1. Custom Icons
2. HUD Readout

It used to be that a truly gung-ho scenario developer would hack apart the Marathon application and modify it beyond recognition. With external MML files, this is no longer as necessary, since most modifications can now be scripted safely in SimpleText.

I decided, however, that I wanted custom icons for my scenario. I also didn't feel like updating a hacked Aleph One application every time a new build was compiled and released. (Keep in mind that the game file icons are still held in the Aleph One application.)

I'll assume that you are familiar with HAS' Editnotes on such matters and, to avoid redundancy, will jump straight into the trick I came up with. Basically, I took my old Marathon Infinity application and stripped it of all unnecessary resources. It can no longer be played, but it does contain my icons.

With this application sitting on my hard drive, game files with the proper type and creator name will look to the stripped application for their icons.

Cons: it takes up about 700k of disk space.
Pros: there is no need to upload a scenario-specific version of Aleph One every time a new build is compiled.

For a working version of this trick, please see my downloads page.

Even the original Marathon games left a void area in the HUD where the image for the fists ought to have gone. I haven't seen too many innovations to this lacking small detail in other scenarios so far. Here's what I did:

With MML, you can play around with the readouts in the HUD, in the Strings. You can rename stuff, move the layout of HUD elements around, and with level-specific MML, even have different weapon, ammo, and item names for different levels (very handy in conjunction with other modifications to incorporate more than 9 weapons into your scenario).

Instead of placing an image of a fist (which is very possible), I toyed with the Strings. I placed a readout of level-specific mission objectives directly into the HUD to simplify what can often turn into aimless wandering on very large and complicated maps.

When I first tried this trick, I crashed the hell out of Aleph One. I asked Loren Petrich about it, and he found that the HUD only allowed 90 or so characters in a String. He fixed it by bumping it to 255 characters (thanks Loren!).

To sum, if you're playing one of my maps, scroll to the fists and you will have a brief list of mission objectives. This, of course, doesn't eliminate the need for terminals. It's merely a brief guide to what you're supposed to be doing in a given level.

To get this trick to work on your own scenario, you'll need to play around with the text box layout (with MML) to find the right dimensions for all the text to line up properly. The biggest setback here is that the text is centre-justified, so a lot of space-bar characters are needed to align the text. 255 characters is a vast improvement, but editing your readout to be very 'to-the-point' is necessary.

I can only manage a maximum of 5 lines of text with my HUD.