The Halo PC Engine

Recently I was able to have a conversation with the Principal Engine Programmer of the Halo franchise Team at Microsoft.

She said to me: "I want to know what the community is doing with the Halo PC Engine" :iiam:

This is no joke. No Troll. I'm very serious as type this. A Employee of Microsoft will be reading this thread.
...So be on your best behavior internet....Please.

I will be watching this thread very carefully also.
Keep it on topic, or I will see your post edited or expunged.

:eng101: Pump in as much detail as you can in the best way you can. That implys that there should only be one post per person (unless of course...you reach the max, and so make sure you add a post permalink in the multi-posts)

Who knows, maybe if she is impressed enough she can convince higher-ups to let us play with source code, or even get a newer halo engine to play with. That is purely my ever hopeful speculation of course, nothing was promised. It's simply just someone wanting to see what others have done and can do with their own work (and I can't blame her... I would do the same). Nothing more nothing less.

This Thread will be locked sometime on Sunday-Monday, so the sooner you post... the better.

Thank You.

-INSANE "Maxiumus" drive

my stuff

Requiem










Revelations






The best thing put in CE:

There has been thousands up-on thousands of maps made over the years. It is great that someone is taking an interest in this community, and should also be linked to http://www.halomaps.org . That website is the archive for all custom maps/mods/sp maps ect which is hosted by Dennis who runs the webhostng company.

Two links to some great custom single player maps, and a full blown mod which ups the gameplay and grapics in every way possible.
CMT SPv3 - Team leader Masterz1337
Lumoria: Episode Two - Team leader Higuy

Other members of these teams can explain their intentions more and show what they are doing.

I personally just enjoy modeling the Halo designs as I love the art work. But I do plan to make a MP map in the future.
Now that normal maps on dynamic objects like vehicles/weapons and scenery has been enabled, due to an OS Post Processing update by Kornman I believe, I may try and get some current-gen game assets into the engine to make it look it's best. But thats in the future.



Martyn Lee Ball - Some of my work which I want to one day improve and get into the engine.

With tags, you can make a vehicle that floats on water by putting the water friction at 5 (I believe it was anything over 3 refuses to enter water) If you place one of these underwater, you are without doubt, dead.

In ghost style vehicles, if you reduce your physics points to 4, giving each an anti-gravity level of 0.25 (0.25x4=1, negates gravity exactly), and a function block linked to markers above and below, you can fly like a pelican while still having your ghost strafe in Halo 1.

using an item (weapon, vehicle, etc) with two bipeds attached to it, I can create portal guns (in SP, you place with the triggers, MP is flashlight) that work with the ai_look_at_object and objects_can_see_object to act similar as a trigger volume. If you preform this with a vehicle with no physics, it stores the velocity you had when placing it (in the future, could probably have it automatically transfer your own velocity to it)

Having AI sync in multiplayer, is as simple as unchecking the client side stuff in the weapon, setting the bipeds model to invisible, and constantly attaching and detaching a physicsless vehicle to it. The vehicles position syncs so everyone sees the host AI, and that AI's projectiles are shown on everyones screens.

SP doublejump can work by attaching two objects, one whose life monitors if you have already double jumped (could be changed to a global variable I guess, haven't looked at it in years) and a second object constantly shooting at the ground attached to your back. When standing, the projectiles hit the ground, causing a damage effect that can only harm the object that was shooting them. When its destroyed, it treats you as on ground, when you jump and its not killing itself, your inair. While inair, if you press jump again, destroy that second object, and create a damage_effect of only force on your feet equivalent to another jump. Have it sleep_until the one object kills itself (ok, I totally don't see where I used that other objects death.. oh well)

For syncing devices exact positions, I have a collection of around 22 bipeds. update, resync, power, direction, and the rest stand for binary. each biped has a vehicle matching it. When (list_count (players)) doesn't equal the previous value (either new player, quit player, dead player, or respawned player) the host uses (device_get_position <device>) and times that by the total number that can be represended by the number of placed binary bipeds. it goes through killing the correct binary bipeds, and then recreates the update biped. If someone new has joined, there is a startup script that waits until it sees the update biped die, then get recreated, and then applies the newly recovered binary number to the device on their side. When the resync biped is dead, it sets the device power to 0, kills the update biped, waits for that other script to revive it, and then everyone applies that number to their device so everyone is insured to have the exact same location. If power was on before the resync was hit, it would now be reactivated. This can be further upgraded with a third switch, and certain positions where it changes tracks, making you able to have like a real train, and change tracks.

Just by spamming mass permutation changes, bsp change, and weapon changing, can do thermal.

By using the two bipeds like in the above portal gun method, an AI piloted vehicle, and some storage, you can turn halo into pokemon. You go around, use flashlight to attach-detach this piloted vehicle, it goes towards a enemy, when the two bipeds see the enemy, it checks it's life, and sees if that number is within a random range (gotta have catch percents lol) if its caught, the vehicle and biped disapear, and the caught biped is moved to a box outside the map aswell as setting itself to a global (representing a position in your party) even if its not caught, the vehicle leaves. In your pause menu, you have widgets that link to dormant scripts. the script checks the global to see who it's playing with, starts a cutscene off screen, attach-detach's a location marker, teleports the player to that storage box, ai_attach to the player, activates bump possestion, and a command list walks the player into his pokemon. it then moves the ai'd player body, and new player to the location marker with an attach-detach. you are now the pokemon battling while the trainer walks around. If you hit flashlight, it does the same thing to switch you back to the player. You may now catch the weakened pokemon with the players flashlight.

Think you get the idea lol, all kinds of stuff mixing and matching this stuff aswell, like FP legs, forge, etc.


People instructed me to add videos and such, view them here.

Corrinne Yu?

Tell her that I would work for free on expanding the Custom Edition engine (especially if I get to finish some of the ideas that Gearbox promised if we got over 1000 players...). Or even pay them to license the codebase to work on adding the stuff I've done in OpenSauce. I live up here in Seattle, so they can hunt me down if I fail to hold up my end of the bargain. Or I guess I could just email her myself, assuming the contact info I have for her is still valid.

OpenSauce - An open source codebase which contains code for projects that interop and directly modify the various Halo games (including Halo Wars). Currently has support for changing the Custom Edition engine and tools to so various things like adding new script functions/globals, adding new tags, increasing memory limits, new shader postprocessing, etc. There are video links for so

There's also some .NET code for interoping with cache files and tag data. The system is setup to work with all games from Halo1 to HaloReach (including Stubbs The Zombie and the ShadowRun prototype). There's some support for Halo2 Xbox (via a custom system I made for allowing people to write C++ "trainers" for the Xbox1, instead of just bare x86 asm), but I haven't tested it in quite some time (worked at one point!). I've also worked on extensions for the H2V editing kit, mostly just to fix some "missing" Tool.exe commands.

There's some stuff in there for HaloWars as well (another engine I wouldn't mind working with...help me, help you make Halo Wars 2!), but most of my tool code for that (expanding/creating new ERA archives, game saves, etc) is part of a new closed source codebase right now.

I've focused on Halo PC, mainly the server. Over the last year I've been making a server extension called Phasor. It adds numerous features such as map voting, hash based admin, afk kicking, broader map system, game logging, different chat system, the list goes on. One of its main aspects is a scripting system that incorporates Lua. This system lets server host script how they want the server to run. It's made a lot of different things possible. For instance I made an infection gametype with it, others have added a lot of server commands, statistics tracking, imposter prevention (reserves a clan's tags) and anti-cliff systems. I'm currently rewriting the project from the ground up, adding new features in the process. The next version will allow people to spawn objects and possibly reserve server slots. The reserving slots is a challenge because the server has everything hardcoded to 16 players, so I need to temporarily expand it to 17 players so that I can receive the player's hash. I've managed to delay the 'server is full' message, but not by enough to process the hash.

Here's a video of the infection script in action, it's quite old but gets the point across. You can remove weapons etc but I think shotguns are better than melee, especially without any aim assist on melee.

http://www.xfire.com/video/3e976f/

I've also made a few simple programs for the Halo PC client. These include a map manager which remembers servers and then loads the necessary modified map, a gamespy lobby mod so that all compatible servers are displayed (not just your version) and a simple multiclient which lets you run multiple copies of Halo, this is useful for testing stuff on a local server.

