Metroid Online Maridia - Public Beta

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Originally Posted by Readme

Metroid Online Map Team – Maridia Public Beta
Metroid Online Map Team is: Seraphim, Teh Lag, Lightning, Kirby, Mithos, Phil and Nebulous
Map Modeled+Textured by: Seraphim and Teh Lag
All-around help: Teh Lag
Scripting and Mod Assistance: Kirby
Original FP Cannon Model: Wave of Lag
Cannon Animations, Effects, and Shaders: Teh Lag
Original FP HUD Model: Jahrain
Samus Model: LiveWire
Beta Testers: Sonic, FlyinRooster, Boba, Mithos, Higuy
Testing Server: Higuy
Original Mod: Byram
Original Biped Animations: TheGhost
Biped Animation Revisions: Teh Lag
Website: Phil
If I missed you, I’m sorry. I’ve had so much help in the past, it’s hard to remember everyone, but I sincerely appreciate everything everyone has done for us.

*This version is for play-testing, and for feedback regarding the mod.*

Maridia is a cave-like area from Super Metroid. It consisted of both wet and dry areas, but this version consists solely of the wet area. Fish swim around its dark and foggy halls, and Space Pirate tech is littered all over the place. Maridia is a very dark place, so you are encouraged to use your flashlight!



(Side note: just having a flashlight in the style of Halo seems kind of tacky; we may replace it with an altered version of the night-vision effect from the 343GS cutscene – think something like one of the visors from the games. Once we have established whether or not that is a workable concept we will ask for your input on it.)

This is the first of our maps to have reached what we consider a playable state, and so we have decided to release a public beta so we can get input on what would make both the map and the mod content more enjoyable. We are looking to get reports on bugs/glitches, oddities, and anything else that you think we need to take care of before a final release. Ideally, by the end of this we will have a balanced tagset that can be applied to any map without much adjustment.

- Suit Up, Dive In, and Fight to the Death! -

The Mod consists of the following:
·Samus Aran biped with custom animations and textures
·4 beams from the original games: Power, Plasma, Wave and Spazer
·2 new beams: Havoc Beam and Force Beam
·Melee: Samus uses a beam sword... thingy. It's a concentrated beam of light from her beam cannon. Works on every weapon.
·Super Missile Power-up: You automatically pick it up when you run over it, and it will allow you to shoot two higher-power shots. Expires and is no longer usable after it is empty. This weapon counts as a third weapon, so you don't have to worry about it swapping out for one of your other two.
·Weapon Swap System: You start with the Power Beam, you can pick up and swap out from there. Don't want the Power Beam? No problemo! Swap it out with one of the five other Beams available. Your old Beams do not show up on the ground when swapped, or when you are killed.
·A fully-3d HUD that moves as you move, with swapping icons for each of the beams and a working missile counter
·Custom first-person animations for the beam cannon, including firing missiles, charging, and firing
·A Metroid hatchling as the oddball and flag that moves inside its’ containment pod, with custom idle animation
·Stunning beam FX and a unique gameplay experience with 6 different balanced beams to choose from
·Be rewarded with a healthpack as you kill your enemies or snag one from a downed ally, which adds a new element to the gameplay experience

Special Thanks: My Wife, Metroid Database, Metroid Metal, Modacity’s Forums, and Open Carnage’s Forums.

All Metroid-related content is based off intellect property owned by Nintendo. All original content is copyright Metroid Online Map Team.

Seraphim says: “5 years in the making! I hope you all enjoy it! I and Teh Lag have put our blood, sweat, and tears into making this the PC experience of Metroid.”

Teh Lag Says: "If it wasn't for me and my legendary level of laziness this would have been out a few months after the original release. Thanks for staying with us!"

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Download here: Metroid Online's Maridia Public Beta hosted at playmetroidonline.com
Mirror: Metroid Online's Maridia Public Beta hosted at modacity.net

And the best surprise of all: I rented a server for a month for the Public Beta and then the Official Release! The server's name is "Metroid Online Official Server". Please utilize it wisely. Anyone who wishes to assist me in hosting this Public Beta, feel free, I won't stop you.

