hit just 1 pixel over his shoulder.
Actually, monstors in M and M2 were modeled as cylinders -- shooting over someone's shoulder would often hit. Shooting just outside of it would miss.
Loved those games much as anyone, but I have to set the record straight on that.
--G
I remember when the original Marathon came out (Mac only, of course - Bungie, at that time, developed only for the Mac), and it was great - like a thinking man's Doom.
Bungie were always very relaxed toward third-party maps, hacks, etc. They even released their own in-house level editor with Marathon Infinity, and carried on that tradition with Myth II, as well. Truly one of my favorite game companies.
To check out more information than you could possibly want to know about the Marathon series, see here.
Most Bungie fans have known about this for a long time now, although there's never been any official confirmation or public announcement. In this case, lack of denial (in response to a direct question) was all the confirmation I needed.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
M2 was the only one of the Marathon series that was both Windows and Mac. M1 and M-infinity were Mac only.
It's what I played before getting Unreal, so that was a *mighty* long time to be a Mac gamer. I was not impressed with Quake, and preferred the single-person missions of the Marathon series.
Some people were working on a port of the Infinity maps to Unreal, but I think they lost interest/steam somewhere along the way.
Best part of Marathon: custom physics models. For M1 I made "Pope's Super Fist" which gave the Pistols faster shooting and exploding bullets (x1.25 damage so it wasn't some super cheat) and the Super Fist: it threw a Phor shot down the hall and lit up as it went, so you could see down dark hallways AND trigger remote switches.
Then in M2 and Mi you got physics models embedded in the Maps, so each level could be in a different atmosphere like space or Zero-G.
It was ahead of its time in terms of playability, and so what if it was sprites instead of polys??
Heck I played through MI last year, just because!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
First and foremost, this application was written with MPW. That means that it will require significant rework to get it to compile under CodeWarrior. Second, the code is 8 years old. That means it's written to versions of the Mac APIs that are long gone. I didn't look closely, but I didn't see any PPC support, support for UPPs, or many of the other tweaks Apple has forced on developers over the past 4 or 5 revs to the universal headers.
Finally, even if you used the precise version of MPW used to build the program originally, it still wouldn't build because several chunks of code are missing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not faulting Bungie in any way. I think this is a great contribution on their part. But it's still going to be a while before someone steps up and gets this thing to build under a modern development environment on the current version of the O/S.
Anyone gotten started on it yet? ;)
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Funny thing about Marathon: Mac owners claim it to be the greatest first-person-shooter of all time, and PC owners never heard of it. The thing to realize here is that for a relatively long time, DOOM wasn't available for the Mac, so Marathon filled the bill. Now that's not to say Marathon is one of the bad children of DOOM, because it's an okay game. But this is why you only see Mac folks raving about the game :)
Look, I've played Quake, and if you pointed somewhat close to the guy, you hit him. In Marathon, shooting at someone on a ledge was very difficult. You could be putting shots that hit just 1 pixel over his shoulder. This is more realistic in my opinion. Shooting this way in real life would be hard.
I'm not saying that the 3d engine in OpenGL isn't more advanced! This was 1995. If you were asking "did Marathon2 more realistically (sp?) display the environment of it's game than QuakeI did?" then I'd say "hell yes." There's more to 3d than whether you are using sprites, or what rendering engine, or how many FPS you are getting!