Getting my hands on the server's source code would make life a lot easier, although that's probably just a dream.

Alright I can confirm that INSANEdrive ​speaks the truth.
(No disrespect but you know the internet these days its best to go to the source)
I took the time to find her contact details and mailed the engineer in question and she was so kind to send me a reply this morning.
Confirming her interest in our community's work related to the Halo PC engine.

I will Quote her here so we cleared this up once and for all:

Quote:

---

Sorry, it is not yet time to discuss what this means.

But it is true that I am interested to see what the community is making with the Halo PC engine.


The community is doing beautiful work. Thank you for developing all this, and thank you every one for bringing this to my attention. I will be looking at all of it.

Corrinne Yu

---

So INSANEdrive +rep to you, now let's make some magic happen on this topic.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Personally I joined quite late in the whole programming and development with Halo PC.
A few things I've been working on in the past.

Stats Console I think the rotating .gif speaks for itself.
Its a client sided statistics tracker that keeps track of your multiplayer scores will you play online.
Added a sound feature to play other multi-kill sounds when you reach kills higher than Killtacular.
Written in C++ and .Net


After a month of learning the ropes and developing Stats Console.
I wasn't too happy with using .Net since it's quite easy to reverse engineering.
I took another 2 months to re-write everything to C++ and additionally have the client sided app send statistics to a database. It was able to detect BlueArrowV2 a hack that shows an arrow above either team. This statistics sending was done over SSL it checked a few memory addresses if certain cheats were being used.
The functionality was quite similar to HaloAntiCheat (www.haloanticheat.com).
But due to maintenance issues I decided not to release this fully C++ app and bought a C++ book instead.

I realized client statistics is not very favorable and decided to move on to an server app.

I approached a programmer called Goemitar aka Omega, who was about to release his first version of a very promising server app called Gandanur. (www.goemitar.com) (He will post a bit later.)
I approached him with the idea of integrating statistics into his server app. He agreed and ever since we've been closely working on getting statistics fully functional for legit players only. With legit players I mean people that actually bought or own a legal copy of the game, pirates are automatically fully excluded.

Thanks to this project I'm able to let my passion loose regarding statistics tracking and providing a competitive platform into a website called HaloRank.com.
Which currently is a large Work In Progress, it will be released when tournaments are fully automated and TrueSkill is implemented.
Currently it contains daily and weekly challenges and Ranks based on cR it won't be long until most features similar to the Xbox360 are fully integrated.

A current postgame carnage as shown on HaloRank fully automated for any server running the statistics app.


A current overview of activity, rank, percentage, players in-game and scores.


So what I mainly do is read memory addresses and store the values from those addresses in either a file or database, since the current gamespy protocol is too limited in its statistics.

Made a long time ago (up to 5 to 6 years):

Show and tell time is it? I'm loving this thread so far because I had forgotten about a lot of these cool accomplishments made over the years. I don't think we give ourselves enough credit at times.

My journey in the community has been interest-based. I tend to work on whatever I feel like at the time, and that has taken me in multiple directions. A lot of work was for teams and others who have already posted here, so I won't show them all again, but I'll highlights some of the things I'm most proud of.

Skyboxes

Revelations




The Pit


Lumoria Episode 1


Lumoria Episode 2 (unfinished)




Precipice


Requiem




Maps

Geomar (unfinished)




Programs

GuiltySpark

GuiltySpark is an automation engine for Halo that can be used to control the player via decision-making scripts, even to the point of creating "intelligent" multiplayer bots.

Read more about GuiltySpark in its official thread:
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showt...merly-HaloBot)

Gandanur

Gandanur is a server tool that works for both the original Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo: Custom Edition. Currently over 100 servers are using Gandanur. I did a quick check and right now, at the time of this post, more than 400 players are currently playing on a server with Gandanur. The number of players vary based on date and time of course (I'm only able to include counts of the latest gandanur releases - so the actual numbers are a tad higher).

As Sean Aero already mentioned in his post, lately I've been collaborating with him on HaloRank.com. Here Gandanur collects statistics and forwards them to HaloRank. Aside from trying to make cool things, I also put strong emphasis on stability and security, which is an important factor in trying to make the program popular and usable. I'm also working together with HaloAntiCheat.com to detect cheaters (although part of this code is still under development).

http://home.scarlet.be/mathy/gandanu...s/gandanur.png

The first goal of Gandanur is to extend the server with new fuctionality. This includes:

• Ability to vote to skip the current map, and the ability to vote for the next map.
• The server can be managed using the Remote Control program. This way you don't need to connect using the halo client to issue commands on the server.
• Improved admin management: Admins can be detected based on their cd key hash. An admin can also be assigned a security level and based on that level he/she is allowed to execute certain commands.
• It includes a system that allows you to track all the nicknames each player has used on your server.
• It fixes small bugs that were left in the original server (player pings not shown in the server query reply, incorrect teams displayed in certain commands, etc).
• The next release will include automatic afk and ping kicking,.
• Etc etc.

http://home.scarlet.be/mathy/gandanu...otecontrol.png

The second goal of Gandanur - and the vision that still drives the development of it - is that it will one day be a platform that people can use the extend the server. Specifically this means that Gandanur will provide a powerfull language such as Python which programmers and modders can use to extend the server. Currently Gandanur is developed with this in mind, and once enough work is done to provide a powerfull enough API which people can use, it will be added to the server tool. This is were halo lack modding tools: The server can't be customized at all (out of the box at least ;).

Gandanur is my main project I work on. I had some problems with the previous webhost so the new website doesn't include all content and information yet.

Sightjacker

The Sightjacker (for HaloPC) allows you to see how a player is aiming. This is used to detect aimbotters.

(Note: This is not a video created by me)

Version Changer

This is a program that allows you to switch between the "bugfix release versions" of HaloPC and HaloCE. The goal of this program is to allow players to use an old halo(ce).exe executable whilst still being able to play on the latest servers. They can now use community created tools that are only compatable with the older halo executable but still be able to play any server.

Other

Does removing the Safedisc v2.7 protection from the older clients, and reversing the CD key verification algorithm also count? Not that I'd ever do something like that, of course! A few years ago I also made a patch that would protect the halo server against an exploit before an official patch was released. And probably a few other small and quick programs I once made.


Contact: vanhoefm@hotmail.com

TM would like to introduce 343industries to our custom single player series of levels, which is the result of a great team-effort and goes by the name of Project Lumoria.

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/f...UMORIA_SIG.png

Project Lumoria is a 2 map episodic series of Halo Custom Edition single player levels set in an exciting new environment at the start of the war between Humans and Covenant.
The goal of this project is to go back to the roots of the original Halo 1 gameplay and offer an enjoyable experience that feels like something that could stand right alongside the original campaign.
That said we do include some custom assets, but we do our best to make them feel like they could fit in the default tagset. We also tweak existing default tags to better suit our needs for our intended gameplay experience.

One example of one of our custom additions is the inclusion of the Halo e3-2000 shield wielding elite:
http://i.imgur.com/v9Gsul.jpg

And another example is the inclusion of the e3-2000 Covenant Shadow vehicle, illustrated below:
http://i.imgur.com/9CZe2l.jpg

-PROJECT LUMORIA: EPISODE ONE-

Description: At the start of the Human-Covenant war, a scientific expedition into the outer regions of human space stumbled upon a previously unknown planet, later to be named Lumoria. The planet was home to various new species of fauna and flora, and several mysterious structures appeared to be dotted across it's lush environments. They would later realize that Lumoria was in fact an artificially constructed planet, carved into what it is now by the "Forerunners". Shortly after the planet's discovery however, the Covenant made landfall and disabled the expedition's ship. Most of the crew was killed or captured, though some managed to stay hidden and set up a beacon. Several days later the UNSC would pick up the distress signal.

http://i.imgur.com/5k4LSl.jpg

Now The Endless Horizon, a frigate class ship, is sent in to execute a low-profile search and rescue operation.
On board is May, a female Spartan II supersoldier. Bred for combat, built for war.
Along her side are a hardy group of higly trained ODST's, lead by Gunnery Sergeant Brandon Keiffer.