Also, if anyone chooses to upload this Beta to halomaps.org, please use the information in the readme contained in the .rar to properly give credit and describe the map. Dennis should be able to do the rest. "Author" would be Metroid Online Map Team. I would prefer you wait till the final is released, but if you are too impatient to wait a week or so, then do what must be done. :raise:

Love,
Seraphim

And to accompany this amazing post , heres some more amazingness in the form of a video and screenshots to accompany it , aswell as a Panorama shot of Samus.

Official Release Video


Screenshots









Panorama



Enjoy :)

EXCELLENT

I expect all of you fags to be online within 10 mins, lets play the shit out of this

The build I played was fun, and nice video. You guys did really well on this!

The map is well crafted. However, I can't run it. Looking towards the middle makes the game stutter. Sound and everything.

Okay after a little more playtime:

-Your beam charging effects suck tbqh. Beams themselves are great though
-Doors(?) look overly simple and out of place
-Melee is cool, but you can barely see it since the energy beam moves out of view almost instantaneously
-Radar sweep is horribly, horribly misaligned from the custom overlay. Get rid of it maybe?

Everything else is brilliant. Which is quite a bit.

Awesome, I'll be sure to play this later.

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Originally Posted by p0lar_bear

The map is well crafted. However, I can't run it. Looking towards the middle makes the game stutter. Sound and everything.

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That's quite odd, I have no clue what may be causing your problem, but I guarantee that none of the testers nor I personally had any issues with your particular problem. Maybe it's an isolated issue, such as how I was never able to join a server that was playing No_Remorse, no matter how many times I downloaded the map and replace my existing copy.

Had alot of fun testing this! Great map I really have had a blast testing, and have found the map to be really enjoyable. Koth, and oddball were awesome along with regular ctf.
Nice job guys

Almost done downloading.

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Originally Posted by odseraphim

That's quite odd, I have no clue what may be causing your problem, but I guarantee that none of the testers nor I personally had any issues with your particular problem. Maybe it's an isolated issue, such as how I was never able to join a server that was playing No_Remorse, no matter how many times I downloaded the map and replace my existing copy.

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It's no doubt that it's my PC at fault, however, I don't know exactly what causes it, though if I had to take a guess, it might be lens flares; the Boarding Action segment of CMT's D40 beta did that, and there was a Halo 2-styled covenant map with lens flares EVERYWHERE that made this happen (I forget the name of it though, it was on one of Rams's gamenights).

It could also be complex geometry or maybe shaders, but I don't know.

e: It's definitely my system not getting along with lens flares.

I stood in a base and turned on wireframe mode. When I moved to a side where the portals in the base access cave culled out your teleporter shafts, the stuttering stopped.

e2: You know my biggest pet peeve in CE maps:

PORTALS, MOTHERF#$%ER, DO YOU USE THEM (besides the exactportals in the base access caves).

2 things that I found, both sound related:
1. Some of the custom effects, namely the beams, have a pretty noticeable cutoff at the end. Rather than eventually becoming silent, the sound begins to damper, then just stops. Would this have to do with the tag, or was the sound file deprecated in some other way?
2. The low health beeping. While it's a good idea, it can get rather annoying if you can't find a health orb. A more subtle loop (like, well, the Metroid Prime health warning) would be better at indicating low health rather than BEEDEEBEEDEEBEEDEEBEEDEE.

Other than that, this is made of multiple kinds of awesome and win.

Looks like I kick scrub ass at CTF :realsmug:

More comments/complaints:

-Beam effects aren't... bad, so to speak, but I'd hardly call them "Stunning." Again, the charging in particular looks like monkey ass.
-Wave beam seems entirely useless, and other than a slight homing on the charge shot(?) I'm not sure what differentiates it from the other beams.
-On that note, you need a section in the readme to detail exactly what all the beams do, their intended purpose, relative stats (damage/range/speed/etc)
-Melee animation when carrying Metroid is recycled from last beta, which is inconsistent with the new energy beam melee and still looks like you're hitting off to the side
-I don't know if it's me or the map (probably me) but I can't see the info/chatbox
-Teleporter spamming during oddball is too easy. I'd recommend you make all the teles one-way

Overall, it just needs polish, and lots of it.

Well that was awesome.

But some things that were wrong:


Havoc Beam sound doesn't play for every shot.
The Force Beam looks terrible from first person.
I kept spawning in the middle of a fight(That's probably not something you did, but it's a bit annoying).
Particles.
Melee with the oddball.
As said before, you can barely see the energy beam in the regular melee.


