goran svensson

I've always been a fan of what people nowadays refer to as gimmicks. This pack is all about that.

Caustics is a cool effect. I don't agree with quartz that it cannot be used, it would just require a custom scenario. Texture sets in marathon can have 100+ textures, and you can write level specific mml.

The amount of textures can also be reduced by 30. You only need one normal texture, which can be used over and over for each bitmap.

Star wars and hamsters shows the new power of untextured sides in the new renderer. Fake floating polygons. Makes me think of old abandoned idea of bridges of balconies. What a marathon we could have had!

Tight rope builds on the same tech as hamster och star wars, but the limits of the floating polygon trick are not visible. It's a foolproof line the air.

Old factory has no gimmicks. It's an unfinished netmap showing of Quartz ability to create good looking architecture.

The updated graphics look good and believable. Most impressive is the fusion bolt.

These landscapes don't give justice to the word high resolution. Unless your idea of that, is enlarged blurred versions of the originals. The only good landscape in this pack is the space landscape.

All hard work has been done for you. This download includes step by step instructions on how to harvest the data from the Xbox live version of marathon 2. But not only that. It also includes an altered shapes file and new MML scripts to make everything work.

It's no plug and play. Harvesting the textures takes some effort on your part. Expect an hour or two if you're not familiar with python programming.

When all is said and done. You'll be a little proud, and very thankful to the authors for providing you with this excellent download.

I don't play net games very often, but yesterday I played a couple with this pack. Impressive level design.

The flying works ok, but when I call in my troops, something invisible enters the battlefield. I cannot see my troops, and they don't seem to do anything.

This is a very short level. You'll finish it in about one minute.

You start in a cavern with a large group of flicktas infront of you. When you walk past them they start chasing you. Luckily, there's an escape route through a water hole. The real challenge on the level is an enforcer guarding the exit. There's not much room to manouver around him and you only got a pistol (unless you manage to sneak by him and grab the AR).

The map run without any problems. The only thing worth pointing out is that there are some ceiling textures in the cavern that need a fix.

20 large levels jampacked with action.

This scenario was boring to play.

Welcome to the fold.

This script makes you jump around randomly. You cannot move the player, the script does that for you, which results in little control over where you are going.

This script will make your screen flash in different colors. It's annoying to the extreme.

waste of time.

I had fun playing this. The gameplay is good and fast paced. It is not often I that I recnognize good gameplay, but here it is. Finished Jack Hammer in one sitting.

Some levels suffer from inescapable traps where suicide or grenade jumping are the only ways out (beta symptoms?). It may annoy the more sensitive player.

The visuals of jack hammer is more akin to oldschool marathon mapping. Which is more or less good depending on your taste.

I gave this scenario a 3. It's a good ride with some bumps.

Gemometry and shading are interesting.

The map has many bad points though. An inescapable water pit. A river that runs too fast(flow 0.4). If you attempt to cross it, you are easily propelled into the water pit. Error combo!

Geometry flickers and fades throughout the map (as if it was untextured). I suspect it is the item-limit that is overshot; the map has 610 items.

Conclusion: The visual aspects of the map does not make up for the 3 errors. Rating 1.

The 2nd level was very good. Not only the rain, but also the landscape effect you applied to that level. Having the sky light up in synchronity with the thunder was realistic and new.

One should note though that thunder is often delayed by x seconds after a lighting flash. Sound only travels at 340m/s.When the sound and the lighting flash are matched perfectly it means the thunder is terrifying close.

If a random amount of time would expire between the flash and the sound, the effect would become more realistic.

Anyway, this map pack is getting a 5 based on the rain and the landscape effect.

It takes a while to get used to the controls, but it's time well spent. Visual lua is on par with forge's visual mode. Very handy if you want to texture a complicated area.