Here you can see the official (but now outdated) trailer for the first release of Project Lumoria: Episode One



And here you can see a small gameplay preview we did for episode one when it still was in an early development stage



Here are some screenshots of Lumoria: Episode One, along with a handy .zip file for those who want to download them to their pc

http://i.imgur.com/XFurFl.jpg

And here's the rest of them:

[smshot]http://i.imgur.com/50Bbll.jpg[/IMG]

http://i.imgur.com/VVGOdl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/aGNKVl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/YpisPl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/dSLbvl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/farLvl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/66Buel.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/NxZ6zl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/N1BAPl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Nar4ol.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rI0Hjl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/edFAUl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/dVZwql.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/mRIH5l.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/lUhURl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Tarn6l.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/xgAgzl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/AC0Wnl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Lru3Pl.jpg

The .zip file containing the 25 screenshots:
http://www23.zippyshare.com/v/63077802/file.html

More Media can be found at the bottom of this post, including several Vidocs we have done during our development process.

Project Lumoria: Episode 1 was released last year and updated a bit later. But after more user feedback we decided to work on another update, which will be released alongside Episode 2 when it is completed.

Project Lumoria was very well received amongst players, totaling over 20 000 downloads from various hosting websites.
It averaged a user rating of 9.2/10 on hce.halomaps.org and an average rating of 9.1 on www.modDB.com, making it the highest rated customly crafted single player level for Halo CE to date.

An example of how we approach our level design is detailed below:
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showt...Player-Mapping

The initially updated version of Episode 1 can be found here:
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5909

A detailed and honest review of the initial release can be found here:
http://halosource.forums.gs/t156-dev...s-reviews#1519

Devil Mingy sums up his review with these inspirational and motivating words:

"I know what you're saying. It's too harsh to judge a fan-made mod like this. I shouldn't be comparing it on the same scale as Bungie's work. However, for as negative as the review has been, the scale that I'm grading it on is the best compliment I can give it. This map is so good that is deserves to be judged on the same level; the first custom level I have ever played for Halo: CE that feels like it could've been made by Bungie. It may not try to stray from Bungie's established encounter structure, but the fact that it can match and, at times, surpass it is a triumph. Anybody who owns Halo PC should try this map out. "

-PROJECT LUMORIA: EPISODE TWO-

Currently TM is working on Project Lumoria: Episode Two, which will conclude the story-ark that you embarked upon in the first episode.
For episode two we have further improved upon our level design, taking all our experiences and user feedback from our first episode into consideration.



So far we are about halfway in the development process of Episode Two.

We have shown off one of our new encounters in the Halo CE3 event, shown here:



Below are some screenshots showing off Lumoria: Episode Two at an early stage of development:



And here's the rest of them:

-MEDIA-

Teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqaomsxv3Sw

Vidoc 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouxPcOfZTq8

Episode One gameplay preview by Higuy (Vidoc 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJuaLgFDdSY

Episode One gameplay preview by L0d3x
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbc4QHseNw

Vidoc 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7slkG4Qfps

Official Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_v6P63k_KA

Episode Two gameplay preview at Halo CE3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7slk...layer_embedded

DOWNLOAD EPISODE ONE:
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5631

EPISODE ONE RELEASE THREAD:
http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm?...&topicID=35231

Moddb page
http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-lumoria

Our website
http://www.lumoriace.com

Halomaps Episode Two thread
http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm?...&topicID=37905

Modhalo Episode Two thread
http://www.modhalo.net/index.php?/to...a-episode-two/

-CONTACT-

If you would like to contact the team behind Project Lumoria you can do so by sending an e-mail to: mail@lumoriace.com

E:@Moderators: feel free to delete the attachments, wasn't sure how much quota I had so went with Imageshack after all

Besides from Lumoria, like L0d3x posted, I have worked on other various multiplayer maps:

Garden CE
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=4863

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...enshot00-9.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...enshot00-3.jpg

Highlands
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3964

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...hot00_copy.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...hot00_copy.jpg

Peril
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=4096

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...enshot00-3.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...titled-1-2.jpg

Immolate (made with Sheer and thanks to DEElekgolo for lighting)
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=4880

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...enshot00-1.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...enshot00-1.jpg

(just a few of about 10 or 12 multiplayer maps I've created that have been decently popular, Garden CE was also ranked #2 in halomaps.orgs 'top 50 maps of 2010')

I've also created a few tutorials, in PDF and video.

Guide To Single Player Mapping (PDF)
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5361

Modeling Terrain for Halo CE (video)
http://vimeo.com/11781231

Creating a basic encounter in Halo CE (Video)
http://vimeo.com/12915248

Converting sound files (Video)
http://vimeo.com/18808279

As others said, this is quite possibly (even though old) the coolest, and most easy engine to work with that creates quality work. If your looking for stuff for Halo 4, upgrading the engine, or even just looking around, its nice to know that others outside our community still are curious to see what where up too.

Hy all!
I think the first and most important thing is to finally make a correct multi-player engine, so players wouldn't have to shoot before the other players, like in the other multi-player games. Also there is a lot of things to fix/change;
- chat is horrible, you should divorce events (join, quit, kills, deaths etc.) from real chat messages, put some anti-spam stuff, and ofc, fix textlag witch is happens when u minimize halo to the taskbar.
- optimizing hud for wide-screen
- if a player gets a corrupted package he/she gets DC immediately or even crash.
- server is still vulnerable for halofp
- logging is buggy too, u can crash the server several ways using this bug
- for example with rcon, and its not even have to be enabled, or u don't have to know the password
- put some bruteforce protection to rcon
- implement some function from current server apps like sapp (xhalo.tk =) such as afk kick, ping kick option, admin system, map skipping, ipban oh and, since lot of players using portable halo (~ dynamic cd-key), and have dynamic IP too, you should identify player by their MAC Address instead of CD-Key, and make a banning system based on this :P
- optimize dedicated server's engine, cuz they using so many resources, even if they are empty they using 5-10% CPU, and about 20% when they are full
- put some basics DLL- injection protection into haloce.exe, cuz there are too many cheaters already... yes some ppl will bypass it, but its still better than nothing

Well, i think these are the most important things, i hope i didn't forgot anything :)

@sehe
Rather than posting what needs to be done, you should post what has already been done.
The HaloCE Releases thread has a great collection of valuable applications.

It should also be noted that we haven't just been making maps and apps, we've been tearing into every type of tag file and making our own as we wish. We have better understanding of how most tags work, how the engine runs, and tons of other things. While some things are a bit random and confusing (portals, sounds, etc.), we've managed to find ways to make these things work. Hell, we've been pounding this engine for years.

In the eight (give or take) years the game has been out, we've dominated just about every aspect of the engine through time, patience, and trial-and-error. I know I've been a part of the CE community for just under a year (playing the pc game for five), but the explosion of new resources once closed off to me from a play-only stand-point swept me along at a great pace. I personally have learned more about the Halo engine in the last nine months than an entire decade of playing and studying the game. And that's all thanks to the various accomplisments and pioneering efforts of others. Tutorials and the like have given me an in-depth explanation of how things work so I could now make my own maps, vehicles, or scenery (you'll get your ponies soon enough, Freelancer). Going through the various tags and maps on Halomaps.org I see that, while some look to be ameturish work, others are genuinely, what's the word? Beautiful. Single player campaign missions, like that of Lumoria, strike me with awe. Even the multiplayer maps like Portent, Snowcast, and Revelations are impressive. I know for a fact that I couldn't even come close to their level of quality. And while we've been cut off and forced to play with the lovely sandbox known as the Blam! engine, I'm sure everyone would like to see everything updated from net-code to graphics. But between maps, tags, and apps, it's amazing to see what we already have and even to see what comes out next.

I honestly don't think there has been a better Halo community than the PC/CE community.

Well, this is what i have right now, a BSP I am working on for a Firefight.

Attachment 2282

This is a sniper rifle i was working on, It wasfrom a Halo Wars concept art by Ensemble Studios. The scope is from Halo 3 though. It is lowpoly because i actually want it to get it in Halo: CE and high poly weapons are bad there.

Attachment 2283

This was my favorite game for a long time. I gained most of my 3D modeling experience modding this game. I ultimately stopped due to engine limitations like graphics, netcode that only transmits certain things (and thus required a shit ton of workarounds to make anything custom sync), the vehicle limit, limited animation space and options (ie: first person permutations), and other stuff like that. The aim leading in multiplayer isn't bad, but the limitations of the engine are what stopped me working in it.

