Space Marine multiplayer.
Without the host advantage.

Manufactorum is lit properly now, and the god rays blend into the air instead of looking like flat slabs.

What changed

• God rays and smoke no longer end in hard lines where they meet floors and walls. They fade out when the camera gets close, and when seen side-on.
• Real-time shadows from the sun, with soft edges.
• Shading in corners and crevices, and some light bouncing between surfaces.
• A thin sunlit smog over the factory that shows light shafts and makes distant buildings fade into haze. It uses the fog colour from the map's own data.
• Darks are deep again: an earlier mistake had brightened the fog and lifted every shadow.
• A small stutter when walking between lighting areas of the map is gone.
• Anti-aliasing (MSAA 4x + SMAA) smooths jagged edges.

Settings

• Lighting has four quality levels. The default is medium, which runs well on mid-range graphics cards. High adds softer shadows and reflections for stronger cards.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Perks now do what they did in the original, using the game's own numbers.

What changed

• 34 of the 48 multiplayer perks work, read straight from the game's data. A few examples:
  • Iron Halo raises the shield from 100 to 150.
  • Larraman's Blessing heals 50 health per second after 3.5 s, instead of 5 per second after 5 s.
  • Final Vengeance sets off a blast where you died, 2.5 s later.
  • Kraken Bolts makes bolter rounds pierce armour, crates and up to two players.
  • Burst Fire fires two rounds per trigger pull.
  • Death From Above triples the ground pound's damage.
• 4 of these work only in part, because the systems they touch (grenade stims, weapon scatter, lascannon handling) are not in the game yet.
• Each class's default perk now actually works: Devastators and Havocs shrug off melee and explosions, and Assault Marines and Raptors hit harder with the charge.
• Perk kills show the perk's name in the kill feed.

Not yet

• 14 perks are labelled "NOT ACTIVE YET" in the class creator. They need systems we don't simulate yet, or details the game files don't record.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. No game files are distributed; you need your own copy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011).

Original changelog text

The Assault and Raptor ground pound now lands with a real impact.

What changed

• The original game's own heavy-landing effect plays where the pound hits: a crater and cracks in the floor, a flash, dust clouds, debris and shockwaves.
• The original ground-pound sound now plays at the moment of impact (it used to come a beat late).
• Normal jump-pack landings play the original's lighter landing effects.

What is ours

• A thin, dark scorched ring marks how far the pound reaches (7 m); the original has no such texture, so we made a subtle one.
• Extra dust and a handful of ground chunks thrown up with physics, plus a small camera shake.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

The green ammo crates scattered around Manufactorum are now solid cover, as in the original.

What changed

• The 49 green crates block players on both sides, including jump-pack flight, and they stop bullets, flames, projectiles and grenades (grenades bounce off them).
• Only the lascannon and the stalker bolter shoot through them, as the original's weapon data says. Behind a crate a shot loses its full damage: only a short, weakened blast continues (lascannon 50 damage up to 15 m, stalker 20 up to 10 m).
• Shots also go through players now: the lascannon passes up to 10 players and the stalker bolter 2, each taking the shot's damage.
• With the Kraken Bolts perk the bolter pierces crates and 2 players too.

What is provisional

• Crates never move (in the original they are heavy physics objects; the owner remembers them staying put).
• How the damage behind a crate is read from the data is our interpretation, and some fine details of the crate shapes come from a file format we decoded ourselves.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Hit feedback from the owner's playtest: you now see and hear when you are hurt, weapons leave their own marks on walls, and the map is silent.

What changed

• Damage flashes. Your screen edges flash yellow when your shield takes damage and red when your health does, pointing towards the shooter. The timing follows the game's screen_dmg_* bloom keys; the colours, opacity and shape are our own, and the flash is hidden while you are dead.
• Hit sounds: armour and flesh together. On the owner's direction, a bullet hitting a player plays the crunchy armour layers and the wet flesh layer together, once per hit (checked against the structure of the game's sound events). Impacts on walls and detonations set the armour state explicitly so the flesh sound never leaks onto the level.
• Per-weapon wall decals from the game's data. Bolter stone and metal craters, melta char with a glow, lascannon char, crater and hole, animated glowing plasma gun marks, and plasma cannon craters with hot cracks. Decals no longer project onto players, weapons or ragdolls.
• A silent map. Map emitters, the ambience bed and trigger regions are switched off; --map-sounds brings them back. This is a deliberate change from the original, decided by the owner. The ringing heard earlier was most likely the spawn-room shield hum.

What is provisional

Whether a hit is shown as armour or flesh uses real knowledge only (your own shield state, for now); anything unknown is shown as armour, and the network bit for others' shield state comes later. Nobody has listened to the new hit sounds yet, and the flash direction was not re-checked in a live fight after the review fixes.

