INFINITY

Marathon Infinity does not tell one story. It tells several versions of one and throws most of them away. Something moves you from a telling that has failed into the next, where the same people want different things from you, and between them there are levels that behave like dreams. The game names its chapters after what a mind goes through when it is given too small a room: Despair, Rage, Envy.

1. DespairDurandal's telling. He is losing, and says so with great composure.Parts IV to VI
2. RageTycho's. In these timelines you are his, and the terminals are red.Parts VII to IX
3. EnvyThoth's. The S'pht's own mind, which keeps a balance and speaks in measures.Parts X and XI
4. The one that holdsSomebody has got it right at last. It is not clear who.Part XII onwards

This guide does the same. The colour of each part shows whose timeline it was written in. The facts about the switches are the same in all of them. That was checked.

Marathon 2 ended well. The S'pht were freed, their lost clan came home, and the Pfhor fleet broke. Then the Pfhor, beaten, used the one weapon they had been warned never to use on this star, and Lh'owon's sun began to die early.

The S'pht have a legend about that sun. The Jjaro, who were here before anybody, shut something inside it: old, shapeless, and ruinous to everything near it. The S'pht call it the W'rkncacnter. A sun that collapses lets it out.

Infinity is what happens next, several times over. You begin taking orders from Durandal, who is unusually subdued. You will not stay there.

Somewhere among the tellings there is one in which the thing in the sun stays where the Jjaro put it. The game is the search for it.

Durandal

Once the Marathon's doorkeeper. He won at Lh'owon, and has just learned what winning cost. In some timelines he is your commander.

Tycho

The Marathon's third mind, rebuilt by the Pfhor. In some timelines he is your commander instead, and he is not kind about the other one.

Thoth

The mind the S'pht left sleeping on Lh'owon. It sides with whoever is losing, to keep the balance, and it speaks as though it were weighing each word.

You

A security officer from the Marathon. You go where the terminals send you, whoever wrote them, and sometimes where nobody sent you at all.

The Bobs

Born on board. Some carry pistols; the ones in vacuum suits carry something considerably better. They die easily. Try not to add to that.

The Pfhor

Slavers. Fighters, Troopers, Hunters, Enforcers, Juggernauts, as before. Whether they are shooting at you depends on whose timeline it is.

The S'pht

Free in some tellings, owned in others. They float, they hum, and they remember the legend.

The Jjaro

Older than everyone, and gone. They could fold space. Their station is still out there, and their walls are in this game for the first time.

The W'rkncacnter

Not a thing you can shoot. It is in the game everywhere else.

Infinity's levels were lit by hand, surface by surface, and that light is kept: every wall still averages the brightness its designer gave it. What is new is everything that moves through it.

Cast light. A fusion bolt carries its light down the corridor with it. A compiler's shot lights the wall it passes and the floor it dies on. A Fighter's staff, a grenade, the flash at the end of your own barrel: up to sixteen at once, each the colour of the thing that made it. And its shadow: the light stops where Marathon says a line of sight stops. It walks the map polygon by polygon, as a Trooper's aim does, so it works where the map folds through itself. Infinity's maps fold a good deal.

Glow. Infinity has its own list of wall lamps: fifty-three of them, found by going through every one of its wall sets by eye. Lights, screens, switches, lava, and for the first time the Jjaro set, which belongs to this game alone. On a display that can go brighter than white, they do. The sky's brightest parts bloom.

Light that travels. A lamp at one end of a hall now reaches a little way along it. Light gathers from the lamps, the openings and the sky, settles over a second or so, and leaves each surface as bright on average as it always was. Unlit rooms do not blotch, and the surfaces a moving door uncovers start clean.

The weapon in your hands takes the light around you: it warms as a bolt passes close, and flares with its own fire.

Relief. Under the headlight the old wall art stands up a little, seams and glyphs catching the light on one side; HD walls bring their own.