This is what I love about the community, the fact that we are such a diverse group of skills who work on different areas in development, yet aiming towards a single goal. Scenery, bsps, texturing, shaders, effects, sound, music, external apps.

Some of the videos below date back to 2008, yet that seems to fresh in my mind. I remember working on programs back in 2005.

Some of mine and Skylines collaboration in application development - shame skyline unlisted his videos from his youtube.

Latest app, edits the FoV, third person, easy-to-use sightjacker, death camera movement using mouse (disabled in default Halo).


Score indicator using kornmans OS SDK to render DirectX boxes onto the screen and determining what type of score to show dependent on gametype, showing the top 2 highest scores.


Adapting RobOplawars script idea for screen bluring when you have taken damage and packages it nicely in a 3rd party app that works on any map and does not require scripts.




Spawning warthogs in a modified dedicated server which has custom methods, e.g. spawning single banshee, single ghost, single warthog.

It's a shame I never published anything I did with Halo in ye 'olde days.

I keep thinking of wanting to get back into Halo, but then I remember the hard limits on the rendering engine, which above a certain number of polygons decides to just NOT draw stuff, and I stop wanting to get back into it.

faking shader transparent generic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvf2UMkBir8

quality thanks to sapien.

basically the pc version of the game has a broken/missing shader type, the "shader_transparent_generic" and it sad to say that alot of the the games shaders used this type. the jackal shield, the covenant dropships, and a bit of other things.

now i cant exactly replicate all the effects that the shader type did in the xbox version, such as distortion and even the offset maps arent entirely the same, but shader plasma CAN be masked, and offset maps are indeed usable. not to the same extent, but with some practise with the blending modes ive come up with this efficient way of faking the shader_transparent_generic.

As an environment modeler it was great to be able to whip up a map, put the textures and such I wanted on it, export it, and be able to play it. Ever since I started, I haven't found another game engine that i've been able to stick with, because to me it just doesn't feel the same. I grew up with Halo CE, and it's an amazing engine to utilize.

I've made countless maps, but the only real thing I released was this:
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5191

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...nshot00-26.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...nshot00-27.jpg

I loved modeling and creating environments for Halo: Custom Edition because of the forerunner. Once you figured out how the aesthetics of everything was, you could create beautiful environments, bases, towers, and even cities. And then put those things into a map, and be able to play it with your friends.

If the engine was updated, or if things were added, i'd probably go back to creating things for this game. It's an all around amazing engine, and a hell of a lot of fun to use.

Oh also, there were some dumb as heck limitations and inconsistencies in the HUD department. Areas where for example flash settings for health were completely different for shields, or transparency coefficients were reversed or something. I cant remember any real specifics, but it was horrifying when you really got into the nitty gritty stuff. Also is it just me, or is any health bar quantized into 8-ish segments? like even meters will decrease in chunks regardless of alpha coloring.


fake edit: Ammo meters. god damn. those were like, if you didn't have a number that divided evenly into 255 or 240 or whatever that number was for that alpha number, your meter just flat out wouldn't work.

Yeah, the HUD stuff was hit or miss. It was probably the most confusing thing I dealt with.

Probably why they went with Scaleform for both the UI and HUD in HA10, than trying to muck with that (or rather, both) old system(s) :P

You have to remember, the HUD system was made with Bungie devs in mind. They had a programmer on hand who wrote the system to explain the derp parts to them. I'm sure back in 2001, they were more interested in certing the game than fixing up some one-off stuff in the tag definitions which they knew how to get around for their game.

Just saying, if anyone with magical corn powers were to get scaleform into halo, thing's would get very interesting in terms of what I could do with the UI, and also since I have several as code monkey friends.

I'm a flash pro dev, I know this.

Attachment 2284

Also, I'm surprised Masterz isn't in here hawking our mod yet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SiriusTexra

Also, I'm surprised Masterz isn't in here hawking our mod yet.

---

I tried messaging him at around 5:24 EST but he never responded, however when I asked Teh Lag he said he was at the time making a post for CMT.

(Well, it's been a while...)

My big on-and-off project for this engine over the last two years has been creating a version of the Elites fully capable of functioning as a player or allied AI unit. To this end I have created a large amount of custom content (mostly on the animation side but I do many other things as well). This included upgrades to the third-person character model and animations, a completely custom first-person arms model, all-new first-person weapon animations, and general content editing. I turned this project into an opportunity to try and pass on some knowledge tot he community regarding animation (as that's my main area of... as close to "expertise" as you could say for a modding community).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0Bgj-h4w4

And then, below are two videos showcasing some of the in-game results of these efforts along with some content I had been cleaning up left over from the CMT SPv2 mod (the reformed team and our new project, SPv3, have I believe already been mentioned and now Masterz is coming up with his own post).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A62eaGPmYw4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnKqBVWyZM

For the project I also cobbled together an incredibly poorly-engineered yet mostly functional tool used for manipulating Halo CE's animation tags (specifically as they are used in characters). It gave functionality for combining multiple source tags into one (a necessity as HCE's character animation system is a bit of a pain to repeatedly set up after recompiling an entire character animation tag), copying and pasting tag-blocks of the same type (something that I think would be incredibly useful as a standard tag-editing feature), and some animation-specific stuff such as automatically filling in empty animation slot references.



Other mini-projects of mine have been attempts to somewhat restore a few of the visual effects that were lost in Gearbox's port; for example here is my attempt at upgrading the somewhat lackluster stock Jackal Shields of HPC:

As far as the aforementioned Open Sauce project by Kornman and CMT's SPv3 mod: I have working a lot on implementing our new stuff that takes advantage of the visual/graphical upgrades that OS offers for the project. Most notable has been the ability to render the shader_model type with normal maps affecting reflection and lighting, though we are also in general attempting to push the engine's boundaries in the realm of visual effects. Here are some of our uses of these features for our first-person assets:

(Minus the background levels and HUD, and in the first group, the Plasma Pistol/Rifle models, all content pictured was created by CMT members; some content pieces such as the hands were obviously undergoing changes as these pictures were taken)

Lastly I just enjoy trying to find out what can and cannot be done in the engine, and finding ways to make cool new stuff that never really got explored before. Here is a short video that I recorded to demonstrate some Open Sauce features (motion blur, normal mapped objects) along with some visual effects I put together for the map Requiem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzKBXnWy8AU

Edit: Something else I'm adding because I forgot to and I think this is really an example of what our community people could do when they cared: the Metroid Online total conversion which I did a substantial amount of work on. Though this is 2008-09 material I think it deserves perhaps more attention than any of CMT's work... despite the sadly underwhelming response I think the team did something really special.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7eRP_sHX0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW5pE4e242g

Quote:

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Originally Posted by higuy

As others said, this is quite possibly (even though old) the coolest, and most easy engine to work with that creates quality work.

---

I cannot stress this enough. Despite all the obscure limitations and occasional frustrations the engine is an absolute joy to work with. I am in love with the content creation and management system and workflow. Barring changes that would come naturally with general engine evolution (graphics power, better particle management, assorted "it-would-be-cool-if" stuff, bug fixes, enhanced error/debug reporting, etc) I can't think of much that could improve it.

I would be making maps if I had an exporter that worked with edit poly.

This is the only screen I have from the mass out. I think i was looking for places to break up large areas of the same material


And this is the version of the massout I had a simple playtest on to see if anything stood out as horrible


After that, I made an iteration over the geometry to try and refine the look and shape. At this point, I ran into a problem converting from edit poly to edit mesh where two edges are unsealed, but since they share the same two vertices they can't be welded together (even after breaking and welding oddly enough). Tried sticking this in CE3, but it's just not built for that kind of engine so I'm working on building it up again.



edit again: found an old screen in Sapien from about 5 years ago. This was going to be a long slightly mirrored map, but it wound up in a similar position where it couldn't get past Edit Mesh (I dunno what I do, but I do it :\). It was in a similar state of limbo and it's another environment I'm looking at moving into CE3.



EVOLUTION

Wave had to go to class and I'll be in bed before he comes back. We have some stuff back from the days leading up to H2V that we were going to use for Evolution. A lot of what I have is concept art and Wave has a lot of the older models and things up beyond the HRH project. Gonna wrap this stuff in spoilers to save scroll space. Also, they're all shot tagged, so there may be some stretching if any of the images are slim. 512x512 was big back then :p.

