Marathon Phoenix 1.4.1 #29 Roquefortress (all kills & secrets) by ReaperAA, 2023-09-03

ReaperAA on the Discord sent in this fantastic film. The monster health numbers are a script I added when I rendered the video; they weren’t present when Reaper initially played the level, but we figured viewers might find them useful.
This is a tense, masterful level - the best level in Phoenix, and that’s not just my opinion; Phoenix’s primary creator and sole level designer, RyokoTK, shares it. It’s extremely unpredictable since the Defenders can fly almost anywhere, and it’s really hard to know when they even get released from monster closets, which makes them a potent source of (very well earned) jump scares. Very effective monster placement. Also, it looks phenomenal and plays very differently from almost any other Marathon level. (The only remotely similar level I know of is Marathon Chronicles’ “To Make an Idol of Our Fear and Call It God”: • Marathon Chronicles (6... which is a complete ripoff of this level, as I’ll be the first to admit. And isn’t half this good.)
There’s more where this came from; expect more films to appear over the next couple of weeks.
Add-ons used to render this video:
- Monster health display script by aperturegrillz (with a few bug fixes by me). We’ll release this…someday.
- My remastered sounds: www.dropbox.co...
- treellama's Basic HUD: simplici7y.com...

[@Khan111]

The health numbers are appreciated!

[@chipius]

ONE OF THE BEST LEVELS

[@MillVillage]

Is the monster health numbers script something that can be used during gameplay or is it only for recordings?

[@MarathonVidmaster]

You can use it while playing. Some people might quibble with the ‘legitimacy’ of doing so (and it definitely wouldn’t be kosher for speedruns), but if you’re just playing for fun, then who cares.
As a rule, the only Lua script behavior that differs between film playback and normal gameplay is anything dependent on Game.replay. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I only ever use that to make sure auto-save scripts (e.g., hellpak and Eternal’s) don’t save the game during film playback. Making anything that affects the game world depend on Game.replay is highly likely to break film replays. (Meanwhile, enabling/disabling the monster health script doesn’t break film replays precisely because it never affects the game world.)

[@MarathonVidmaster]

…sorry, replying again to add a minor clarification: i forgot to mention that any Lua script elements that depend on ephemera can also differ between initial gameplay and film replays. these depend on the player’s “scripted effects quality” setting, which is why they shouldn’t affect the game world at all. i didn’t specifically think of them as “Lua script behavior that differs between film playback and normal gameplay” because they can also differ within the same playthrough if a player changes their settings between gameplay sessions.
for completeness’ sake, a few other things that aren’t specifically Lua-related may also differ between the initial playthrough and a replay (or between different gameplay sessions, if a player swaps them out) without causing desyncs. off the top of my head:
* various graphics and sound settings, e.g., whether or not fog, bloom, bump mapping, OpenGL, frame interpolation, active-panning stereo, zero restart delay, etc., are enabled
* iirc, it should be possible to swap out sound files without causing desyncs
* hi-res plugins and HUD plugins, if applicable - these should usually be possible to enable/disable with no effect on gameplay. (there are rare exceptions for HUDs: e.g., _Istoria_ is probably unplayable without its HUD.) if a hi-res plugin causes such a desync, that’s a bug that should be reported to its developer, since it’ll also desync network games if one player uses it and another doesn’t. (as a rule, if any discrepancy desyncs a film, it is almost certain to also desync any network game it occurs in.)