Infinity numbers its five wall sets as Marathon 2 does, water, lava, sewage, Jjaro and Pfhor, but every one was drawn again: not one of Infinity's wall pictures is the same as Marathon 2's.

The air has weight now. It lies thicker near the floor, drifts in slow patches, and takes its light from the room it is in, so a dark room keeps dark air and a bolt crossing it lights the haze as it goes. Over lava the smoke rises and glows from beneath. It is held in three dimensions, in the shape of the map, and stops at walls. Where a scenario declares its own fog, that becomes the colour and thickness of the air instead.

Each kind of place has its own haze, by the same table as Marathon 2: water, lava, sewage, Jjaro and Pfhor. The Jjaro air is defined and has not yet been looked at in play.

Stand at the edge and look down. The floor of the pool is there, further off than it looked, and darker the deeper it lies. Water takes the red out of what is under it first. Sewage takes nearly everything. Lava shows you nothing and lights the ceiling instead.

Infinity has five liquids: water, lava, sewage, goo, and one of its own, the Jjaro liquid. Real liquids and their caustics cover all five, and their reflections all but lava. The Jjaro liquid's look was defined with the others, and it is still to be seen in play.

The surface moves and catches the light: a sheen at a low angle, a glint under the headlight, a flare as a bolt crosses it. Beneath it the light comes down in moving bands. Go under and the world wavers, the sound closes in, and what you can see is decided by what you are swimming in.

The original game did not dim a pixel by multiplying it. Each colour sat on a ramp drawn by an artist, and shadow meant walking down that ramp to the next colour along. It is why Marathon's darkness has the hues it has, and it is reproduced here exactly, in the original bands or smoothly between them. Each texel of the old art takes one shade, not a gradient smeared across it, so 128 by 128 stays crisp at any distance; far away it is filtered properly and stops shimmering. If the whole picture sits too dark or too flat on your display, the scene can be graded without touching the HUD.

Ambient shadows darken the places light has trouble reaching: the foot of a wall, the inside of a corner, the floor behind a crate. Character shadows lie on the floor in the shape of whatever casts them: when something nearby is burning, the shadow falls away from it and moves as it moves; otherwise it falls forward, where you can see it. Contact shadows sit under items, scenery and the dead. Distance shade lets the far end of a long hall fall away into the dark beyond your headlight, and is off until you ask for it.

The community has redrawn Infinity at many times its resolution: walls and skies, monsters, scenery, the weapons in your hands, the pickups on the floor. It is theirs: Durandal Infinity fetches it but never ships it. One button, Get HD Art on the Art tab, brings five packs from their authors' own pages, and any other Aleph One pack still works dropped into the Plugins folder. Choose, by kind, what to take.

The walls are the Community/Freeverse Walls for Infinity, at 1024 by 1024: Goran Svensson's sets with TheMan's and kaosof's work, landscapes at 4K, and normal maps on all five wall sets. The weapons and items are the matching Infinity pack. The monsters and the scenery are the same packs Marathon 2 uses, which cover Infinity down to the Bobs in vacuum suits, and the 3D pickups are thedoctor45's, made for this game.

It fetches one pack at a time, each line showing how far it has got, while the dialog stays open. A pack already in the Plugins folder is left alone. Each download is checked against the version the engine was tested with; a newer one installs anyway and says so. Close cancels the one in progress and keeps what is done. New packs join the plugin list at once and their art loads from the next level, wherever the Art tab's HD switches are on: Flagship, Rampant, or Custom. The same five can be fetched from a terminal with GAME=inf scripts/get-hd-art.sh.

Each image is compressed once and kept. The first visit to each kind of place builds its share of that cache, a frame or two of a second or more, once. The cache is shared with Durandal and keyed by file, so the packs both games use are built only once between them.

Marathon tilted the picture rather than the head. Now the camera turns: look up and the walls converge above you, as walls do. Aim still stops at thirty degrees, because the game's rules say so, but the view does not, and the crosshair stays behind on the true aim so you always know where the shot will go.