Here's some of the concept art we had going around for weapons, scenery, and vehicles:

A lot of this stuff made it into CE where to played around with it waiting for the H2EK. I don't think we were ever expecting the project to die because of the lack of a toolkit, so unfortunately there's not many screens of things when they first got into the game.








I think a good number of these vehicles ideas are post-H2V, but it's all along the same path we were taking to H2V.

We were gonna pull a Metroid on legendary.

There was a Pimps at Sea for Bungie Day project going on at one point. This stuff is admittedly rough, so I'll just put this in and Wave could fill in the rest if he wants.

The map was gonna be set up with boats in water instead of hogs and this was a pose for the driving animation.

Other than that, I have some ingame shots of things in game or rendered out in relation to Evolution:

This thing was going to be a kind of tank thing that would get around much better than your general tank while having the ability to switch out the armament like a chain hog or rocket hog. I think we had a multi-chain gun, HE launcher, grenade launcher, and heavy artillery on the thing in variations.





I think this rifle and carbine may have been in Municipality at one point, but I think the version on halomaps is using the default weapons.




At one point, we were exploring 3d HUDs using the first person rig. We got ammo counting to work properly and the reticle animates when firing. I don't think we ever found a way to plug health/shields in with CE and were waiting for H2V to roll out for us to look into it then. I only have one screen of this unfortunately.

edit:

Quote:

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I cannot stress this enough. Despite all the obscure limitations and occasional frustrations the engine is an absolute joy to work with. I am in love with the content creation and management system and workflow. Barring changes that would come naturally with general engine evolution (graphics power, better particle management, assorted "it-would-be-cool-if" stuff, bug fixes, enhanced error/debug reporting, etc) I can't think of much that could improve it.

---

A million times this. The beauty of this engine is in tags, Guerrilla (Bonobo now), and Sapien. It provides the utmost ease for people to create, manage, and deploy content. UDK is horrible in that regard and CryEngine is a bit better, but you have to get your hands messy with .cpp/.lua/.xml to really have creative freedom. With Guerrilla (well, when hacked open), everything possible to do was available to you. It would be absolutely amazing if a refresh on the HEK was made available and I can't imagine the old names that would come back if such a thing were to happen.

Hi, I'm Wave of Lag, and I haven't been here for a while but Zeph told me to post some stuff so I am. Sadly I haven't been active in years (like 3) but while I was here I was one of the more active members and made a good deal of work. So I'm just gonna dump some here...I'm not gonna dig back into Gearbox Forums-days, though...toooo far back. I'm not going to go chronologically, but just the best stuff first. Most of it is unfinished for two reasons--I usually took on gigantic projects by myself which didn't work out too well partly because of the second reason--I had to fight the engine every time I put stuff in there because it was getting more and more detailed.

Everything is ingame except for a few renders of the hog and that master chief model.






Another hog variant:







One of my biggest projects was a remake of the New Mombassa level made by Mrs. Doublefire who now works at Bungie. Needless to say I was not nearly as good as that guy was.













Some other assorted goods put into the engine:





Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJJZqlmT4Z8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXPNYhIa95Q

I'm still missing a lot of cool stuff here so when i find my haloce key I'll go ingame and take some shots as well. I don't have any project Evo stuff up, but Zeph does in his previous post.

my only hpc/ce work

http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?23798-Servertool

on a side notee.... Did she say anything about Halo 2 Vista :allears:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bad Waffle

one of my biggest projects was a remake of the New Mombassa level made by Mrs. Doublefire who now works at Bungie.

---

He's only done contract work for them (the only contractor to work remotely mind you). After Reach they offered him a full time position, but as I recall he turned it down since he didn't want to move. That kind of stuff happens when you have a family.

I’m Masterz1337, and I lead Custom Mapping Team, the oldest and (arguably) most successful mapping team for Halo CE. Since being founded in November '04, CMT has released at least 24 maps with over 887,936 downloads, and that's only on official Halomaps releases - total downloads easily break one million. Since its humble beginnings those seven years ago, the projects we have undertaken and the people with whom we have worked have shaped the Halo CE modding landscape to a degree no other HCE group has even approached.

The team began as a simple Halo 2 replication mod - CE was only a few months old at the time. While those efforts now seem crude and amateurish, products from that early era proved the enormous potential in Halo CE modding, showing the community that there was much more to be accomplished than mere multiplayer maps. Here are just a few of the advances and innovations pioneered by CMT members:

-Burst-fire weapons
-An understanding of netcode syncing (our map was the first to manipulate the netcode to work around the lack of data sent about vehicle collisions, allowing us to implement destructible, respawnable vehicles without using scripts)
-Properly done first-person animations
-Importing models with rigged vertex weights
-Custom HUDs

These feats may seem rudimentary, but keep in mind that CMT at the time was just a group of kids - I myself was only 15, lacking any development experience or artistic talent. In working with each other to accomplish what seemed to be impossible goals, many of our lives were influenced to the point where we are now basing our careers and educational plans around the skills we learned and developed.

We were still limited by what we had been given - outside of the occasional experiment, we only had access to the multiplayer tagset and had to restrict ourselves accordingly, but then a major innovation came along: HEK+, a utility that gave us the ability to extract tags from existing map files, including single-player content. This allowed CMT to take on the unprecedented task of a full campaign mod, an effort which is now known as SPV1. SPV1’s focus was around expanding the gameplay of the Halo 1 campaign, featuring content and gameplay based off experience and observation from Halo 2, the Halo 3 Beta, and even old Halo 1 betas. This project was easily the first to come close to matching Halo 1's existing quality bar, and most of the content ended up being repurposed, polished, and reused in a series of custom multiplayer maps - some of which are still played to this day. With the release of SPV1, we had over 4,000 unique downloaders and over 10,000 hits to our website in the first 48 hours.

Coming off SPV1's immense success, the team began work on another iteration of the campaign mod, aptly titled "SPV2." Unfortunately, due to a wide variety of complicated issues, the most that ever came out of that effort was a couple of buggy beta maps (only one of which was an official release). To put it simply, we wanted to put so much new stuff into the mod - not only was there nearly four times the amount of content found in vanilla, including an entirely new Brute enemy type; there were completely new BSPs and encounters - that we could not maintain quality and stability within such a broad scope, and after a few months, the team officially disbanded.

In July, however, the team came back together, bringing back old veterans while assimilating some of the top-notch modding talent that arose during its absence, and began work on what we now call SVP3. This third iteration is planned to feature both refined stock maps - with a focus on quality rather than quantity - released one map at a time, to keep fresh content flowing and interest high, while giving us time to focus on custom campaign maps, which are planned to encompass anything from an ODST squad to a cut mission from Halo 1 - more specifically, a mission taking place between A30 (Halo) and (A50), appropriately named A40.

Central to SPV3 is a project called Open Sauce, developed by elder community gentleman Kornman00. Open Sauce gives us the ability to make engine-level changes to the game, allowing us to add things such as vehicle boarding, normal and specular maps on all objects, and extra functions to our weapons, such as single shots on our battle rifle when scoped. These features greatly enhance the mod, but for those who would rather not install anything extra, we have been able to make the mod function without OS - anybody with Custom Edition can enjoy SPV3 on some level.

Despite the huge number things we've created and accomplished, CMT uses entirely custom-made content (with the exception of sounds). The release of the editing kit and the work the community as a whole has put into unlocking its secrets is nothing short of extraordinary, and, again, the degree to which it has impacted our lives is immense - the experience we have had with it has shaped our futures and created friendships that have lasted longer than any of us could have possibly expected. So many people who were once simple gamers have been inspired by the content we have created to take their own shot at becoming artists. While I don’t know what you plan to get out of all of this, I hope the story of my team can prove to you that HCE really is an amazing game, and that its PC community houses enough talent and passion to realize dreams I can pretty confidently say even Bungie never thought possible on this ten year old engine.

My email is mastersthe1337@hotmail.com, and our official forums are located at www.halomods.com/cmt. I would love nothing more than to help answer any questions or concerns that you have. Please do not hesitate sending me an email.

Vids

SPV1 (2005-2006)

Teaser Trailers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F_zlb2IvLw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs51kyOrPkc


Release Trailer




Multiplayer Mod (2006-2007)




SPV2 (2007-2009)








Developer Commentary




SPV3 (July 2011-Present)
Forums: www.halomods.com/cmt

Videos
These were done by our team member Ifudafi, who also helped write this post.









