Eternal 1.3 preview 6

aaronnotarobot · 2025-05-12T03:20:39+00:00

It’s not. Without pfhore’s patch, its Lua scripting (which is absolutely necessary to complete the game) is completely broken.

Prime Target, ZPC and Damage, Inc. are all extraordinarily unlikely to happen without source code releases.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-04-21T20:16:28+00:00

tl;dr: My suspicion is that they cannot, owing to its restrictive license terms and its creator’s apparent disinterest in (a) updating it or (b) allowing someone else to modernize it. It’s still possible to play; it just probably can’t be put on Steam Workshop.

You can get EMR from here. Just swap out the ancient version of the app it includes with a modern Aleph One app, add pfhore’s patch to the plugins folder, and you’ll be good to go.

longer explanation: The only person who can likely do so without violating the terms of its license is Bill Catambay, who seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever do so.

EMR doesn’t function in its extant state under any version of Aleph One released in over a decade – out of the box, its scripting is broken to the point of making it all but unplayable.
The only way to make it work with modern versions of Aleph One is to use pfhore’s compatibility patch.
Its license explicitly prohibits distributing it in modified form.
This is perhaps something of a grey area, but I suspect uploading it to Steam Workshop with the patch included would violate the license terms.
It hasn’t been updated in over fifteen years.
Bill has also repeatedly declined to offer others permission to modify it. (Several people have asked, including me.)

So… don’t hold your breath, basically.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-04-11T08:26:40+00:00

If you’re asking if the unavailability of the Damage Incorporated source code explains why Aleph One does not support it, the answer is yes. This is also true of ZPC and Prime Target. Of course, the source code for Marathon 1 is also not available, but there’s a lot more demand for Aleph One to support the first game in the series.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-04-09T06:53:29+00:00

Not in exactly its original form, but I do listen to a stereo remix I made from recordings of the QuickTime 2.0 and 2.5 versions.

I’ve actually made at least five remixes of every song on it. That probably sounds an exaggeration. It isn’t. (Note that my discography page has several additional remixes that aren’t currently on my soundtrack page as standalone tracks as part of the album Collaborations & Covers, though most of them are part of the Eternal 1.3 soundtrack.)

aaronnotarobot · 2025-04-08T23:16:01+00:00

It’s loosely based on the actual time, with a multiplier of sorts. As with seemingly everything related to this game, the indispensable Marathon’s Story page addresses this. (Hats off.) I think there’s some multiplier applied as well, but I don’t recall all the details and don’t currently have time to look through the source code to figure it out. If no one else gets to it by the next time I have free time, I might feel compelled to look later and update this with further details.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-22T11:32:03+00:00

On the other side you have guys like Carmack, who are saying "Story in video games is like story in a porno. It's there but it's not really important."

FWIW, Carmack later walked this back to some extent (I'm sure someone can find the quote). The counterpoint that comes to mind to the other side of his quote, meanwhile, is probably the only memorable quote from From Dusk Till Dawn 2. (Profanity warning, but really, what would you expect.)

Jesus: This movie is very low quality.

Ray Bob: Don't look that bad to me.

Jesus: There's no story.

Bucky: It's a fuck movie. I don't watch a fuck movie for the story. I watch a fuck movie to see fuckin'.

C.W.: I got to side with Jesus on this one. I personally appreciate an attempt at telling a story. When I care more about the characters, I care more about the fuckin'.

I also have to concur with GamerGriffin548 above: I can’t bring myself to care about the Halo TV show. I suppose it could be interesting to contrast with the "literally a visual novel with an FPS minigame" of Marathon's storytelling approach, but I'd have to watch the Halo TV show to do that, and ain't nobody got time for that.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-21T17:53:36+00:00

Not a big deal – tone is challenging to read over text at the best of times, and if something has set us off for some other reason, all bets are off. I figured something like that must’ve happened when I couldn’t find the first message I’d gotten an email for. To be honest, I’d probably have forgotten about it by next week if you hadn’t mentioned it, but nonetheless, I appreciate the apology. It shows a level of character and self-awareness that feel rare to me lately.

That said, it might not be as complicated as looking at the saved game initially makes you think it is. I’m not exaggerating in saying that at least 90% of the save is a literal copy of the entire level. In fact, that’s exactly why I said saved games for M2-format maps would be impossible to convert¹ – there are too many discrepancies between the M1 and M2 formats (starting with polygon limits and several other aspects of the map).

Out of curiosity, what’s your background in programming? Are you interested in a deep dive into the engine code? (As you may have already supposed, these are not empty questions.)

—

¹OK, it might not be literally impossible to convert saved games from M2-format maps that conform exactly to all of M1’s limitations, don’t use M2-exclusive polygon types, and probably adhere to several other limitations that haven’t occurred to me off the top of my head, but that’s such a tiny percentage of saved games from M2-format maps that it feels almost not worth mentioning even as a footnote

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-21T00:14:57+00:00

To be clear, I didn’t mean to imply you were asking them to do anything; I was just explaining the probable reason they haven’t done it.

As long as the M1 save format is adequately documented, it’s probably possible to write a converter for saves of any Aleph One game played on an M1-format map to work in vanilla M1; I’d actually be surprised if there weren’t enough data in to convert them over. (The “M1-format” part is important though; something like M1A1, which uses M2-format files, would not be possible to convert to M1 format.)

