A Chisel plugin that lets you swap any pair of polygons - very useful for bringing high-numbered polys down to the beginning, to make them easier to reach in the teleporter menu, for example.
A Chisel plugin that allows you to auto-create staircases (finally reproducing the Script effect of Phforte 1.x!). Straightforward, simple - it does one thing, it does it right. Check the readme for minor caveats (mostly common-sense stuff).
Building a map, and reailze you need to add another polygon to the side of an already-filled poly? Dang, you have to delete that filled one and rebuild it... WAIT! This Chisel plugin allows you to split that FILLED poly line! Way cool.
This is a Chisel plugin that allows you to set the permutation field of polygons, which specifies what certain poly types do. Yes, Forge lets you do this... but Forge limits you to 'reasonable' values - and Jason has come up with some pretty dang useful 'unreasonable' ones. A simple example: Automatic exits and teleporters are basically the same thing, but with different permutations assigned. Exits use negative numbers to specify levels (-2 is level 2), but teleporters use positive numbers to specify poly numbers (2 is poly 2). Flip the sign, and reverse the effect... and suddenly, conditional teleports are easy. Set a level to 'repair', set an automatic exit to a negative value... and that auto-exit will act as an intra-level teleporter... but ONLY if the repair is completed. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
A Chisel plugin that allows you to horizontally move everything within a specified rectangle of the map. (If you started building too far towards one edge, you can now pull it back.) This differs from the existing 'Better Move' Chisel effect in that it's not applied to the entire map, it's applied to only a subset (hence the name). Pretty slick...
A Chisel plugin that allows you to add to the normal light intensity for a given light, without changing that light... vastly reducing the number of lights needed. (The demo map included shows 11 distinct lighting effects... and it uses exactly ONE light.) It only works on walls, and a wall can display only one value of the ambient delta field... but if you're building complicated levels, and have run into lighting limits... check this out.
Another cool Chisel plugin - if you've created a map in Forge which has too many lines connected to a point, you'll find you can't delete the point without crashing Forge. If you don't have an older backup... you're in big trouble. This plugin gets you out of it.
An Aleph One/SDL conversion of Missed Island.
Converted by Craig Caroon of Electric Infinity.
To learn more about Aleph One/SDL or Aleph One/SDL for Windows, visit the respective pages.
The closest anyone's ever come to a cutscene level. Pretty astounding, even given the limitations... play it to see what it's all about. (It's cool. Really cool.) The author gives permission to incorporate this into your scenario, and even offers to customize it for you. Amazing what he thinks of...
From the master of cool tricks comes a bizarre, but thought-provoking idea... a mechanism by which you can determine the difficulty level at which someone is playing. The included demo simply has different terminal messages for each difficulty level (kindergarten through total carnage), but you could, in theory, use the technique to decide where to send a player, depending on what level he's playing on. The possibilities are pretty far-ranging...
A pretty neat demo of two walkways on top of each other. The technique uses scenery items to fake the look of the walkway, so you don't look like you're floating... it seems pretty clear that with a little bit of artistry, the proper scenery items could be created to make the upper walkway look nearly flawless. Also contains an intriguing extension of the author's untextured wall experiments.
He's done it again... In response to Mark Levin's Coop-Only Level Bypass Demo, Jason has once again extended the scope of the marathon engine with a cool new tool. The enclosed map shows you how to set up a counter that can count events (number of players appearing, number of secret areas, you name it). The attached readme adds a few extremely innovative potential uses for the technique... if you're making a solo scenario, download this and process it. Use the technique... make Marathon better.
Wow. I wrote up a small tutorial to help people create terminals with more than one message in them. The day after I released it, Bo Lindberg sent me mail explaining that I'd taken the hard road, and that there was an easier one. (He also sent along a quick demo map.) I planned to add his info to the tutorial, but backburnered it... Two days later, I got mail from Jason Harper, who explained that your options in this field are nearly unlimited, and sent along a demo map, with a promise of a full tutorial to come. Here it is... and if this technique interests you, you need this file. The example map has a total of 8 different messages, depending on what combination of three switches are thrown. From the creator of "Missed Island", a map that revealed a Forge master at work, comes one of the most informative demonstrations I've seen of an advanced mapmaking method. Download this, learn this, incorporate this. Make cool maps. Give Jason more stuff to play, and more incentive to teach new groovy stuff.
A further advance of the techniques shown in "Untextured Walls". In this case, you can stack openings in a wall. A nice hack... and correctly done, nearly invisible to the player.
A cool demo of what can be done with untextured walls. Hacks, all, but in the right hands, they can make the architecture in Marathon levels look more realistic.
The Granddaddy of puzzle maps. This map won "best use of Forge" in the Bungie Mapmaking competition, and is a treasure-trove of super-cool tricks. Any serious scenario-maker should have this map in their arsenal of tools. (Yes, it's a tool.)