This demos our new battle rifle with grenade launcher functionality.


Related SPV3 posts in this thread
#34 - t3h lag

I know Masters likes to downplay CMT's multiplayer maps, but I am most proud of our team's Snow Grove map. The map features a well-balanced, competitively-minded, custom weapon set, with weapons ranging from spikers to battle rifles with grenade launcher attachments. It also became one of the most played CE maps of all time. It's one of only six maps to surpass 100,000 downloads, and (arguably?) the most popular CE map that isn't mostly a gimmick map.










Not to mention its nifty ability to toggle between daytime and nighttime at will.



Although to be fair to the more-popular maps, this is, in fact, a player-piloted fighter jet assaulting a player-piloted scarab. And that's pretty cool. (We've had fighter jets in this engine LONG before Bungie ever introduced the Sabre in Reach.)


Also, a member of our community, CtrlAltDestroy (formerly L33T), was able to make visible backpack weapons.

Waffle, didn't you also make an ODST? (Assuming you are WoL).

So we are missing Tiamat, Jahrain and that Church bumpmap guy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nero

Waffle, didn't you also make an ODST? (Assuming you are WoL).

---

I have a couple of his ODSTs. One that was made for Bridge, HRH, and one that went to CE3. If he can't find them, I'll put them up. Jahrain knows about this thread, but is legitimately pessimistic about it going anywhere for us due to internal organization in microsoft concerning PC games.

I'm in contact with jahrain, I'll shoot him off an email and get him in here.

Does anyone remember that one beauty of a map that took forever to finish, there was a gigantic thread on it about gbx. It was a bitch on everyones system iirc so we didn't play it often but it was sweet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TPBlinD

Does anyone remember that one beauty of a map that took forever to finish, there was a gigantic thread on it about gbx. It was a bitch on everyones system iirc so we didn't play it often but it was sweet.

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Chronopolis? http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1625

We should also get EJ, Lightning, and Neuro/Mothergoat in here. Also, CAD...he did a lot of really cool stuff like the backpack weapon mod.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zeph

Jahrain knows about this thread, but is legitimately pessimistic about it going anywhere for us due to internal organization in microsoft concerning PC games.

---

After 8 years I think most of us hope for the best but expect nothing.
Still as the saying goes "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" I think that's the main reason why most people post here.
If Microsoft does indeed do nothing, we will still have a memorable thread to reflect on and pat ourselves on the back for the great thing the community has achieved so far.
So I see no reason to hold back from posting, even when facing pessimism.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TPBlinD

Does anyone remember that one beauty of a map that took forever to finish, there was a gigantic thread on it about gbx. It was a bitch on everyones system iirc so we didn't play it often but it was sweet.

---

Church



http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files/lg/halomaps2.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3135

Portent was pretty awesome too.

I was going to make some giant video that showed some of everything, but then I decided that I was to lazy.

I think basically all this stuff is explained in my previous post.


vehicle setup, strafes + goes up and down. A CMT vehicle will use this setup later on (actually, masterz already mentioned the sparrow hawk, so I can talk about that I guess *shrug* there will be a sparrowhawk like this later on.)
http://www.xfire.com/video/410650/

multi-track sync
http://www.xfire.com/video/463cd5/

FP legs. If the obvious graphical errors are worked out, may be used in CMT SPv3 (yay for kicking yourself in the face. I don't call that an error, I call it a feature!.. why does nobody agree with me?)
http://www.xfire.com/video/4a55ab/

dynamic sun (just a dynamic light that orbits the map, not that amazing. its setup with the device sync script used in that other video. Its always the same time for everyone)
http://www.xfire.com/video/4a7be9/

portal gun SP varient (I think the MP one is actually working better than that lol, oh well. opensauce instantly improves this by like 20x, but I haven't bothered with that yet)
http://www.xfire.com/video/21b5db/

boost tests (CMT tests. Do a BARREL ROLL! (still waiting for the starfox edit of this video))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-YxTIXAzqI

recorded animation testing (do you know how hard it is to steer a default peli?.. Also, I am only including this, because apparently other people cannot make recorded animations for vehicles or something?.. idk, works fine for me lol)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io6qHwEJwJM

Water vehicles (well, logs) Very deadly lol, for the lawlz, I don't even want to fix them jumping out and killing me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGexEHndNy0


CMT Support Weapon test
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/7821/supportweapon.png
Animations are a little off (pictures, ftw lol), but it works great. It enters third person without external applications or OS, it is purely scripts and tags. (you know its not camera scripts, because those remove the HUD)

(yes, I could embed a bunch of this, but I don't really care) I think that may be all I have to show off, may replace the support weapon with a video later if I feel less lazy.

I found some of my other work through XFire:

This was me working with pickup icons for Reach weapons:


Pickup icons from Halo 3: ODST:

This is some HUD stuff I did, i'm going from earliest to newest:

As I said before, I was an environment modeler. Here's some other things I was working on:

I'm aware most of it is crap, but I figured that i'd post it anyway. The Halo CE engine was the one engine that I really felt at home with, no other game kept me amazed for as long as this did.

I wasn't going to post, because all I made were maps and we could fill hundreds of pages with all the maps that were released. But I figured this would be a good opportunity to upload some old promo videos that have been in a time capsule for 5+ years.

Launch Bay X promo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXmX-w_mI4I

Launch Bay X promo by Katana:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfebtzwd--M

Portent teaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj21pJXQefM

Portent promo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LsvOHfbcl8

It's nice to know that somebody at 343/MS is thinking about this community.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ejburke

It's nice to know that somebody at 343/MS is thinking about this community.

---

Well someone (thankfully) brought us up during the H4 panel. I was sitting way too far up in the nose bleed section to run down to the Q&A line. Our community has always been the bastard step child, especially once DLC started to really get popular in the game industry. "Can't have players making stuff for free that we sell for money!".

When it's not feasible for a business to do something, give it to the community. You know our motto: we deliver.

Meh, didn't feel like posting the ODST because i knew it wasn't gonna be able to go into halo CE. Here it is anyway, before zeph posts shots of those horrible ODST's i made for Bridge CE >_> And yes, I am Wave of Lag.



also that lies...it was like 8k. oh well.

Also the kestrel and the map i released. Really fun gameplay.

http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1692
http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1700

Seems everyone is posting their own stuff so I guess I will jump in the wagon.


I have been around Halo making maps since 2007 but have been a player ever since the beginning of Halo PC. My maps are not known for their visual of technical quality. I have been working to create RPG Maps to fit inside the Halo Engine. They have gathered large amount of downloads and have been continuously played ever since RPG_Beta4 was released by Terrel and Gibbo and I in 2007. Following this, RPG_Beta5, RPG_Beta6, RPG_Beta6.2 and Sanctuary Final have gathered a total of 112 000 downloads. Well before the creation of ''Forge'', RPG_Beta4 created a mass wave of ''modding'' with many people opening the map file to customize and create their very own version of the level. This trend continued with all future released of RPG_Beta.

I also released a single-player mini campaign.

RPG_Beta4

http://hce.halomaps.org/images/files...nshot00-10.jpg

RPG_Beta5

http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/21429009-3.jpg
http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/28756445-3.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/users...B4CA6F604B.JPG

RPG_Beta6

http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/47625425-3.jpg
http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/43939239-3.jpg

RPG_Beta6.2

http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/91248556-3.jpg
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/users...9C8BA6AD1D.JPG
http://hce.halomaps.org/images/users...BE69A57EDF.JPG
http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/95164778-3.jpg

Beatle-class ODST Insertion vessel

http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/104572068-3.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NVOUS

Portent is the single best map ever released for hce

just sayin

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Too bad the flag shader crashes the game for some people. :(

Let's see... I worked with CMT on SPV1's Halo 2-themed HUD, which was publicly released afterward:
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs44/i/20...p0lar_bear.jpg

...figured out how to do first-person spectating (a.k.a. sight-jacking):


...made a working multiplayer vehicle spawner for Metroid Online (which was unfortunately scrapped due to balance issues):


...and made the community's second custom-scripted single-player map, which was the first with cinematics:


That's all I got. Good times...