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
There was a patch that fixed that shortly after M2 was released, as I recall.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
And this is what you define as 'real 3d shooting'. Interesting choice of words. Anyway, when you are running around with a rocket launcher kind of device in the real world, precision is not really that important (not getting your own hair on fire is I would imagine, is that in M2?). No, but one of the many things you had to do in the solo game was do a thing called "gernade jumping", which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course). You were in a low-grav environment (space). If you had a powerup for health, you could do the same with a rocket launcher. The launcher "shook" and moved you when you shot it. It did variable damage based on how close you were. Also, if you killed someone with the rocket launcher, you got the treat of watching there body distintegrate into a bloody mess as it arched accross the room. It was especially spectacular if they were high on a ledge. As for "realistic" shooting. I mean you couldn't hit somebody clear across the room. If you used a fast, single point weapon like a laser pistol, or pistol, it was to difficult to aim. If you used an area affect weapon, like a gernade launcher or rocket launcher, the person could see it coming and move. I didn't mean to turn this into a whole "bash doom and quake" thing, but the fact of the matter is, Marathon1/2/Infinity was more a "thinking person's shooter". It stuck religously to a physics model. It had a good story. It had, as someone else said, a great balance of weapons. It had great team events. And most people never saw it. My windows freinds who were Quake heads who came and watched (and joined) us playing were blown away. Every one of 'em. I personally know three people who bought a power PC for the sole purpose of playing Marathon.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Touche! OK, so I guess I was trolling a little :)
I just got really tired of "Oh, you don't have a PC? You don't play Quake? You must really suck as a gamer" If I'd spent 1/4 of the time playing Quake most of those guys did, I'd kick their ass!
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
See above posts. I meant in terms of how you played it. You had to actually AIM up and down, not just point in the general vicinity. You had to get to funky places by using the recoil from your rocket launcher, among other things... I know this is passe' now, but at the time, NO OTHER GAME EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT IT. Remember. M2 was released well before Quake.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
The Pfh stuff is from the Pfhor.
:)
also, there were lots of custom mods using "Pfh" stuff. Phfreakaz0id was my Marathon playing name.
Anyone remember Disco Inferno? A mod of a classic multi-player map with lots of lava as I recall. The "disco" one just added a flashing strobe in the shape of a mirror ball
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
From the readme:
"This is the Mac source. The sole known archive of the Windows 9x source was placed in a l
ead box and shipped to one of our island laboratories for safekeeping. Unbeknownst to us, the boat c
arrying the box made an unscheduled run up the coast of Madagascar, where the ship's captain hoped to
catch the end of the annual Miss Middle Of Nowhere pageant. The ship was approximately six miles f
rom shore when it was torpedoed by a one-man sub purchased from the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog by a
punter with more money than brains. Divers are still combing the sea floor looking for the box conta
ining the Windows code, and if we ever find it I'm sure we'll let you know. Windows hackers with lot
s of spare time may still be able to do interesting things with this code."
Anyone else find that funny?:)
-----
Can I Play With Madness?
IMO Marathon 2 ranks up with Ultima, Star Control II, and System Shock 1/2, as one of the all time greats, as far as player immersiveness is concerned. The only game I feel clearly surpasses this one in quality and immersiveness is Half-Life (wow). Marathon 2 was also the first that I can recall that had something besides 'player 1 go kill player 2' style deathmatch.
It was the first game that I could recall that had a full scale alien invasion where everyone else wasn't dead and you actually had NPC's alive and fighting at your side. The lack of a sense of being 100% alone was a relieving break from the standard fare.
I'm gonna have a GREAT time playing this game and hitting those Durandal terminals and watching those NPC's go at it again
By the way I could smell a GPL move coming from Bungee. I am not at all surprised by this news. Way to go!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I've set up an anonymous cvs server here:
n ux/cvsroot
:pserver:anonymous@beetle.bungie.com:/home/m2li
login: anonymous
password: pfhor
module: m2linux
...for your source-tree grabbing needs. To submit patches, talk about plans and ideas, etc, please write me at m2linux@bungie.com.
No, not the game--I've never heard of it.
The fact that they didn't pre-announce when they thought of it is the best part of this news. They went ahead and did the work of removing the proprietary stuff, bundled it up and set an exact time and location for the release. THEN they told everyone.
---
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---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I Played this game at the newspaper I worked at almost every night while we waited for the press to run on our Mac network with 20" monitors (page design workstations). It was SO much fun. We'd play with 8 players doing team events. Thousands of maps.
It was a great series. GREAT solo play. A really good sci-fi story. You had to pay attention to the plot, get clues, not just blow stuff up.
