Marathon Shape Installer 2.0b1
Copyright  1995 Kevin Bell. All rights reserved
Marathon is a trademark of Bungie Software.


This program allows you to view and change the shapes used by Marathon. It's still in development, but I feel it's usable enough to distribute as it is now. It hasn't been fully tested yet, but I haven't had many problem reports from early testers. I've decided to release MSI now because I'll be occupied with other things for the next few weeks and won't have time to work on it much.

Please send your comments, suggestions, and bugs to:

kbell@mail.utexas.edu (preferred, at least till I graduate)
KevinBell1@aol.com


Note:

This software is much more capable when used with Macintosh Drag and Drop. At the time of writing, MD&D could be obtained via anonymous FTP at:

ftp://ftp.austin.apple.com//Apple.Support.Area/Apple.Software.Updates/US/Macintosh/System.Software/
Other.System.Software/Mac.Drag.and.Drop.1.1.sea.hqx

It may be available on commercial online servicies as well.


Quick start:

1) Make a copy of your shapes file, and make sure it's not locked (choose get info in the finder to check)

2) Launch MSI, and open your shape file.

3) The bold faced items in the list window show various shape collections. Click one of the triangles to see the names of the shapes inside.

4) Double click on a shape name to open a window to view or change the shape.

5) In the shape window, you can rotate the views, switch color tables, and animate the shape.

6) To change a shape, either paste an image from the clipboard, or if you have Macintosh Drag and Drop, you can either drag an image from a paint program that also supports drag and drop or you can drag a PICT file icon from the finder into the shape window.

7) Game objects (guns, monsters, etc) need to have their origin set correctly for them to look right in the game. This action currently requires Macintosh Drag and Drop. Move the pointer on top of the shape's image, and drag the outline of the image so the crosshairs in the window are lined up with where you want the shape's origin. Usually, you want the origin in the center near the bottom of an image.


Distributing Shapes

I haven't yet added a way to save individual shape collections to a file. This would be easy to implement and very useful to have, but it seems there are always more technically demanding issues waiting to be solved. For now, if you want to distrubute files, you'll have to use ResEdit or equivilent to copy the changed '.256' resources from the shapes file into a new file (or the Marathon Shape Shuttle). If you modified the interface or texture shapes and want the custom names to come along with the shape, you also need to copy the 'STR#' resource with the same ID as the '.256' resource.

I apologize for the complexity. This will be addressed in the next version. 


Things to do:

1) Color Tables. Yuck. This is the most requested feature I've gotten from early versions, as nobody is happy with how quickdraw maps pasted pictures into the color sets defined in the Marathon shapes. I've put off doing it because I haven't decided what the best solution is yet, or even if there is one.

2) Create small, install files for distributing altered shapes.

3) Keyboard navigation. Right now, the list window only responds to mouse clicks.

4) Set the size and origin position of the shape edit winow more intelligently.

5) When running on a monitor showing thousands or millions of colors, changing the color table doesn't have any effect unless you rotate the view.

6) A bunch of other stuff. Write me and let me know.
