How to create Source quality effects in Halo CE

[Rambo]

OK this is a little tutorial on how to create higher quality results for shaders than expected for Halo CE.

Imagine, if you can, walking inside of a hospital. The floor is white tile and very shiny. Reproducing this in Halo CE seems to be a nightmare. Well, not anymore!

Start by creating your base geometry and giving it the normal texture as you normally would (e.g. shader_environment with tile texture). Next, create a second plane for the floor just above the collidable surface and make this render-only. give it a shader_transparent_glass with a dynamic mirror property in Guerilla. What will happen is the mirror will be reflective but not supersede the texture as it would if it were a shader_environment dynamic mirror. Now, the tile will show up beneath it and it will have a dynamic glare to it that looks like Source's reflection mapping.

It's a way to trick Halo into producing higher quality results than normal by doubling up on geometry.

For structures that glow, give the crystals in your map (like we are for ours) a shader_transparent_glass and a very nice set of bitmaps. Then, for the glowing part or the "core" of the crystals, create a second crystal geometry that's inside the crystal geometry and give it a shader_environment. Next, give that a self-illumination property with the same bitmaps for base map and reflection bitmap as the shader_transparent_glass. Now your crystals should appear as though they werre glowing and still have that resiliant shimmer to them that only glass can provide. If done right, this will be uber pwnage with respect to texture and shader quality.

There you have it, ladies and gents! Hope you like this little walkthrough on how to trick Halo CE into producing ultra-high quality texture effects.

Do let me know your opinions and any constructive criticism you have.