At the time, all my PC friends were playing doom2 (YAWN!) then quake came out. Still looked like crap next to M2 and m2 had real 3d (you know, you had to aim up and down, not just point in the general vicinity).
Anyway, this is good game. These are the folks who did Myth, etc.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
For some time people have been discussing what they would do if Marathon's source code went public. One of the most exciting ideas that may happen now is the use of OpenGL for rendering better looking graphics. There is already a freeware application available called MapViewer that lets you walk through Marathon levels in real time. (get it from bungie.org.) It uses OpenGL to eliminate pixelization and jagged edges. It now seems feasable to combine the OpenGL map viewer with the Marathon game code to create a more modern looking Marathon, some kind of a hybrid with all the graphical beauty of a game that's five years newer than Marathon.
The storyline of Marathon is nothing new: one of the moons of Mars has been converted to a human colony ship and shot off to a new planet for colonization. Midroute, the ship is hijacked by an alien race called the "Pfhor" (pronounced 'four'), who begin to slaughter the humans. To make matters worse, one of the 3 AI, Durandal, apparently communicated with the alien ship, and has decided to do whatever possible to escape his computer prison.
You are the ships only hope as a security guard (your true identity is still a mystery through the remaining games).
At that time, the engine featured 8 player multiplay over Appletalk (not networkable :-/), a pseudo 3-D enviornoment: the maps were made of polygons in the x-y plane, with the ability to overlap polygons to achieve 4-D effects, but was limited in that no wall between polygons could have more than one opening), monsters and items were rendered as spirits, and various lighting effects. Liquids were only simulated, and floors and ceilings of each poly had to be horizontal and walls had to be vertical. Sure, that's a lot of limitations, but on basically 68030's, the game ran rock solid. Additionally, the ggame when beyond just shooting, providing a detailed story through terminals that you interacted with.
Marathon 2 did a lot of revamping of the engine, allowing larger and more colorful textures, liquids, transparent textures, and more lighting effects, but not much else. The plot of M2 took off where M1 ended: you've saved the colony ship, but have been abducted by the rogue AI Durandal, who is looking to save his butt before the universe collapses in 1x10^13 someodd years (paranoid, aint' he?). To do so, you visit the Pfhor homework as well as the homeworld of a race they have enslaved, the S'pht, looking for a device that might be able to transport planets across universes. As your survival is controlled by Durdanal, you have but little choice to follow him.
Marathon Infinity (the last of the trio) didn't do much to change the game engine, and mostly extended the story line and play to sort of wrap up the series... while the game play in Infinity is pretty good and the cleanest of the 3, the story at that point was a bit weak. IMO.
By this time, however Quake for the PC was out, Quake 2 was in the works, and MacSoft was working on getting Quake ported to the mac; the Marathon series had fulfilled its goals to fill in that FPS game that the mac players did not have. While people have begged Bungie to make a 4th Marathon sequel, they will probably not, as work with Myth and Halo continues. Oddly enough, people will be watching Halo carefully - the story in Marathon actually includes elements from a Wolvenstein clone that Bungie created called Pathways Into Darkness, and the players expect to see a drop or two of Marathon references in Halo and Oni.
One of the key things that made Marathon much better over Quake for me was the intelligence of the monsters: supposedly, the game adjusted the AI of the monsters as you continued depending on how well you played, and while it's hard to reproduce such events, I truely believe that is the case. Only recently has the AI of other games improved over Marathon's (that being Half Life), going above the basic 'charge the player'. The aliens in Marathon would seem to be able to cut around to your back if there was a way and get you trapped between two sets of them. They also seemed to know how to lurk well. Alot of this depended on the mapmaker's ability as well, but in general, the game was tough.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
As Bungie's SysAdmin and resident Linux enthusiast, what I'd really like to see is a Linux port. I want to play Marathon again, dammit!
My C skills are not the best, but I can contribute space for a cvs server, time to manage it, and time to manage patch submissions, builds and testing. And a mailing list and bugzilla db, if those are needed.
If you want to get in on the fun, please email me at m2linux@bungie.com.