The flash screenshots are test captures on Manufactorum (shield damage yellow, health damage red; placeholder HUD). The decal image is a test wall; the marks are original textures, the placement is ours.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Two fixes after the M31-M37 round.

Clients froze on a busy machine

Test bots, and on a busy PC any client, could freeze for seconds and then be dropped by the server. The cause was reading effect entries from the game's effects archive on the main thread: the archive is one compressed stream, so each read unpacks everything before the entry, and under CPU load one frame could take 5 s or more. Effects, decal textures and the shell casing are now loaded in the background, the effects player only does lookups, and startup loads effects in one pass (about 9 s before, one pass now). A frame watchdog for test bots reports slow frames by phase, and a bot that loses its connection says why. Before the fix two bots froze within 2-40 s under load; after it, a 200 s run under heavier load stayed connected throughout.

One sprint animation for every class

Following the owner's knowledge of the original, all classes now play the same multiplayer sprint loop (the strafe left, forward and strafe right clips of the multiplayer sprint). The per-weapon sprint clips for the heavy bolter and lascannon/plasma cannon are still read but no longer used; --per-weapon-sprint shows them for comparison.

Status

The freeze fix was reviewed independently and measured under load. The sprint change is small and client-only and has not been seen in play by a person yet.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Every gun that reloads now plays a reload animation with sound, and its own magazine drops to the floor.

What changed

• Animations from the game's data: reload clips, tags, bone masks and blend times for the bolter, bolt pistol, storm bolter, stalker bolter, grenade launcher and lascannon, for both Space Marines and Chaos. The clip plays over exactly the simulation's reload time, layered over movement.
• Dropping magazines: the weapon model's own magazine part leaves the gun when the hand takes it and falls as a physics object (10 s, at most 24 on screen); a fresh one reappears when the new magazine is loaded. For the Chaos bolter and pistol the magazine is an embedded mesh shell, which is our interpretation. The weight, friction and bounce are our values.
• Sound: reload sounds go through the existing sound-tag path, for your own weapon and for others.
• No reload where the data has none: the heavy bolter, plasma gun, plasma cannon and melta use heat, venting or pumping instead, so none is shown.

What is provisional

Other players' reloads are inferred from their shots, because ammunition is not sent over the network. That inference is an approximation with known limits.

The screenshot is the bolter reload in the model viewer on a placeholder floor, with the magazine already on the ground beside the boot. A person has not seen it in play yet.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Fixes from the owner's first playtest: sprinting and backing up now animate, the own character and camera move smoothly, and the test markers are hidden by default.

What changed

• Sprint and backpedal animations come from the game's navigation and sprint graphs. Relaxed run and walk pick the nearest of 8 directions, backwards included. Sprint shows above a speed threshold with hysteresis, only on the ground and not during rolls, charges, hit reactions or jumps. The clips are original; the thresholds are our interpretation.
• Smooth own character and camera. Turning is drawn at the per-frame view angle and position is interpolated between predicted ticks, with corrections faded over 0.1 s. In headless measurements, frames without movement while running fell from about 50 % to 3-8 %, and stuttering yaw from 50 % to 0 %. --no-view-smoothing shows the old drawing. Collision and shooting still use the simulation position.
• Markers hidden by default. Seize Ground zone indicators, ground-pound and landing rings and spawn-room shield planes are off unless you pass --show-markers. The HUD point markers stay.

What is not verified

It has been measured headless on a flat map and on Manufactorum, but not yet felt on a windowed, vsynced client by a person.

The screenshots show the same Seize Ground view with the placeholder spawn-room shield visible (--show-markers) and hidden (default). The HUD is a placeholder drawing.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

The remaining sound gaps from the first sound milestone, all read from the game's own audio data.

What changed

• Master bus: the game's bus volumes are applied up the chain, including the master bus at -7 dB, so the overall mix is about 7 dB quieter than before (--sound-gain lets you compare).
• Muffling: low-pass filtering now follows the game's data: stun, grenade deafening, sniper zoom and the map's rolloff regions all muffle sound through 20 filter buses.
• Fades and switches: pitch, volume and mute fades (plasma charge, chainsword glide, jump-pack descent) and the primary/secondary weapon sound switch.
• Distance and speed now drive volume, pitch and filtering.
• Voice barks: class voice lines for exertion and actions (melee, charge, ground pound), one line at a time per character. Reload and throw lines have no multiplayer entry in the data, so nothing plays for them.
• The audio readers were hardened against damaged data.

