Reviews

Cool.

I suggest making two versions of this, "No Friendly Fire.lua" and "Fix Team Colors.lua"

That way, when joiners see the script in the game info dialog, they know right away what is happening!

Useful, but to be true to name you should force teams to avoid red and green or blue and yellow at the same time.

Primary colors have never been so easy to interpret!

Seems to work well with the Carnage Soccer map.

holy shit w'rk pushed me through a wall

pushed me through a wall and out of the game

that's strong

It was nice to use, but the only major use I could find for the powers themselves (as they were meant to be used) was... Throwing enemies into giant flaming pools of lava! This gets old after awhile. Also, they tend to be very deadly. They take out even the toughest enemies quickly, including the Juggernauts!

I DO enjoy being able to push and pull myself by aiming my POWERS at scenery objects, provided they do not break. This is one area I see potential for an interesting level... perhaps one specifically designed for this script that may require something like aiming your POWERS at objects in order to reach otherwise impassible areas.

I did come across a problem, though. If I aim my POWERS at an enemy unit, provided they do not die quickly, I can push them until their head is stuck in the ceiling... usually around this time I get an error on the top corner of my screen, but I'm still allowed to play exactly as normal, so that's not a problem, hopefully.

I cannot help but wonder how this will turn out to be in the end.

Interesting concept. I wish you could use the POWERS to deflect projectiles. For some reason the POWERS doesn't work through a liquid. Co-op seemed interesting, but it could get a little slow. I liked how players could flip switches, trigger doors, etc. I think it would be better if only one or two players got the POWERS while everyone else had traditional weapons. It would also be neat to combine the POWERS with other game types. Maybe tag where the person who is "it" gets the POWERS. The biggest problem I found was the lack of POWERS. The first thing I did was increase the POWERS by several orders of magnitude, but it still wasn't enough. My next thought was to make the POWERS exponential, which seemed to be effective.

Amazing strong netscript 5/5

The central arena and the lower area with the lifts between them make a nice combination. Based on the few games I've played, the upper areas around the arena seem to get ignored somewhat. Something feels off about the weapon and ammo placement but I can't put my finger on it. The textures look very bland and it's difficult to orient yourself quickly.

Overall it's a good map but there are a couple similar ones in Cosmic Clouds that I'd probably play instead.

I dont get it. Whats it supposed to make better? everything is exactly the same!!! please can some on help?

All these maps are great fun and I am very much enjoying Arcadia and Egyptian Temple as alternatives to the usual Spanker-centric maps to which I usually gravitate.

Everyone loves Zora's Domain...admit it, you do! Haven't seen any other examples of a good multi-tiered cylinder like this.

Velora Pass is great fun too though I would love to see it retextured.

Lastly, Anticitizen One is simply fantastic and the most realistic combat arena I have ever played on A1. There are long open streets on the outside leading to a central plaza, and buildings on the perimeter complete with rooms, stairs and windows. I wouldn't normally be firing off rockets in CQB but it works well here! Every game I've played on this map has been nonstop carnage.

Nice work, TL.

P.S. I'm OCD and would appreciate one more map to round out the pack.

This pack is getting better with original map architecture.

But the texturing work (especialy in the new map) has to be improved.

For those who are wondering from what games those maps come from :

Zora's Domain : Zelda Ocarina of Time Velora Pass : Unreal Egyptian Temple : Golden Eye (N64) Arcadia : ? Anticitizen One : Half Life 2 (?)

Even though Arcadia plays horribly for me, this pack deserves an unmitigated 5 -- every other map has long lines of sight, lots of elbow room, and plenty of ins and outs, which are my three favorite ingredients in a map.

I might have hesitated to 5 it before Anticitizen One was added, but now it's a no-brainer.

I don't know any of the games these maps were based on, but I guess a little plagiarism is a good thing from time to time.

Might take some getting used to and such but all in all is a fine script.

First off to be positive this little utility has alot of potential such as Terminal Editing, Scripts, Plug Ins, and all that jizz. Now what really bugs me the most however is the visual mode.. I understand I could use the Visual mode script but to save time a built in visual editor that is good would be fine.

In this visual mode everything is frozen including liquids and platforms.