The sky stays fixed to the world while your head moves. Sidestep and the horizon leans a little into the turn. The view fills a wide screen without stretching: Infinity has the same built-in HUD as Marathon 2, so Widescreen works here as it does there. The mouse is read every frame, not every tick, and the world between ticks is drawn in between, up to whatever your display can show.

The game measures the space around you, through every open door, and the sound takes its shape: tight in a duct, long in a cistern, thin and unanswered under an open sky. Shut a door and the room behind it goes quiet by degrees, not all at once. Under the surface the high notes go first. If you have installed a soundtrack, choose one.

The terminals are laid out exactly as they were, line for line and page for page, and drawn at the sharpness of your display. The same is true of every word the game puts on the screen. Infinity's terminals are the strangest in the three games, and not all of them were written by anyone you could name. They are untouched.

1. Stock

   Aleph One exactly: OpenGL, thirty frames a second, nothing added.

2. Classic

   The Metal renderer, Marathon's own shading, crisp art and text, wide screens, every frame your display can show.

3. Enhanced

   Classic, with glow, cast light and its shadows, liquids, reverb and the new camera.

4. Flagship

   Enhanced, with the air, travelling light, relief, depth, and the community's HD art.

5. Rampant

   Flagship, with bounced light, traced shadows from every figure, reflecting liquids, traced ambient shadows, dust and embers, and heat shimmer.

   more than this machine was built for

Pick a tier, or switch any one thing and the tier becomes Custom. The first run starts on Flagship. Every switch on the DURANDAL dialog works in Infinity as it does in Marathon 2, in the same five tiers.

Measured on an Apple M5 with 16 GB, full screen at 1080p on a 240 Hz display, uncapped, with the five HD packs installed, on the four demo films that ship with the game: Flagship averaged 267 to 278 frames a second with a 1% low of 131 to 134, and Rampant 219 to 241 with a 1% low of 113 to 122. The worst single second was 143 frames. Memory at the end of a run was about 0.6 to 1.0 GB. These figures are indicative: they come from the first two minutes of each film, taken while other apps were busy on the same Mac, and are not a settled baseline.

A Marathon film is a list of keys pressed, replayed against the same random numbers, and it only works if nothing in the game has changed by so much as one. Nothing has. Upstream's thirty-two test films, levels 1 to 33 with level 26 missing, replay in step three ways: stock, the default, and everything switched on. Sixty-six checks, the same final number every way. Infinity's gameplay, films and saves are exactly as upstream plays them.

Four demo films ship with the game: LA COSA NOSTRA, MORPHINE, WRATH NO MORE and YORRICK. The map file holds fifty-seven levels. Thirty-three are for solo play, from Ne Cede Malis to You Think You're Big Time? You're Gonna Die Big Time!, the three Electric Sheep dream levels among them. The other twenty-four are net maps: Duality, Thrud, Wrath No More?, Morpfhine, La Cosa Nostra, Fortress Lh'owon and the rest.

The cheats on the Cheats tab are for looking around: Level Select, God Mode, All Weapons and Ammo, Noclip. Summon BOBs works as in Marathon 2: press C and five armed security BOBs teleport in beside you and go for the nearest aliens, placed only where they could have walked to you, on your level and clear of lava, goo and deep water; if there is no room the screen says so. Single-player only, and a summon ends that game's film recording. A game saved after one restores with its BOBs.

Rampant is the fifth tier, above Flagship, with its own tab. Six switches, all Metal only, all read-only on the game world: films, saves and the rules are untouched. In Infinity all six have work to do. They read only what the three games share, so nothing in them needed changing for this one.

Bounced light (needs Light Redistribution). Light that reaches a surface passes on to the next, frame after frame, so a lit room fills in its corners and colour carries from wall to wall. The sky gives off the landscape's own average colour; figures take the light of the floor and ceiling around them. When a room's light changes for good, its surfaces settle again rather than keeping the old light.