What is provisional

Filter cutoffs, slopes and steps, the one-line-at-a-time voice rule and how the bus volumes are summed are our choices. Test bots ran with no unsupported audio actions, but nobody has listened to the new mix yet, so treat the balance as provisional.

No sound plays on this page. The audio comes from the player's own game install.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

The files' "krak" grenade turns out to be a blind grenade, and now behaves like one.

What changed

• The blind grenade only blinds. No damage, no stun, no knockback. Everyone with a clear line to the blast and within range is blinded, allies and the thrower included: 3.5 s within 8 m, 2 s out to 30 m. The radii and durations come from the game's data (ammunition_type = blind_grenade, shown in the game's UI as "Blind Grenades"). Measuring the line of sight to the eye is our interpretation. The HUD and kill feed say "blind grenade"; --equipment blind (and the old name krak) pick it.
• Ground pound and landing blasts were checked against the jump-pack data for both sides (25 explosive + 50 shield damage at 7 m with fall-off, landings 15 and 5). Nothing needed changing.

Evidence

Test bot runs blinded players at 26.8 m and 29.5 m, the thrower included, with zero damage, and ground-pound impacts matched the data. The network protocol stays at version 21.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

More of the owner's answers about how the original plays, applied to the charge and to weapon readiness.

What changed

• The charger's hyper armour. For roughly the first half of the rush (0.333 s here) stuns and other reactions are ignored, so a charge cannot be stopped by being hit at the start. Damage still applies. Later in the rush, or when the charge stops against something, a stun ends it. Charge collisions are now resolved after all contacts in a tick, so head-on charges no longer depend on which player was processed first.
• The ready hold is 10 s. After a shot the weapon stays up for 10 s before lowering. This is the owner's rough memory of the original and is unverified; it will be checked against the original.
• Raise rules confirmed. The first shot after a weapon switch waits for the raise; weapons that are always up never wait, also after a sprint or a roll. Tests now pin these rules.
• The network protocol moved to version 21 for the longer ready timer.

What is provisional

"Roughly halfway" through the attack part of the rush is the owner's description. The 0.333 s figure is our reading of it, because the game's animation data marks the whole clip rather than half of it. Whether the armour should end at first contact (it does now) is an open question for the owner.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

Tools for recording clean footage of the game, so promo videos no longer need a private copy of the code.

What changed

• --no-markers hides every test overlay and placeholder marker: side rings, name tags, charge glow, ground-pound and landing rings, blast shapes, the melta cone flash, spawn-room shield planes, Seize Ground point columns and debug text. The HUD stays (--no-hud hides it). Gameplay is unchanged, and without the flag nothing looks different.
• movie.cmd --movie-size WxH --write-movie file.avi records at a chosen frame size (for example 1080x1920 or 1080x1080) without touching the project itself. It refuses to write inside the repository or the game install.
• --spectate inspect slowly orbits the player's own weapon.

What it looks like

The two screenshots are the same spot on Manufactorum with and without the marker overlay (the yellow ring is the side marker, a placeholder).

What is not covered

The rings, blasts and melta flash under --no-markers are switched off in code but were not captured on screen.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text

The project owner's rules for how the original plays went in, plus faster-looking tracers. "Owner's knowledge" below means the owner's memory of the original game; where the game's files are silent we say so.

What changed

• Charge needs a sprint. The charge (W + F while running) only starts from the sprint state. Without a sprint, F is the stun strike. Assault and Raptor charge on the ground only. The exact speed margin for "sprinting" is our choice.
• Hip fire waits for the weapon to come up. The first shot after raising a weapon waits for the raise (rifle 0.2 s, pistol 0.167 s, both read from the animation graphs). Weapons that are always up never wait. After a shot the weapon stays ready for 1 s (our choice at this point).
• Charged weapons: tap the left mouse button for a basic shot, hold it for the charged shot. The separate alt-fire button is gone.
• Spawn rooms can no longer be flown over. The spawn-room barriers now reach 25 m above the level so jump packs cannot skip them. This is a deliberate change from the original, decided by the owner.
• Tracers and beams feel immediate. Bolt tracer heads now cross the distance in at most 0.1 s and arrive with the impact. The lascannon beam and its impact appear together; before, the Space Marine lascannon impact showed up 0.18 s late because of a texture-scroll speed.

What is provisional

The charge speed margin, the 1 s ready hold, the 25 m barrier height and how tracer timing is compressed are our own choices, not values from the game's data. Every deliberate change and every guess is now listed in docs/changes-from-original.md in the code repository.

The screenshots are from a flat test arena, so the floor is a placeholder; the weapon effects are the original ones.

Unofficial fan project: not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop, Relic, THQ, Sega or Focus. Screenshots show original game assets rendered from the owner's own install of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011); no game files are distributed.

Original changelog text