That being said, this is only in it's infancy so I could be proven wrong.

If someone could put this much effort into an update for forge or something maybe we could put an end to the "Your line of sight crosses too many polygons. Please remove some."

When you need to fix a map right then and there you can do it..

The only major setback I find tho is that it just does textures so if you need to make a map you gotta make it blank first then work off that which can be a bit tedious.

All in all tho it does what it says it does and it is a must have for all mappers.

But it isn't ready yet. Although there is some amazing architecture and level design here, there are too many things which hold it back.

First of all, the weapon/ammo availability and placement. The beginning of the first level almost made me give up on this scenario altogether; there were simply too many enemies in too tight an area to fight with your pistol and fist. Throughout the first level at least, I found that having to fight the amount of monsters there were with only my fists and pistols to be annoying.

The second issue with this scenario is the lighting. There are many areas which could be improved drastically if you just applied more differential lighting. Most of the scenario is simply too bright; in most levels there are only "dim" and "bright" areas, with very few (possibly no) dark areas. To clarify, I generally consider lights 0 - 8/9 to be "bright", 9/10 - 14 to be "dim" and 15 through 20 to be "dark". The texturing generally isn't (in my opinion) too bed, with the exception of the second level. The second level is largely textured poorly and far too bright. An example of a level which could be spectacular of better lighting was used is Atom Heart Mother (I enjoyed the Pink Floyd reference). I'd make the passages between areas substantially darker, and add more differential shading to most areas (using both bright/dim and dark lighting together in areas). This level seemed to be inspired by Aye Mak (although I could be wrong) and I'd suggest looking at Aye Mak for examples of good lighting, you can also check out Marathon: Rubicon which (I thought) had generally good lighting.

The third issue was the monster placement. There are simply too many areas where you have to fight too many monsters in too tight a place. Every level seems to have this problem; you are often not prepared for the amount of monsters and/or have no room to dodge; this is amplified (again, especially in the first level) by the lack of appropriate weapons.

That said, I thought the overall level designs (with a few exceptions, most notably the beginning of level 1 and most of level 2) were excellent; rivaling (again, in my opinion) some of the best scenarios/conversions out there. I also happen to be a huge fan of Marathon: Infinity's levels (those which didn't suck), and a lot of these levels brought to me the feeling of marathon Infinity's better levels.

I also thought your terminals were excellently written, no complaints there (although I've never been a fan of Robert Blake in any scenario).

I really think this deserves 2.5 stars at the moment, but simply by fixing the existing levels in terms of monsters, weapons, lighting could easily bring it up to a 4 star scenario, and by fixing up all of the better levels (mainly minor things) it could become a 5 star scenario; but the first and second level would have to be re-done, and the pfhor levels could be better.

I greatly look forward to seeing this scenario "fixed up", I really enjoy some of the designs/architecture, even if the levels themselves need a lot of work in other aspects.

One final note, is that playing co op, neither Jim nor I could find any way of getting past the immediate post-initial area without rocket jumping. We were able to get to the platform leading out of the lava to the building, and found one switch, but our guess was that one of the inactive terminals was supposed to teleport us to the next area. I can't really comment on that too much though, as with the addition of terminals it likely would have been far more clear.

If you'd like to run through these levels with me co op for more specific advice/examples, I'm fully willing. You can e-mail me at [email protected] or contact me over AIM (animalsfloyd) if you're interested.

This was a lot worse than I heard, but new co-op maps are always good. Don't give up, keep trying

Great maps, although after playing them for months I wish there was just a little more to this release. You need to play co-op to really experience these maps.

While the technical merit of these scripts is unquestionable, I speak for all of us here at Ray Laboratories when I question treellama's stance against spawn killing. Spawn killing is a time-honored tradition of Marathon, and it's a shame that concessions such as this are being made to the rabid anti-spawn-killing partisans. Look to Ray Laboratories in the near future for some forward-looking action on the spawn killing dilemma.

There's some excellent mapmaking going on here... Good differential shading, clever secrets, and some ingenious use of 5D space. I especially liked the addition of small details that really complete the level, like being able to flood the starting area in "Harpooning." The story's intriguing... can't wait to see more!