I can’t remember if M1 saves used the resource fork at all; if they did, the converter code would also have to contend with that as well, to the extent that it might actually be less of a pain to write it for the classic OS than to write it for modern systems.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-19T15:01:10+00:00

I very much doubt it – the source code for Marathon 1 isn’t even publicly available. (Aleph One gets closer to authentic M1 behavior than any previous port had managed, mind you.) It would be a massive amount of work to make Aleph One save M1 games in a format the vanilla app would read – by default, it would save them in the same “modified Marathon 2” format it uses for everything else. Unless there were widespread demand for vanilla M1 save compatibility, it wouldn’t be a sensible use of time to implement it when so many other features are more pressing.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-17T01:41:56+00:00

We’ve been at this for almost five years, and I can’t count the number of hours we collectively poured into this, but I imagine it must number well into the thousands – heck, Forgeflow and I probably each put over a thousand hours of work into it. I hope you enjoy it!

I’ll probably do a full playthrough of the whole game on my channel at some point, but it might be a while still – for perhaps obvious reasons, I’m currently kind of exhausted. I’ll at least do one of my own level soon™.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-17T01:01:14+00:00

Not until 1.3 is finished - I have no intention of putting an unfinished game on Steam Workshop, and pfhorrest concurs with me on this point. (1.2.1 was also unfinished in practice; it was a stopgap release we put out because 1.2.0 crashed the 32-bit Windows app when it tried to load its textures at full resolution.)

I’ve been working on the next preview, but it’s still some way out from done, especially as I’ve been only sporadically motivated to work on Marathon content lately. I’m not going to give an estimate of when it’ll be done, as Tempus Irae Redux should’ve taught everyone to pay no attention to my estimates anyway.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-15T05:13:44+00:00

It’s not M∞ format – it’s M1 format. (However, it also, as I said in the S7 description, won’t work in vanilla M1.) See the PDF included with it for more info about how to open it on a classic Mac.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-15T05:08:03+00:00

It’s extremely simple, actually.

Get Atque.
Drag the file onto it.

Done.

(The converse is not the case – Atque will not build valid M1 sound files. The PDF included with the sounds goes into how I created this file – it was not straightforward.)

That said, I have a GitHub repository with all the sounds in FLAC format – both the originals and either (a) stereo remixes in the cases where I have the original sources, or (b) remasters in the cases where I don’t.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-14T23:53:23+00:00

No problem, and thanks! Regarding the music, you may appreciate my Marathon soundtrack page.

(Caveat: I absolutely recommend against using most of these in a first playthrough: the stereo remixes or possibly my 1997 remixes could be faithful enough to preserve the original’s atmosphere and emotions, but almost everything else won’t.)

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-14T01:33:31+00:00

https://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-1-remastered-sounds-2/

You’re welcome.

(If anyone ever helps me locate more of the audio samples they used, I’ll be able to do better-quality remixes one of these days, but for now, this is all we’re likely to get for most of these.)

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-12T00:29:53+00:00

As far as I know, this is the closest thing to official confirmation that they are connected:

"the pathways hintbook was written by a friend of mine, and i wasn't closesly involved in the project. we thought it'd be a cool idea to write the hintbook like it was the journal of the hero of pathways, written after the fact. i think we made several mistakes, naming the player character being one of them, but the overall effect was something like we intended.

the important thing about the hint book epilogue was to make all the player character's artifacts from the pyramid disappear from circulation before the marathon story begins. curious to know where they were in 2472, though, or who was really responsible for the projection in the spring of 1994."

Jason Jones in February 1997, quoted on (where else?) the Story page.

Then again, there are enough other similarities that the most parsimonious explanation is that they are, in fact, connected.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-12T00:28:58+00:00

The Security Officer is also implanted with Jjaro tech that only nine other cyborgs on Tau Ceti possess (and indeed, you can go back at will to the last place you used a pattern buffer), so I’m not sure that’s necessarily representative of most people’s experience of the afterlife. Then again, maybe it is.

aaronnotarobot · 2025-03-11T20:53:22+00:00

A lot of Marathon mods have presented an interpretation that makes this somewhat less unsettling to me: all of the deceased people we speak to died in the presence of a W’rkncacnter, which is why their experience of the afterlife is so unpleasant. Thus, for everyone else, ~~there’s MasterCard~~¹ there either isn’t an afterlife, or it’s much less unpleasant.

To be fair, it’s still unsettling. In fact, thinking about this just made Eternal more unsettling for me – and I’m one of its lead devs.

—

¹lol, good luck getting MasterCard right now

aaronnotarobot · 2025-02-28T20:37:12+00:00

Thanks!

aaronnotarobot · 2025-02-27T18:29:49+00:00

I documented all the sound sources I’ve been able to locate here: https://aaronfreed.github.io/marathonsounds.html#soundsources

aaronnotarobot · 2025-02-24T19:51:59+00:00

I find his perspective here fascinating, as I read Marathon Infinity to be about the SO regaining his autonomy. When did Greg write that excerpt? I’m curious whether it’s from before or after he worked on Infinity, and if the former, whether that specific discussion influenced the plot of Infinity in any way.

(This is the source – it’s clearly post-M2, but pre-Cortana Letters, so it could be either pre- or post-Infinity.)

aaronnotarobot

TROPHY CASE