The Halo PC Engine

[Donut]

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.

[ThePlague]

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

[Kornman00]

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.

[SiriusTexra]

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.



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

[CodeBrain]

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.

[teh lag]

(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.

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.

[Zeph]

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 .

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:

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.

[Bad Waffle]

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:




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.

[KantIZBack]

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

[Kornman00]

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.