Still, that was the best game of CE I've played, and I can't wait for even more maps.

make it foggier

Amazing TC. Very well made.

Uploading to the hcel when I get home. Yall better populate it. :)

If it's already been done, thanks.

-via blackberry

ffff, at school.

Any australasian's wana play in around 7 hours?

This is amazing.

My remarks:

• It's a bit laggy on my machine.
• Weapons take a long time to pick-up.
• Collision model on the Metroid Hatchling is set to dirt.

Now implement the lock-on feature of Metroid Prime.
:D

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Originally Posted by p0lar_bear

PORTALS, MOTHERF#$%ER, DO YOU USE THEM (besides the exactportals in the base access caves).

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I tried to make decent portals but they kept breaking when we had more than we have now :(

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Originally Posted by Ifafudafi

-Beam effects aren't... bad, so to speak, but I'd hardly call them "Stunning." Again, the charging in particular looks like monkey ass.

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Care to help us out there :-3

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-Wave beam seems entirely useless, and other than a slight homing on the charge shot(?) I'm not sure what differentiates it from the other beams.

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All of its shots were supposed to home in... Nobody commented about this during the private betas. I'll go change it around in that case. It also fucks up your screen when you get hit.

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-On that note, you need a section in the readme to detail exactly what all the beams do, their intended purpose, relative stats (damage/range/speed/etc)

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Power - All-around competent weapon. Designed to keep you alive. Charged shots stun targets.
Medium damage - Medium range - Fast projectile - High ROF.

Plasma - Kindof like the Pistol, but not. Short range limits its usefulness.
Medium damage - Low range - Instant projectile - Medium ROF

Wave - All shots stun and blind targets.
Medium damage - Long range+Homing - Slow projectile - Low ROF.

Havoc - Upped damage on Power Beam with no charge and bouncing projectiles. Most effective at close range but high damage makes it effective as long as you can lead shots.
High damage - Bouncing - Fast projectile - High ROF.

Spazer - Shotgun.
High damage - Low range+Spread (increase # of projectiles per shot?) - Slow projectile - Low ROF.

Force - Sniper rifle.
High damage - High range - Instant projectile - Low ROF (Needs to be turned down lower imo, it has serious rape potential at close range which shouldn't happen)

Super Missile - 2 shots, each projectile deals 3/4 of one healthbar of damage. 1/3 chance of spawning every 60 seconds. Designed to mix up gameplay every now and then.

We really want to know what people think about weapons balance! If something else seems over/underpowered or anything let us know!

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-Melee animation when carrying Metroid is recycled from last beta, which is inconsistent with the new energy beam melee and still looks like you're hitting off to the side

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That... is true. When I redo the melee animations to make the sword more apparent I'll redo the Metroid animations as well.

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-Teleporter spamming during oddball is too easy. I'd recommend you make all the teles one-way

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I always liked being able to drop down... I see your point though. We'll try it that way in the next beta.

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-Doors(?) look overly simple and out of place

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I'll go and change them... they were modeled based on what I could remember from Super Metroid's door shapes while in the car.

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-Radar sweep is horribly, horribly misaligned from the custom overlay. Get rid of it maybe?

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You mean just the expanding circle or the radar itself? Again, nobody complained during internal betas so we left it until now.

The radar thing was my fault; I was running at a 16:10 ratio which fucked everything up. Switched to scaling a 4:3 ratio; it's fine now.

And yeah, the Force Beam is overpowered, even by Sniper Rifle standards. I forgot to mention that.

force beam best beam

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Originally Posted by taterSALAD

Now implement the lock-on feature of Metroid Prime.
:D

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FYI, they tried that with Z-targetting for Zelda Online.

We ended up with an aimbot, and the longest-running drama this community has ever seen.

true that. I can't join a non-dedi server without getting banned for "botting."

Yeah, in case you guys didn't figure it out yet, the HUD in the mod only supports 4:3 ratios. Ex: You can't play it properly in 1440x900, but you can in 1024x768.

Please keep playing it (if you can stand to) regardless of some of the bugs you have found, we would like to find all of them before we release our next beta build, and then we can successfully release the final, which will contain the core mod that we will use for all future maps.