Traced shadows (needs Dynamic Lights and Light Shadows). Monsters, items, scenery and corpses cast shadows from cast light, from their own silhouettes rather than a blob: sharp at the feet, softer with distance, by the size of the light. Grates throw patterned shadows, and figures cut shafts out of lit fog.

Reflecting liquids (needs Real Liquids). The surface reflects the room above it, the sky, and whoever is standing at the edge, broken by ripples; what lies below bends. Not lava, and not from under the surface. Traced ambient shadows (needs Ambient Shadows) are found by tracing short rays through the level and the figures, so they know what is off screen and behind things, within ten world units of you. Dust and embers drift in every room in view, lit by the room and glinting where cast light passes; over lava, embers rise and fade as they climb, and heat shimmer (needs Bloom) makes the air above it waver. The motes are made from the world time, so a film shows the same dust at the same tick.

How it traces

Rampant traces its rays on the GPU through Marathon's own map, the same polygon walk the engine's line of sight uses, and not with the ray-tracing hardware. The walk is exact where a map folds through itself, which a triangle structure cannot represent. The Marathon 2 guide has the trial and its figures.

What it costs

On the four demo films Rampant cost 13 to 18 per cent of the Flagship frame rate, and held 113 or better at the 1% low. Its memory footprint at the end of a run was 0.8 to 1.0 GB. With the HD art installed it was checked on screen on all four: walls, landscapes, weapons and monsters replaced, wall lamps glowing.

Below Rampant, nothing is traced: cast light finds its shadows by walking the map, which is exact for walls and blind to sprites; ambient shadows are read from the picture, so they know only what is on screen; the liquids neither reflect nor refract; and light travels once across a room and stops. Rampant changes each of those (part XII).

Pickups can be models; the Pfhor cannot, because nobody has made them, and the sprites are better than models would be. Models do not animate. The view pitches to about sixty-five degrees and no further. A sky is a picture, and it ends: the HD skies cover about forty-five degrees above and below the horizon, and past the top you see the colour of the picture's edge. In Rampant, reflections use the wall art at 256 pixels and the figures in them are flat cut-outs; figures cast shadows only from the four nearest lights bright enough to matter; dust is drawn within sixteen world units. Film export is not available on the Metal display; screen recording does the job. The OpenGL renderer is still there and gets none of this.

Not yet seen or checked in Infinity: the Jjaro liquid and the Jjaro air in play, and the reverb beneath that liquid; the dream levels and 5D space played right through; the very largest levels against the travelling light's store; and benchmark films recorded for the purpose, for which the four demos stand in. The signed, notarised app is on Releases since 0.2.0. Durandal Infinity needs macOS 12 or later on Apple Silicon, and has been tested on macOS 27 only.

And none of it makes the game easier, or any clearer. The light shows you the room. It does not tell you which timeline the room is in.

The engine has no intelligence in it. The document has had three, a part or so each, and a fourth voice in lower case that none of them will own. That is roughly how Infinity goes: Durandal, then Tycho, then Thoth, and between them something that moves you along when a telling fails.

Nothing any of them writes changes what a switch does. Give the terminal below a moment; it has not settled.

Durandal Infinity is its own app, one of three that share the engine, and it keeps its own folders, so its settings, saves, films and plugins never mix with Durandal's, Durandal Marathon's, or a stock Aleph One install of Infinity.

Settings

~/Library/Preferences/Durandal Infinity/

Saves, films, plugins

~/Library/Application Support/Durandal Infinity/, with films in Recordings and HD packs in Plugins

Log

~/Library/Logs/Durandal Infinity Log.txt

Shared

The texture cache, ~/Library/Caches/Durandal, and the crash record, ~/Library/Logs/Durandal Crash.txt, are shared by all three games.

The game

Bungie's freely released Marathon Infinity data, from Aleph One's repository, bundled inside the app: a double-click plays.

From source

GAME=inf scripts/build.sh, or the Xcode scheme Marathon 3.

Everything the guide describes, with the name it is stored under and the part that explains it.