I would like to post the videos of the Online co-op mod for Halo 1 Xbox started by Adolif and recorded by Phantom360, I know it isn't on Halo PC, but I feel it shouldn't be missed out. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyFNqbF5Iq8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi7MUoi3LX4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFRMZnVW9z8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw5fzcLPICw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxuTOB1hBM

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Masterz1337

That's cause I don't believe the OP.

If the OP can provide proof I'd gladly be part of this. I have lots of things to talk about and show.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by seanaero

Alright I can confirm that INSANEdrive ​speaks the truth.
(No disrespect but you know the internet these days its best to go to the source)
I took the time to find her contact details and mailed the engineer in question and she was so kind to send me a reply this morning.
Confirming her interest in our community's work related to the Halo PC engine.
...
So INSANEdrive +rep to you, now let's make some magic happen on this topic.

---

The OP (thats me) is wondering how he would prove such a thing...and thanks seanaero for being that "second opinion". (Yay +Rep)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kornman00

Well someone (thankfully) brought us up during the H4 panel. I was sitting way too far up in the nose bleed section to run down to the Q&A line. Our community has always been the bastard step child, especially once DLC started to really get popular in the game industry. "Can't have players making stuff for free that we sell for money!".

When it's not feasible for a business to do something, give it to the community. You know our motto: we deliver.

---

Yea...I'm sure that guy is swell.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zeph

Jahrain knows about this thread, but is legitimately pessimistic about it going anywhere for us due to internal organization in microsoft concerning PC games.

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Take note...this treads very purpose is not about "convincing" or "compelling" a end game involving something new engine wise (vis a vi the "it going anywhere"). It is about showing off the work done within the engine...to a person who made it (yes really...like I said {even if it was understandably doubted}...this is not a troll.). What better way for a engine programmer to celebrate the Halo anniversary but to see what many talented groups of people have done with in an engine so many years later. (Yes I am aware of the Halo PC release date)

I won't blame you (all) for the thoughts though.
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Reminder: This thread is to be locked around Sunday. Thank You.

I've lurked and made some maps in my times. The only one that I really ever published though is a Halo Reach Powerhouse "remake" that I did in about a month's time last summer before I started college. I made the BSP, Hud, really crappy DMR, and other stuff, but overall I'm proud of what I did in such little time, especially because it has over 10,000 downloads. Now a year later, I think I'm going to pick it back up and try to "finish" it eventually. Anyway, here's some screenshots:

Attachment 2307

Attachment 2308

Attachment 2309

Attachment 2310

Just as a side note, I would be absolutely ecstatic if we got a Custom Edition for Anniversary.

I haven't been able to get a hold of CtrlAltDestroy, so I'm going to be filling in on his behalf. CAD has a lot of experience with getting things in-game which were never intended for this engine. He's been extremely creative, instrumental, and artistic in what he's done. Here's some examples:

Halo 2 Sanctuary, all Halo 2 weapons, and Halo 3-like "backpack weapons"


Randomized melee animations (with the help of Kornman00's OpenSauce)


Zombie Mod, money/score tracking


Zombie mystery box


He's done a lot more, including things he hasn't even put into videos. I just wish he didn't go on hiatus until further notice. He pretty much abandoned all hope of another decent Halo game on the PC, so instead of holding his breath and wasting time, he just left.

Another member, ShadowSpartan, has a lot of experience with Halo's tag format and made a real-time tag editor to assist people in fine-tuning their maps:


----------------------------------------

Also, I just want to post something here to "show off" a mix of OpenSauce and a popular trend in high-end PC setups today...multi-screen gaming.

http://jcap.h2vista.net/files/person...8_56_38_28.jpg

The preservation of the HUD's aspect ratio and FOV are possible thanks to OpenSauce.

More pics here: http://www.modacity.net/forums/showt...l=1#post341643

On and off over the past few years I've also been working on a new Halo UI (makes use of features of OpenSauce):
http://jcap.h2vista.net/files/personal/cache/uimain.jpg


In addition, I've worked with another member of this forum on a project to create custom gametypes for Halo servers. We created our own Zombie mod, similar to Infection from Halo 3 and Reach. We've also made another gametype called "Dogfight". In Dogfight, every player spawns in a banshee in the air, and they basically have to shoot down the other players. Players are unable to exit vehicles and rider ejection is disabled to prevent exiting from accidental flips. It can work on slayer, team slayer, and juggernaut, and with a few other hacks it could probably work on Race and KotH too.

For me this game has made me learn quite some things about computers, especially networking and basic logic of servers which I found useful later. and it even made me start hosting servers for my clan and later (after some requests) to host for other people as well.

It was also the main reason I decided to learn a bit of c++ and made an new version of Server checker, Which is an open source program that checks if a server is still running and if not reboots it automatically.

I did this because halo servers tend to crash sometimes and Serverdoc (which has the same purpose as server checker) didn't always reboot them because sometimes they just "hang" without closing.

See my forum for more info about server checker:
http://www.1xgclan.com/forum/viewtop...83848a509e7400

Also those projects stimulate the community feeling for example:
I help with the development of sapp (Mostly testing and giving feedback and sometimes coming up with new idea's) and im currently hosting his website as well because his old host had some issues.
Also my clan members and especially the admins are always here when Sehe needs some players to test something and they like to help.

Btw: I hope Microsoft will release public dedicated server files for their games on the pc platform in the future. (Instead of what EA Games and Activision are doing by keeping the executables private to hosting companies).

This allows the community to host much more servers for a lower price (running a dedicated server with 20 or 30 halo servers is cheaper then renting 20 or 30 servers from gameservers.com for example)
And it also allowed us to create new server programs which can do amazing things (look at Gandanur and Sapp).

This also happens with other games look for example to Battlefield 2 which has its own server tools and mods as well.
Games which do not have public server files tend to have less of an active community and also die a lot quicker.

I primarily work with OpenSauce now which kornman00 has posted previously in this thread, but prior to that I created a number of programs for working with BSP and bitmaps.

Halo Bitmap Extractor
Extracts the bitmap data from Halo 1 or Halo 2 bitmap tags and saves it to formats usable in modelling programs.




Aether
A program that allows map makers to create their maps lighting in a 3D modelling program. This has allowed a number of maps to be made with higher resolution lightmaps and higher quality lighting than the stock tools can provide, some of which have been showcased already.




OpenSauce
With kornman00's OpenSauce I have added a post processing extension to Halo which adds built in bloom and per pixel motion blur as well as a highly flexible tag based system for per-map post processing effects. I have also added a GBuffer to Halo's rendering pipeline with a linear depth buffer, screen space normals, per pixel velocity (though only on BSP for now) and an index buffer with information about the mesh team and type. All of which can result in some nice eye candy ;).

The GBuffer.


An attempt at creating a VISR-like effect to show the use of the depth, normals and index buffers.


A big picture...just because. Shows bloom, colour tinting and depth of field.


I also add custom vertex and pixel shaders, used primarily when rendering with a shader_model, for adding specular and normal maps to game objects which CMT are now using.

CMT have shown off the new shaders better than I can but here are some comparison shots I cooked up a while back.

Specular:


Reflection:


Lighting:


Final:

...and finally, a demonstration video (which is also linked on the googlecode OpenSauce homepage).

Not much to show or to tell, but you could say that quite a few things changed when I found out about the HEK back in 2005. It would be a shame to leave this engine someday.
Hallway from the Halo 2000 E3 video.

And some high resolution Halo 1 textures that are being recreated from scratch.

I am not personally here to show work, but I just want to mention how video producing using Halo is one of my favourite things. Of course using Bitter Banana's alldev app to give camera access in multiplayer, it's great being able to record games and spectate during clan matches. The game also has reasonably popular machinima thanks to Dennis on halomaps. (a link has popped up more than once to there)

A map that I worked on about 2.5 years ago and released. This was my only project that I completed....Well, sort of completed.

http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3934

I don't really work on Halo CE maps any more, but I wouldn't mind get motivated again. I guess the only reason why I stopped is because everyone hosts or wants to play blood gulch.

Oh wow, I didn't see this thread until today.

My contributions are mainly Precipice, a MP map.





Features full custom lightmaps made using Aether, which Firescythe developed and mentioned earlier in the thread. Also utilizes some tricks to have scenery AI moving around and a synced energy beam that can damage players.

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Also, Inferno has asked me to post his work for him.