Also, if you click my signature, it will take you to the stats of the server, where you can, among many things, see your (albeit artificial) ranking.

Give the force beam some more down-left offset. A projectile with a contrail that big coming from the center is wiiierd.

Props to whoever busted their asses on those 3P animations, god damn.

EDIT: Down-right, not down-left. I was tired lol

This map reminds me to go play some Metroid on the game cube. But why only 2 beams at a time?

Going to play now if anyone wants to join.

Sure, why not?

Played it some a bit ago. Not a bad map at all. Definitely more fun with more people on it.

Is it just me, or does the gun not animate properly? When you shoot a missile, and then start shooting regularly, it freaks out and then starts looping the missile firing animation. Only happened sometimes, but it happened. Anyone else? Sorry if it already got brought up.

It was laggy ):

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Originally Posted by BobtheGreatII

Is it just me, or does the gun not animate properly? When you shoot a missile, and then start shooting regularly, it freaks out and then starts looping the missile firing animation. Only happened sometimes, but it happened. Anyone else? Sorry if it already got brought up.

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Yeah, known problem. It doesn't happen often, but we are unsure of how to fix it. You can get out of the loop by using melee or switching weapons, and I even think by firing once.

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Originally Posted by Yuki

teh lag can you do the waterfall now!

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You've heard of a PM, right? Don't spam up this thread, please. :raise:

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Originally Posted by Advancebo

It was laggy ):

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The server or the mod? I had no problem with either. You will always face some "lag" with Halo CE, but if you've played it at all already, you should be used to it.

I had about 10-20 fps when I had everything on high, had to turn off specular, decals, and shadows. Then had about 20-35 fps

You can actually get the hud to work in widescreen, if you set the FOV to 77

I thought the map was awesome :smugsome: I had a framerate locked at 60 FPS, and had a blast when there was people playing!

Beautifully crafted. I love this. The last thing the map needs is added particles/nature elements (which would add the final depth and complexity of a the Metroid Prime look). All this taken into consideration, I do understand it's not near complete and the work needed is obvious, so I'm sure you guys will handle it fine :)

you guys should do frigate orpheon :downs:

After finally looking at the map for a whole of 15 minutes I have to say that i'm quite impressed. I've always liked your work before and can't help but be amazed. :D

If you guys ever want to use doors in your map, so they sync, It isn't that hard. Just talk to me or Kirby about it. The only problem would be shooting the doors but hey. :P

Everything I want to say about the map itself is already mentioned.

Tho there is one thing: the square lights are too strong, hurts the mood of the map a bit. (Lower the Opacity, I think(?) that's how you do it)

To give updates/comments on Podacity 4 and recent stuff in this thread;

The grenade animation glitch - I'm honestly lost on that. I'll try to find out what causes it but I've only encountered it once or twice.

The lens flares in the map were a response to complaints that the lights didn't seem to "glow" enough in pictures. I will turn down the # of flares in the light shaders. P0lar, if you want to help me out with making the portals not break it would be much appreciated.

The beam sounds are recorded from the game and we don't really have a sounds expert to help us out. I can try to make them fade out longer? Unless someone can get us a higher-quality source I'm limited in what I can do.

Regarding beam pickups, I'm going to do what I arguably should have done from the get-go instead of the lazy "colored spheres" cop-out I came up with and make the 3p use a legitimate 3d model. (Probably something akin to the Metroid Prime beam powerup models).

By extension, the rationale behind adding the constant sound to the super missile was to allow people to recognize that it had spawned, since it only has a 1/3 chance of spawning. Obviously this implementation failed... is it a valid idea (in which case what other avenues do you think we should go down) or should we just scrap it?

The block lights - already taken care of.

The beams themselves: Ifafudafi has graciously agreed to help us out with the beam effects. Hopefully his will be more eye-pleasing than the ones I cobbled together just about 2 years ago by now.

The map itself is getting some more visual touches, depending on what we can make look good. The plan is to have more more scenery (seaweed/other plants) and a proper ground bitmap to break the monotony of a single shader tiled everywhere.

If you want, you can give me the wav's and whatnot that you have and I can look at it. I don't have access to the Prime series (fucking college), but what you have should be more than enough for me to tweak.

Also, yay Ifafudafi ^_^