The Tech Artist

One man's blunderings into the 3D realm

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Rendering Marathon Maps with Panda3D

28 Sep 2011 -

I’m still making strides with the editor, but I’ve been pleasantly distracted with something recently. One of my favorite games I used to play years ago was Marathon – a first person shooter I played on my Mac. By modern standards the game play is pretty simplistic, but at the time I was hooked – especially by the computer terminals which exposed the story to the player gradually as they progressed. For a time I got into creating maps and painting textures, but the limitations of a 2.5D engine eventually got to me and I moved onto other things. Several years later I noticed Marathon Rubicon, a rather ambitious 3rd party scenario, which quickly became my favorite scenario to date.

The Marathon community is still active, and many of the old tools have been revamped and updated. One of these, a project called ‘Weland’ is open source and available on SourceForge. I grabbed the level loading code, pythonized it, and plugged it into Panda. There are a few texture issues but the level comes across pretty well.

I’m not exactly sure what else I’m going to do with this; I might just shelve it for now and call it a fun / useful exercise / great way to kill some time. I will say that it’s hard not to imagine converting more content across to the engine – switches, platforms, terminal text, etc – then to light the entire thing with pixel lights and go exploring… 🙂