Inferno's Map Pack, with video links and descriptions:
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?21175-3-Years-and-11-Maps..

Epsilon, a Singleplayer Campaign:


And Yoyorast V2, which Inferno did a lot of work on, which features a whole bunch of syncing doorways and switches far beyond what H1 multiplayer was originally meant to handle:

I thank you all for posting and reminiscing for all that you do and have done. I'm sure that (...yes kornman00...) Corrinne Wu will be very impressed. If she gives a reply (after seeing all this effort and skill I would be surprised if she didn't) I will see to get it posted here in a new post.

That said I would like to bring to light just a small few whose voices have faded into Halo-modding History...those who are no longer actively "of and in the community". All of these people I am posting of, originally posted at Halomods in its Hey-Day when it was under the Administration of Grenadiac and Iron_Forge (Who basically invented Halo Modding/The Tools to do it). All these individuals did something more so on the engine side (as far as I can tell). I could go on forever of all the Mods including the different "skins packs"/texture packs such like the ones by Halo 2 Rules!! (Jean-Luc), quaglinoman, or My Own. From the different "Swap Mods" to All the many many many...many log mods, which basically was our version of Forge for Halo 1. I could go on forever...there are so many people who have done so much. There isn't enough space on the net.

But I digress...

Iron_Forge - BansheeWars for Death Island - (Jan 21, 2004)

NiTrOuSoXiDe - Halo 2 for PC - Our Halo 2 was better than your Halo 2 (I will give you the Rant link on if you wish- Feb 27, 2004)

Deimos - Chain Spawning Projectiles- Bloodgulch- One of the first simple mods that (as I recall...and yes I really have been in the community for that long) really got beginners interested in Halomodding...just playing in the engine. It's an Simple Oldie but it's a goodie. You just got to start somewhere.(Mar 13, 2004)

? - Rocket Chasers - Sentinel SPNKRs - Step 1: "Swap AI" into Rocket Launchers. Step 2: Profit!!!! (Ok...so this one doesn't count. ;) )

MonoxideC - Attack On the Control Room Multiplayer (Play AOTCR as a Multiplayer map - Apr 04, 2004)

Some Random Guy [url=http://old.halomods.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=6287-[/url] The Ultimate AI mod - I got yer Halo 1 Firefight RIGHT HERE (Apr 20, 2004)

bitterbanana - 3rd person "hack" (A trainer that enables the camera in 3rd person - Dec 04, 2005)

DECOY - Modded sidewinder with custom scenery and modified desert terrain. Play as a marine, modded human weapons only. (He has a ton of maps...this is just one of them. Oct 30, 2006)

CtrlAltDestroy (& spikes122) - Backpack weapons (Like you see in Halo 3 - Oct 21, 2007)

Pepsi - Halo:FTW - A PepNess Project - "...tried to strive for a way to enhance Halo in a way to rekindle a new light in a game we both have played for over 4+ years by giving out something away from the same scenery and look we had come accustomed to for so long..." ( Jan 01, 2008 HBO LINK)

I really want to post that "Cel-Shaded" Mod the Jean Luc made...but its just a total reskin....IT DOESN'T COUNT! :gonk:

....SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MANY PEOPLE!
There is are links in the dash.

You asked a question and I told you it would be best for the community to answer. I was foreshadowing when I said that...I knew the magnitude in which you asked. I told you a week. With all due respect...Here ya go. :allears:

This here...this thread in its entirety...is your answer. ^_~

Godspeed everyone...and Thank you for posting.

-INSANE "Maxiumus" drive

Just an FYI, NiTrOuSoXiDe was hired by Bungie, moved onto Microsoft Game Studios, then onto Monolith, then back to MGS... Corrinne may want to look him up and have a chat with him on his work about Halo Custom Edition as well.

He still does very occasional work on Halo Custom Edition mapping but seems to be focused more on the game play design and feel of maps. For his most recent work in CE (to my knowledge) you can checkout this thread.

Looking back over the past 8 years since Halo was released on the PC and 10 years since the game’s initial debut on the Xbox, it’s truly astounding how far the devoted Halo 1 modding communities have pushed this game. When Halo PC was released in 2003, the game was initially viewed as a cheap console port that lacked many features. However, even past the game’s release, Gearbox continued to support the game, and about 6 months later, they released they highly demanded and anticipated Halo Custom Edition (Halo CE) and Halo Editing Kit (HEK). The release of Halo Custom Edition marked the birth of Halo PC modding communities over the next 7 years, which still exist to this day.

When Halo Custom Edition was released, we were given a locked-down Halo Editing Kit. Although the tools in the HEK were for the most part the same tools that Bungie and Gearbox used when developing the game, important features were removed from the toolset which prevented the creation of much content. Fortunately, the community savior, Kornman00, discovered that most of the features weren’t removed from the HEK, just “locked.” He worked on “unlocking” those features, and shortly after released an unlocked version of the HEK. While creating custom maps was possible with the stock toolset, the unlocked tools have permitted the creation of some of the BEST content available for Custom Edition today.

Despite Gearbox’s support for patches and the release of the HEK, the toolset was unsupported. Aside from a small tutorial covering the basic functionality of the HEK, the developers of the community had to learn most of the features of the HEK through experimentation. Furthermore, with Kornman00’s unlocked version of the HEK having zero official support whatsoever, it took several years to finally learn all of the ins and outs of the tools. It was the members of the modding communities that created tutorial documents and videos to teach others what they’ve learned.

Over the past 7 years, the modding communities have accomplished substantially more than map creation. Server apps have made server administration easier and have given many features such as IP bans, mapcycle voting, and even custom gametypes such as Zombies and Dogfight. Stats tracking projects are providing career stats similar to that of Halo 3 and Reach. The recent release of OpenSauce has opened the door for a whole new era of mods. The creative engine modifications clearly illustrate the superiority of the open PC platform over any consoles.

Prior to the release of with the release of Halo 2 for Windows Vista (H2V), the PC community was anxious to move on to a newer engine. However, the quality of the game to this day is so depressing, it compelled many members of our community to work together on a letter to Microsoft: Buyer’s Remorse. The poor integration with Games for Windows Live (GFWL) and overprotectiveness of the game made all creative and productive mods (such as OpenSauce) impossible, while not preventing cheaters. The dedicated servers lacked crucial management functionality, and some features, such as stat dumping, were broken out of the box. The editing kit we were given for H2V had fewer features than the HEK for Halo CE. In Microsoft’s attempt to gain total control over the game, they ended up depriving it of any community. The harder they squeezed, the more the community slipped through their fingers. The bad news circulated throughout the Halo communities, discouraging most players from ever purchasing the game. Players were driven back to Halo Custom Edition, where we are today, while others abandoned the Halo series altogether due to their new distrust in Microsoft.

We love the Halo engine. It’s easy to learn and to use, and the power it possesses is immeasurable. We have considered and tried to find another game engine to call home, but we keep coming back to the game we love. We don’t want to go to any other game, and as long as our hands aren’t tied, we would create more, even better content. Seven years ago, Halo Custom Edition was weak, and its future was uncertain. No one expected the game to still have a community today, but the mods and community support have kept it alive. If Halo Custom Edition was as locked down as Halo 2 for Windows Vista, none of our accomplishments would have been possible, and this thread wouldn't even exist today. We would have no community and nothing to show. H2V has proven that if a game doesn’t appeal to the modding communities that support the game, the game will have no future.

Even when the PC community was dealt a bad hand of cards, we managed to make the most of it and defy the odds time and time again. Still, to this day, we continue to push the limits of a game engine that is 10 years old! We have had our hopes of successful Halo ports crushed repeatedly, and for the most part it appears that Microsoft simply ignores the fact PC communities exist. We are dedicated fans - even moreso than the “biggest fan” you see roleplaying at E3 or Halofest. We’ve put years of our LIVES into developing for Halo, for our own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. But no matter the outcome of this, you can’t ignore our devotion to this game and the impact we’ve made.

Response: Friday, September 16, 2011 [12:45 P.M EST]
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The community is very respectful of all the good work every one puts out...

...Thank you very much! I am very impressed!

Cheers,

Corrinne Yu
Halo Team Principal Engine Architect
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So that is that. We will see. Time will tell.

--Thank You Everyone--

-INSANEdrive

Minor Edit: Response Time Error Fixed. Move along. Move along. :mysterysolved: