Halo 2 Vista and Halo CE Shader database?

I'm excited as this kid: koolaidfacemelter.ytmnd.com
But omg, I would totally love it. Especially just like a massive pack with a perfect shader_collection file and everything.

Yea, Lightning... how much... uhh.. how much bandwidth do you have? :P

Sounds like a jolly plan to me, to be honest though, for this to work I think it would need to be a shader+bitmap combo thinger... like.. you download a .rar of lets say a water shader+bitmaps thinger

[FILE DIRECTORY]
\
\shaders\multi\multi\water.shader
\bitmaps\multi\multi\water.bitmap
\bitmaps\multi\multi\waterbump.bitmap
and so on and so forth... just have that all in a rar so that they could unrar the package right to their tags directory and get it going from there without having to really edit anything.

Ideally, that's how I think it would have to be.

I agree with Llama Juice, especially with shaders that use bitmaps that the map editor didn't come with. I wouldn't want a bunch of shaders lying around that i couldn't use.

What i would like to see is a dependency download system, where you select the shader you want to download and the server packs all of the dependencies that that particular shader depends on into a single rar (on the fly), which you then download. But this would cause problems with versions with duplicate bitmaps being a possibility, but that could be sorted out by using the date that the bitmaps were added to distinguish the correct one.

Although, this system would probably be very complicated to set up.

That would be something totally out of my league, Firedragon, but a cool idea none-the-less.

I plan on having the archives packed with recursive structure, so no need to worry about messing with dependency locations.

I use bungie's own tag database file for when I extract a tag with dependents so I can look in one place at the tag I extracted, and all of its dependents. It also shows the dependents for that same tag's dependents, so you can branch off from other tags easily. I'm also planning on making the database support building from source tags as well (not that trivial), just have various other things I'm trying to take care of with my code library I use.

any progress on this so far??


EDIT

sigh but it needs one so bad... meh guess it wont matter once we get kornman's extractor

^^dont bump bro

It's okay if the bump is on-topic enough.

Quick question: When the time is right, will someone be able to simply extract every shader and its dependent from Halo 2? Because if so, uh.. awesome.